The next morning at the Sydney Hotel, we call came downstairs for coffee. Iago, naturally, put liquor into his.
We had to come up with an act. We’d chosen Csipherus, to which I felt immense personal connection (and pressure) to succeed with, but unlike our first act, this time we actually needed a plan. We had Stanley, who had done his best to provide us with access to materials, costumes, and various sundries to make our tasks easier, but like, at the end of the day, we needed ideas.
The notebook Stanley had procured for me felt like a lead weight. I felt vaguely ill.
“Is there an aquarium?” Tem asked, her scaled hands meditatively wrapped around a fine bone china cup from the Sydney Hotel’s coffee service.
Zeno blinked. “Aquarium?”
“Yeah,” Tem said. “An aquarium.”
“No,” he said, with a distinct undertone of why would there be?
Tem did not reveal her mysterious reasons for needing an aquarium, only looked deflated. “I cannot find fish at all in this hotel,” she said, dejected.
I had a brief moment of panic that she was going to swallow another one whole in the same way that had upset the nice man at the inn in Fallow’s Reach.
What followed, perhaps most normally, was a discussion of land meat versus sea meat. Stanley walked in just as we were getting into the merits of (and what constituted) air meat. To his credit, he only looked a little disturbed.
“Ah yes!” he said. “Just the people I’ve wanted to see!”
He was here to report back on how things were progressing with our abundance of strange requests, also making sure to mention that there were opportunities around town to learn (either actual music or actionable performance skills) and understand more about what coming up in the next round.
Helli had asked him to do some sleuthing around, and he had been able to discern from Audrichard, a female human (and also one of the other managers of talent), that the group she was looking after was staying at the Ronday. Stanley mentioned that she looked particularly euphoric, which probably meant that it was the Druids of the Sun and Moon and their excessive pheromones at work.
“So not a half-elf?” someone asked.
No, Stanley confirmed. That was Lane.
“Well, Lane visited our concierge yesterday,” said Iago. “We’ll see if they report anything.”
Helli confirmed that she had indeed bribed a concierge to inform her of any happenings and dissuade people from looking for us.
“That one?” Stanley asked, nodding in the direction of the current concierge. “That woman?”
Helli squinted in her direction. “No,” she said. “The one I talked to was smaller.”
Stanley straightened his lapels, then noted that while he was not allowed to give us specifics about tournament competitors, that we should “take on an enterprising state of mind” concerning acquiring knowledge.
Helli steepled her fingers. “Stanley, what are your hopes and dreams?”
Oh shit. I sat up in my chair and took a deep drink of coffee. This was serious. This was game time.
“What, me?” Stanley asked, seemingly unaware of the depth of this question. “Well, once I dreamed I was a centaur frolicking in the meadows.” He looked wistful. “But I don’t think that’s what we were talking about.”
“But–” Helli scrambled, looking for an angle– “we could have drinks after all this is over!”
Iago nodded sagely. “It’s okay, Steve. I don’t trust us either.”
Helli elbowed the old man.
Stanley smiled, then sat down. “There is an enshrining ceremony, an enshrining of champions. It’s attended only by those who win the Battle of the Bards, and their management, of course. It would be the greatest of honors in my career to attend.”
Helli nodded. “It’s decided then. I’ll bring you along at my plus one.”
“Well.” Stanley cleared his throat. “I hope I’ll be invited as well.”
“Stanley,” Zeno said languidly over a fresh refill of hotel coffee, “you’re our groupie. Admit it.”
“Roadie, more like.” Iago snickered.
“Tour manager!” Helli added hastily, trying to retain her hard-won goodwill with this poor man.
“I hope I can attend in any capacity,” Stanley said, a little more subdued. Maybe he really had gotten serious; maybe this really was his big dream. “The people who attend come back and do great things. They come back changed, truly affected by this. Some become prominent business people, but all are richly rewarded.”
Iago meditated on this. “Zeno, is the goal of being a good performer to run a small business?”
Zeno took another sip of coffee. “Uhh, I hope not, because I already do that.”
It would be a shame to think he’d peaked already, though the Bacchus Jolly was a fine establishment.
“I think,” he continued, “that we’re here for bigger and better things.”
This stirring sentiment roused Felegum to practice the drums. “That reminds me, I have to get to work on that intermediate manual.”
“You know,” said Iago, “I feel like I’m really growing as a person in this town.”
We were eating pastries and he had, only a few days ago, revealed himself as a fish ventriloquist.
“Isn’t that the point of travel?” Felegum said with a smile.
“Oh!” Stanley stood. “How could I forget? Please come outside with me and see the cart. We don’t have costumes yet, but if you’d like to view this chest I have–“
We followed him, albeit with some hesitation from me, Helli, Zeno, and Felegum. We had some history with carts and the terrible fates that seemed to befall them after associating with us.
The chest Stanley was so intent on showing us was full of gold-wrapped disks. Helli and I were elated.
“Are they made of chocolate?” Helli asked excitedly.
“Or cookies?” I added.
Iago did not ask anything. He simply took one and bit it, I think with the wrapper still on. “Uh, guys,” he said, “it’s not a cookie.”
Stanley looked even more distressed, if that was possible. “Ah no! They are not.”
Helli put down her disk. “It’s sabotage, Stanley.”
“We are justified in our retribution!” Iago said, still holding half of an eaten(?) not-cookie.
“Let me contact the bakery and see what happened,” Stanley said, holding up both hands, as if this would stop anyone from either a) enacting retribution or b) eating more. “I’m not sure why these are rocks.”
He had been able to locate a golden costume tiara for Helli, though, which put him back in her good graces.
“But mostly,” he said, “I’m excited about this!”
On “this!” he brandished a long metal tube and opened up another chest with six pouches of shot carefully arranged inside. “I am told that confetti shoots out the top. It comes from a semi-reputable artificer in the first dahn. Sometimes this is deployed at sporting events, like the grand joust of the fall equinox.”
Tem’s eyes lit up at “joust”.
“Why don’t we enter that?” Iago asked, never minding that it wasn’t even fall.
Zeno, meanwhile, inspected the confetti. “Blue and red??”
Together, they did made purple. But we wanted conhesion.
Stanley at last had reached his breaking point. “You didn’t specify!” He composed himself. “I can go ask Sijare about it.”
There was continued discourse on the confetti cannon and changing the color of the confetti.
“What if,” Helli pondered, “we put the cookies in the cannon?”
“Helli, those are not cookies,” Iago said with an expression of deep regret.
This did not stop her from thoroughly inspecting the cannon and making a note of the artificer’s name. I got the sense that she’d already made one contact here, maybe in the second or third dahn, but this new person was a subject of interest, especially on seeing their work. Each of the six pouches was a mix of red and blue confetti.
“In two days’ time, I should be able to construct the thing you talked about with the multiple circles,” Stanley said. “I will be able to build that, but it might not be functional.”
Hell, if he was able to build it and have it be functional, we needed him down in Csipherus, where I would set him up with a life of luxury and my eternal thanks.
“Now, what have you made?” Stanley asked us.
There was an awkward silence.
Then I held out the now coffee-stained notebook I’d been pouring my soul into over the last few days. “You told me to write some verse,” I said to Zeno, “so I wrote a verse epic in iambic heptameter.”
“YES,” Zeno said, leaning in.
Meanwhile, Iago was having a heart-to-heart with Felegum.
“Would you consider yourself a traveler?” he asked.
Felegum considered it. “I would,” he said.
I didn’t catch more of the context on that one (though obviously it was nice to see them bond over something besides ending the lives of a lot of ratpeople) because Stanley had focused on me with the desperation of a man clinging to a single piece of driftwood after water tendrils had destroyed his ship (specific, perhaps, but I speak from experience).
“Tell me everything you need,” he said.
“Can I get–” I consulted my oeuvre– “a green streamer?”
“Okay, I can get a green streamer,” Stanley replied, looking much relieved at the simplicity of this request compared to previous tasks of “actual gold tiara” and “gold wrapped cookies” or “functional un-zombifying gate”.
“I just don’t know how this is going to work with getting it to look like a spell,” I said. “I mean, whoever plays the Lich can like, flick it at me, but it’s got to be clear.”
“Mage Hand?” suggested Iago.
I made a contemplative noise. “Maybe. I’ll be reading, but okay, I can probably make the streamer kill myself.”
This might have sounded unhinged if you hadn’t read the verse epic but like, I’d had to condense some things, okay? We had three people, which meant three Red Eyes and three SDC members. The way I’d broken it up had kind of been in archetypes depending on memorable foes and also like, who we had on either team.
I knew that Zeno, me, and Tem would be the heroes. So, I’d come up with the Piper, the Thief, and the Knight as roles for us. I’d also written the Lich, the Archer, and the Stone (“I figured,” I explained, “why not risk a little copyright infringement? What’s he going to do, fight us? I’ve only ever heard Lankin talk about him.”) for the Red Eyes. Yes, obviously there had been more people on each side, but we barely had enough zombies to make a crowd. I was working with a limited cast and doing my best.
I had also consumed quite a lot of coffee by that point and was reluctant to go through the hell of changing the verse epic at this point in the game.
We decided on Felegum as the Lich, Helli as the Archer, and Iago as the Stone.
Felegum and Iago did their double act of trying to pull information out of Stanley while Stanley demurred. He said he was under a powerful spell and couldn’t tell us anything about other competitors.
Zeno was quick to wave off this obstacle. “Let’s go mingle and see when our competitors are performing.”
“Thanks, Steve–sorry, Stanley– see you later,” said Felegum. Stanley made to leave.
“Wait!” called Tem. “If we need instruments, is there a library nearby?”
Stanley paused. “Why would you need a library?”
Tem explained, sheepishly, much as she had when requesting the aquarium: “To try things out?”
To his credit, Stanley was chill. “This time of year, people often become inspired! They want to see if they could be a bard, like the ones they see performing. To that end, they’ll often buy their instruments, not rent them.”
Tem nodded, understanding but downcast, and Stanley bade farewell after that. This left us with the interesting problem of trying to get everything into the hotel. The cannon was the trickiest part, since it was six feet in length, but we managed.
“I bet Tem would help me with this,” Felegum said, somehow finding himself on cannon duty.
Tem bowed and dutifully came over to help with the transport.
From there, we went about our own separate business. Zeno went out for a walk, and later commented that he’d seen us on a poster. We seemed to be a wildcard. The poster had described a “test of mettle and wits to determine the end of the round”, which Zeno had taken as an excellent sign (“This is great,” he explained to us later. “Felegum’s heart is made of metal! And I’m witty!”).
Felegum practiced, and Helli also went out into the city.
Meanwhile, I sought out an apothecary. Being somewhat versed in this subgenre of market, I was able to find one that I liked called the Provisions Apotek. It had a tabaxi proprietor named Karvejic Martinezee, and when I asked him for a good tea recommendation to help with my voice before a performance, he had plenty of suggestions.
One of them was to chew some root of the jahwi tree (he was very clear on how it was important for me not to swallow it) a few hours before the show. For our noon performance, we’d want to have me chew it about an hour after breakfast.
For recovery post-show, he recommended a tea brewed from the petals of the nightshade flower.
This obviously seemed sus as hell, even if I weren’t the progeny of literal apothecaries, but Karvejic was quick to assure me that this was aboveboard. “I see the look of concern on your face, but it’s only the essence that’s used.”
That checked out. I thanked him for his help. I’d never read for this long before in front of so many people, and I didn’t want to mess up. Besides, I liked this guy.
“Thanks,” I said, “if things go well, I’ll probably be back.”
He bowed. “You may come into my shop at any time. It would bring me great joy to be helping on stage at the battle.”
This made me wonder if maybe I needed to be advertising for these people or something. Was this like, a part of the social contract here? If so, how did I handle the silversmith I’d bought the ring from?
I put that from my mind. We’d cross that bridge when we got to it.
Once I got back with my tea and root, I set up shop in the lobby with my notebook, more coffee, and a pen, double-checking lines. Tem had said how much she was looking forward to speaking in the performance, and uh, well, my first draft hadn’t given her any lines.
This wasn’t like, because I was a dick or anything– I’d kept the lines to the Piper and the Lich because they were the protagonist and antagonist. I hadn’t even given my character lines, just narration. But Tem was doing vocal exercises and speaking in a hushed voice as she practiced her swordplay, that–ugh– I couldn’t just tell her she didn’t have a speaking role when she clearly wanted one.
So there I was, frantically revising the verse epic so there would be a few more lines for people.
Zeno sat down at the table with me with his bagpipes and read my work over. Not going to lie, I was a little nervous. Dude was a professional. I was, well, not.
“Does this line scan?” I asked, passing him my notebook. The meter was a Csipherian one, all those seven’s. Sometimes I had to re-read lines multiple times because I got paranoid I’d goofed up.
He read the section over. “Yeah,” he said. “This is actually really good.”
I blinked, then looked back at my work. “Thanks.”
He nodded, then played around on his pipes, figuring out a melody in the background as I wrote. It was surprisingly pretty nice. I scratched out a few more lines, adjusting parts.
From time to time, we’d chat. Either about music and lyrics or just about random stuff.
“Oh, the other day I inhaled some bagpipe smoke,” Zeno said. “Just to see.”
“Oh dang!” I said, looking up from a rhyme. “What happened?”
Zeno shrugged, a little disappointed. “It just came back out.”
“If you want something to like, help with that, I have this nightshade flower recovery tea–“
“What the fuck, no!” Zeno wrinkled his nose at me. “Don’t drink that!”
“It’s the essence,” I tried to explain, but he was hearing none of it.
“No, no way.”
We settled back into that companionable kind of chill, adjacent working space. Zeno would read my lyrics, then play a bit. I’d pass him a page and get his thoughts on dramatic timing.
“Oh yeah,” I said, coming out of a writing reverie, “how’s the throat-singing?”
“It’s great,” Zeno said. “I basically become the bagpipes.”
“Oh, what!”
A few days passed in that happy in-between of practice and work.
When the appointed day came, I was less of a nervous wreck than I’d thought I’d be. I diligently chewed my jahwi root (careful not to swallow it) and had spent most of the morning going over my lines and not speaking.
When we left the hotel, though, we were in for a weird surprise.
There was a different person waiting by the clothes, props, bakery goods, and cart.
“Excuse me,” said Zeno. “Who are you?”
“I am Stanley,” said the dude who was definitely not Stanley.
“Um, no, you’re not.” Zeno put his hands on his hips, and turned the rest of us for confirmation.
For the first time in days, I regretted not preparing Sending as a spell. I’d stopped because I was feeling kind of down about Milto and how I’d kind of deluded myself about that for a long time post-the ring thing. Now I kind of wished I’d had it, just to see if I could contact Real Stanley. Was he okay?
Iago did a slow circle around Fake Stanley, sniffing him occasionally. “He seems like a Stanley,” Iago said. “That’s why I’m worried.”
Fake Stanley looked very uncomfortable. “I’m here to guide you.”
Helli leaned in, eyes narrowed. “What are your hopes and dreams?”
I quietly freaked out. This was it. This was how a professional operated. We had established a secret only Real Stanley would know.
“Ah,” the interloper said, “I don’t feel comfortable sharing that.”
“Stanley,” said Zeno, checking his nails, “shared his hopes and dreams with us.”
Other Stanley floundered for answers, and I nearly choked on my bark laughing. New Stanley was definitely not the same as Old Stanley, which would be a fascinating mystery to solve later, after our event.
But first:
“Is the previous Stanley okay?” I asked in a whisper, so as not to strain my voice.
“He’s okay,” said New Stanley. “He’s perfectly fine.”
I considered it. I still wanted proof for myself, and honestly didn’t feel like I had much reason to trust New Stanley, but like, at least this guy had acknowledged that he was not OG Stanley.
“Can we still invite him the shrining?” Iago asked.
“I think,” said New Stanley diplomatically, “you should refer to me as Stanley.”
“Look, Peter,” Felegum cut in, “I think you know you need us to cooperate for this event. Otherwise we won’t be in ‘perfect condition’.”
“I’m condition,” said Iago.
Felegum had been approaching Genocide Felegum levels of scary, but when Iago followed up, the sorcerer just lost it, ruining the intimidation with his laughter. Even New Stanley (who had looked shaken) was unable to take him seriously after that.
Helli poked around the cart, looking no doubt for signs that anything had been tampered with, and the rest of us went through set design. One of the Stanleys had procured red spotlights for the smoke at the end. There were even six Egonian gas masks.
“Will you change into your costumes here?” New Stanley asked. “Or in the purple room?”
We elected to change at the venue and rode in the cart to the center of the park.
“You’ll find the secret of the park as you enter,” New Stanley said, cryptically, as he dropped us off at the event entrance. We walked about a mile underground before we reached the purple room. It was actually pretty cool in there– there was a painted mural on the ceiling to make it look like the sky.
We changed into our costumes. At least this past seemed to be going according to plan; the directions we’d been given by New Stanley matched the ones Old Stanley had told us.
I spat out the bark. It was showtime.
Heading to the elevators below the stage, the air around us reverberated with the sound of drums. Then a voice said, magically magnified:
“And now, introducing the Song and Dance Crew!”
I got off a quick spell, making Zeno and me more charming. I doubted Zeno would need it, but I probably did with all this declaiming ahead of me.
“Knock ’em dead, kid,” the bard said to me and flashed me a thumbs up.
I gave him one back.
Zeno droned on the bagpipes and we emerged– me, Tem, and Zeno across from Felegum, Helli, and Iago who were center stage. I found a higher platform with a small rod, no doubt also for amplification, and steadied myself, remembering my lines and my embattled city.
Then I took a breath.
Angsty Teen Breakfast Blog 