Fake News: Castle Down, chapter 2
Jan. 14th, 2010 11:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ptahrrificTitle: Castle Down (2/6)
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Jon/c!Stephen, Steve, Larry/John-OFeatherwick
Warnings: Fantasy clichés; past slavery, abuse; an overabundance of shiny things.
Disclaimer: Two.
For the Report characters: They and their universe are property of Stephen Colbert, the other Report writers, and of course Viacom. Not mine. (Alas.)
And for the real people, the poem:
Please, make no mistake:
these people aren't fake,
but what's said here is no more than fiction.
It only was writ
because we like their wit
and wisecracks, and pull-squints, and diction.
We don't mean to quibble,
but this can't be libel;
it's never implied to be real.
No disrespect's meant;
if you disapprove, then,
the back button's right up there. Deal.
The plot thickens in this chapterof Princess Jonivere and the Jewel Riders. Featuring language barriers, stock tapestries, magical card tricks, dramatic foreshadowing, and, yes, potato pancakes.
Decorative capitals are still from Daily Drop Cap. List of chapters here.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
ever had Jon been so relieved to be back in the Castle.
Oh, it was always great to be home, and usually in ways that Jon hadn't even thought of while he was away. The multitude of tiny healing spells, for instance. He had all but stopped noticing how dry and cracked his lips were becoming, and then he got home and ran his fingers along the pearls embedded in the walls of his shower, and all of a sudden his mouth stopped hurting and it was the most amazing thing he had ever forgotten how to feel.
But this was the first time he had had another human being to consider. His company hardly counted; they were wilderness-trained and battle-ready, and knew how to be self-sufficient when left alone. Stephen...didn't seem to know much of anything.
That's not fair, Jon chided himself. Likely as not, he's been a house slave all his life. He's probably a master when it comes to laundry, or jewel care, or gardening, or some completely unexpected skill. And now that we're here, we can work out what it is.
For his own part, Jon had done his duty for a while, and earned a bit of relaxation. After shrugging on a thick blue-grey robe and a pair of soft slippers, he settled into the plushest chair in his study and chose a thick book so new it still smelled like fresh ink.
He had just cracked the spine when the bell at the door jingled. Loudly.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
ES!"
"NO!"
"YEEEEESSSS!"
The racket was giving Jon a headache from halfway up the stairs. One of those voices was definitely the head chef (Mr. Carell to his staff; Produce Pete to his friends). But the other one, matching it in volume, couldn't possibly be Stephen. He wasn't that loud.
Jon wound his way through the kitchen, dodging open flames, pot handles, and various cooks who were craning their necks to get as much of the action as possible without actually leaving their posts, until he saw just how wrong he was.
Stephen stood in the back entrance, poised over a steaming pot of stew, shouting in rapid Vulpin. Jon caught something about invisible hands, and had a moment of panic about whether someone had gone transparent on them.
"THERE YOU ARE!" shouted Carell, not adjusting his volume in the slightest. "GET THIS MAN OUT OF MY KITCHEN!"
Stephen followed his gaze — and lit up like a wand when his eyes fell on Jon. Tamping down on his grin, he pointed at Carell and yelled something that Jon barely followed. Something about...pulling your boots on?
"Calm down for a minute," ordered Jon in Vulpin.
As if he hadn't been surprised enough that morning, Stephen shut up in an instant.
"He's trying to stop the leftovers from being delivered to the soup kitchen," barked Carell, only slightly more quietly. "We've got maybe a hundred needy people out there, and he's got a problem with us feeding them!"
"Maybe he just doesn't understand." Turning to Stephen, Jon translated the idea as best he could.
Stephen just folded his arms. "They can't rely on government handouts," he grumbled. "They need to either become pets or get jobs."
Jon gaped.
"What is it?" demanded Carell. "What did he say?"
"I think," said Jon, as diplomatically as he could, "the kitchen may not be the right fit for him."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
kay, maybe we've been taking the wrong approach," admitted Jon, after Stephen had been thrown out of two more kitchens, three sculleries, a barber, and a smithy — not counting a few establishments that had pre-emptively barred him from entry. "Do you want to stay here?"
Stephen squinted; the other man had been pacing from one side of the room to the other, and was far away enough to be no more than a blur. Jon must have taken it for confusion, because he added, "Here. In my rooms. I never have, uh, a personal attendant before, but I can find some work for you to do."
At last Stephen perked up. The phrase "personal attendant" had gone untranslated, but he could tell that it meant something like "pet". "I can do that, sir."
"Great!" There was a flash of teeth in Jon's blurry face. "Come with me. You can dust the books."
Dusting books turned out not to be a euphemism. Luckily, it also turned out to be easy to learn.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
emembering those first few weeks afterward, Jon couldn't pinpoint when he had realized something was wrong.
Maybe it wasn't any single thing so much as a cascade of subtle hints. The way Stephen stared while Jon was across the room, and hung close at his side whenever they went out. The way he fought through the children's workbooks Jon had found for him (in spite of what had turned out to be a remarkable hostility towards the written word in general), knees drawn up to his chest and eyes narrowed. The way he stuck close to every task Jon set him, going over it with meticulous care even when it turned out he had no idea what he was supposed to be doing.
But at last one day Jon led him into the study (with a hand on the small of his back; Stephen always seemed to get more docile when touched), stopped them both a good fifteen feet from the wall, and asked, "How far do you see?"
Stephen frowned. "As far as the wall. I'm not a seer, sir."
Okay, you see the tapestry." Jon had considered asking Stephen to read from the spines on his bookshelf, but they were full of large words and larger concepts, several orders of magnitude beyond See Spot Run. He himself would have frozen up if asked to apply his halting Vulpin to an encyclopedia. "Describe the figures?"
"A hunting party with hounds," replied Stephen instantly. "A maiden and a unicorn. A knight slaying a dragon."
And that could have described every tapestry ever woven. Mentally kicking himself, Jon rephrased. "The figure in the top left. What is it?"
Under his hands, Stephen began to tremble.
"I don't know," he stammered, hands clenching in the folds of his tunic. "I'm sorry, sir. I didn't know I was supposed to know that. I'm sorry...."
"Sh-h-h," urged Jon, rubbing his shoulders. "It's okay. You understand? You don't do anything wrong."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
ace it," said Oliver, sitting back from the pyrite inlay and throwing up his hands. "We're doomed."
"Way to be a downer, Jo—uh, 'Featherwick'." Wilmore adjusted his cape. While Oliver's was purple with gold embroidered designs, he had gone for basic black: he understood it was slimming. "We don't even know that this is a manmade disturbance. For all we know, it's just a natural cycle."
"Natural," echoed Oliver, with increasing squeakiness. "Oh, sure, yes, that makes perfect sense. Every couple million years it just happens that the very fabric of the universe just happens to pick up a few completely unnatural notes that just happen to sound exactly like somebody's devised a way to rip people's souls out through the eyeballs!"
"Now, now, that's not necessarily what it means," hedged Wilmore. "It might be the ears."
"The orifice is not the point!" shrieked Oliver, so loudly that he drowned out the bell at the entrance. "Someone out there is working the worst kind of bla—er, dar—that is, evil magic imaginable!"
Wilmore grimaced. "We'll figure out something. Here, keep an eye on things; I'll get the door."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
arry! Good to see you. How're you doing? How's the wife?"
"Wife?...Oh, you mean John!" Wilmore forced a dry laugh. "He's...as well as can be expected. Look, Jon, can it wait? We're kind of on the trail of something big, here."
"I'll make it quick, then." Jon nodded to the man practically glued to his side. "Stephen here needs glasses."
Stephen edged another half-inch towards him. Maybe the cape was intimidating.
Too busy to fuss with specifics, Wilmore swept over to the diamond-locked cabinets, retrieved the first set of gold frames his fingers closed around, and settled them over Stephen's ears. He barely raised an eyebrow at the pointed one; Jon supposed the story was starting to get around. "Tell him to hold still while I do the shuffle, all right? If you had given me a little warning, I could have had a translation crystal ready when you got here."
"Hold still," said Jon softly to his anxious companion. To Wilmore he added, "I thought you just said you were busy?"
"Yeah, well." The wizard was already flipping through a deck of cards, which he had produced out of what looked like thin air, but what Jon knew to be a trick sleeve. Never waste magic when sleight of hand is just as flashy. "I'm sure we could have worked something—ooh. Oh. Oh, dear."
"I heard that." It was Oliver, appearing at the top of the staircase that led down into the depths beneath the Castle. (To most people, including Jon, the caverns were off-limits; either they were full of sensitive magical equipment that non-adepts would probably disturb, or the occupants had a tendency to leave dirty socks on the floor.) "You know something, don't you?"
"It's a known unknown," countered Wilmore, shuffling cards much faster now. "Come look at these."
Looking between the two anxious faces, Jon tried to keep his own concern in check. Didn't want to freak Stephen out before he even knew what was going on. "Is there something else wrong? Can you not fix his eyes?"
"Hm? No, the eyes are easy." Without looking up, Wilmore snapped his fingers, and Stephen jerked in surprise as the glasses sprang to life. "But for something else...."
"...they don't even want to say," finished Oliver in disbelief. "I don't believe this. We're getting the runaround from a pack of cards."
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
eeping close to Jon's side had suddenly become a whole lot harder.
Of course, that didn't seem as important now, not when Stephen could pick Jon out from ten or twenty or even fifty feet away. Could everyone else do this? See the birds overhead, count the stones two stories up the walls of the Castle (Stephen didn't actually know its name yet, but Jon always said the word with a capital letter), catch the eye of a fruit seller across the courtyard and know whether they were angry or smiling?
How long had the world been this huge?
He scanned a row of stalls, then scurried back to Jon (he felt like could pick out the grey-blue sparkle of Jon's eyes from anywhere now) and pointed excitedly. "What are those?"
Jon said something in his own language. Stephen obediently repeated the word, then couldn't stop himself from asking, "What are they?"
To his astonishment, Jon didn't chastise him for thinking too much, for being a nuisance. Instead, he thought for a moment, then said, "Potato pancakes."
Stephen would have commented on the bizarreness of this combination, but his eye had been caught by a couple of children, playing with something he had seen on a dozen previous walks but which now stood out in sharp relief. "What about that?"
Another word, another repetition; Jon smiled. "Wooden tops," he translated.
"And what are those?"
"Candles."
"Can-dles. What are they?"
"They are candles!" snapped Jon, but softened immediately when he saw Stephen cringe. "It's the same word for both of us," he clarified, more gently. "So the glasses work?"
Stephen let his voice drop into a lower register, in imitation of the important men who would stand in Papa Bear's throne room and give grand pronouncements. "The glasses..." In one smooth gesture he whipped them off; the new string of rubies around his wrist jingled with the motion. "...are magnificent."
Jon did a double-take, then burst into giggles.
♢ ♘ ♢ ☯ ♢ ♘ ♢
fter Stephen had finished his evening chores (in all their years, Jon's rooms had never been cleaner), Jon found him at the window, enthralled with the night sky.
"Jon," he whispered without looking back, though Jon had thought he was approaching too quietly to be noticed. "There are lights up there."
"Those are the stars," said Jon, struck with a pang of sadness. How long had all of Stephen's night skies been dark?
"Stars," repeated Stephen, holding the foreign word in his mouth like a slice of rare fruit. "I remember stars. When I was little, I used to see...but I forgot, Jon. I forgot how...small they are."
"Ah, they're just far away," said Jon, joining the other man at the windowsill. His eyes strayed to the rubies on Stephen's wrist, the dark red stones reflecting glints of starlight. The wizards had assured him up and down that Stephen was safe, probably, and whatever had happened to him was over, as far as they could tell; but that hadn't stopped them from loading him up with more protection spells than Jon had ever seen in one place at one time.
Tearing his eyes with some effort away from the sky, Stephen followed Jon's gaze.
"Thank you for the gifts," he said abruptly, in a thickly accented version of Jon's native tongue that made it sound like the words had been slathered with butter and honey. "I like them very much."
In spite of Jon's worries, a bemused smile broke across his face. "I—well—it was the least I could do. Really."
Stephen's features folded up as he tried to work out the unfamiliar construction. "Least...I...could...."
Jon waved the dilemma aside and switched back to Vulpin. "It is my pleasure."
"Pleasure," repeated Stephen, his whisper like an echo from the bottom of a well.
The joy that had been wafting gently out from him since the afternoon was suddenly undercut by a surge of longing so intense it left Jon dizzy.
He couldn't think what it meant, though, until Stephen slipped the glasses from his face and bent hesitantly down toward Jon's.
Rating: PG-13
Pairings/Characters: Jon/c!Stephen, Steve, Larry/
Warnings: Fantasy clichés; past slavery, abuse; an overabundance of shiny things.
Disclaimer: Two.
For the Report characters: They and their universe are property of Stephen Colbert, the other Report writers, and of course Viacom. Not mine. (Alas.)
And for the real people, the poem:
Please, make no mistake:
these people aren't fake,
but what's said here is no more than fiction.
It only was writ
because we like their wit
and wisecracks, and pull-squints, and diction.
We don't mean to quibble,
but this can't be libel;
it's never implied to be real.
No disrespect's meant;
if you disapprove, then,
the back button's right up there. Deal.
The plot thickens in this chapter
Decorative capitals are still from Daily Drop Cap. List of chapters here.
ever had Jon been so relieved to be back in the Castle.Oh, it was always great to be home, and usually in ways that Jon hadn't even thought of while he was away. The multitude of tiny healing spells, for instance. He had all but stopped noticing how dry and cracked his lips were becoming, and then he got home and ran his fingers along the pearls embedded in the walls of his shower, and all of a sudden his mouth stopped hurting and it was the most amazing thing he had ever forgotten how to feel.
But this was the first time he had had another human being to consider. His company hardly counted; they were wilderness-trained and battle-ready, and knew how to be self-sufficient when left alone. Stephen...didn't seem to know much of anything.
That's not fair, Jon chided himself. Likely as not, he's been a house slave all his life. He's probably a master when it comes to laundry, or jewel care, or gardening, or some completely unexpected skill. And now that we're here, we can work out what it is.
For his own part, Jon had done his duty for a while, and earned a bit of relaxation. After shrugging on a thick blue-grey robe and a pair of soft slippers, he settled into the plushest chair in his study and chose a thick book so new it still smelled like fresh ink.
He had just cracked the spine when the bell at the door jingled. Loudly.
ES!""NO!"
"YEEEEESSSS!"
The racket was giving Jon a headache from halfway up the stairs. One of those voices was definitely the head chef (Mr. Carell to his staff; Produce Pete to his friends). But the other one, matching it in volume, couldn't possibly be Stephen. He wasn't that loud.
Jon wound his way through the kitchen, dodging open flames, pot handles, and various cooks who were craning their necks to get as much of the action as possible without actually leaving their posts, until he saw just how wrong he was.
Stephen stood in the back entrance, poised over a steaming pot of stew, shouting in rapid Vulpin. Jon caught something about invisible hands, and had a moment of panic about whether someone had gone transparent on them.
"THERE YOU ARE!" shouted Carell, not adjusting his volume in the slightest. "GET THIS MAN OUT OF MY KITCHEN!"
Stephen followed his gaze — and lit up like a wand when his eyes fell on Jon. Tamping down on his grin, he pointed at Carell and yelled something that Jon barely followed. Something about...pulling your boots on?
"Calm down for a minute," ordered Jon in Vulpin.
As if he hadn't been surprised enough that morning, Stephen shut up in an instant.
"He's trying to stop the leftovers from being delivered to the soup kitchen," barked Carell, only slightly more quietly. "We've got maybe a hundred needy people out there, and he's got a problem with us feeding them!"
"Maybe he just doesn't understand." Turning to Stephen, Jon translated the idea as best he could.
Stephen just folded his arms. "They can't rely on government handouts," he grumbled. "They need to either become pets or get jobs."
Jon gaped.
"What is it?" demanded Carell. "What did he say?"
"I think," said Jon, as diplomatically as he could, "the kitchen may not be the right fit for him."
kay, maybe we've been taking the wrong approach," admitted Jon, after Stephen had been thrown out of two more kitchens, three sculleries, a barber, and a smithy — not counting a few establishments that had pre-emptively barred him from entry. "Do you want to stay here?"Stephen squinted; the other man had been pacing from one side of the room to the other, and was far away enough to be no more than a blur. Jon must have taken it for confusion, because he added, "Here. In my rooms. I never have, uh, a personal attendant before, but I can find some work for you to do."
At last Stephen perked up. The phrase "personal attendant" had gone untranslated, but he could tell that it meant something like "pet". "I can do that, sir."
"Great!" There was a flash of teeth in Jon's blurry face. "Come with me. You can dust the books."
Dusting books turned out not to be a euphemism. Luckily, it also turned out to be easy to learn.
emembering those first few weeks afterward, Jon couldn't pinpoint when he had realized something was wrong.Maybe it wasn't any single thing so much as a cascade of subtle hints. The way Stephen stared while Jon was across the room, and hung close at his side whenever they went out. The way he fought through the children's workbooks Jon had found for him (in spite of what had turned out to be a remarkable hostility towards the written word in general), knees drawn up to his chest and eyes narrowed. The way he stuck close to every task Jon set him, going over it with meticulous care even when it turned out he had no idea what he was supposed to be doing.
But at last one day Jon led him into the study (with a hand on the small of his back; Stephen always seemed to get more docile when touched), stopped them both a good fifteen feet from the wall, and asked, "How far do you see?"
Stephen frowned. "As far as the wall. I'm not a seer, sir."
Okay, you see the tapestry." Jon had considered asking Stephen to read from the spines on his bookshelf, but they were full of large words and larger concepts, several orders of magnitude beyond See Spot Run. He himself would have frozen up if asked to apply his halting Vulpin to an encyclopedia. "Describe the figures?"
"A hunting party with hounds," replied Stephen instantly. "A maiden and a unicorn. A knight slaying a dragon."
And that could have described every tapestry ever woven. Mentally kicking himself, Jon rephrased. "The figure in the top left. What is it?"
Under his hands, Stephen began to tremble.
"I don't know," he stammered, hands clenching in the folds of his tunic. "I'm sorry, sir. I didn't know I was supposed to know that. I'm sorry...."
"Sh-h-h," urged Jon, rubbing his shoulders. "It's okay. You understand? You don't do anything wrong."
ace it," said Oliver, sitting back from the pyrite inlay and throwing up his hands. "We're doomed.""Way to be a downer, Jo—uh, 'Featherwick'." Wilmore adjusted his cape. While Oliver's was purple with gold embroidered designs, he had gone for basic black: he understood it was slimming. "We don't even know that this is a manmade disturbance. For all we know, it's just a natural cycle."
"Natural," echoed Oliver, with increasing squeakiness. "Oh, sure, yes, that makes perfect sense. Every couple million years it just happens that the very fabric of the universe just happens to pick up a few completely unnatural notes that just happen to sound exactly like somebody's devised a way to rip people's souls out through the eyeballs!"
"Now, now, that's not necessarily what it means," hedged Wilmore. "It might be the ears."
"The orifice is not the point!" shrieked Oliver, so loudly that he drowned out the bell at the entrance. "Someone out there is working the worst kind of bla—er, dar—that is, evil magic imaginable!"
Wilmore grimaced. "We'll figure out something. Here, keep an eye on things; I'll get the door."
arry! Good to see you. How're you doing? How's the wife?""Wife?...Oh, you mean John!" Wilmore forced a dry laugh. "He's...as well as can be expected. Look, Jon, can it wait? We're kind of on the trail of something big, here."
"I'll make it quick, then." Jon nodded to the man practically glued to his side. "Stephen here needs glasses."
Stephen edged another half-inch towards him. Maybe the cape was intimidating.
Too busy to fuss with specifics, Wilmore swept over to the diamond-locked cabinets, retrieved the first set of gold frames his fingers closed around, and settled them over Stephen's ears. He barely raised an eyebrow at the pointed one; Jon supposed the story was starting to get around. "Tell him to hold still while I do the shuffle, all right? If you had given me a little warning, I could have had a translation crystal ready when you got here."
"Hold still," said Jon softly to his anxious companion. To Wilmore he added, "I thought you just said you were busy?"
"Yeah, well." The wizard was already flipping through a deck of cards, which he had produced out of what looked like thin air, but what Jon knew to be a trick sleeve. Never waste magic when sleight of hand is just as flashy. "I'm sure we could have worked something—ooh. Oh. Oh, dear."
"I heard that." It was Oliver, appearing at the top of the staircase that led down into the depths beneath the Castle. (To most people, including Jon, the caverns were off-limits; either they were full of sensitive magical equipment that non-adepts would probably disturb, or the occupants had a tendency to leave dirty socks on the floor.) "You know something, don't you?"
"It's a known unknown," countered Wilmore, shuffling cards much faster now. "Come look at these."
Looking between the two anxious faces, Jon tried to keep his own concern in check. Didn't want to freak Stephen out before he even knew what was going on. "Is there something else wrong? Can you not fix his eyes?"
"Hm? No, the eyes are easy." Without looking up, Wilmore snapped his fingers, and Stephen jerked in surprise as the glasses sprang to life. "But for something else...."
"...they don't even want to say," finished Oliver in disbelief. "I don't believe this. We're getting the runaround from a pack of cards."
eeping close to Jon's side had suddenly become a whole lot harder.Of course, that didn't seem as important now, not when Stephen could pick Jon out from ten or twenty or even fifty feet away. Could everyone else do this? See the birds overhead, count the stones two stories up the walls of the Castle (Stephen didn't actually know its name yet, but Jon always said the word with a capital letter), catch the eye of a fruit seller across the courtyard and know whether they were angry or smiling?
How long had the world been this huge?
He scanned a row of stalls, then scurried back to Jon (he felt like could pick out the grey-blue sparkle of Jon's eyes from anywhere now) and pointed excitedly. "What are those?"
Jon said something in his own language. Stephen obediently repeated the word, then couldn't stop himself from asking, "What are they?"
To his astonishment, Jon didn't chastise him for thinking too much, for being a nuisance. Instead, he thought for a moment, then said, "Potato pancakes."
Stephen would have commented on the bizarreness of this combination, but his eye had been caught by a couple of children, playing with something he had seen on a dozen previous walks but which now stood out in sharp relief. "What about that?"
Another word, another repetition; Jon smiled. "Wooden tops," he translated.
"And what are those?"
"Candles."
"Can-dles. What are they?"
"They are candles!" snapped Jon, but softened immediately when he saw Stephen cringe. "It's the same word for both of us," he clarified, more gently. "So the glasses work?"
Stephen let his voice drop into a lower register, in imitation of the important men who would stand in Papa Bear's throne room and give grand pronouncements. "The glasses..." In one smooth gesture he whipped them off; the new string of rubies around his wrist jingled with the motion. "...are magnificent."
Jon did a double-take, then burst into giggles.
fter Stephen had finished his evening chores (in all their years, Jon's rooms had never been cleaner), Jon found him at the window, enthralled with the night sky."Jon," he whispered without looking back, though Jon had thought he was approaching too quietly to be noticed. "There are lights up there."
"Those are the stars," said Jon, struck with a pang of sadness. How long had all of Stephen's night skies been dark?
"Stars," repeated Stephen, holding the foreign word in his mouth like a slice of rare fruit. "I remember stars. When I was little, I used to see...but I forgot, Jon. I forgot how...small they are."
"Ah, they're just far away," said Jon, joining the other man at the windowsill. His eyes strayed to the rubies on Stephen's wrist, the dark red stones reflecting glints of starlight. The wizards had assured him up and down that Stephen was safe, probably, and whatever had happened to him was over, as far as they could tell; but that hadn't stopped them from loading him up with more protection spells than Jon had ever seen in one place at one time.
Tearing his eyes with some effort away from the sky, Stephen followed Jon's gaze.
"Thank you for the gifts," he said abruptly, in a thickly accented version of Jon's native tongue that made it sound like the words had been slathered with butter and honey. "I like them very much."
In spite of Jon's worries, a bemused smile broke across his face. "I—well—it was the least I could do. Really."
Stephen's features folded up as he tried to work out the unfamiliar construction. "Least...I...could...."
Jon waved the dilemma aside and switched back to Vulpin. "It is my pleasure."
"Pleasure," repeated Stephen, his whisper like an echo from the bottom of a well.
The joy that had been wafting gently out from him since the afternoon was suddenly undercut by a surge of longing so intense it left Jon dizzy.
He couldn't think what it meant, though, until Stephen slipped the glasses from his face and bent hesitantly down toward Jon's.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-15 03:06 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-15 05:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-15 04:03 pm (UTC)He couldn't think what it meant, though, until Stephen he slipped the glasses from his face and bent hesitantly down toward Jon's.
Oooh, wonder how Jon's going to react to that. (Also, an extra 'he' snuck in there.)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-15 05:21 pm (UTC)Because of this Stephen's position, he does a lot less yelling (particularly at Jon) and a lot more being-a-confused-puppy. Good times. (...Sort of. It'll get complicated later on...)
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-15 07:49 pm (UTC)Oh so cute!!! :3
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-15 09:58 pm (UTC)JohnFeatherwick's trip-up realization on "black/dark magic =/= evil" was awesome. Also I am in great need of more John/Larry.The pics of Stephen and Jon in medieval clothing are soooooo amazing. Seriously, my inner fantasy geek is squeeing off the radar here.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-16 12:22 am (UTC)John/Larry is a secret OTP of mine. And it wouldn't be a Larry segment if there weren't a white person being awkward in it at some point XD
I think half the reason I wrote this is to get a chance to draw Stephen in that shirt =3
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-15 11:02 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-16 04:40 am (UTC)From the bottom of my economics/anthropology majored heart, Bravo.
*squeals* I can't wait for the next installment!
M.
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-16 05:17 am (UTC)Thank you!
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-19 01:58 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-20 10:12 am (UTC)He's probably a master when it comes to laundry, or jewel care, or gardening, or some completely unexpected skill. Oh, Jon, I think you are going to be very pleasantly surprise by Stephen's skill!
The innocence of Stephen's discovery of the world with his newfound glasses is beautiful, and I do love the way you weave canon bits into your story (the whole bit leading up to "THEY ARE CANDLES!!" made me :DDDD endlessly)
Er, I know nothing about anthropolgy & economics, but "invisible hands" and Something about...pulling your boots on? were strokes of brillance XD I like the way "Stephen's" Vulpin cultural mindset is being introduced. Also, this is from the last chapter, but I love that Stephen's round ear is the wonky one.
Oh! And of course, beautiful sketchy pictures of soft-haired!Stephen FTW! Eep, one more note actually before I run to read the next chapter- The very first thing I thought of when I saw the first Stephen pic was "aw, no glasses in this fantasy world, too early?" so I like that you made that an actual plot poin ^_^
(no subject)
Date: 2010-01-20 05:35 pm (UTC)We-ell...you'll see his reaction to that at the end of the next chapter =P
Language is always fun to mess around with, and I just got through Terry Pratchett's Nation, which dealt with the multilingual conversation in an interesting way - all rendered in English, with other markers used to indicate which words were which language, and who understood it - so I wanted to try that out.
You don't really need to know anything economic, as long as you know which phrases Stephen shouts semiregularly on TCR ^_^
I thought the sketchy style would be a timesaver, and then these pictures ended up taking twice as long as expected. Heh. It's a fun experiment, at least.
And thanks!
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Date: 2025-03-17 11:07 pm (UTC)consent-wise, this doesn't seem like a *good* sign!