Stabbity & Blockity - Part 1
Posted: Sun Oct 01, 2017 5:37 am
23rd Saun 717
If you asked Zipper what animal she would pick to represent the sum total of the civil, military, and guild-related operational functions that made up the bureaucratic framework of Etzos, she would have unhesitatingly said a snail.
Her reasons were surprisingly not all completely bitter and spiteful.
Snails lived in a protective shell: the outlying towns that shielded Etzos and acted as a first-response defense against the city’s many enemies could never have been done without the deft administration and the interconnectivity granted by the vast bureaucracy. In her own way, and more now that she was a brick in it, she respected it. At its core, the system, from the reigning ministers and officials in the Tower to the newest recruit at the bottom rung of the Black Guard represented organisation, structure, and direction. It honed all the moving parts of Etzos into a singular, focused blade to strike at Rhakros and parry away the beasts they sent their way.
In theory anyway.
That was the last good thing she had to say about it, because snails were a lot of other things too.
Few of them were flattering.
Snails couldn’t hear.
She found out long ago that Torvyn had a hearing issue that seemed to replace any idea, suggestion, or vocalized thought with how much red tape he was going to have to jump through in order to accommodate her latest inability to understand that, collectively, the more immediately efficient way was not always the best way to move forward as a whole, that there were other important intangibles to consider.
She knew that intellectually, learned enough of the game by this time in her 4 arcs as a Caster of the Etzori regulars and 1 arc as a Black Guard. She understood that politics and the public, more than any great army, kept a more common and widespread utility of magic in check, that sometimes keeping your head low and not offering a solution to what looked like an easy problem was the proper move forward, that sometimes you had to pick your battles, choose between professional survival or wasting it all curbing some inefficiency that was going to be undone the moment you weren’t there to enforce it.
But still she persisted, and still he ignored her.
Sometimes he just ignored because she was, to quote him, more grating than the offspring of a drainage cover and a cheese shredder.
More often than not, he shouted back.
In its own deeply dysfunctional way, he was as close a thing to the father she never had. She looked up to him through a purely pragmatic lens: he was in a position of power, he had a respectable discipline of magic that he had elevated to mastery, he exhibited traits she could resonate with - assertion, leadership, responsibility. She didn’t like him, probably never would, but she didn’t see what respect had to do with adoration or dislike.
She respected the power of the Qualities taken into her Palatte, understood them as only one who had committed them to the memory of her soul could, but she had no further opinion on them.
It was a confusing thing to imagine that anyone could conflate like and respect. It was like mixing food and drink together and calling it one or the other.
But back to the snail analogy: snails were slow.
The bureaucracy, like a snail, was very, very slow.
The mutant crisis had been raging on for more than a season now. Padfoot’s freaks had been running their carnival for a long time now and while the vast bulk of them were mere humans with some physical oddities, once in awhile a true monster would emerge from claw their way out from the rabble, an inheritor of a larger piece of the Becoming prowess that made them. Some were said to be ever-shifting, guided between huge predatory forms by some unseen will. Some were said to be battered into the curb, only to rise again renewed and unharmed. Some could command animals to a point, driving rats into a frenzy and rallying dogs into a mass howling that came before they struck at their masters.
At least one could birth out another creature to serve as its minion.
Not something the average guard would be inclined to handle.
Not every Black Guard unit had access to the amount of magical equipment needed to combat the more powerful mutants. For all the cast reach of the Bureaucracy, the small things didn’t seem to go where they needed to go, and so these units would write into the Domain branch to see whether they could loan something over and in the meantime all they waited and waited and waited.
It took until mid Saun for them to respond and send someone down.
...
“We regret to inform you,” Zipper had neither regret nor a particular inclination to inform, but at least she had the good sense to sound like she did. If nothing else, she sympathized with the need to wait. “That your initial application for the requested items has been denied. The Master extends his apologies for your current predicament and hopes that you would-”
She threw her head to the side, dodging the boot thrown at her.
For a moment, she considered the sergeant, a small and wiry man who looked like he had served longer than she was alive. He looked like the guard post he was running: old, run-down, in need of retirement for new, better things. She looked into the his angry, beady eyes and the way his shoulders slumped with defeat as he took in the news of what they both knew was the outcome.
Or what he thought anyway.
Not even worth acknowledging his attack. Not even worth the anger she could feel boiling up from inside.
“-make the best of what we can offer instead.” she finished seamlessly.
“You come in empty-handed!” he said, his voice weak and reedy. “10 of my men have been maimed by t-those things in the gutter and you come in a season later to tell me you have nothing for us? You’re worse than the mutants out there! At least they’re killing us to our faces.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said, that statement so dirty in so many ways to her: the deflection of blame, the fact that ‘sorry’ came out of her lips, the similar ‘feel’ that she had to say so many times in her Etzori Army evaluation sessions. The idea of even speaking to him civilly after all the crap he said to her face. But she was on thin ice here: she had taken so much time off looking for Finn that even one big blunder would very well... “But we have not forgotten you.”
“Unless you’re going to pull a rabbit out of your coat-”
“Something like that actually.” Rabbit out of your coat. Where did this man get his material. “I’m here to give your swords and armour power in lieu of the mutants. The Domain branch is stretched thin with the mutants and more, but though belated, no branch will be left undefended against the mutant scourge.”
“Eventually,” the sergeant said bitterly.
“You-” Keep to the script, Zip. Keep to the fuckin’ script. “Have every right to be angry. I can only apologize once more on behalf of the Domain branch.”
The sergeant shrugged. She resisted the urge to drive a boot up into his ancient head and send him into the ceiling.
“Okay,” Zipper said, rubbing her hands together. “What’s your taste? Fire for your blades? Ice? Not out of quality steel by any chance?’
“I don’t really understand.”
Of course he didn’t... how could she simplify it. “I can take stuff from the and make other stuff stronger.”
Nailed it.
“That doesn’t sound much. I saw a man no older than you teleport across the room, girl-”
“Do you or do you not want my help.” she said tersely.
“We don’t want anything fancy.”
“Steel then.”
“We gots lots of steel and it’s still not enough to cut through them hides of the big ones half the time.”
“I’ve got little stronger than that.”
“That so?”
Imploding in 3, 2, 1-
“You saying you can work with stuff?”
“Those were my words, correct.”
“I got some of them sky metal and them fire metal from the last, last, last last-”
“Is this going to take awhile?”
“Last guy who headed this post. Used to wear a whole load of it back in the day. THey took most of it back, said it was too expensive and precious to leave lying around, but they let us keep a gauntlet and a dagger just to frame up when he went.”
“Uh, sure, sure. Go wild. ” It was official: he was senile. He was going to leave and come back with some dingy ancestral dagger, raving about how it helped slew the God that Parhne fought back when Etzos was young, and-
She stared. He came back and all she could do was stare.
“Here ya go. You have to promise me your mage stuff won’t damage these. It’s important to this outpost.”
She just continued staring. She stared so long he started waving a hand in her face.
“Yeah,” she said, looking at the unsurprisingly pristine looking dagger and softly glowing gauntlet. “Yeah, I can work with Admantite and Malorite.”
If you asked Zipper what animal she would pick to represent the sum total of the civil, military, and guild-related operational functions that made up the bureaucratic framework of Etzos, she would have unhesitatingly said a snail.
Her reasons were surprisingly not all completely bitter and spiteful.
Snails lived in a protective shell: the outlying towns that shielded Etzos and acted as a first-response defense against the city’s many enemies could never have been done without the deft administration and the interconnectivity granted by the vast bureaucracy. In her own way, and more now that she was a brick in it, she respected it. At its core, the system, from the reigning ministers and officials in the Tower to the newest recruit at the bottom rung of the Black Guard represented organisation, structure, and direction. It honed all the moving parts of Etzos into a singular, focused blade to strike at Rhakros and parry away the beasts they sent their way.
In theory anyway.
That was the last good thing she had to say about it, because snails were a lot of other things too.
Few of them were flattering.
Snails couldn’t hear.
She found out long ago that Torvyn had a hearing issue that seemed to replace any idea, suggestion, or vocalized thought with how much red tape he was going to have to jump through in order to accommodate her latest inability to understand that, collectively, the more immediately efficient way was not always the best way to move forward as a whole, that there were other important intangibles to consider.
She knew that intellectually, learned enough of the game by this time in her 4 arcs as a Caster of the Etzori regulars and 1 arc as a Black Guard. She understood that politics and the public, more than any great army, kept a more common and widespread utility of magic in check, that sometimes keeping your head low and not offering a solution to what looked like an easy problem was the proper move forward, that sometimes you had to pick your battles, choose between professional survival or wasting it all curbing some inefficiency that was going to be undone the moment you weren’t there to enforce it.
But still she persisted, and still he ignored her.
Sometimes he just ignored because she was, to quote him, more grating than the offspring of a drainage cover and a cheese shredder.
More often than not, he shouted back.
In its own deeply dysfunctional way, he was as close a thing to the father she never had. She looked up to him through a purely pragmatic lens: he was in a position of power, he had a respectable discipline of magic that he had elevated to mastery, he exhibited traits she could resonate with - assertion, leadership, responsibility. She didn’t like him, probably never would, but she didn’t see what respect had to do with adoration or dislike.
She respected the power of the Qualities taken into her Palatte, understood them as only one who had committed them to the memory of her soul could, but she had no further opinion on them.
It was a confusing thing to imagine that anyone could conflate like and respect. It was like mixing food and drink together and calling it one or the other.
But back to the snail analogy: snails were slow.
The bureaucracy, like a snail, was very, very slow.
The mutant crisis had been raging on for more than a season now. Padfoot’s freaks had been running their carnival for a long time now and while the vast bulk of them were mere humans with some physical oddities, once in awhile a true monster would emerge from claw their way out from the rabble, an inheritor of a larger piece of the Becoming prowess that made them. Some were said to be ever-shifting, guided between huge predatory forms by some unseen will. Some were said to be battered into the curb, only to rise again renewed and unharmed. Some could command animals to a point, driving rats into a frenzy and rallying dogs into a mass howling that came before they struck at their masters.
At least one could birth out another creature to serve as its minion.
Not something the average guard would be inclined to handle.
Not every Black Guard unit had access to the amount of magical equipment needed to combat the more powerful mutants. For all the cast reach of the Bureaucracy, the small things didn’t seem to go where they needed to go, and so these units would write into the Domain branch to see whether they could loan something over and in the meantime all they waited and waited and waited.
It took until mid Saun for them to respond and send someone down.
...
“We regret to inform you,” Zipper had neither regret nor a particular inclination to inform, but at least she had the good sense to sound like she did. If nothing else, she sympathized with the need to wait. “That your initial application for the requested items has been denied. The Master extends his apologies for your current predicament and hopes that you would-”
She threw her head to the side, dodging the boot thrown at her.
For a moment, she considered the sergeant, a small and wiry man who looked like he had served longer than she was alive. He looked like the guard post he was running: old, run-down, in need of retirement for new, better things. She looked into the his angry, beady eyes and the way his shoulders slumped with defeat as he took in the news of what they both knew was the outcome.
Or what he thought anyway.
Not even worth acknowledging his attack. Not even worth the anger she could feel boiling up from inside.
“-make the best of what we can offer instead.” she finished seamlessly.
“You come in empty-handed!” he said, his voice weak and reedy. “10 of my men have been maimed by t-those things in the gutter and you come in a season later to tell me you have nothing for us? You’re worse than the mutants out there! At least they’re killing us to our faces.”
“I’m sorry you feel that way,” she said, that statement so dirty in so many ways to her: the deflection of blame, the fact that ‘sorry’ came out of her lips, the similar ‘feel’ that she had to say so many times in her Etzori Army evaluation sessions. The idea of even speaking to him civilly after all the crap he said to her face. But she was on thin ice here: she had taken so much time off looking for Finn that even one big blunder would very well... “But we have not forgotten you.”
“Unless you’re going to pull a rabbit out of your coat-”
“Something like that actually.” Rabbit out of your coat. Where did this man get his material. “I’m here to give your swords and armour power in lieu of the mutants. The Domain branch is stretched thin with the mutants and more, but though belated, no branch will be left undefended against the mutant scourge.”
“Eventually,” the sergeant said bitterly.
“You-” Keep to the script, Zip. Keep to the fuckin’ script. “Have every right to be angry. I can only apologize once more on behalf of the Domain branch.”
The sergeant shrugged. She resisted the urge to drive a boot up into his ancient head and send him into the ceiling.
“Okay,” Zipper said, rubbing her hands together. “What’s your taste? Fire for your blades? Ice? Not out of quality steel by any chance?’
“I don’t really understand.”
Of course he didn’t... how could she simplify it. “I can take stuff from the and make other stuff stronger.”
Nailed it.
“That doesn’t sound much. I saw a man no older than you teleport across the room, girl-”
“Do you or do you not want my help.” she said tersely.
“We don’t want anything fancy.”
“Steel then.”
“We gots lots of steel and it’s still not enough to cut through them hides of the big ones half the time.”
“I’ve got little stronger than that.”
“That so?”
Imploding in 3, 2, 1-
“You saying you can work with stuff?”
“Those were my words, correct.”
“I got some of them sky metal and them fire metal from the last, last, last last-”
“Is this going to take awhile?”
“Last guy who headed this post. Used to wear a whole load of it back in the day. THey took most of it back, said it was too expensive and precious to leave lying around, but they let us keep a gauntlet and a dagger just to frame up when he went.”
“Uh, sure, sure. Go wild. ” It was official: he was senile. He was going to leave and come back with some dingy ancestral dagger, raving about how it helped slew the God that Parhne fought back when Etzos was young, and-
She stared. He came back and all she could do was stare.
“Here ya go. You have to promise me your mage stuff won’t damage these. It’s important to this outpost.”
She just continued staring. She stared so long he started waving a hand in her face.
“Yeah,” she said, looking at the unsurprisingly pristine looking dagger and softly glowing gauntlet. “Yeah, I can work with Admantite and Malorite.”
