When Leera of the Ace tribe was bored, she helped some of the elders of her village quarry huge blocks of stone from a rock face a few miles north of where her family was encamped.  

    When Leera felt like she needed exercise, she dragged one of those blocks back to the camp with her.

    When Leera was angry or sad, she picked one of the blocks in the camp at random and smashed it with her fists until the stone began to crack and the tears stopped washing down the sides of her cheeks.

    When Leera was calm, or needed to think, she sorted through the cracked blocks of stone, looking for large pieces of broken rock which made her feel like wanting to carve them into something beautiful.  These ones, she hauled over to the most skillful of her tribe's artisans.  The blocks that were the hardest, sharpest and most difficult to work she kept for herself.

    When Leera was feeling lonely, she'd pick up one of those bad stones and work it with her claws and grind it along the heavy scales on her arms.  Every once in a while, she'd work loose an old scale that was ready to come out.  These she carefully wrapped in paper or leaves or old cloth for when one of her people next went to trade with the non-manakete peoples of the world.  Humans and Burroin both had many uses for Makakete corundum.  Leera, meanwhile, was always happy just to be rid of the damned itchy things.

    Like all of her people, Leera's body had been warped by the types of magic her ancestors had used on themselves in the ancient past.  Unfortunately for Leera, her body wasn't nearly so good at shedding scales as it was at making them.  She was quite young by Manakete standards, but both of her arms were already covered in a thick crust of layer upon layer of scales.  

    Every day, Leera felt the intense weight of the scales on her arms pulling her toward the ground.  Some days, she feared they would grow to entomb her entire body and make maintaining a humanoid form impossible.  Other days, she dreamed of removing the serpent shackle from about her ankle once and for all and fully embracing the transformation that overtook all manaketes who lived long enough.  To do so young carried heavy risks.  Both to her body and her mind.  So she embraced her duties to the tribe and made a game of seeing how much more of life she could take.

    On the days when Leera didn't want to get out of bed, she started the day by pounding a pile of leftover stones into gravel.  

    When Leera thought she couldn't take any more, she pounded piles of gravel into sand.

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    When Leera couldn't think of a reason to live any more, she got out her mortar bowl and ground a bucketful of sand into dust.  It was a process that took days.  Usually, she fell asleep with the mortar still in her lap.  Often, she didn't eat.  By the time she was done though, the scales on the backs of her hands and wrists would be ground down to nothing, or nearly nothing and she would be coated from head to toe in a layer of sweat.  

    Then, if her black bout of depression still hadn't broken,  Leera would carefully sift the ground flecks of her scales out of the dust and seek out her liaison partner Varsaaken.  And then drag the other woman back to her tent at the first opportunity.  Mostly they talked.  Occasionally they did other things.  

    Such liaisons weren't exactly common among Leera's people, but they weren't frowned upon either.  The hereditary effects of their ancestors' transformation magics often forced Manaketes to make breeding decisions based on the risk of inherited disease rather than for love.  This, in turn, had forced her people to learn about the science of genetics and uncoupled the idea of romantic love from simple procreation.  Same-sex coupling between close friends was, in a word, merciful.  At least, compared to bringing a child into the world who might only live for a few days or weeks at most.  Most likely in terrible pain.

    Varsaaken's parents had been lucky.  Their family lines and genetic screening had shown no trace of inherited disease.  And they had been madly, madly in love with each other since they were children.  Nevertheless, their second daughter had been born with a mutation that had made her bones and scales extremely fragile.  The tribe's healers had compensated for this by teaching Varsaaken how to make a lacquer that provided a limited amount of reinforcement and could fill in any cracked scales before they fractured entirely.

    Naturally, many of the males in the tribe would offer to help Varsaaken apply the lacquer - as to do so properly required a painstaking inspection of each and every one of her scales.  However, to apply the lacquer properly was delicate and tedious work.  Vasaaken herself spent hours every day just trying to keep up lest her body lose what little protection it could muster against claw and fang and talon.

    Helping care for her childhood friend in this way always gave Leera a fresh sense of perspective.  Every moment of every day, Varsaaken lived in a kind of quiet fear that another manakete might attack her.  It had been ingrained in her since she was a child that she was vulnerable and fragile; constantly on the verge of breaking apart.  And yet, she had learned to live her life wearing her vulnerability openly.  It was plain to see in the striations and splashes of other colours in her cracked scales.   The very same individuals who could tear her apart with ease instead chose to donate their strength to buttress hers.  They loved her and she loved them all back.

    Spending time with Varsaaken always made Leera re-evaluate the meaning of the weight on her shoulders.  The weight of her scales constantly threatened to crush her, consume her, break her.  That same weight had also made her strong and confident.  She didn't live in fear of any in her tribe.  She didn't avoid heavy or difficult or painstaking work.  She thrived on it.  She sought it out.  Bit by bit she was tearing part of a mountain into dust with her own two hands.

    It was so easy to forget to use those hands to reach out to other people.  Isolating herself was a choice.  A choice she kept making.  She could always choose, instead, to lay down next to her beautiful and beloved Varsa and fall asleep.

    At least for an hour or two until the lacquer dried.  Then Varsa kissed her beloved Leera on the forehead and snuck out of the tent to finish the rest of her chores for the day.