Jeppson

• Build & height: 1.75 m, wiry, all sinew and knuckle, with forearms corded from twenty years of planing. He stands slightly crooked from a lifetime of sighting down planks with one eye.
• Face: thin and sharp-nosed, always chalk-smudged somewhere. Deep squint lines round the right eye (the one he sights with), eyebrows white with chalk dust, and a mouth set in a permanent "hm". At rest he's measuring something, usually you.
• Hair: sandy-brown, cut to exactly half an inch by himself with a rule and shears, and chalk-grey on top no matter how often he washes it.
• Eyes: grey-green, the right one usually shut when he's looking at anything that matters. When BLUEPRINT is live, a fine violet grid of measuring lines glows across both irises.
• Skin & sin-mark: pale and dusty. Sloth, violet. The script runs up both forearms like measuring marks: actual ruler-ticks, every inch numbered in tiny violet numerals, wrist to elbow at K-III. He measures with his own forearm. When the Rivet Beat fires, every tick blazes at once.
• Clothing, layer by layer: a collarless work shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow (to keep the script clear) · a leather work apron with deep chalk pockets · the tool-belt: square, boxwood folding rule, chalk-line reel, mallet, chisels rolled in oilcloth · canvas trousers with leather knee-pads (he kneels to draw) · soft-soled boots that don't scuff a line · brass-rimmed goggles pushed up on his forehead · a carpenter's pencil behind each ear · chalk dust everywhere, on everything, always.
• Signature item: the chalk box: dented brass, a dozen sticks of graded hardness in felt slots, and a violet-dusted chalk-line reel clipped to its lid. Second: the Book of Works.
• Movement: deliberate and economical, never hurried. He kneels, sights, measures, and draws in long single strokes.
• Voice: quiet, clipped and precise. He talks in numbers and corrections, and "Hm" covers most of his feelings. His balloons are square-cornered with tiny ruler-ticks along the bottom edge, and any number he says is lettered in small, exact print.

He chalks a thing (a bridge, a wall, a mast, a stair) and it stands built for one hour. Anything he has once built by hand, the chalk version keeps.

• The drawing: chalk on any dry surface (a deck, a cliff, a wall, the side of a ship), full size or to scale with the measurements written in. It has to be right: every line, every number. "It stands exactly as well as I drew it."
• The rise: he snaps the chalk line (the last stroke) and the thing rises out of the drawing as chalkwork: pale as bone, hard as seasoned oak, with violet tick-marks along every edge.
• The hour: it stands for one hour, then sighs back into dust.
• Fair Copy: if he has once built that exact thing by hand, the chalk version keeps, forever, as real as the original, because his hands have already paid its hours. Every hand-build is logged in the Book of Works, and that's his library of keepable designs. This is why the Upp Igen can never stay broken, and why, from Saga V, Arc 4 on, neither can the Marka's hull (on the page, ch. 275: "Entry one thousand and forty-nine. I built her back by hand. So anything I chalk on her now is a fair copy. Hole her, and I'll patch her, and the patch keeps.").
• Size: limited by how fast and how well he can draw. A ladder in a breath, a mast in a minute, a bridge across a gorge in ten. Big builds are drawn in spans, and each span counts as a build (and a price).
• What he builds: things to stand on, cross, climb and shelter behind: bridges, walls, masts, stairs, hulls, tables. Never a thing that's only for hurting. (He tried a ballista once. It came out as a very good chair.)
• What it can't do:
  • Build what he doesn't understand: anything alive, anything with a soul (no gun-souls; Malm's work is Malm's), any machine he can't draw every part of.
  • Rise from a wet drawing: rain and spray smear the lines first. (Once risen, chalkwork shrugs off rain for its hour.)
  • Last past the hour, unless it's a Fair Copy.
  • The Null: chalk doesn't hold on what isn't. A line drawn across the grey simply isn't there. A chalk bridge can rise from both banks of the grey, but no span of it can touch the grey. (Phase One: shown failing, once.)
  • Mingus: he can't build anything that holds Mingus. No pen, no crate, no kennel: the chalk lines won't close round him. He tried once to build him a doghouse; the roof rose and the walls wouldn't meet. He can build him a bed. Beds don't hold anything. (It's on the Upp Igen, for whenever the ships are side by side, and Mingus sleeps on it every time.)
• A smudged line never rises (ch. 265: Flisa wiping his cofferdam lines from inside the rib, "Nope.", until Mingus lay down on the corner).

• Tempo: 90: "A right angle." He's prouder of that than of anything on his plate.
• Home tempo: the Wreck Basin slipway at the Examination Docks, where he raised the Upp Igen. Every hulk in that basin is something he once measured.
• Heartbeat technique: THE RIVET BEAT. For one beat, everything he ever built locks rigid: nothing he made can break during that beat. Hand-built and chalk alike, every entry in the Book of Works, wherever in the Current it is. No one else holds everything they ever made in a single heartbeat.
• Burn cost (and the HADOM OVERFLOW rule): the Rivet Beat is one action only because he holds everything he ever made as one work: one picture, the Book of Works shut in his head. If he thinks of them as separate things, a thousand builds become a thousand actions, his ninety can't count them, and the beat overflows. It takes perfect focus, and a frightened Jeppson thinks in pieces. After it fires, his hands lock rigid with everything else and stay clenched for an hour, fists he can't open, so there's no drawing.
• On the page (ch. 268), against Flisa's Splinter-Pulse: the Book of Works tears apart in his head into 1,049 separate pages (ENTRY 1 · BIRDHOUSE · ENTRY 611 · UPP IGEN · ENTRY 802 · ROFFE'S LONG TABLE · ENTRY 1,049 · MARKA (REBUILT)), a violet crack opens over his heart, ba-ba-ba—: the overflow. Emma's Keeping Beat holds his heart ("I can keep your heart, Jepp. I can't keep your ship. That's yours."), and Krydog talks him into one picture: "Entry one. The birdhouse. Start there… Where's the birdhouse?" / "In the Book." / "Where's the Book?" / "Under my head." / "Then it's one book, isn't it?" The pages slam home, the cover shuts, TOK: both ships, the birdhouse on Glasheim's lowest terrace (a sparrow inside, blinking), Roffe's Long Table, Mingus's bed and a chalk stair at the Examination Docks lock violet for one beat, and nothing splits. Then his fists lock for the hour: "Hm. An hour. No pencil for an hour."

Each chalk-build costs him a day of steady hands, paid from tomorrow: that day his hands shake too much to draw a straight line. Builds stack: five in a battle means five shaky days after. After a big build he can't hold a pencil, which he hates more than anything in the world, more than rain, more than wrong numbers. On the page: the tremor drawn in his fingers, a pencil rolling away across the deck, and Jeppson asking someone else to hold the chalk, then being physically unable to watch how they draw. The Book of Works shows the shaky days as blank entries, and he keeps a running count of days owed in its margin. Shown in Arc 4: one cofferdam (ch. 265) = one shaking day (ch. 266, "Day nothing. Shaking day. Sorting."), with the shake arriving early as he lays his palm on the split keel. Then eleven days with no chalk at all, because every line would have cost a steady day he needed for the rebuild ("Every line I draw costs a steady day. I've got eleven, and I've spent them.", ch. 267; a stripper throws him a chalk stick and he puts it back in its felt slot). The Rivet Beat's hour of locked fists (ch. 268). And a battle's worth of chalk at the Great Root, paid later: "I'll shake next week!" (ch. 271)

• Wet: rain, spray, a sluiced deck. The lines smear before they rise.
• Time: rush him and he's a wiry man with a pencil.
• Smudges: a boot across a line before it rises, and nothing stands. (Rävgrytet, where the paths rearrange when someone laughs, would be his nightmare.)
• The hour: every build he hasn't made by hand has a clock on it, and enemies who know it wait him out.
• Shaky days: after a big fight he's useless for days, and a second fight before his hands come back finds him helpless.
• His perfectionism: he won't snap a line he knows is a hair off, even to save a life. It's the hesitation that nearly kills someone in the Splinterlands, and the one he spends two sagas unlearning: good enough, if it holds. On the page (ch. 265): the rib twisting under him, the last line of the cofferdam a hair off, and Isa holding the whole sea still with no breath, Jeppson and Krydog moving inside her Hold, while he rubs the line out and redraws it four times ("Off. Off. Off."). Her lips go blue. Krydog roars "GOOD ENOUGH, IF IT HOLDS!", the loudest he has ever been at his own crew, and Jeppson snaps it. It holds. Isa breathes after 2 minutes 4 seconds. "It's off." / "It's holding. That's the whole job, mate."
• The overflow: the Rivet Beat needs one picture, and fear breaks pictures into pieces.

• The chalk box and chalk-line reel; the boxwood folding rule, which he has carried since he was seven; the two pencils (sharpened to exactly the same length); square, mallet, chisels; the goggles.
• THE BOOK OF WORKS: fat and oilcloth-bound. Every build he has ever made is numbered and drawn in it. Entry 1 is a birdhouse he built at seven, still standing on Glasheim's lowest terrace. Entry 611 is the Upp Igen. Entry 802 is Roffe's Long Table. 1,018 entries at Saga V; 1,049 by ch. 268 (Entry 1,049: MARKA (REBUILT), ch. 267); Entry 1,050: "A hair off true. Kept." (ch. 275), the first flaw he has ever written down as kept. He sleeps with it under his head ("I've watched you sleep on it for six years, Jepp.", Krydog, ch. 268). It's his library of Fair Copies, and the one picture he holds in the Rivet Beat.
• Jeppson's plank: on every ship he boards, he trues or replaces one plank by hand, and ticks its underside in violet. Nobody notices ("There's one on every ship I board. Nobody notices.", ch. 275). It's a habit, and in Saga VI it's the whole plan. The Marka's (ch. 275): he chisels out the one cut plank (the knot that weeps, ORDER STOCK) by hand, "as if pulling a splinter out of a friend", and fits a new one shaped from the slab of bark Ferdinand dropped at the Great Root the night the tree stopped hurting ("It fell. Last night. When it stopped hurting."), the gift Flisa pushed toward him: "Take it. For the one that was cut. He wants you to."
• The UPP IGEN: his work, end to end. A broad, battered carrack, sunk five times and raised five times, every raising a band of differently coloured planks along her sides, oldest at the waterline, newest at the rail: tar-black oak · rust-red pine · grey larch · pale ash · and at the rail his band of cork-brown fallen-bark scrap. Below the waterline she's sheathed end to end in his bark-scrap mosaic: about eleven thousand scraps of Ferdinand's fallen bark, carried out of the Order's yards in his pockets over four years and fitted by hand, and that's the only reason she can sail the Current. He carved the figurehead (a raised fist with a bandage across its knuckles) using Krydog's own fist as the model. He built Roffe's Long Table and Mingus's bed. The Chalk Room, his workshop in the orlop, has every tool hanging inside a chalk outline of itself. Flag: the bandaged fist on black. Motto: "UPP IGEN!"

He builds the battlefield. He opens by chalking cover: a wall across a gangway, a stair to the high ground, a mast-top for the lookout. Mid-fight he keeps the ship whole, patching her as she's holed (on the Upp Igen, and on the Marka after Arc 4, every patch keeps). He finishes by building the way out: a bridge, a ladder, a road home. He has never once thrown a punch, and he's proud of that too. Crew combos (the Up-Again crew):

• Jeppson + Krydog, "Upstairs": 5. Krydog rises; the stair rises under him.
• Jeppson + Roffe, "The Long Table": the hand-built table, chalk-copied as long as the meal needs.
• Jeppson + Emma: her circles are drawn with his chalk, freehand, and they're perfect, which infuriates him. "You didn't measure." "I didn't need to."
• Jeppson + Perne, "The Crow's Nest": a chalk tower anywhere in a minute, so her long look starts higher. She says it's always a foot short. He says it's exact. They're both right: she means the horizon.
• Jeppson + Flexsnus, "An Hour and a Notch": Flexsnus bends the chalk's hour one notch, to an hour and a minute. That minute has saved them twice.
• Jeppson + Tihi, "Trapeze": chalk swings and bars across a deck; she cartwheels across, bells flying. She's the only person allowed in the Chalk Room.
• Jeppson + Daniel: wherever Daniel needs a court (a beach, a deck, a cliff-top), Jeppson chalks him a bench and a rail in a minute.

Marka combos:

• Jeppson + Drekk, "Running Repairs": Drekk steers straight into the fight, Jeppson patches the Marka as she's holed, and since the Splinterlands every patch keeps. They still argue the whole time.
• Jeppson + Rougeina, "Pillars": he raises chalk pillars behind the enemy's line, and she Swaps with them.
• Jeppson + Trollmage, "Two Sloths": the troll waits, and the shipwright works slowly beside him. Trollmage once offered to MACRO a chalk wall forty times; Jeppson worked out that it would cost him forty shaky days and said no in four seconds, the fastest answer of his life.

• Wants: one perfect build. Then, as he grows, things that hold.
• Fears: his hands shaking for good; something he built failing with someone standing on it; rain.
• Contradiction: filed as a Sloth, he's the hardest worker on either ship. A perfectionist whose greatest work will be the fastest, roughest thing he ever made.
• Humour: dry and pedantic. He corrects everybody's numbers and makes measurement jokes nobody else gets. "Hm."
• Habits: measures people by eye when he meets them, and tells them ("One eighty-eight. You lean. It costs you an inch."); numbers every build; sharpens both pencils to the same length every morning; trues one plank on every ship he boards; sleeps with the Book of Works under his head.
• Alone: he re-reads the Book of Works from Entry 1. When his hands shake, he draws on his own palm with a fingertip, very slowly, until they stop.

• Drekk: shipwright and navigator; they argue about the Marka's keel for a whole arc. First words (Saga V, Arc 1), from the Upp Igen's rail, one eye shut: "…A hair off true." Drekk: "WHAT did you say about my ship?" In the Splinterlands it becomes a war, both of them on their backs under her, sighting along the same plank: "It's a hair off." "She steers like that." "It's a hair off." "It's MY hair." (Flisa, from a knot between their faces, takes both sides: "Whose side are you ON?" / "The keel's.", ch. 267.) He sorted Drekk's ship into heaps ("That's my ship in heaps." / "Nine hundred and forty heaps.", ch. 266) and gave her back whole ("There you are.", ch. 267). After the arc: "Nobody touches my hull but you. And you ask first." (ch. 275)
• Old Stav (posthumous): on day five he finds Stav's troll-mason's mark (a little hammer under a crooked crown) cut into the Marka's keel where the hair-off plank begins, and goes quiet, his hand flat on it. "That's Stav's. I don't touch Stav's." / "It's a hair off." / "…It's his hair." (ch. 267). Stav was also one plank short, and bought the one cut plank Jeppson replaced (ch. 269, 275).
• Vigolas: Stav's hair-off-true keel is why the Marka leans left in a crosswind. "I could true it in a day. I'm not going to." Vigolas, grinning upside down at the end of the keel: "She leans left? Good. So did Camilla." Jeppson, who has never kept a flaw in his life, writes it in the Book: "Entry one thousand and fifty. A hair off true. Kept." (ch. 275). He asked about DESPAWN's price, one eye shut: "New command. What's it cost?" / "Something small." / "Hm. They always say that." (ch. 273)
• Trollmage: two Sloths; patience as work. They sit on a slipway for six hours without a word, the troll waiting and the shipwright measuring. Trollmage is the only person whose slowness Jeppson has never once corrected. Jeppson gives the Barkstrippers' Foreman the Brygdar answer ("Learn to wait for him to drop it.") and the troll adds the time ("Sometimes a hundred years… Bring a pillow.", ch. 274).
• Flisa: she watched him from the first day: "Not a sliver?" / "I don't take bark off a living tree. Never have." / "…I'll be watching." / "Good. Hold the lamp." (ch. 265). She smudged his lines and pulled one shard a night out of his rebuild ("Doesn't that make you angry?" / "No. It makes me faster.", ch. 267), and her Splinter-Pulse broke on his Rivet Beat (ch. 268). Then, fists locked, he read her the grain, plank by plank, until she was saying "It fell" with him: she believed the grain before she believed the crew (ch. 269). He measured her: "You were one-eighty. You're about one-oh-nine." (ch. 269) · "Hm. One metre. Exactly." (ch. 274). She gave him Ferdinand's gift slab for his plank (ch. 275). Later: two souls who live in hulls.
• Krydog: he carved the figurehead from the captain's fist, keeps the patch count, and has the sum worked out to the afternoon: "Of nights you owe? Four thousand one hundred and six. And an afternoon." (ch. 267). Krydog threw him across the gap between two sinking ships ("Ready?" / "No." / "Good!", ch. 265), roared him into his first off-true line (ch. 265), and sat up with him all eleven nights of Shard by Shard with two mugs ("You don't sleep. I don't sleep. Might as well.", ch. 266): the captain who can't sleep, keeping company with the shipwright who won't. "Why a birdhouse?" / "I was seven. It's still up." (ch. 267). On day eleven Krydog held him up by a hand flat on his back for the last shard; in the Rivet Beat he gave him "one book" (ch. 268). "Go to sleep, Jepp." / "You go to sleep." / "Never."
• Isa: held the sea for him, not breathing, 2 min 4 s, while he wouldn't snap a line (ch. 265). "Don't ever make me do that again."
• Levla: priced him untouchable for the whole rebuild: PRICE: ELEVEN DAYS. "Thank you. Mind the heap." (ch. 266)
• Gnag : two Glasheim yard-boys paid in bread ("The yards paid in bread. Never enough bread."); one became the Root-Eater, the other never took bark off a living tree. He measured Gnag's bark-line like a plank: "A finger's width. For a fistful." (ch. 274)
• Roffe: built his Long Table; hates the chalk menus on the bulkhead.
• Flexsnus: the pockets of sweepings. He rebuilt Flexsnus's boot heel and lends him pencils, sighing.
• Perne: the chalk towers, always "a foot short".
• Emma: her perfect unmeasured circles. Her circle round him and his heaps all eleven days ("Nobody steps on a heap!", ch. 267), and her Keeping Beat round his overflowing heart (ch. 268).
• Tihi: the trapeze, and the only key to the Chalk Room.
• Daniel: a bench wherever he needs a court.
• Kompis + Mingus: the kennel walls wouldn't meet. He built the bed instead, and Mingus sleeps on it whenever the ships are side by side (it locked violet in the Rivet Beat too, ch. 268). Kompis thanks him every time, which embarrasses him every time. In the flooding hold Mingus lay down across the corner of his drawing so Flisa couldn't smudge it (ch. 265), and after day eleven he lay across the shipwright's feet "like a warm rug" (ch. 267).
• Rougeina: the pillars. She's the only person who has ever complimented his angles.

• "Stands for an hour. Don't dawdle."
• "Measure twice. Measure again. Then measure the first two."
• "Draw it dry. Build it wet." (ch. 265)
• "Eleven days. By hand. Her own bark. Not a sliver off the tree." (ch. 265)
• "That's Stav's. I don't touch Stav's." / "…It's his hair." (ch. 267)
• "Plank one. No axe. No saw at the root end. Smooth. It fell." (ch. 268–269)
• "Entry one thousand and fifty. A hair off true. Kept." (ch. 275)
• "I can't hold a pencil. Somebody draw it for me. No. Not like that. NOT LIKE THAT."
• "It's all one ship." (Saga VI)