Strawberry's Descent

Nettle had sewn a lot of strange things in her time. Enchanted hats that shifted color with the wearer's mood, green for pleased, blue for melancholy, red for anger, yellow for anxious, the entire spectrum of human and demon emotion helpfully broadcast to everyone nearby whether the wearer wanted it known or not.

She ran a hand along one hanging from a nearby hook, remembering, with fond, private amusement, the exact shade of humiliated yellow one guild member's hat had turned the entire time he'd tried, badly, to flirt with an NPC bartender.

Boots that muffled footsteps for the guild's more mischief-inclined members. A scarf once commissioned specifically to make the wearer look 'vaguely threatening but also festive.' None of it had prepared her for a material that actively fought back.

The first attempt at cutting the cloud fabric went about as well as Arista's first pancake.

"Okay," Nettle muttered, laying the material flat across her worktable and testing her sharpest shears against one corner. "Fabric. It's fabric. Fabric cuts."

It did not cut. The shears sank in, met resistance somewhere in the material's strange, springy depths, and then the whole thing simply pushed back, shears popping free of her grip and clattering across the table.

[Tailoring Attempt: Failed][Material Response: Elastic Rebound]

"...Right. Not fabric, then. Not really." She retrieved her shears, flexing her fingers, and eyed the material with newfound respect. "You're a shield. You're built to resist force, not yield to it. Cutting is force."

She tried heat next, on the theory that maybe softening it first would help, a mistake she realized almost immediately when the material simply absorbed the heat instead of loosening, radiating it back out a moment later in a way that left her singed fingertips and a very undignified yelp.

[Tailoring Attempt: Failed][Material Response: Thermal Deflection]

"Okay. No heat." She shook out her hand, glaring at the material like it had personally wronged her. "You don't just resist force. You redirect it. Every single approach that works on normal fabric, you're just going to bounce right back at me, aren't you."

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The material, being fabric, did not respond. It did, however, sit there looking smug in the particular way only a stubborn object could manage.

Three days in, Nettle had filled an entire wall of her workspace with failed approaches, each one crossed out with increasingly aggressive strokes of charcoal. Shears, failed. Heat, failed. A finely serrated blade, borrowed from a butcher two doors down, failed, though it did leave the material rippling with what looked almost like amusement. A focused burst of arcane energy, more out of desperation than genuine expectation, failed, and also cost her an entire mana potion she wasn't getting back.

"You know what," she said, slumping over her worktable, addressing the material directly the way she'd started doing somewhere around attempt six, "I respect you. I do. But I also need you to be a wingsuit, and right now you're being a personality."

She sat with that frustration for a while, turning a scrap of the material over in her hands, pressing and releasing, watching it rebound to shape every single time no matter how she distorted it.

Then, slowly, an idea crept in, the same kind of idea, she suspected, that Arista seemed to have constantly, the ones that arrived sideways instead of head-on.

"...Wait." She sat up. "I'm trying to cut something that's designed to resist being cut. What if I stop fighting its actual nature and work with it instead."

She grabbed her notebook, a much tidier one than Arista's, color-coded and properly indexed, because if there was one thing Nettle prided herself on, it was organization even in chaos: and started sketching.

"It doesn't yield to a blade. Fine. What if I don't need it to? What if, instead of cutting panels and stitching them together the normal way, I shape the whole thing as one continuous piece, molded into form the way Strawberry apparently did with the shield, pressed and worked by hand into the shape I need, joints and seams built in from the start instead of cut and sewn afterward?"

She turned the idea over, testing its logic against every failure so far. No cutting meant no fighting the rebound. No heat meant no fighting the thermal deflection. Just... patient, deliberate shaping, the same slow manipulation Arista had used on the shield, except now applied to something far more complex than a simple round shape.

"Okay," Nettle murmured, cracking her knuckles, genuine excitement creeping back in past the frustration. "New plan. Forget tailoring. This isn't a sewing project anymore."

She glanced at the pale, faintly rippling stockpile still sitting untouched at the center of her table, and grinned in a way that would have looked entirely too familiar to anyone who'd spent enough time around a certain demon blacksmith.

"This is a sculpting project."

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