[color=ed1c24][center][h2]Akeno[/h2][/center][/color]

The process of preparing a hide for tanning was, as Akeno was quickly discovering, dirty, smelly and physically intensive work. Strip the flesh, salt them down, soak them in water, smoke them dry and then comb them out; it was a lot of work for what was apparently a single Orc to be doing by herself, but given the smell, she could see why no one was volunteering for this. No one but her, apparently.

There was still the option of turning around and walking away. She hadn’t committed to anything, the work was hard and the hunter hadn’t even guaranteed that she’d get anything worthwhile at the end of this; she could walk away, try her luck somewhere else, or just try to fend for herself. But…

Walking away at this point, just because the work sounded difficult felt like admitting defeat. Would any other Orc in the camp even give her work if she shied away from this? Could they trust her to follow through if she backed down from a challenge? Maybe it was arrogant to think that anyone would even pay attention, maybe she was over-estimating these Orcs who mocked someone for trying to fertilise the soil, maybe they wouldn’t care.

Akeno let out a sigh and turned away from the bloody, gorey hides and walked away, eyes lowered to the ground.

Then, a few meters away, she bent down to pick up a reasonably sharp rock that fit in the palm of her hand and walked right back.

If asked, Akeno probably wouldn’t describe herself as a particularly hard-working person. She coasted through her studies at a school her parents paid the tuition for, her social life mostly consisted of her being dragged along by those more outgoing than herself, her home life was similarly unattended and she had little drive to improve herself in either area. She was the type of person to let herself by carried along by the flow rather than push to move in a different direction instead; thing were easier that way. Less resistance. The one except to this was her dedication to karate; rather than sit back, she spent a couple of hours in the dojo two or three days a week training and longer on the weekends, worked out a home on the days she didn’t and went on frequent runs. Then, she took that effort and entered herself into competitions, tournaments, to see how much her dedication was worth compared to other peoples.

Most people would call that sort of thing hard work she supposed, but to her it was just something she did because she enjoyed it or sometimes just because she had an aversion to being sedentary. There was a desire to improve, and satisfaction when it happened, but no driving goal beyond that; her black belt had come as a matter of course, any improvements to her technique or fitness a matter of time and experience. She’d only ever placed higher than fourth in a competition once and that was when she came second a month or two before her eighteenth birthday; the trophy from that was the largest she’d ever won and though proud of it, Akeno ended up stuffing it in the back of her closet because she didn’t have anywhere to put it and didn’t want to make room.

She’d see it back there sometimes and think about doing something with it, but…

The point was Akeno was someone who put in exactly as much effort as she felt like putting in to something and had so far managed to coast by on just that. She was not a hard worker. She was a teenager in high school, or had been one at least, approaching the end of her final year and trying to figure out what to do once she got to college. The life of an Orc, by comparison, looked like it was going to one of constant physical effort. At the beginning of the day she had been asked to go out into the wilderness and fighting a wild animal to the death to earn herself the right to stay in the tribe or whatever these Orcs called themselves. All she’d really done was earn the right to fend for herself; find her own food, her own place to sleep, secure her own safety.

So she might as well get started. Placing the flat edge of the rock at the top of the sheet of hide, Akeno angled it so that it formed a wedge relative to its surface and dragged it down the length of the wooden board it was resting on. It accumulated a good amount of fleshy, bloody gunk along the way, some of it climbing up the rock to coat Akeno’s hands too, which she then shook off into the bucket of dirty water for lack of a better option. She continued at this until it seemed like she wouldn’t be able to get any more off, not with the tool she had anyway, and stepped back to examine her work.

Her hand was cramping around the rock; both of them, since she’d had to swap hands a couple of times to let the other rest, but from what she could tell the job she had done had been… adequate. Time for the next step then, which had been… salting, right.

Now where was that bucket of salt?

[@Zeroth]