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rainbowfic2012-09-19 07:40 pm
settecorvi) wrote in rainbowfic2012-09-19 07:40 pm
Entry tags:
Alice Blue #18
Name: Chel
Story: Demiurge, Bitterdin
Colors: Alice Blue #18 (when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean)
Supplies and Styles: pastels (the usual suspects)
Wordcount: 1,986
Summary: Dor would very much like to know if the rude inkling in Father's studio is yet another assassin.
Rating: G
Warnings: Some internalized ableism, oblique references to a death in the past
Notes: Constructive criticism is always welcome, especially for Dor's storyline. I'm currently able-bodied, and she's paraplegic in an ableist society. If I screw something up, I would truly appreciate it if you'd let me know. Thanks toisana for the beta!
Dor stole out of her room and past the sadly predictable guards to find a stranger already in Father’s studio. An electric jolt clenched in her gut; she couldn’t have said whether it was anger or fear. Her wish to run, a constant over the last week, sharpened and twisted in her like a knife. She stilled her chair’s wheels too late and hated herself for being so clumsy, so new at this. The intruder was already turning.
“It’s just a small human,” they - he - murmured to himself. His voice was wrong. Nothing organic had those metallic overtones.
Dor held her silence, pulse pounding sickly in her chest, fingers so tight on the chair’s handrims they ached, until he sighed like ruffled pages and said, “Come in if you’re coming or go if you’re going, but make up your mind, whatever you are.”
The assassin hadn’t spoken. Couldn’t have said a word, even if he’d wanted to. Obviously that didn’t translate to this man being harmless, given that silence was not a defining feature of prospective murderers, but he wasn’t even bothering to keep his voice down. If he hadn’t come to kill anyone, she wanted to know why he’d invaded the studio in the middle of the night.
She rolled forward slowly, the wheelspokes ticking against her fingers as they slid past. The momentum brought her over the threshold almost before she registered it, and she didn’t burst into tears, or scream, or die. No ghost appeared to harangue her for not being fast enough, clever enough. (She would have taken his hatred, anything, just to see that some part of him survived.)
Even with two of them there, the room felt empty in a way it never had before. A disorientation verging on vertigo threatened at the edges of her awareness, and maybe she wasn’t taking this as well as she’d thought. She forced her breath into the one of the calming patterns. It rasped through a throat suddenly too tight, and she absolutely did not have time for a breakdown right now, no matter how cathartic, so the prickling behind her eyes needed to stop. She pulled herself to a halt well out of the stranger’s reach, her chair still in line with the doorway so she could reverse out of the room if he so much as twitched in her direction.
He stood unmoving and allowed her appraisal while he examined her in turn. The second look told her: bipedal humanoid, too tall and thin to register as true human, angular features, coat cut in the latest Lianese fashion. His pallor registered first and foremost. The moonlight streaming through the windows of the far wall limned him in silver and washed all color from him. Not even a ghost would be so unnaturally pale. A small smirk played around his narrow-lipped mouth, so the achromaticism made her think spark before inkling, which only went to show that it did no good letting your preconceptions narrow the field of hypotheses. The third look told her not to be ridiculous, a spark would be luminous, not illuminated, and would never have hair so limp besides. This, then, was one of those inklings who chose to have a mouth cut and a voice shaped with scalpel and wordcraft. No wonder he’d sounded like a windharp. What would the surgeons have used for his vocal tract? By the way he tipped his chin up and the pleased curl to the mouth he shouldn’t have, she suspected he knew what a striking picture he made.
“Hello, small human,” he said. His hands moved as he spoke, and the fingernails of his left hand flashed in the light. Someone had replaced the nibnails with metal.
“Incorrect! I am a respectably-sized child called Doralionne, not ‘small human’,” she said, and added, “I use the feminine,” because making him guess at her pronouns was such a petty power play. “Does the inexplicably talkative inkling have a name?”
“Bitterdin. I’ll confess I’ve never understood the point of Lianese pronouns. Use whichever you like.”
“What exactly about our pronouns confuses you?” she asked, and couldn’t quite decide if his airy dismissal left her curious or merely irritated.
“I didn’t say they confused me,” he said with some asperity. “Only that I didn’t grasp the purpose of all your...” He gestured vaguely; his fingers left trails of pale grey in their wake. “He and her and they and so on. It’s like waving your genitals around in every sentence.”
“And I suppose inkling pronouns are much more decorous.”
“Hardly. Ours just tell us things that are actually important about a person.”
“For instance?” It didn’t count as distracting her if she recognized what he was doing, she reasoned.
“Like I am,” and he drew a sinuous line that hung in midair for a moment before dissolving. “Meaning that I am a calligrapher, and anyone talking to me would know better than to ask impertinent questions.”
He looked meaningfully at her. Perhaps rather than trying to derail her, he was simply very distractable.
“Do they have pronouns for housebreakers?” she asked, and returned his look with interest. As fascinating as the impromptu linguistics lesson had proven, and as superior to attempted murder as it admittedly was, that didn’t change the fact he was a stranger in her house in the middle of the night.
“What a rude small human you are!” he said with immense delight.
Annoyance strangled interest and buried it in a shallow grave.
“Oh do excuse me,” she simpered. “What I mean to say was: Tell me why you’re here or I’ll scream and every guard in this household will come running.”
“Certainly. Just as soon as you tell me what you’re doing here,” he returned, as though anyone over the age of five actually thought turning a question around on someone would stymie them.
She’d come to pay her respects. She’d come to face what woke her shaking, cold sweat sticking her shift to her skin, swallowing a scream so that Mother wouldn’t worry more than she already did. She didn’t know why she’d come.
“I have my reasons.” It sounded even stupider out loud than it had in her head, but any response was better than fumbling for an answer longer than she already had.
“As do I.”
“I will scream if you don’t start answering questions properly. My oratory tutor says I have excellent projection.”
“And then you’ll have to explain to all those guards why you interrupted the work of the very important calligrapher your mother has hired - at great expense, I might add - to investigate her dear consort’s murder.”
So he recognized her, even though she hadn’t given her surname. She supposed not every child had tutors. Either that or she was rather distinctive these days.
“That’s the why, now address the timing. Pitch dark is not generally considered optimum conditions for detailed scrutiny.”
“Given that my time is so very valuable, I thought I shouldn’t waste a moment of your darling mama’s money.”
“My mother is no one’s darling,” she snapped.
“Least of all yours?”
“That’s not what I said.” She felt obscurely shamed and didn’t quite know why, as though he’d winkled something out of her she hadn’t meant to admit.
“Of course not,” he said with such solicitous understanding that she wanted desperately to prove him wrong, despite knowing that the more she protested, the falser it’d sound.
He took advantage of her silence to go back to whatever task she’d interrupted. Pale loops and whorls followed the path of his fingers as he traced patterns in the air. It didn’t look like any language she knew so much as an equation written in interlinked spirals and expanding mandalas. Some twisted on themselves, others remained unchanged, and Bitterdin punctuated his private discourse with little tchas of displeasure. They hung suspended and strangely dimensionless for long moments before fading. She followed him at a safe distance while he paced around the room.
Once she’d gathered all she could by observation, she asked, “What are you doing?”
“Very complicated wordcraft. You wouldn’t understand even if you could write properly, which you can’t on account of your birth defect.”
“My legs aren’t-“
“Your hands,” he corrected. “Are what I meant, naturally. If you’re attempting to write with your feet, you’re even worse off than most humans.”
The dull heat of embarrassment burned her cheeks. She should have known an inkling would think of human nails as a deformity, and instead she might as well have painted a cheerful sign saying “This is a weakness! Please attack it mercilessly!”
“Naturally,” she agreed. “As I was saying, I don’t need to know every fascicle and muscle attachment to understand what my legs are for.”
Pathetic recovery. Her internal panel of judges gave it a resounding zero out of zero. Mother would be so disappointed.
“I don’t require a step-by-step explanation of what you’re doing,” not at the moment, at least, “just the purpose behind it.”
He sighed gustily and stopped writing to face her. “Imagine you’re me, small Doralionne. Imagine that you have come very far very fast for a very bossy human and a very large sum of money.”
“You’ve mentioned the compensation twice now.”
“Yes, well, I’m quite fond of that bit. In any case, now imagine that as you’re trying to uphold your end of the social contract, vis the exchange of goods for services, a positively minuscule human accosts you at your fiddly, easily disrupted work. Are you constructing your mental simulation of this flight of fantasy?”
“I can picture it quite clearly,” she said.
“Now, rather than letting you pursue the task for which you’ve been hired-“
“And paid?”
“-and paid, she wants you to cater to her incomprehension and walk her through a process she doesn’t even possess the proper framework to understand.”
“You’ve probably spent more breath explaining why you don’t want to explain what you were doing than you would have if you’d just told me,” she pointed out. “But I suppose you’re right.”
“I am always right.”
She let that pass without comment because she didn’t think she could take another dissertation. Not now, not here.
“I’ll let you get on with your well-salaried calligraphy. Thank you for the parallel.”
She’d nearly reached the door when he asked,
“What am I paralleling?”
She swiveled the chair around to see whether he was asking in earnest, and found to her surprise that he was. She’d assumed he knew, when he recognized her.
“Last week I met an assassin who couldn’t talk, and now I’m chatting with an inkling who can. It makes a charming set of bookends to my week.” She couldn’t quite keep the venom out of her voice, and it came out less lighthearted than she’d meant to sound.
Quite suddenly she had his full attention.
“You were there, then? For all of it?”
“Yes.” It didn't shake. She was proud of that, in a numb sort of way.
He tapped his chin thoughtfully with the fingers of his metal-nailed hand.
“I don’t know why you’re here, but I am here to bring the del Mar consort justice, not gossip with little girls. Which, unless you have the memory of the stupider sort of goldfish, you ought to remember. If you aren’t going to help, you’d best roll back to bed.” He gave her a little shooing motion to speed her on her way.
A slow smile spread across her face. If he expected her to react with outrage to what he seemed to be saying than to what he’d actually said, he would be sorely disappointed. Every beat of her heart was an exultant yes, and she didn’t dare let go of the handrims or he’d see how her hands wanted to shake.
“Doralionne del Mar at your service, sir.” For the first time since she’d tried to stand and couldn’t, the name felt like it fit.
Story: Demiurge, Bitterdin
Colors: Alice Blue #18 (when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean)
Supplies and Styles: pastels (the usual suspects)
Wordcount: 1,986
Summary: Dor would very much like to know if the rude inkling in Father's studio is yet another assassin.
Rating: G
Warnings: Some internalized ableism, oblique references to a death in the past
Notes: Constructive criticism is always welcome, especially for Dor's storyline. I'm currently able-bodied, and she's paraplegic in an ableist society. If I screw something up, I would truly appreciate it if you'd let me know. Thanks to
isana for the beta! Dor stole out of her room and past the sadly predictable guards to find a stranger already in Father’s studio. An electric jolt clenched in her gut; she couldn’t have said whether it was anger or fear. Her wish to run, a constant over the last week, sharpened and twisted in her like a knife. She stilled her chair’s wheels too late and hated herself for being so clumsy, so new at this. The intruder was already turning.
“It’s just a small human,” they - he - murmured to himself. His voice was wrong. Nothing organic had those metallic overtones.
Dor held her silence, pulse pounding sickly in her chest, fingers so tight on the chair’s handrims they ached, until he sighed like ruffled pages and said, “Come in if you’re coming or go if you’re going, but make up your mind, whatever you are.”
The assassin hadn’t spoken. Couldn’t have said a word, even if he’d wanted to. Obviously that didn’t translate to this man being harmless, given that silence was not a defining feature of prospective murderers, but he wasn’t even bothering to keep his voice down. If he hadn’t come to kill anyone, she wanted to know why he’d invaded the studio in the middle of the night.
She rolled forward slowly, the wheelspokes ticking against her fingers as they slid past. The momentum brought her over the threshold almost before she registered it, and she didn’t burst into tears, or scream, or die. No ghost appeared to harangue her for not being fast enough, clever enough. (She would have taken his hatred, anything, just to see that some part of him survived.)
Even with two of them there, the room felt empty in a way it never had before. A disorientation verging on vertigo threatened at the edges of her awareness, and maybe she wasn’t taking this as well as she’d thought. She forced her breath into the one of the calming patterns. It rasped through a throat suddenly too tight, and she absolutely did not have time for a breakdown right now, no matter how cathartic, so the prickling behind her eyes needed to stop. She pulled herself to a halt well out of the stranger’s reach, her chair still in line with the doorway so she could reverse out of the room if he so much as twitched in her direction.
He stood unmoving and allowed her appraisal while he examined her in turn. The second look told her: bipedal humanoid, too tall and thin to register as true human, angular features, coat cut in the latest Lianese fashion. His pallor registered first and foremost. The moonlight streaming through the windows of the far wall limned him in silver and washed all color from him. Not even a ghost would be so unnaturally pale. A small smirk played around his narrow-lipped mouth, so the achromaticism made her think spark before inkling, which only went to show that it did no good letting your preconceptions narrow the field of hypotheses. The third look told her not to be ridiculous, a spark would be luminous, not illuminated, and would never have hair so limp besides. This, then, was one of those inklings who chose to have a mouth cut and a voice shaped with scalpel and wordcraft. No wonder he’d sounded like a windharp. What would the surgeons have used for his vocal tract? By the way he tipped his chin up and the pleased curl to the mouth he shouldn’t have, she suspected he knew what a striking picture he made.
“Hello, small human,” he said. His hands moved as he spoke, and the fingernails of his left hand flashed in the light. Someone had replaced the nibnails with metal.
“Incorrect! I am a respectably-sized child called Doralionne, not ‘small human’,” she said, and added, “I use the feminine,” because making him guess at her pronouns was such a petty power play. “Does the inexplicably talkative inkling have a name?”
“Bitterdin. I’ll confess I’ve never understood the point of Lianese pronouns. Use whichever you like.”
“What exactly about our pronouns confuses you?” she asked, and couldn’t quite decide if his airy dismissal left her curious or merely irritated.
“I didn’t say they confused me,” he said with some asperity. “Only that I didn’t grasp the purpose of all your...” He gestured vaguely; his fingers left trails of pale grey in their wake. “He and her and they and so on. It’s like waving your genitals around in every sentence.”
“And I suppose inkling pronouns are much more decorous.”
“Hardly. Ours just tell us things that are actually important about a person.”
“For instance?” It didn’t count as distracting her if she recognized what he was doing, she reasoned.
“Like I am,” and he drew a sinuous line that hung in midair for a moment before dissolving. “Meaning that I am a calligrapher, and anyone talking to me would know better than to ask impertinent questions.”
He looked meaningfully at her. Perhaps rather than trying to derail her, he was simply very distractable.
“Do they have pronouns for housebreakers?” she asked, and returned his look with interest. As fascinating as the impromptu linguistics lesson had proven, and as superior to attempted murder as it admittedly was, that didn’t change the fact he was a stranger in her house in the middle of the night.
“What a rude small human you are!” he said with immense delight.
Annoyance strangled interest and buried it in a shallow grave.
“Oh do excuse me,” she simpered. “What I mean to say was: Tell me why you’re here or I’ll scream and every guard in this household will come running.”
“Certainly. Just as soon as you tell me what you’re doing here,” he returned, as though anyone over the age of five actually thought turning a question around on someone would stymie them.
She’d come to pay her respects. She’d come to face what woke her shaking, cold sweat sticking her shift to her skin, swallowing a scream so that Mother wouldn’t worry more than she already did. She didn’t know why she’d come.
“I have my reasons.” It sounded even stupider out loud than it had in her head, but any response was better than fumbling for an answer longer than she already had.
“As do I.”
“I will scream if you don’t start answering questions properly. My oratory tutor says I have excellent projection.”
“And then you’ll have to explain to all those guards why you interrupted the work of the very important calligrapher your mother has hired - at great expense, I might add - to investigate her dear consort’s murder.”
So he recognized her, even though she hadn’t given her surname. She supposed not every child had tutors. Either that or she was rather distinctive these days.
“That’s the why, now address the timing. Pitch dark is not generally considered optimum conditions for detailed scrutiny.”
“Given that my time is so very valuable, I thought I shouldn’t waste a moment of your darling mama’s money.”
“My mother is no one’s darling,” she snapped.
“Least of all yours?”
“That’s not what I said.” She felt obscurely shamed and didn’t quite know why, as though he’d winkled something out of her she hadn’t meant to admit.
“Of course not,” he said with such solicitous understanding that she wanted desperately to prove him wrong, despite knowing that the more she protested, the falser it’d sound.
He took advantage of her silence to go back to whatever task she’d interrupted. Pale loops and whorls followed the path of his fingers as he traced patterns in the air. It didn’t look like any language she knew so much as an equation written in interlinked spirals and expanding mandalas. Some twisted on themselves, others remained unchanged, and Bitterdin punctuated his private discourse with little tchas of displeasure. They hung suspended and strangely dimensionless for long moments before fading. She followed him at a safe distance while he paced around the room.
Once she’d gathered all she could by observation, she asked, “What are you doing?”
“Very complicated wordcraft. You wouldn’t understand even if you could write properly, which you can’t on account of your birth defect.”
“My legs aren’t-“
“Your hands,” he corrected. “Are what I meant, naturally. If you’re attempting to write with your feet, you’re even worse off than most humans.”
The dull heat of embarrassment burned her cheeks. She should have known an inkling would think of human nails as a deformity, and instead she might as well have painted a cheerful sign saying “This is a weakness! Please attack it mercilessly!”
“Naturally,” she agreed. “As I was saying, I don’t need to know every fascicle and muscle attachment to understand what my legs are for.”
Pathetic recovery. Her internal panel of judges gave it a resounding zero out of zero. Mother would be so disappointed.
“I don’t require a step-by-step explanation of what you’re doing,” not at the moment, at least, “just the purpose behind it.”
He sighed gustily and stopped writing to face her. “Imagine you’re me, small Doralionne. Imagine that you have come very far very fast for a very bossy human and a very large sum of money.”
“You’ve mentioned the compensation twice now.”
“Yes, well, I’m quite fond of that bit. In any case, now imagine that as you’re trying to uphold your end of the social contract, vis the exchange of goods for services, a positively minuscule human accosts you at your fiddly, easily disrupted work. Are you constructing your mental simulation of this flight of fantasy?”
“I can picture it quite clearly,” she said.
“Now, rather than letting you pursue the task for which you’ve been hired-“
“And paid?”
“-and paid, she wants you to cater to her incomprehension and walk her through a process she doesn’t even possess the proper framework to understand.”
“You’ve probably spent more breath explaining why you don’t want to explain what you were doing than you would have if you’d just told me,” she pointed out. “But I suppose you’re right.”
“I am always right.”
She let that pass without comment because she didn’t think she could take another dissertation. Not now, not here.
“I’ll let you get on with your well-salaried calligraphy. Thank you for the parallel.”
She’d nearly reached the door when he asked,
“What am I paralleling?”
She swiveled the chair around to see whether he was asking in earnest, and found to her surprise that he was. She’d assumed he knew, when he recognized her.
“Last week I met an assassin who couldn’t talk, and now I’m chatting with an inkling who can. It makes a charming set of bookends to my week.” She couldn’t quite keep the venom out of her voice, and it came out less lighthearted than she’d meant to sound.
Quite suddenly she had his full attention.
“You were there, then? For all of it?”
“Yes.” It didn't shake. She was proud of that, in a numb sort of way.
He tapped his chin thoughtfully with the fingers of his metal-nailed hand.
“I don’t know why you’re here, but I am here to bring the del Mar consort justice, not gossip with little girls. Which, unless you have the memory of the stupider sort of goldfish, you ought to remember. If you aren’t going to help, you’d best roll back to bed.” He gave her a little shooing motion to speed her on her way.
A slow smile spread across her face. If he expected her to react with outrage to what he seemed to be saying than to what he’d actually said, he would be sorely disappointed. Every beat of her heart was an exultant yes, and she didn’t dare let go of the handrims or he’d see how her hands wanted to shake.
“Doralionne del Mar at your service, sir.” For the first time since she’d tried to stand and couldn’t, the name felt like it fit.
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Also, I love your inklings. And your writing.
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(And thank you also for the lovely compliment.)
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Dor and Bitterdin are such jerks to each other, which is fun until I remember she's supposed to be eightish, and he's an adult. Way to rag mercilessly on the disabled kid, Din. (There are Reasons he's a jerkface, of course, but they still don't excuse him. In his defense, if she seemed distressed I think he'd tone it down. She, meanwhile, is just grateful that someone's not treating her like she's both mentally incompetent and liable to shatter at the slightest harsh look.)
I am so relieved she's not coming off as obnoxious, and that I haven't yet slid into that phenomenon where the author wants to convince you so badly of a given character's Awesome that they force it down your throat until you hate that character on principle.
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I really appreciate the feedback on how Dor comes across. She's supposed to be precocious and frustrated out of her mind by the way adults treat her like a mental incompetent... especially after she becomes paraplegic. It's easy for that sort of character to slip over into being obnoxious and too much an Author's Darling, where you kind of hate them just because the author seems so enamored of them, so it's good to hear she hasn't hit that point (yet.)
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But, now I have it to read tonight *determined stance*.
"It’s like waving your genitals around in every sentence."
And that is why we love the Bitterdin.
We love him MORE with this description of him. He sounds so elfin, but not in a high fantasy nose-in-the-air kind of way. Like actual elfy thing sneaking about on the moors elfin.
“Do they have pronouns for housebreakers?”
And that is why we love the Dor.
"Bitterdin punctuated his private discourse with little tchas of displeasure." Not sure about this, but "tcha" is a noise he's making, halfway between a breath and a lipsmack? Because I live with someone who does that and have never before seen a way to /write it/.
"Imagine that you have come very far very fast for a very bossy human and a very large sum of money."
*stops*
*imagines*
*makes grumpy cat face*
*which shortly falls*
Holy SHIT. Dor watched her father be murdered the week before and still has snark in her soul?
Scratch why we said before. THAT IS WHY WE LOVE THE DOR.
It was really a pleasure to learn how these two met and to see them spar with each other from first grin. And then there. At the end.
HOLY SHIT.
...can I feed Dor cookies? Is that OK? I have some nice Japanese prints for Bitterdin too.
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Inklings are basically anime bishounen, complete with long flowy hair, who look like the should break in a strong wind, and instead are a race of terrifying reality-manipulators who are basically indestructible. They have metal bones, FFS. So "fey" is exactly what I was going for. (Bonus trivia: they have four sexes, but as mentioned, don't use it in their pronouns. Inkling women obviously don't breastfeed, so their breasts are pretty vestigial, and often don't even develop unless they have kids. They think the Lianese are really weird for insisting on telling people what's in your pants when you're talking about completely unrelated topics.)
There are a couple noises I make that fit "tcha," but the one I imagined is... almost saying it, actually. Unvoiced dental stop sliding into a, lessee, unvoiced post-alveolar fricative? (It's a t∫ in the IPA, if that makes sense. As in "chat".) Kind of like an irascible sigh. If the sound you're talking about is done on the exhale, I'd probably write it as more of a "pah" - when I do it, it ends up a plosive sigh. If it's done on the inhale, kind of... either snipping in a bit of air while your tongue is in the position to say "d," or between your pursed lips so that it makes a noise, I'd end up writing it as "tch," most likely. But that's just me, and you may be talking about another hard-to-describe wordless sound.
Dor's snark is... not so much because she's resilient or unaffected, but more a combination of defense mechanism and pressure outlet. People have been treating her like she's an idiot because she's young, and it's gotten exponentially worse since she became paraplegic, so when she's a kid, she gets aggressively verbose to prove that she can too argue rings around you. So don't you dare condescend to her. She's basically shouting "I'm a person! I am! Stop treating me like a brainless little pet!" only with polysyllables and rudeness. Along comes this alien person who's actually willing to snipe back at her, and she gleefully cuts loose on him, particularly since while she's arguing, she's not having PTSD flashbacks. (And now I just need to figure out how to actually write that characterization effectively. It's good to have goals to grow towards, I guess.)
Dor won't take your cookies because she's an awful person and doesn't deserve them and what if they're poisoned, she doesn't know you, why are you being nice to her anyways. :( Bitterdin will admire your Japanese prints and nom them (with his eyes.)