003 - [video]
[The Forge is propped up on a table. At first, nothing is visible save for the tabletop, a blank wall, and a couple of scrolls at the far right edge of the view; until, that is, a small, featureless wooden puppet steps into the frame from the opposite side.
It shuffles to the center of the view, hesitant like a child about to perform for the first time in public, making a little motion with its hands that suggests it's wringing them nervously. It then stiffens as if given its cue, bowing rather awkwardly to the 'audience' before beginning to dance to the rhythm of a tapping foot.
The puppet's hesitancy disappears as soon as it begins, however, and it seems hard to believe a stiff wooden figure can move with such expressiveness and graceful precision. It's a playful dance, performed with the full-hearted exuberance of a child. The slight missteps the puppet makes as it goes through the motions are also the sort of mistakes that stem from youthful over-eagerness.
Its movements are so natural that it can be easy to forget for a moment that every one of those little childlike errors is completely deliberate.
The puppet continues to hop and turn and swing its arms through the dance's steps before it, and the tapping of the puppeteer's foot, abruptly stops.
And then a voice, barely audible.]
...Pointless.
[The puppet suddenly collapses in a heap, lifeless once its strings are cut. The voice of the man who'd first learned how to control puppets using this very figure a lifetime ago sounds just as lifeless.]
This is pointless.
[With a blur of movement, the video feed cuts out.]
[[ ooc: Characters from Japan/Japanese-themed canons will probably recognize the style of dance as a folk-type festival dance similar to one like this. ]]
It shuffles to the center of the view, hesitant like a child about to perform for the first time in public, making a little motion with its hands that suggests it's wringing them nervously. It then stiffens as if given its cue, bowing rather awkwardly to the 'audience' before beginning to dance to the rhythm of a tapping foot.
The puppet's hesitancy disappears as soon as it begins, however, and it seems hard to believe a stiff wooden figure can move with such expressiveness and graceful precision. It's a playful dance, performed with the full-hearted exuberance of a child. The slight missteps the puppet makes as it goes through the motions are also the sort of mistakes that stem from youthful over-eagerness.
Its movements are so natural that it can be easy to forget for a moment that every one of those little childlike errors is completely deliberate.
The puppet continues to hop and turn and swing its arms through the dance's steps before it, and the tapping of the puppeteer's foot, abruptly stops.
And then a voice, barely audible.]
...Pointless.
[The puppet suddenly collapses in a heap, lifeless once its strings are cut. The voice of the man who'd first learned how to control puppets using this very figure a lifetime ago sounds just as lifeless.]
This is pointless.
[With a blur of movement, the video feed cuts out.]
[[ ooc: Characters from Japan/Japanese-themed canons will probably recognize the style of dance as a folk-type festival dance similar to one like this. ]]