Frost 1, 120
It had been an entire year since he'd begun his apprenticeship, and while much had changed, both within himself and without in the greater world beyond, some things remained painfully static. The most prominent of such fast and fixed unmoving landmarks in what was otherwise becoming quite an anxious and understandably frightening time given Lorien's fast-growing civil war was "Script Day". The "event", if it could even really be called such, was almost enough to make the world at large seem half-way appealing, at least where Foma was concerned.
In the interest of keeping the workshop's products unique and at least on the forefront of innovation, Mister Wagner regularly altered the workshop's scripts. The popular theory among the apprentices was that the man spent most of the time in between each update, retcon, and rewrite to devise the next nearly impossible to decipher set of strings. Kriemhilde Holzknecht was the exception in both frustrated theorizing and "Script Day" entirely. She seemed to effortlessly parse together the new codes with very little effort and made a point not to share her discoveries as such a thing would, as she said, "Defeat the entire purpose of the exercise."
Fortunately for the rest of them, such sentiments didn't extend to stopping discussion or collaboration in an attempt to discover the master's new and improved codes. She was usually far too busy with her own work to bother policing the rest of them, so long as no one got overly enthusiastic in either their excitement or mounting despair.
Foma found himself somewhere in the middle of the two as he carefully paged through the skimmed nexus in front of him. He'd managed to disassemble the simple golem easily enough, but removing the script from its shell was barely even the beginning. The hollowed-out teddy bear carcass was slumped in the corner of Foma's workspace, kept for reference to cross-check with any strings he couldn't quite figure out. Working through another's code was a very long process of trial and error, excessive notetaking, and a near-constant cycle of removal and installation of the nexus in question. He'd already mapped out several hundred of the same lines just to make sure that a particularly confusing string of script was what was allowing the teddy bear to correct its balance by identifying a foreign "push" and countering with a "bend" and "tense" in its legs rather than a counter "push" of its own.
The journey to discovery had been somewhat cathartic, gently but firmly shoving the partially stuffed creature about his workbench and examining each of its working parts to figure out what exactly it was doing each time. He'd managed to come to what he imagined was the proper conclusion and was just finishing up jotting down the notations into his journal, when Miss Holzknecht cleared her voice to draw his attention.
"Four days is all I can allow you, Mister Kozlov," she began, her bright and piercing emerald eyes studying him as he'd studied the velutinous teddy golem. "I expect you to have these strings untangled by then and resume work on those assignments from yesterday." Assignments that all involved a fair amount of scripting and would be utterly impossible without untangling said strings beforehand. She raised a neatly plucked brow, her childlike features barely aged even over the course of a year. "Though at your current rate, you're bound to disappoint. See that you don't."
It wasn't an invitation to conversation or debate. So very little was with Miss Holzknecht. Foma nodded his understanding, frustrated as he was he had no desire to start into an argument he'd surely lose or make excuses only for the sake of annoying his child supervisor. Four days was in and of itself quite generous, at least according to Miss Holzknecht's ambitious standards. Ordinarily and without the pressure she made sure to relentlessly apply to him, he might comfortably make sense of the golem's code in six or seven days. Four was doable. Doable but by no means convenient, though convenience had long since been rudely shoved upon the shelf where it now sat under a considerable film of dust ever since he'd elbowed his way into the workshop last year. There wasn't much sense in reminiscing over its retirement now.
She returned to her own desk, settling into her own work, and allowed him to return to his. Already his head was heavy with the familiar but foreign runic script in front of him, symbols and glyphs and a few frustrated doodles nearly blackened his current sheet of note-taking paper. "Hug" was a function he'd found, and one he'd named for lack of a better word, but it had been phrased with two symbols he'd been having trouble deciphering. One of them, at least, he figured had to be "wrap" or "coil" while the other was something conditional, an entire string dedicated to some tactile function that he could only assume was what notified the teddy golem when to stop squeezing or "wrapping" or "coiling".
The word "gentle" came to mind, but such a modifier was far too ambiguous to be used without at least a string or two to clarify, strings he'd been searching for in his vain attempt to locate an internal and arbitrary dictionary. They'd had one in the last batch of codes, a clever little repository neatly added via mold to save time and allow for particularly strange strings to be written that would otherwise fail or produce particularly strange effects. This time, however, there was no such resource, or at least not one he could find.
"Pressure" seemed to be the most correct of the possibilities, and he jotted it down next to several other synonyms all scattered alongside the symbol in question. He refitted the nexus back into the bear, carefully mapped out the relevant lines for the third hundredth time, and sloppily sewed the thing shut so the lines wouldn't immediately erode and the nexus would stay in place while he tested his theories. "Wake up, teddy."
The little furry thing stirred, its blank and staring eyes of black glass seeing thanks to the careful carving from the lapidarist but carrying with them no life beyond that. "Hug, teddy," Foma sighed offering his outstretched hand for the furry arms to take hold of. He hadn't bothered mapping out the lines for its legs, and he wasn't interested in any other movement interfering with his tests. The golem wrapped his hand in a furry embrace, not too tightly, and Foma tested out his first guess, one he'd already come to suspect was wrong, with a sharp and mostly-convincing, "Ow!"
There was no change from the teddy golem. It continued to cling to his hand. "Comfort" then was out. He tried out several different tests, slowly crossing out his guesses one by one until he tried to push back against the teddy's cuddling arms. The moment he exerted enough pressure to extricate himself, the teddy's limbs went limp and fell back to its sides. He tested several different ways, pulling and pushing and shifting about, but whenever he exerted enough pressure to break free, he was instead released. "Pressure" was circled in his journal along with "encircle".
"Wrap" would have needed a conditional string to keep the limbs from just eternally snaking around his wrist, a similar problem "coiling" would have faced. "Encircle" better fit the precise way the bear's flat paws pressed together whenever it was able to wrap its arms entirely around whatever it was asked to hug and the manner in which it tried to connect its paws whenever it hugged something too wide to do so.
At the very least, "deactivate" and "activate" were neatly tied to "go to sleep" and "wake up". They were the first and most obvious bits of the script he'd had no issue parsing through. The rest continued to elude him, though already he was making progress. The others were as well, and from their quiet discussions, he found his own suspicions vindicated. It seemed the general consensus was "encircle" and "pressure" in regards to the golem's hugging. "Tense" was currently being hotly debated in a quiet argument in one of the workshop's many corners, and the more he idly listened while he unstitched and removed the golem's nexus, the more he found himself agreeing that "tighten" seemed to be more accurate.
He made the amendment in his journal, not bothering to throw in his own thoughts. While the year had given him ample time to improve his skill at the craft they were all so dedicated to, it had done little for his interpersonal relationships with the other apprentices. They were all so much younger than he, and while they weren't exactly unfriendly, there was little for them to bond over. That and his station as one of Lorien's nameless did little to stoke the embers of interest. It had been something of a shame initially, but Foma had quickly found that between his work and Miss Holzknecht's relentless instruction, he didn't really have time for friends. And, to be quite frank, they didn't really have time for him either.
