Orc Name Generator

The story

By the third evening, Varka had repaired everything on the north watch platform except the reason she kept going there. The roof no longer leaked over the bell rope. The hook held a lantern upright. The bench remained terrible. She had considered improving it, but that would have removed the one excuse everyone accepted for her presence: the person seeking the next neighborhood leadership turn had to take the least comfortable watch. Nobody could accuse the north bench of secretly offering luxury. It tilted toward a gap through which the evening wind arrived with the determination of a creditor.

Then Bren arrived carrying two cushions. Varka looked at them with professional disapproval and personal hope. He put one beneath a cracked weather vane he had brought for repair, leaving the other under his arm. 'For the metal,' he explained. 'Naturally,' said Varka. Both were adults, both could negotiate a workshop lease without assistance, and neither could ask why the other had brought enough supper for two. Bren set a covered dish between the lantern and the bell. He said he had misjudged the size of an onion. Varka said she often did that with pies.

Their town offered several ways to earn a leadership name. A rescue could establish a person's claim. A freely accepted settlement could establish another. The Endurance route concerned the unglamorous watch: taking the shift that nobody wanted, while leaving the other routes open to other candidates. Varka had entered for it during a burst of civic enthusiasm in spring. That enthusiasm had survived two drainage disputes and a meeting about cart widths. It had not survived learning that the office included introducing every guest at the midsummer dance. She still had not withdrawn her name.

Bren had entered the same route because his sister thought he needed to meet people. His sister had meant a supper club. Bren, who preferred an instruction with a recognizable task, had chosen a watch involving a bell, a weather vane, and very few strangers. On his first evening he found Varka arguing with a hinge. On his second he found she remembered how he took his tea. By the third he had begun inventing repairs that could reasonably take all evening. Neither knew the other's application had become largely incidental to the company available on the platform.

The watch did actual work. They checked the lanes for returning carts, sounded a warning when a load needed help at the steep turn, and kept an eye on the communal tool shed below. The neighborhood's Tool care duty required borrowed equipment to return in better condition. Varka sharpened a borrowed chisel after adjusting the lantern bracket. Bren replaced the worn grip on a communal hand drill. The repaired tools went back downstairs rather than becoming gifts one could use to make the other indebted. Their smallest improvements also made excuses harder to find. A properly maintained platform offered a disappointing shortage of reasons to visit twice.

On the fourth night, the bell rang while both were reaching for the last piece of pie. A returning cart had stalled at the bend. They went down together, arranged help, and returned to discover that the town's notoriously opportunistic raven had won the pie negotiation. Bren laughed until he had to sit on the bad bench. Varka watched him fold his long legs around the repaired weather vane and realized she wanted to remember this view when no qualification depended on it. She nearly said so. Instead she asked whether he intended to take the watch tomorrow. He thought she was asking how seriously he meant to compete.

'I can manage the whole week,' he said. Varka heard a challenge. 'So can I.' Bren heard a boundary. They ate the remaining onion without mentioning the dance. At home Varka told her cousin that Bren was plainly determined to become neighborhood leader. Her cousin asked whether political determination usually arrived with a second cup already sweetened. Varka replied that good officials anticipated needs. The cousin considered this explanation for a generous moment, then asked whether Varka would prefer to be right or invited somewhere. Varka found several urgent things to do with the dishes.

The following afternoon, Bren asked to exchange his watch for the south platform. The clerk accepted. The south platform was presently the least comfortable because roof work had made its ladder awkward, and the person taking it had to stay on the ground until the workmen finished. It was a legitimate shift with a legitimate inconvenience. It was also nowhere near Varka. When she reached the north platform with a little pot of stew, she found a note about the change and a repaired stool. Bren had borrowed it from the shared shed and returned it better than he found it. He had not left a message asking her to follow.

Varka carried the stew downstairs. For several minutes she considered taking it home, which would preserve the useful fiction that she had brought only one person's supper. Then she walked to the south platform. Bren stood beside the ladder, looking up at two roofers who were conducting a disagreement with tremendous enthusiasm and very little progress. Varka asked if he had left the north watch because he wanted the office badly. He asked if she had asked him about tomorrow because she wanted him to stop visiting. Between them, the stew went cold while they reconstructed a conversation made almost entirely of perfectly understandable wrong answers.

'I don't want to introduce everyone at the dance,' Varka finally said. Bren looked relieved. Then he looked disappointed. 'I was hoping you might introduce me to one person.' 'Who?' He waited. A roofer dropped a nail into the empty bucket beside them, producing a sound that gave Varka an unreasonable amount of courage. She asked whether he would come to supper on a night when neither was keeping watch. Bren asked if she meant the supper club. She said she meant her kitchen, one evening, and he could say no. He said yes before she finished explaining the available chairs.

They completed their separate watches. Varka withdrew from the leadership application the next morning; Bren stayed in because he had discovered he actually liked helping the returning carts. His eventual endurance name, Stayren, was bestowed after the required stretch of unwanted shifts, witnessed by people who had seen him do them. It did not translate into a promise that Varka owed him her evenings. For their first supper she borrowed two sturdy chairs, tightened a loose joint before returning them, and made a pie entirely unsuitable for sharing with a raven. Bren arrived without a repair to perform. They stood in the doorway for a moment, both pleasantly short of excuses.