[Sarah]

“Reaper in Training”
Kody had been working on his signing idea for weeks now and this was the best he could come up with. The self-imposed project had been easy to start. He’d fixed the fencing around the farm and set up signposts at all the major areas both within the farm and along the border. The farm was meant to be a cover, but everyone knew what went on and all the surrounding farms had pretty signs saying what farm they were.

[Sarah]

“That doesn’t work,” Kdin came up from behind him. Kody jumped and then covered his work – not that it mattered since Kdin had already seen most of it.

“Clearly, but I can’t think of a ‘p’ word,” Kody complained. He hadn’t gone to anyone for help as it was his project and he didn’t want anyone to think he couldn’t do it on his own. The downside being he really only had himself to bounce ideas off of.

[Sarah]

“Reaper in… Practice?” Kdin thought aloud.

“Sound more confident, please,” Kody said. He’d run down a list of possible ‘p’ words to use but couldn’t find one that fit. RiP would have been a great acronym for the signs, but the P still needed to mean something. He could always use the farm’s name but that would defeat the purpose of all the work he’d done so far.

[Sarah]

“Reapers in preliminaries,” Malcolm suggested. Suddenly every Reaper was interested in what Kody was doing. For weeks he’d had the workshop to himself and now all of the sudden he was getting attention. At his weakest moment he’d been exposed and now he was paying the price.

“No,” was Kody’s only response.

[Sarah]

“Reapers in…. – no that won’t work,” Kdin talked himself into an idea just as easily as he talked himself out of it. At least Kody was finally getting some word help. It’d been easy enough to find help for fence repair, but he’d been on his own when it came to design.

“What?” Kody asked. He was curious now, but he got the feeling that Kdin was right about the word not working.

[Sarah]

“So you can make fun of me? I’m not saying,” Kdin said. As if Kdin would do any different if Kody suggested something dumb. Malcolm was excluded from that because he was in charge of both of them – all of them – Malcolm was in charge of the whole farm.

“C’mon, what were you going to say?” Malcolm implored. Just because he was in charge of them didn’t mean he was any more mature than they were.

[Sarah]

“It didn’t work, and I’ve already forgotten it,” Kdin said.

“Why not just use the farm’s name?” Malcolm asked, turning his attention away from Kdin. It would be far easier to just use the farm’s name, and Kody had already worked up a few good designs for it. His stubbornness to work out RiP was mostly just on principle of how much work he’d put into it.

[Sarah]

“Fine,” Kody said, “I already have designs for it anyway.” Utterly defeated he dramatically crumpled up his brainstorming papers and tossed them haphazardly onto the floor. Already there were masses of crumpled papers and he would bet there would be more before the signs even went up.

“Do you want help with them?” Malcolm asked. Kody got the feeling he was only asking because of the dramatic display. Malcolm had better things to be doing anyway, even if the offer for help was genuine.

[Sarah]

“No, thank you. I know what I’m going to do next now,” Kody said. It had truly been helpful to have someone else come in and give him direction. Now that he wasn’t hung up on the acronym, he could make progress for the first time in days. A blessing and a curse, as his self-project got him out of his normal chores, but he’d been working on the project so long he was beginning to miss his old routine.

[Sarah]

Kody shuffled through the mass of papers that were not crumpled on the floor and Malcolm and Kdin both left. Now he needed to find his original designs and brainstorm from there. He’d written down his initial ideas somewhere it was only a matter of searching through the table mess. If worse came to worse he’d start uncrumpling his failures on the floor.