Tricks, Cons and Bamboozles | Wednesday | Period 1

[charming_thief]

Today in class, the students were fortunate enough to have a fully-human, fully-clothed teacher. Sure, that teacher was one who had spent the weekend sobbing into an empty bottle of Bordeaux, but that was neither here nor there.

“Today,” said Neal, “we’re going to do a couple of workshops.”

The room was set up with three main tables, with various pieces of equipment in buckets on each one. Yes, the class was a bit small to do workshops like this, but that was what he was doing and that was that.

“I’ve set up three main stations for you all, and each one focuses on a different manual task that’s pretty much essential in this field. I’m not saying you have to be experts at it, especially if you want to move to the more white-collar stuff, but you’ve got to know the basics. So here we have lock-picking, pickpocketing, and forgery.” He pointed to each table as he spoke, then shrugged.

“Any questions?” 

Comments

Re: Station Three: Forgery

[bigshoestofill.livejournal.com]

Yeah. This. This took patience and skill and, well, patience.

Bart wasn't good at patience.

He squinted at the books and the writing and his pen and the paper. After a couple seconds he started scrawling something down. He tried to make it look different than his normal practically illegible handwriting. All that served to do was make it more illegible.

Re: Station Three: Forgery

[charming_thief]

"Try turning it over," Neal advised quietly. "If you copy it, your original handwriting will show through, but if you treat it like it's a drawing, you should be able to manage."

Re: Station Three: Forgery

[bigshoestofill.livejournal.com]

Bart cocks his head to one side and looks confused, then turns the page over so the text is face down. He looks confused at it, then back up at Neal. "Urm..."

Re: Station Three: Forgery

[charming_thief]

Neal just grinned agreeably and turned the paper back over, then rotated it so it was upside down. "Like that," he said, and tried to pat Bart on the shoulder. "Copy it and try to forget that it's letters."

Re: Station Three: Forgery

[bigshoestofill.livejournal.com]

It's as if Neal had just explained the nature of the universe itself. Bart looked wide eyed at the letters which were hard enough to learn how to write in the first place and now they looked just like little pictures.

"Oooh. That... Makes more sense." Bart nodded in understanding and then leaned over the desk and started working.