"The damage is infectious, and all that can be done is purge it all and start from scratch."
If life is a series of choices, then perhaps that just means that life is a game? To Akazawa Saki, that's all life really is. She refutes the existence of G...
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Saki never went back to Wistal the next day, and she certainly didn't grace the city with her presence the following day, either.
In spite of her usual presence nearby, Saki was nowhere to be found, and that was the way she wanted it.
There was nothing she needed from the city, and in a sense she was even contemplating throwing in work the next day purely to avoid nosy people who ask inconsiderate questions. And she certainly wouldn't deny that avoiding Minene's greeting rant for an extra day would be enjoyable.
Oddly enough, the chicken she had encountered during the storm harboured the same sentiment and had yet to vacate the smithy attached to the front of Saki's house, and appeared to have taken an empty canvas sack in the corner of the smithy as it's permanent nest.
So it appeared Saki had a companion living here from now on, which wasn't a problem, since a free egg a day was not something she would argue about.
The forests were in a catastrophic mess in the wake of the storms just passed. Trees were uprooted, branches snapped and hurdled across the ground, and while only feathers and nest matter remained, it was sign enough that many birds unfortunate enough to miss their escape from the falling trees had met their end.
The scavengers of the forests were undoubtedly feasting well, this week.
Saki traversed the wreckages of the forest trees, dragging along trimmed branches alike as she made her way back towards home. While green wood wasn't useful for particularly much until it dried out, Saki wasn't one to look a gift horse in the mouth.
She did have the lumberjacks in Wistal to compete with in claiming the fallen trees, after all.
Saki huffed slightly as she finally managed to get the stack of weighty branch lumber back towards her home, with a relieved sigh threatening to escape her.
However, that sigh caught in her throat the very instance that she found that stack of lumber she had gathered on a trip beforehand was almost completely missing, with drags marks leading towards Wistal seeming to be half scuffed out by a leafy offshoot and boots.
Saki was silent at first as she stared down at the tracks, before she cast her gaze towards the makeshift bridge leading to her house on the inlet just to her immediate left.
Somebody was stealing the lumber she had carted all the way back here, and Saki had a very clear idea of who it could possibly be.
The lumberjack mill at the East-most gate into Wistal just so happened to have two young teens working as apprentices, and Saki was willing to bet that these apprentices were taking advantage of what looked like an abandoned house with wood left on its doorstep. The long-standing lumberjacks didn't claim clean-trimmed wood if it was left in front of Saki's house out of principal, however young teens were another matter altogether.
So, Saki decided she was going to teach them a little lesson about their unethical acquisitions.
She left the wood exactly where the previous pile had once sat, with her brow furrowing as she jogged indoors to snatch up a roll of parchment and an ink-pot with a quill.
