I feel things
Dec. 30th, 2011 08:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kasihyaLife goes on after the Texcoco Incident, much as it usually does in the caravan these days: Mother is quiet, Orezi is stern and solemn, Evimari is the only stable one besides me, and Agioren is twice as loud as he was, as if he’s trying to fill in the gaps left by Alaet’s death. That’s what I think of it as for that night, anyway. The next morning, the real incident comes, the one that everyone knows now as the Texcoco Incident.
Technically speaking, Texcoco is part of the Shanrien Empire, but it isn’t part of Oboureon. It’s too far west, and it commands its own city-state lands. But it’s been paying taxes to Oboureon for years now, and they’ve always been looking to rebel and get back full independence. (The Shanrien Empire consists of six ‘main’ city-states, Oboureon being one of them. Each of these city-states has control of several others in the surrounding areas. Oboureon just happens to be the city-state farthest to the southwest, and so it controls most of the region in which this story takes place.) It’s easy to pick up on these things, if you’re paying attention: when the people around you don’t think of you as being quite human, and they know that everyone else also hates you as much as they do, they tend to talk around you where they wouldn’t normally.
To be honest, it slipped my mind that this would change because of Tanwen. (Of course it’s because of Tanwen, everything in the world that is ever affected by anything these days, it’s because of her.) Last year, when we were here, we were the useful, but outcast, foreigners. I didn’t get bothered too much, because we were all low on the chain of command. But now. Now!
Now when I set up my wares and start threading beads onto strings to make protective jewelry, people stare at me and whisper. I think that perhaps I’ve just gotten prettier since last year, which may or may not be true, but it happens to everyone. Orezi is talking to another merchant in the area, just someone with whom he can exchange gossip, and I watch from twenty feet away as the man’s face suddenly pales to the color of deerskin, and he beats a hasty retreat. Orezi rolls his eyes at Father as he returns from the other markets. He always looks so odd wearing Shanrien clothing; I hardly ever see him wearing it, even though he dons it to go out into the streets nearly every time we arrive in a town or city. He’s always quick to duck inside the house on the way in and change, so that he reappears in the market a few minutes later looking normal.
‘I feared coming back alone without arms,’ I hear him say to Orezi. I believe that I hear my uncle give him a reply that tells him to stop being so fearful and become strong, but I miss the very end of it because a tall, athletic woman looms over my table to inspect the artwork laid out there.
‘Can I persuade you to buy anything today?’ I ask her, putting on my best selling face. I feel very small next to her; I glance to the side to make sure that Agioren is there in case I need someone to help me defend myself, but it’s only Sambiya, wearing his new clothing, and he appears to be flirting with one of the visitors instead of selling them anything immediately. Must have learned that one from Agioren. Wonderful.
The woman barely glances up as she paws through the assortment, turning things over, lifting them halfway off the table and then dropping them like burning coals. ‘No, thanks. I’m just looking.’
‘Anything in particular? I make art suitable for a variety of different purposes, and there are some, like this bracelet right here, that contain substances not found anywhere else in this land,’ –
‘I said, no.’ She barks out the last word; Sambiya and his conversation partner both turn to gawk at her for a moment. I take a half-step back, to keep her from flipping out at me and causing a scene.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm at this fantastic stage of the story where suddenly, things started happening, and I realized that if I nudge them just a little in this direction, everything suddenly clicks into high gear and I have a plot to hold up the character interactions of Tanwen's side of things (and really, all I ever ask for in life is to be able to write stories about characters who don't get along, getting along) that starts as a plot on Meilen/Tsuya's side of things, and then crosses over into Oboureon, and it all fits together and is an interesting dilemma that will involve both lots of action and lots of dialogue and thinking.
Also after everything is done I am going to hide in my room and read aloud every single conversation and rewrite it so that it sounds like normal human speech and not me reading off a speech.
ALSO I JUST SAW WICKED AND ELPHABA HAD THE MOST FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE VOICE I HAVE EVER HEARD. She made 'No Good Deed' nearly as epic as 'Defying Gravity'. She and Glinda really amped up the homoeroticism, not that I minded at all: they literally never stopped holding hands or clinging to each other after the Ozdust Ballroom scene (in which Glinda asks if she can cut in, then proceeded to grab Elphaba by the hand and run to the back of the stage to dance with her) and in 'What Is This Feeling' they were literally an inch apart and kept leaning in. I kept thinking 'Kiss! Kiss! Kiss? Now kiss. Dammit.' This ship has been boarded and now I will stop thinking about it for twenty minutes to go work on my story. Current tentative title is 'Nixtamal' but I think I'm going to have to wait until I go back through to really find symbolic motifs that I can use to create a title.
My dad bought me a Wicked t-shirt. Tossed it in my lap during intermission, really. I feel like a real gay man now. Musical theater! With lesbians and men in dresses and songs about having to want something different because society isn't going to give you what you want!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This needs to be written over.
Dakiyo slides his macuahuitl out from its position behind his back, and motions to the rest of his family and the other carriers. They follow him into the market, amidst growing murmurs. Going into third-person outline mode, because I don’t know how to write action scenes very well and I just want this story to finish itself. The eagle warrior says that he doesn’t want to make a fuss or cause any trouble, he just wants the Andoin to pack up their things and leave the city immediately.
‘But the soup’s still on,’ argues Tsuya, which is such a quintessentially Tsuya thing to say that Meilen is dumbfounded because why on earth is he trying to defend them? Why would he try to take their side? (The answer, of course, is that Tsuya dislikes the Andoin, but he dislikes the eagle warriors even more, because they are Shanrien and they are commoners who have been able to better themselves and he dreamed about being an eagle warrior before and until and even after he learned that because of the parents to whom he was born and because of his kasihya blood, he will never be worthy of any position he doesn’t create for himself.)
The eagle warrior knows that Tsuya isn’t one of them because his bare arms show off his tattoos and he wears his scarf knotted around his head to keep his matted hair out of his eyes, rather than draped across the front of his neck with the ends hanging over his shoulders down his back. He snaps, and Tauno wearily comes to the front and explains that he’s their slave, and that if they’ll just give the caravan a precious few moments to clear up the last of their food preparations, they will leave quietly. The eagle warriors are suspicious, but they allow them as long as a close watch is kept. They don’t discourage the universal staring that the caravan receives from the rest of the merchants, because that would defeat the purpose of what they are doing. Meilen knows this, but it makes her angry, and she mutters something rude under her breath before her mother lays a hand on her shoulder and tells her to keep her voice down and not cause trouble. Meilen apologizes, but it’s only lip service, and she takes her mother’s compliance as a sign that she is weak, rather than a sign that she is surviving.
Except that then, the aforementioned stocky figure with a backpack stacked up above his head and a macuahuitl strapped across that struts into the market, stops, and demands to know what is going on. The head eagle warrior leans on his spear casually, like he’s not even bothered by this gypsy man wielding a weapon with which he could potentially decapitate him in one good strike. ‘Who’s this?’ he asks. ‘You with them?’
Dakiyo doesn’t immediately know what to say. His gaze darts back and forth between Grandmother and the carriers with whom he entered. ‘I’m a carrier for this caravan,’ he finally settles on. Meilen notices the wording and feels scorn because he left them in their time of need, even though her own family had much more of a reason to leave than his. They’d already lost a child, but even her mother didn’t want to abandon family. (This should be another hint to the reader that there is more to Biemi than the weak-willed woman that Meilen sees, that maybe she’s strong by virtue of holding it all in and allowing Meilen to be angry at her and allowing Tauno to comfort her because she knows that he needs to comfort someone else in order to feel better about what happened.)
‘All of you need to leave, at the command of the utuya of Texcoco,’ the eagle warrior says by way of reply.
‘Do we now?’ Dakiyo reaches back over his head, as if to pull his macuahuitl from its sheath. It’s possible to hear the horror and fascination of the crowds.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have so many Wicked-induced feelings right now it isn't even funny. It's tragic. I'm all muddled up inside like an impressionist watercolor dunked in a bucket of fish.
EDIT 02.06.12: I was going back through old entries to find something, and I would just like to make it clear that I have no idea what I meant by a bucket of fish. None.
Technically speaking, Texcoco is part of the Shanrien Empire, but it isn’t part of Oboureon. It’s too far west, and it commands its own city-state lands. But it’s been paying taxes to Oboureon for years now, and they’ve always been looking to rebel and get back full independence. (The Shanrien Empire consists of six ‘main’ city-states, Oboureon being one of them. Each of these city-states has control of several others in the surrounding areas. Oboureon just happens to be the city-state farthest to the southwest, and so it controls most of the region in which this story takes place.) It’s easy to pick up on these things, if you’re paying attention: when the people around you don’t think of you as being quite human, and they know that everyone else also hates you as much as they do, they tend to talk around you where they wouldn’t normally.
To be honest, it slipped my mind that this would change because of Tanwen. (Of course it’s because of Tanwen, everything in the world that is ever affected by anything these days, it’s because of her.) Last year, when we were here, we were the useful, but outcast, foreigners. I didn’t get bothered too much, because we were all low on the chain of command. But now. Now!
Now when I set up my wares and start threading beads onto strings to make protective jewelry, people stare at me and whisper. I think that perhaps I’ve just gotten prettier since last year, which may or may not be true, but it happens to everyone. Orezi is talking to another merchant in the area, just someone with whom he can exchange gossip, and I watch from twenty feet away as the man’s face suddenly pales to the color of deerskin, and he beats a hasty retreat. Orezi rolls his eyes at Father as he returns from the other markets. He always looks so odd wearing Shanrien clothing; I hardly ever see him wearing it, even though he dons it to go out into the streets nearly every time we arrive in a town or city. He’s always quick to duck inside the house on the way in and change, so that he reappears in the market a few minutes later looking normal.
‘I feared coming back alone without arms,’ I hear him say to Orezi. I believe that I hear my uncle give him a reply that tells him to stop being so fearful and become strong, but I miss the very end of it because a tall, athletic woman looms over my table to inspect the artwork laid out there.
‘Can I persuade you to buy anything today?’ I ask her, putting on my best selling face. I feel very small next to her; I glance to the side to make sure that Agioren is there in case I need someone to help me defend myself, but it’s only Sambiya, wearing his new clothing, and he appears to be flirting with one of the visitors instead of selling them anything immediately. Must have learned that one from Agioren. Wonderful.
The woman barely glances up as she paws through the assortment, turning things over, lifting them halfway off the table and then dropping them like burning coals. ‘No, thanks. I’m just looking.’
‘Anything in particular? I make art suitable for a variety of different purposes, and there are some, like this bracelet right here, that contain substances not found anywhere else in this land,’ –
‘I said, no.’ She barks out the last word; Sambiya and his conversation partner both turn to gawk at her for a moment. I take a half-step back, to keep her from flipping out at me and causing a scene.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm at this fantastic stage of the story where suddenly, things started happening, and I realized that if I nudge them just a little in this direction, everything suddenly clicks into high gear and I have a plot to hold up the character interactions of Tanwen's side of things (and really, all I ever ask for in life is to be able to write stories about characters who don't get along, getting along) that starts as a plot on Meilen/Tsuya's side of things, and then crosses over into Oboureon, and it all fits together and is an interesting dilemma that will involve both lots of action and lots of dialogue and thinking.
Also after everything is done I am going to hide in my room and read aloud every single conversation and rewrite it so that it sounds like normal human speech and not me reading off a speech.
ALSO I JUST SAW WICKED AND ELPHABA HAD THE MOST FUCKING UNBELIEVABLE VOICE I HAVE EVER HEARD. She made 'No Good Deed' nearly as epic as 'Defying Gravity'. She and Glinda really amped up the homoeroticism, not that I minded at all: they literally never stopped holding hands or clinging to each other after the Ozdust Ballroom scene (in which Glinda asks if she can cut in, then proceeded to grab Elphaba by the hand and run to the back of the stage to dance with her) and in 'What Is This Feeling' they were literally an inch apart and kept leaning in. I kept thinking 'Kiss! Kiss! Kiss? Now kiss. Dammit.' This ship has been boarded and now I will stop thinking about it for twenty minutes to go work on my story. Current tentative title is 'Nixtamal' but I think I'm going to have to wait until I go back through to really find symbolic motifs that I can use to create a title.
My dad bought me a Wicked t-shirt. Tossed it in my lap during intermission, really. I feel like a real gay man now. Musical theater! With lesbians and men in dresses and songs about having to want something different because society isn't going to give you what you want!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
This needs to be written over.
Dakiyo slides his macuahuitl out from its position behind his back, and motions to the rest of his family and the other carriers. They follow him into the market, amidst growing murmurs. Going into third-person outline mode, because I don’t know how to write action scenes very well and I just want this story to finish itself. The eagle warrior says that he doesn’t want to make a fuss or cause any trouble, he just wants the Andoin to pack up their things and leave the city immediately.
‘But the soup’s still on,’ argues Tsuya, which is such a quintessentially Tsuya thing to say that Meilen is dumbfounded because why on earth is he trying to defend them? Why would he try to take their side? (The answer, of course, is that Tsuya dislikes the Andoin, but he dislikes the eagle warriors even more, because they are Shanrien and they are commoners who have been able to better themselves and he dreamed about being an eagle warrior before and until and even after he learned that because of the parents to whom he was born and because of his kasihya blood, he will never be worthy of any position he doesn’t create for himself.)
The eagle warrior knows that Tsuya isn’t one of them because his bare arms show off his tattoos and he wears his scarf knotted around his head to keep his matted hair out of his eyes, rather than draped across the front of his neck with the ends hanging over his shoulders down his back. He snaps, and Tauno wearily comes to the front and explains that he’s their slave, and that if they’ll just give the caravan a precious few moments to clear up the last of their food preparations, they will leave quietly. The eagle warriors are suspicious, but they allow them as long as a close watch is kept. They don’t discourage the universal staring that the caravan receives from the rest of the merchants, because that would defeat the purpose of what they are doing. Meilen knows this, but it makes her angry, and she mutters something rude under her breath before her mother lays a hand on her shoulder and tells her to keep her voice down and not cause trouble. Meilen apologizes, but it’s only lip service, and she takes her mother’s compliance as a sign that she is weak, rather than a sign that she is surviving.
Except that then, the aforementioned stocky figure with a backpack stacked up above his head and a macuahuitl strapped across that struts into the market, stops, and demands to know what is going on. The head eagle warrior leans on his spear casually, like he’s not even bothered by this gypsy man wielding a weapon with which he could potentially decapitate him in one good strike. ‘Who’s this?’ he asks. ‘You with them?’
Dakiyo doesn’t immediately know what to say. His gaze darts back and forth between Grandmother and the carriers with whom he entered. ‘I’m a carrier for this caravan,’ he finally settles on. Meilen notices the wording and feels scorn because he left them in their time of need, even though her own family had much more of a reason to leave than his. They’d already lost a child, but even her mother didn’t want to abandon family. (This should be another hint to the reader that there is more to Biemi than the weak-willed woman that Meilen sees, that maybe she’s strong by virtue of holding it all in and allowing Meilen to be angry at her and allowing Tauno to comfort her because she knows that he needs to comfort someone else in order to feel better about what happened.)
‘All of you need to leave, at the command of the utuya of Texcoco,’ the eagle warrior says by way of reply.
‘Do we now?’ Dakiyo reaches back over his head, as if to pull his macuahuitl from its sheath. It’s possible to hear the horror and fascination of the crowds.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I have so many Wicked-induced feelings right now it isn't even funny. It's tragic. I'm all muddled up inside like an impressionist watercolor dunked in a bucket of fish.
EDIT 02.06.12: I was going back through old entries to find something, and I would just like to make it clear that I have no idea what I meant by a bucket of fish. None.
