It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Niabh » Tue Aug 21, 2018 2:26 pm

With a beady steel-grey eye, the raven scrutinized the rug.

"Stepped on a lamp," he muttered in disgust, before he plucked a final glass shard, short and curved as a single eyelash, that had snagged in the carpet fibers. "Stepped on a feckin' lamp. And so casual about it, too: 'oh, she stepped on a lamp.' Gestures."

With the fragment pinched delicately in his violet-black beak, he waddled awkwardly across the thick padded floor, all the way across the sitting room to Glenn Burnie's cold and empty hearth. The speck of glass fell with a tiny tink upon the larger jagged glass snowflakes deposited there. He had tried to make himself quiet and helpful while Glenn wrote, and this was the best service he could think to provide. Plus he liked glass. The concave fragments reflected his face if he put his beak right close to them, even if they were too brittle and sharp to consider keeping.

"What even are gestures, man?" he demanded of Glenn. "What are they for? I mean, what is the point? What do they get you except broken lamps? I don't understand why people don't just say what they mean."

It was hard to get a run at anything when there was a ceiling and furniture to contend with. He ended up flopping around like some fat-ass chicken, a waggling of wings and a ungainly hop that took him to the arm of the chair his mistress had of late abandoned.

Watching Glenn, he cocked his head. "Can I ask you a question? I'm not supposed to inquire about the deliveries or anything, but...does this sort of thing happen with any of these other folks you write to, or is it just her?"
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Glenn » Wed Aug 22, 2018 2:36 am

"Sorry," it was a rare thing for Burnie to apologize, or at least to only use one word to do it, but he had left the raven waiting without much in the way of proper explanation. In truth, he wasn't apologetic about the first letter. There were priorities that superseded mandated but amiable friendship. The second letter had been in excess, but Gloria Wynsee would be the one to suffer upon reading it, not the bird. "Better I got that out of my system than you had to hear it." He could have put the question of nature to his guest but the response would probably be reasonable enough, but expletive-laced and not at all useful in a philosophical sense.

Anyway, 'eyoo had questions of his own.

"Gestures," Glenn repeated, setting down the tool of his trade (if said trade was, in fact, wank) and taking the raven in, as if for the first time. He seemed much as he had upon awakening the first time this morning, lucid, focused, somewhat more energetic than anyone who knew him well might be used to, more of a spark to his eye but perhaps less of a sparkle, slightly more overwrought in his motions, though that could be lingering fatigue. Energetic or not, it had been a long two days. "If you meant that to be rhetorical, you shouldn't have lingered on it so long," such things were on his mind, after all. "Anyway, three reasons. The first is that sometimes we don't want the other person to know what we're thinking, or we don't want to admit it to ourselves, or maybe we're not sure. This gets some of the idea across without saying something that can't be unsaid. That lamp will never be fixed but a lamp is more easily replaced than a heart." That felt right (to be unfair, it usually did) so he continued.

"The second is that it's symbolic. It leaves a mark. Maybe I won't remember every word she said to me later, but I will remember she stepped the lamp. That image will be burned into my mind forever, and with it the emotion she was expressing." His tone shifted towards the dismissive, as if he was now more than ready to move on from this topic. "The third is a bit like the first. It made her feel better to lash out and the gesture meant that she didn't have to lash out at me."

What followed from there was an actual question, phrased as a question, permission sought. He could hardly refuse after brandishing a three-part answer for something far less formally presented. He'd even go farther. "You can inquire about whatever you want. I appreciate and respect your position but I do not take you for granted because of it;" for something said so formally, he somehow managed to endow it with warmth as well, a trick that he couldn't have managed but a few weeks before. It faded by the time he reached the actual response. "Short answer, yes, over the years. One of them poisoned me to manipulate my dreams. More recently, I've written at least two dragons in the last year. Don't get me started on Gloria. I almost got involved with the matron of a fighting pit but that became a non-issue. When I wrote the niece of the king, she stormed in here, sword at her side, guards at the door, and who knows what could have happened then?" He'd glance back to the inkwell with a little frown. What could still happen there? That was distracting. At the least it meant that he wasn't looking at 'eyoo as he finished his answer. "So short answer, yes. Long answer is one of magnitude. Not quite like this, not for a long time. She's exceptional in that regard."
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Niabh » Wed Aug 22, 2018 12:19 pm

"Dragons?" The bird puffed up in mild alarm and peered cautiously into the corners. Assured that there were no dragons present, he smoothed himself down again. "See, that's another thing. You got dragons walking around like people. Writing letters. Wearing trousers. And here you are just tossin' that out there: yeah, sure, wrote a couple letters to some dragons, like it's not a thing. Is it different when they wear trousers, or...never mind, that's not what I was getting at, anyway."

He flitted his wings for balance, which seemed to restore him to his original train of thought. "So you do this a lot, then. That's kind of reassuring. For her, not you. That means you're the only common thread. You're a meddler. You meddle long enough with people bigger'n you, eventually they show up with swords and smash your lamps. I'm surprised you still have a head, really."

Or maybe not. The lady had only given him a brief overview, but the picture she painted was quite bad enough: she'd glammed him enough to addle him, she wanted to make sure he was safe to be alone with himself when he woke up. See if he seems rational, she'd said, and he'd wanted to ask by whose rubric? except you didn't really ask that sort of question of your queen. By wanker standards, he seemed fine.

"So what was in your system that you needed to get out of it, anyhow?"
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Glenn » Thu Aug 23, 2018 12:53 am

"Dragons, gods, and unicorns, sure." It wasn't like Finn didn't cavort with a dragon herself, after all, but that wasn't his tale to tell and he was mature enough (and recovered enough) not to give playful hints just for the sake of enjoyment. "You've been here long enough. You've seen Catch, right? There are things. Either you can pretend they don't exist and be preyed upon by them or you can try to eradicate them and lose whatever humanity you have in the process or you can figure out how to live in the same world they do and make the best of it. That means writing letters."

He seemed a little impatient with this line of discussion, even with the bird refocusing it to his initial point. "Including fairy queens, right? Actually, break that down. Gloria talks like you do sometimes. I'm not fascinated by the supernatural. I'm aware of it. Power is power, no matter if it is temporal or preternatural. A man with a thousand soldiers can strike you down just as easily as some ancient wraith with hundreds of years of weaponized remembrance." It had been a day of honesty, whether he had wanted it to be or not, and more trickled through, though here he was more directly responsible for it. "If I'm obsessed at all, it's with not being helpless. I just want a chance. In the absence of glamourie and the ability to spew fire from my guts, all I have is a mind for obtaining knowledge and processing it, of squeezing the secrets out of the world however I can. Sometimes that means I run afoul of a being that wants to punch down and smash me, and yeah, sometimes, that makes all of this a circle of grief where I might have been ignorant and possessing a happy illusion of being safe if I hadn't looked, but I'd rather be smashed for knowing than repressed and ignorant of it."

The raven asked another direct question (though why he'd inflict this upon himself was anyone's guess) and Burnie couldn't help but chuckle a bit. "Musings on nature mainly. A year ago I might have posed them solely to myself. They're for Gloria now though. It'll be a good mental exercise for her if nothing else. It'll force her to confront things that she takes for granted, and her opinion will give me something to react to, which is better than being left alone with my own thoughts right now." Sometimes that smashing pressure came not from gods and beasts but from the building torrent within. He licked his lips slightly, for he had some sense what was there waiting for him, underneath his own surface, once the distractions were used up and once his friend flew away once more. When he spoke anew, it was cheerfully enough though. "Do you know her? Gloria? It's not all dragons, see?"
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Niabh » Thu Aug 23, 2018 4:24 am

"You know I've seen Catch," the raven replied. "I've seen 'im with you, remember? That bloke's a unicorn like I'm a house carpenter, but whatever." His wing fanned outward, exposing the long fingers of red-and-gold on their underside, as he dipped his head and nibbled at a pleasurably itchy spot. He popped back upright and twitched himself in order again like a lady rearranging her skirts in a chair. "So what do you do with them when they can't write? What about the ones as can't talk or think like you do? Do they get a say in this?"

The difference in tone and texture from his mistress was the difference between burlap and silk. The lady would have put him to the question to start an argument. The raven genuinely wanted to know.

"Sometimes one of us'll be born wild. They're just like anyone else, except they never learn talk or figure things out good or get as big. No one knows why. Whatever we got, they didn't get. Usually they don't make it. It's no good tryin' to feed 'em when they fight you. You gotter do for the ones you know will live. Sometimes the clann'll hand-feed 'em, but then they're just pets, y'know? I guess it's better to be a pet and still be alive than the other way. It's not like us. Someone tries to jess me and feed me scraps, I'll take their feckin' fingers off. But these ones don't know anything else, so you can't even really feel bad for 'em. That's just how it is. My ma used to scold us: 'don't you ever be talking down about wild ones because any one of them might've been you.' I wouldn't want to be one of them, but you get the feeling they wouldn't want to be one of us, either. I had a point with this. I forgot my point."

He paused a moment, head down to let the blood flow to his brain, then fluttered in excitement. "Oh yeah: things that can't answer for themselves. How do you find out about those ones?"

He hopped down from the chair's arm to its padded seat, settling down cozily. One could imagine the chair's buttons were strange flattened eggs against its breast. "I only know the ones she sends me after. Which one's Gloria?"

It was easy for a raven to lie. All their tells looked identical to their usual twitches and flutters.
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Glenn » Thu Aug 23, 2018 4:59 am

"You're right," It had been a strange two days for Glenn Burnie. He had conceded a victory of sorts to Finn, and now he had both apologized without qualification and admitted he was wrong to the raven, both within a span of but a few minutes. Maybe he wasn't well at all. "You were there. I was mostly focused on him. I would have been happy to have seen more of you with her over the last day or two, you know. We almost brought you in at the end there. Either she distracted me or I distracted her and we didn't." He didn't seem too worried about the blurriness of it all. This moment was clear. His voice was clear. His stare was clear. His movements, few as they happened be, were clear and steady. "It's more likely Catch will be the end of her than it is that I will be," not that it was a competition. He was sure she didn't see it as one.

The raven asked another question. Usually it was Glenn doing the asking so this wasn't at all unwelcome. Part of why he had written the second letter was to stretch out his own thoughts. This was just another way to achieve that end. "You use the resources at your disposal. If they can't write, maybe others have written about them. If they can't express themselves, maybe someone nearby has observed their behaviors. You look for patterns. What do they do again and again? Why? How do they react to one situation? How do they react to another? If they are harmless, you figure out how to best coexist with them. If they are dangerous, you figure out how to best protect others from them. In short, my friend, you do anything you can within reasonable cost. That's how I handle most things I don't know, whether they can write, or talk, or not."

Of the two of them, one could mimic the other personally. Still, Glenn, his gaze softening, would try to mimic the raven's easy tone, "All you humans look alike," before grinning ever so slightly and taking on his more natural inflection. "You'd probably remember her. I don't think Finn's encountered her too much. They danced once and Gloria was dressed like me, at a ball. I guess you weren't there?" It's not like he stalked her every moment, after all. On the other hand... "She has you watching me sometimes. I know she does. That probably mean watching where my letters go, when they're not going too far. Past our mutual acquaintance with the birthmark on her shoulder, Gloria's the one who gets most of my letters."
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Niabh » Thu Aug 23, 2018 7:34 am

"Eh, I figgered we see each other all the time but you two gotter go well out of your ways to talk face to face, so I made myself scarce. I knew I'd see you again before we left." He ruffled and stood up, cocking his head to the side. "One thing I was gonner say, and this is between you, me, and the chair: right before she sent me back in here to check on you, she said 'I trust you with him.'" There was a little note of pride, not unlike Fionn's own immodest, girlish gloating, in his rough voice. In such moments one remembered he served a queen. "Felt good. Not just that she trusts me, but that she wouldn't leave you with someone she didn't trust."

Which was a weird position to find oneself in, because at the moment, the raven wasn't sure if he could trust her. It had been a short report; she'd been a lot hastier than a woman who needed to talk to a man about a horse really should be, given the circumstances, like she couldn't wait to be out of there. It was the kind of fast talk you got from a Tuatha in a big damn hurry to be far from the site of her last feckless borrowing, hounds on her heels. He'd come in expecting Glenn to be pissed. At least as pissed as Glenn probably got. But he seemed more like a man who'd gotten himself a nice nap. Something had shifted. Some tension. The remark about who-ended-who was, if nothing else, a safe return to form. "Look, can we take it as a given that nobody is going to kill anyone around here? Can we start from that assumption? She doesn't want to kill you. You don't want to kill her. The big guy...might hurt her by accident. He don't strike me as having real good control over himself. But that's actually pretty acceptable. They have this thing, the Tuatha. If you die for love, it's a good death. You're one of the heroes."

Glenn's last remarks he could answer honestly and with a clean conscience, so much as ravens had consciences. "Nah, I told you. I don't like spying. The most she's ever asked is for me to tell her how you seem when I see you. I've told you that, too. I don't think I know a Gloria, though. She a lamp-breaker?"
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Glenn » Thu Aug 23, 2018 7:51 am

Before it had been a chuckle. Now it was a low laugh. There was a difference, something in how the chest moved along with it, an oh so slight lurch forward, more movement to his lips. Still, he was Glenn Burnie, and after but a moment of it, he shook his head and stopped. "It feels like it's been weeks and weeks since you and I spoke at length. It's been what? A couple of days. I trust you with her, too. Sometimes I even trust her with you, not that any of that probably matters." What did matter, apparently, was the issue of mutual endings. Still, he smiled, and arced his head back so that it was leaning awkwardly on a jutting portion of his chair. "No, I'm afraid you have the wrong of it. Neither he nor I would end her. She would come to an end because one of us or the other, or probably more accurately because of actions she took because of one of us or the other, which isn't necessarily the same as being for one of us or the other."

That was overly complicated, about as full of wank as something could get, but he said it with hardly a bit of hesitation. He didn't hold that cranial position for long though. Such a contortion was somehow necessary to place those words just so, but neither it nor the sentence had been comfortable.

"Gloria's a lampbreaker. Full of gestures, and often the wrong ones at the wrong times. I know her well enough to know that. She almost got me killed in front of an angry mob once, actually." This was well and good, small-talk, philosophical back-and-forths, reminiscing about mob violence. He didn't mind it at all. Still... "Did she talk to you about either plan, then? Mine for her or mine for me?" Wherever his gaze had ended up, it was not quite upon the bird, but instead just past him. "She must have told you something, along with bestowing that trust. I know she wants to leave the city and then there's the matter of the satchel, of course, which she seems to not think is a matter at all, which makes it all the more a matter as you well know, but even with that, it's not like she'd send you in here blind, right?"
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Niabh » Fri Aug 24, 2018 6:28 am

There. That was it. His movements were looser. More spontaneous. The raven could recall all of two times he'd seen the man laugh in the past year and it hadn't been through lack of trying. It was like someone had surgically extracted the literal stick from his ass that prevented him from bending at the waist.

Shit. She did something. And it wasn't the obvious thing, because she would have been more smug about it, and Glenn probably would have been more annoyed than amiable about being taken in. The raven's breast puffed out, then deflated, in silent frustration at the two of them. The lady just dashed off and let him figure it out, and if he asked Glenn, it would turn into a game of Questions.

He followed Glenn's gaze to the solid brown wall of the chair's back behind him. For obvious reasons, he liked knowing what might be sneaking up on him. "She told me not a feckin' thing. The way she talked, I was worried she was sendin' me in on a suicide watch or somethin', but I didn't think she'd just up and leave either of us if it were somethin' that serious. Now I don't know. You're actin' funny." He bobbed a bit nearer, all the way up to the seat's edge, and served Glenn with as suspicious a look as a raven's face could muster. "What's up?"
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Glenn » Fri Aug 24, 2018 3:17 pm

What's up? That's what the raven went with. You're acting funny and What's up? Grand detective that he was, he had figured out something had been different, had some sense of what. A was not B and B was not A. Then he went with that question.

So of course the raven got exactly what he deserved for his exacting precision. "It was the carriage ride that surprised me. That was for her, all for her. I threw a book at her. She deserved it," idle eyes gazed towards where she had been standing, where the book had been. "Trying to steal a kiss just because she could. She didn't even want the damn thing; she just knew I wouldn't want to give it to her."

What did he expect? Burnie didn't sound particularly angry, but there was an undertone of frustration that any bird that spent his time learning to mimic voices might well recognize. "So a carriage ride and a ball and a trick to be played together. That was the plan. I'd give her a gift of all sorts of things that'd appeal to her. How was I to know that she could barely breathe in this city as it was? The carriage ride suffocated her. She lashed out to gain control." His joints seemed to tighten, but it wasn't like before; the difference was between holding in and holding back.

Glenn Burnie watched and Glenn Burnie listened. He spoke and acted, but he looked and heard as well. "So she lashed out and got all sorts of things she wanted in the first place. I had the right idea but I got the details all wrong. You mess up like that with a lamp breaker who's bigger than you? You pay for that."
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Niabh » Sat Aug 25, 2018 1:18 am

"See what's funny about that," said the raven without a trace of humor, "is I asked what's up with you and you tell me what she did. She does it about you, too. I think I told you that before? I ask her what's wrong with her and she ends up veerin' off into some grand tirade about some damn thing you said or something you did or else she's askin' me what I think you think--how the hell should I know what you think, because I try to find out what you think and it ends up with you askin' about her and round and round the mulberry bush we go. One of these days I'm gonner stop asking either of you anything and just ask the other one first. Save some time. Want to know what's up with me? I got two hot-heads who've traded letters back and forth for a year or and they still gotter ask me what the other'un's thinkin' because gods forbid they actually talk to each other."

The raven tipped its head so that it could at Glenn first with its left eye, then with its right. Grey-blue, bright with intelligence, but with the alien glassiness and roundness of a wild creature, the movement seemed more like clockwork than the spontaneous interaction of a living thing. The raven straddled several borders--fairy and mortal, wilderness and civilization, Myrken and here--but ultimately occupied its own space. It was, as it often claimed, a raven.

"So she flipped out in the carriage. Carriage was a bad idea. This whole city was a bad idea. I told you that before she even got here. Your lot smells like mortality, mate. You smell like death. Bad enough when it's just one of you but put you all in one place and it's like a whole buncha corpses on a slow simmer. So she lashed out at you. And you--you don't do well with surprises. You don't do well with anything you don't know how all the moving parts work. You got no sense of...what even is the word? Things bigger'n you. Everything's bigger'n you if it gets the drop on you. You can't stand admittin' that you didn't know enough to keep it from gettin' the drop on you so you blame it for bein' bigger. You can't admit to anything. Which is why I'm kinda lookin' sidelong at the fact that you said the word 'wrong' just now. That ain't her style. If you'd really done anything to hurt her, she'd turn you into a feckin' toad and be done with it. And she sure as hell wouldn't send me in here to make sure you were all right afterwards. So don't give me this smart-ass passive-aggressive bullshit of yours, man; I'm on your side here."

His tail feather gave a defiant little flip. "Now. Since I am not her, you mind tellin' me what the hell is goin' on with you? Because you're actin' glammed, wanker. Glammed to the gills."
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Glenn » Sat Aug 25, 2018 3:40 am

"It goes back to the bit about either not wanting to admit something or not knowing it, probably. Would you rather I made a gesture?" There were lots of books there but to point that out would be to cross the line between a general statement and a near-threat. Obviously he wasn't going to do that. "Look, it's not like we didn't talk. We talked a lot. For most of it, I wasn't able to stop myself from speaking my mind and don't think for a second that she, even knowing that, was going to not ask what she wanted to know." Violation. Somehow the thought became less severe each time, not more so. He had some sense that it was the opposite for her, which didn't make it so terrible. Still, it felt like it was becoming commonplace. How much was intention worth? That was something they'd worked out.

He'd been even-handed for months, overwrought sometimes, but usually for good reason. At the raven's words, he seemed actually offended. "I have a sense of things bigger than me. I have a sense that most things are bigger than me. It works both ways though. If I get the drop on it, I have a fighting chance. To do so, I figure out how the moving parts work." He shook his head and shifted the feet of the chair slightly (though not without a screeching noise) so that he was more directly facing the bird. "You're making my point for me. The problem, if anything, is that I was trying to do a nice thing instead of getting a drop. That's a lot harder to get right. It doesn't mean that I regret trying though."

Now both of them were being defiant. The raven might have had some higher moral ground but Glenn actually seemed to enjoy arguing. "If I was glammed to the gills, I'd probably have gills. Look," the moods were shifting quickly, more quickly than either of them probably liked. Now he threw his head back, though not quickly, obviously exasperated. "Can we come up with a better name to call you? I don't think 'eyoo properly expresses the weight of the current conversation here."
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Niabh » Sat Aug 25, 2018 11:30 am

"You may as well make gestures," the raven replied, morose. "It's probably safer, even with the lamps. Look, what's between you two is between you two. You figure it out. If she's gettin' all up in your beak takin' advantage, either throw another book at her or cut her dead." He gave a short, ominous croak. "Except when I say 'cut her dead,' I mean, stop dealin' to her. Don't actually cut her dead."

At the chair's long screech, the raven's ruff rose around his neck in spikes. He gave a wild little dance in place, a series of hops, until Glenn was settled and he was reasonably assure that nothing would make that noise again. "Maybe you're just crap at being nice? Some folk are. That don't make 'em bad people. They're just bad at pleasantries, like. So you didn't know about the carriage-thing. That's not your fault. Well, you actually did know because I told you, but I should've been more specific. But apart from that, she should have said something; she was right there."

Now he had to wonder if she had said something and Glenn had gone gallantly trammeling over it, or if she'd kept quiet out of sheer Niall obstinacy--the never-let-'em-see-you-bleed mindset. Either option seemed equally likely, knowing what he knew of them both. The first was just Glenn being a wanker. The second was more worrying. It meant she saw Glenn as a threat.

That part he kept quiet, though he did let out a long, frustrated gurgle, like a handful of gravel going down a sluice, at the direction of Glenn's priorities right now.

"It's Benedict. My name is now Benedict. Pleased to meetcha, Glenn; I am Benedict." He feigned a bow. "So with that bit of prevaricatin' bullshit out of the way...what the hell happened? Do you even know, exactly?"
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Glenn » Sat Aug 25, 2018 11:47 am

"She responds to gestures," he admitted. It was really more than an admission. It was an acceptance. The story about the Storyteller had been a gesture. It had a point but he could have made it other ways. It was a gesture. He knew damn well what he was doing (even if he wasn't exactly in a position to stop himself) and it worked. So he wasn't admitting that she responded to gestures but that he had used that. Except for he didn't admit to that at all, nor would he. That he could hold that bit back was a good thing in his mind. He was capable of shame, but it took a bit, quite a bit, more than this.

Then, even worse than shame, he laughed again. This time he rubbed a hand against his forehead as he did, wiping off sweat that wasn't really there. "She responds to gestures by taking advantage a lot of the time. That's not totally fair, but it is half fair," he added. "Because some of it is just her being her. I write, she glams. It's still taking advantage and she knows it, but it's reflexive, especially when I throw her off. That's as much of why she stormed past you as anything else, I bet: she likely feels bad and some of that is for being herself."

Was he a nice person? Was he a cruel one? Even in his current state, he could quite get himself to care. He was pragmatic; in this case though, he had tried to be thoughtful. "I feel bad here because I was trying to do something for her. I think she enjoys it more when I don't. That's not fair either." So nice or cruel didn't seem to matter but he was concerned with fairness today. "You give a gift and it's the wrong gift, that's on you. I think I got the gift right, just the wrapping wrong, mind you. It meant she didn't get to open it."

That was just a small part of the time they spent, though, and he was having difficulty expressing that. It meant his next words were too fast by far, perhaps making them unbelievable when they ought not to have been. "We had a lot of good things to say to each other though. I figured out what we were and she accepted it. It was a good visit, more than not, at least for us." That wasn't saying much at all.

A name followed. "Benedict. What..." Six questions instantly arose there, and it was readily apparent for a brief moment that Glenn was actually going to find the audacity to challenge the name (he didn't have to look far; he never did). The raven's tone was dismissive enough that he did not do that. Instead, he smiled wistfully. "So there's what I think happened, what she thinks happened, and what actually happened. In this case, the first two are different and the third is probably a mix of them. She thinks that by glamming the environment around me, a second-degree glamourie, as I'd call it, there were some side effects: confusion, poor judgment, disorientation; the sorts of things that happen to most humans who get glammed. She thinks it'll wear off within a few days because it usually does. I think she's wrong."
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Re: It's a thankless job, but someone's got to do it.

Postby Niabh » Sun Aug 26, 2018 4:57 am

"If you don't want to get glammed out of your gourd, don't write to the feckin' queen of Cnoch-na-Niall," the raven replied, blandly and without sympathy. "You don't want to get your shoes wet, don't go out in the rain. Of course she responds to gestures. You just said that's what they're for. She responds to gestures with glamourie because that's how she gestures. You respond to gestures by movin' the milestone another half-a-league down the road. As long as they keep trying, you know you're still in the game; you know someone's acknowledging your presence, that you still have some say in how this all goes. Hell, I'm feeding you right now just by entertaining this dumb-ass conversation. You just happened to get the attention of a Niall. Nialls never stop trying to win an argument. They're stupid for it. Congrats. You hit the jackpot."

He shot Glenn a stubborn, defiant look of his own, scaly feet braced against the leather seat. If the man was first going to demand a name to continue and then object to his choice, that pretty much summed up everything he'd just assumed about him.

His sleek head bobbed and dipped, an oddly elegant gesture of defeat from a creature who was almost wholly awkward when earthbound. "What stinks about this," he said, "is that both of you think you're trying to accomplish something. I do believe that. I don't think you're both just jerkin' each other back and forth here. It's just I have no idea what the hell it might be. Whatever it is, can you both just...maybe not throw things at each other to get that?" He blinked at Glenn hopefully. "Because that way just leads to bigger and bigger books."

That was his concern now. He had the feeling the lady had slung a pretty heavy book. He also believed that Glenn was at least half-right in his prediction: the lady had been in a hurry to get away less because of feeling bad and more to forestall the next escalation. Mentioning that to Glenn would result in an immediate denial and probably a shifting of blame back to the lady, because Glenn didn't seem to realize that was the very pattern that caused the escalation to begin with. And he wouldn't have any better luck explaining all this to the lady, either.

It was not his job to untangle this kind of damage, dammit. He'd been set one task: find out if the wanker would be all right on his own.

Fortunately Glenn had introduced the topic all on his own, which spared the raven the trouble of coaxing it out of him. He raised his head back up, intent and interested. "So that's what she's so worried about? She glammed you and you ended up a wee bit spoggly?" That question was deliberately leading. Whatever this was, he could see it was too coherent and too persistent to be deemed 'a wee bit spoggly.' "So why do you think it's wrong?"
Anything can be magic if you're gullible enough.
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