Chapters 89-92: Seriously Competative Professional Readers
For next week — 93-96
93. Bottle Episode
94. Grayscale
95. Time Enough
96. A Portrait of the King as a Young Man
Cakoluchiam’s stellar Character Sheet
Steven’s Predictions – Everything is a Clue
Worth the Candle can be read at AO3 or RoyalRoad.
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Fenn being worried about the shot glasses makes sense. An aerosoled poison that floods a house might not have the power to kill you, being diluted with a houseful of air. It might just give you diarrhea or something, especially if you’re not feeling anything right now, because poison gas is REALLY hard to get the dosage right. But a shot glass is DEFINITELY enough to kill you.
They weren’t dead yet, maybe the house is operating under some harsh limitations, maybe Amaryllis could order it not to kill them, so it needed them to kill themslves. This is Aerb, who knows.
When Vervain said: “It pains me to hear you speak that way.”
I had another thought. Do you know “Order of the Stick”?
It’s a huge webcomic about an adventuring party and everyone in that world knows they are in a DnD setting and the main characters know they are doing a DnD campaign in a webcomic.
One of the characters is Elan the Bard. He has high charisma, meaning he looks hot as F, but low wisdom. But as the Bard he understands narrative and pacing and punchlines and tropes to an insane degree, to the point where he was willfully ignorant about some bad guy’s plan and went along in a way that would work out in his favor.
And in the first 90% of the comic he gets on the other’s nerves SO MUCH. Like, he pauses for dramatic effect, he does dumb things to move the plot forward and he comments on the tropes and clishés. The characters groan like Eneaz does when the puns come out.
So my read was that Vervain was like “Oh god, he’s doing the genre savvy thing again.” and he was like “I’m always right.”
And better yet, that ties in with my GoodGuyDM theory. Joon was sent to Aerb, out of the infinite multiverse, because that’s where all his guesses turn out to be right.
Uther’s life was so terrible, because that was the world where his guesses would turn out to be right the most, where he would have the most power and do the most good.
The reason the narrative fucked him over? Because he expected the narrative to fuck him over. The narrative was one of Uther’s super powers, not something the DM did to him to fuck with him.
I heard a story of a woman that said: “The rape wasn’t bad. It really was just my uncle’s penis in my vagina. It hurt, yes, but not as much as falling off my bike and breaking my leg. The thing that was bad, was my father slapping me and telling me to stop lying. That part was what changed my life.”
So, just because Kuum says that the sex didn’t bother her, doesn’t mean that the sex actually didn’t bother her. Maybe the sex did hurt and bother her. Just your father slapping you and not believing you your uncle, say, stole fifty dollars from you isn’t enough to fuck you up for life.
Maybe if Uther didn’t statutory rape her she wouldn’t have been as fucked up. She would have had better realationships with the people who inhabited her, she wouldn’t have started hiding from her owners ect. Maybe she could have explained that the dude she killed tried to make her worthless, was actually attacking her.
When you think “Yeah, but she doesn’t have human psychology!” That might true, but having sex with Uther, being taught to have sex with Uther, all that build up an intimacy. It build up a relationship. And then being threatened, forced to abandon your burgeoning identity and finally being abandoned is what breaks you and makes it so that the whole being threatened is a “kill the fucker” button.
So much that ELVES INSIDE YOU GET HUNCHES THAT THEY SHOULD SHOW YOU THAT THEY REACT VERY POORLY TO BEING THREATENED.
Because HAHA! Fenn said all those “stupid things” and was “really mean” because the house was contemplating murder and she Elf Lucked into bonding moments with the house instead.
She offends the house? Ping, she backpaddles.
House treatens them: Lots of other adventurers have tried sucking up to the house and beg for their lives. Fenn: “I’ll fucking burn you down if you threaten me, just like you killed people who have threatened you, we’re alike.”
Amaryllis displays things the house doesn’t like:
“You should have mentioned how she’s too pretty,” said Fenn.
And it WORKS:
“That too,” said Zona with a laugh that came from everywhere at once.
BONDING!
“Mary, come on, this is blackmail, You can’t honestly be thinking of bowing down.” Look, we’re so in tune!
“Literature?” “It means books,” replied Fenn. Zona laughed.
Kuum tortured people for information: “I suppose that doesn’t make you feel any better about living inside me?” asked Zona.
“It helps,” said Fenn, the effin MVP.
“Did you break OUR house on our first day here?”
“Juniper already talks about them constantly anyway, so if you just leave him alive…”
“Am I the only one thinking that there’s no way that she’s going to make it the full nine months, let alone however long it takes to get Solace up and running? She’s going to snap. She’ll crack like an egg,” Amaryllis can maybe relate to Kuum a little bit, you know? She’ll get a taste of the isolation you’ve felt, so don’t kill her either.
“It’s a hard pass from me, I’ve spent enough of my life in solitary confinement, thank you very much.” And I can relate too.
Grak says he’s a dwarf and does typical dwarf things like live in the underground? “No, you live on the surface, in big houses like this one. You’re nothing like all those dwarves this house killed and no, Kuum, you should not even kill the kinda standoffish dwarf, we can’t just replace him with another dwarf.
Now she saved the whole Party’s life and her Elf Luck Pings calm down a little.
And the rest is going to be spoilers, but: Fenn M. V. P.
That’s genius. Did you just come up with this or has this thought circulated before?
I came up with it on my own and, after realizing both steven and eneaz missed it, posted it to the discord.
When Fenn is being threatened, she goes very quiet. She wants to suck up to the house, gets a ping. ” Um… Mary is the talker.” She wants to say something else “He’s” Ping “ah, my boyfriend.”
Fenn wants to explain the druid thing Ping. “Do you need to know why we need it? Cause if I just tell you someone dies.”
Tough luck? Ping. Buy time.
“And If I don’t tell you?”
“Kill you all.”
Fenn nods, while thinking of more things to say. Ping. Ping.
‘Mh, what if I tell her I can’t be threatened? Threaten her back? … No ping. Okay. Lets do that.
Ah, she laughed! Good, just… just do more of that.
Fenn speaks haltingly… she never speaks haltingly.