View Flat HTML
View Metadata
Search Post
Tumunzahar makes Menegroth look like a contract project. Which, the Dwarves assure her, it was. The stonework is astonishingly careful and beautiful, silky to the touch up close while from a distance it gives the impression of stretching on forever above, a sky of stone with crystals for stars. Vast natural cave systems are connected by dozens of perfectly smooth, gently sloped broad stone pathways from which the fall, if she fell, would be several miles down. There are handrails. "We use those to move materials carts," someone explains to her, "we're not going to be reckless."
There's an amphitheater, a place where a hundred of the stone walkways twine around to create space for a hundred thousand people to sit in close proximity, and someone is giving a lecture or a demonstration at the base of it, the seats closest to him filled with eager, tiny, bearded Dwarf-children.
And they spiral down, and down, and down, past waterfalls and egg-sized gemstones left half in the rock and halls of crystal. Everything grows gradually more ornate and more perfectly maintained and the clang of hammers fades behind them. "People say," her guide says, "that we only have a council instead of a single King because there were nine winners of the competition to design the throne so we couldn't just select one person to sit it." And they push open the doors to reveal, indeed, nine thrones so elaborate it would be hard to choose between them, and nine squat bearded people sitting them.
+ Show First Post
He's very good at it, but 'knows all of the carpentry and stonework skills involved in building cities, works very quickly' isn't an advantage on the same scale as 'may be able to sing them into place', no. The politics is the main thing I was considering. I would like Findekáno not to expend all the credibility he has with his people by caring about me far more than his information warrants. But it sounds like he's doing that anyway and quite publicly. In which case inviting him here would at least be possible to pass off as the two of them settling our differences in a way that ends to the benefit of his host.
...people who know, or have guessed, or are wondering, are going to be constantly looking for a way to determine which of us has the advantage of the other, it's this absurdly unshakeable assumption. It used to amuse me but now if we're going to be in contact again I need to make sure his people think it's him and my people think it's me and I actually don't find it amusing at all at this point, just exasperating.
It did not occur to me to worry that I'd feel complicated emotions. I do not think that's particularly likely. It's not really him and this is a delightfully interesting problem. If he thinks it'd be unhealthy for him he should not come.
...people who know, or have guessed, or are wondering, are going to be constantly looking for a way to determine which of us has the advantage of the other, it's this absurdly unshakeable assumption. It used to amuse me but now if we're going to be in contact again I need to make sure his people think it's him and my people think it's me and I actually don't find it amusing at all at this point, just exasperating.
It did not occur to me to worry that I'd feel complicated emotions. I do not think that's particularly likely. It's not really him and this is a delightfully interesting problem. If he thinks it'd be unhealthy for him he should not come.
purposeful_glory
Has the adv-? Okay, for one thing I'm not sure how public it is, he talks to me about you a lot but I'm the one who can relay messages, I think he may well just look vaguely maudlin to everyone else, and for another is that what I think it is.
It's not public. That we were as close as brothers in Valinor is known to everyone and sufficient explanation for his being bothered that I've been tortured into insanity. I don't know what you think what is.
purposeful_glory
Would your families seriously work themselves into a tizzy over who's on top. That's not their business! That's not anyone's business unless you're attending an orgy and even in those it's not customary to dwell on it as though it has great cosmic significance!
Ohhh. ...there is a cultural assumption that there are power dynamics associated.
purposeful_glory
At home even folks who recreationally pretend there are power dynamics involved in their sex and/or relationships because it makes their weekends more interesting don't rigidly adhere to an assumption about what acts that implies. Not as a group, anyway.
That's lovely for Asgard. When you have enough cultural assumptions about what things mean, there's a sense in which they actually do mean those things.
And more importantly and entirely independent of my personal life, which would be far, far worse than trying to eat to try to take up again anyway, I need everyone inclined to figure out whether Findekáno and I are manipulating each other for political advantage to come to three or four different conclusions about the answer to that question, depending who they are and what they know, and this is complicated anyway and way more complicated if he's already burned through political capital by making it clear he's very sad about me.
And more importantly and entirely independent of my personal life, which would be far, far worse than trying to eat to try to take up again anyway, I need everyone inclined to figure out whether Findekáno and I are manipulating each other for political advantage to come to three or four different conclusions about the answer to that question, depending who they are and what they know, and this is complicated anyway and way more complicated if he's already burned through political capital by making it clear he's very sad about me.
purposeful_glory
I'd say there's a sense in which it communicates the thing rather than a sense in which it means it but that's semantics and semantic arguments through Allspeak are a headache.
No comment on his personal life except that ugh that's so sad.
No comment on his personal life except that ugh that's so sad.
I have more urgent concerns.
The spell that might make us fly faster, have you tried it out?
I would.
It does, in fact, make them go faster, like a strong tailwind.
He also does a fair bit of swooping around, though he does not express enjoyment.
purposeful_glory
I am such a fan of song spells. I wonder how many more there are scattered around that people will let me have.
Macalaurë has more than that, including some that might be useful. My guess is that he hesitated to list them because he mostly used them for throwing wild parties that lasted a week, in Aman, and now he's my father's heir and trying not to have a reputation for throwing wild parties that last a week.
purposeful_glory
Do I need to tell him how disreputable I am, will that help?
It might change the impression he presumably formed when he offered you a drink over the realization you were kidnapped as an infant and you explained you don't drink.
purposeful_glory
In a useful way? I like my brain how it works all by itself; I have fewer concerns about anything non-mind-altering.
I didn't drink much either, back when 'my brain, working as it does by itself' was a meaningful concept. It is predictive of being generally disinclined to wild partying, though, so if you want him to think you're a wild partier you should probably clarify.
purposeful_glory
Any drawbacks to, 'hey, Macalaurë, in case you got the wrong impression from the fact that I avoid drinking when I can get away with it, I thought you should know that I have completely lost count of how many people I've slept with of either gender'? I'm just not sure how to present this information if it doesn't come up in conversation; he's never ambiguously had a boyfriend at me to make it salient.
He does not have a boyfriend. Among musicians it'd be less surprising, though, they're supposed to have every vice imaginable. I imagine you could just say that I said Asgard's sufficiently different from here that he's going to do poorly at predicting what is embarrassing.