"For the love of God, Saint-Martin."

He has to hide his lips to cover his giggles.

...

No, fuck that, he specifically did not take "Decorative" for a reason. What he is doing is not "giggling" it is something more like "cackling". Not as, uh, loudly as that implies, but still that same verb.

"I am not childlike all through. In the cake of innocence are sultanas of obscenity. - usually I say mon chat, incidentally, but it confuses matters unduly when it's the first someone hears of it."

"Oh but I do so hope it won't be the last. Someday I'll get to pay obeisance to ton chat, the sultan of obscenity."

"That is also an amusing bit of wordplay, provided it is wordplay and you are not simply unaware that sultanas are a type of raisin."

"It was a promise," he replies, grinning. "...and also wordplay, yes."

"Promises, promises. Though I suppose I made you a promise as well... we shall see who gets where first."

"It might be him," Edmund warns. "He's very convincing."

"I will be vigilant, I promise you that."

"I am not going to make another innuendo about my honeyed tongue except by apophasis because I should probably cool it a bit and also that'd be recycling a joke which is anathema to me, even if the original one was used to torment Peter and not either of you. The audience will get bored. Quick, come up with a new topic, Tintin tell me about yourself and your inevitably foreshadowed interest in investigative journalism."

"You are a wonderfully strange little man. Yes, I work for the student newspaper, perhaps you have seen some recent headline of mine - I have been given a new story that is really exciting, though. Have you heard of the Seven Mysteries of the Valentine School?"

"Why would he have heard of those, your editor made them up."

"She did not! She collected data indicating that there were mysteries and she organized them into seven distinct phenomena!"

"Well, that sounds like plot, color me interested. What are the Seven Mysteries of the Valentine School?"

"Mostly they are quite normal ghost stories! There is a spirit in the fourth-floor corridor of the natural sciences building, whose scratching and wailing can be heard when walking the halls after dark; the auditorium has been known to play music of its own accord when no one is there; that kind of thing. I expect little of such mysteries, but for completeness' sake I will document them anyway. But the seventh mystery is that sometimes, someone will encounter a little patch of space that is wrong, somehow. Or lose a stretch of time, and find themselves somewhere they were not going, without any history of such tendencies. Or say things they would never say - I have a record -" Tintin retrieves a little notepad. "Ahem. Clarence Fitzpatrick, on the morning of the seventh, spoke into empty air the words I'm not even mad anymore. Okay, I guess I'm a little mad that it's happening again - whatever, alright, I've made my point, and this is potentially an information leak. God I'm bored. Is he bored too? Who am I kidding, of course he's - this is still an information leak. End quote."

He scratches his chin. "Didn't peg this setting to be one to have ghosts in it, and that last one was just yelling right through the window on the fourth wall. No clue who the message is to or about, though, I'm definitely not bored so it can't be me."

"Yes, my life has been quite resolutely genre-fiction thus far, I doubt ghosts. But 'yelling through the fourth wall'... that is interesting. I imagine it to be an intercepted transmission of some kind, but I confess doubt that you are the recipient."

"It is at this time that I must admit that I am not the sole protagonist of this story and as many as five things have ever happened that have nothing to do with me."

"I should hope so. Choose your five carefully; I will assign blame for all other historical events, and it will help to minimize your body count."

"...shit I didn't think this through." He starts counting. "The Big Bang, evolution, the invention of society, uhhhh... something something, and human free will!"

"Regressive of you, to disclaim responsibility for humanity so thoroughly. You are responsible for none of our tragedies, but also for none of the beauty we have brought to our world, and hence I call you not wicked but dull, which is worse."

"That is how he gets you," Edmund says to Pete, unnecessarily.

"In this, I am exactly as every other human who has ever existed. Except I'm prettier and better dressed. So I only claim responsibility for the beauty I, personally, bring to the world."

And to Edmund: "Two can play that game."