12-12-2012, 11:15 PM
Originally posted on MSPA by MalkyTop.
The king strode his way into the library, dismissed his guards. There was a meek protest. It was silenced quickly.
The fact that the king had escorts in the first place implied something was wrong. Though such a conclusion could also be reached by taking in his haggard face and stooped shoulders.
Something had shaken the castle a few moments prior. The castle itself was solid enough so that such a disturbance could barely even be considered an earthquake. There had been a few more like disturbances, but then they had halted. Perhaps this had something to do with what was worrying the king, as well as the reason why the king was here in the first place. Whenever something worried him, he couldn’t help but talk to the librarian. It didn’t make a lot of sense for the king to pour his heart out to his confidante in the middle of a crisis when he was likely needed to make decisions, but, well, that was Max. The librarian didn’t mind his unofficial role as an adviser/consoler/listener/pillow-to-scream-into, but he certainly preferred the congenial conversations over this.
Before the librarian could politely ask what the matter was, the king started. “This is all my fault.”
The librarian asked for clarification: what is all your fault, exactly?
“This…this rebellion. There’s a rebellion going on right outside and they’re going to burst in and kill me! The guests don’t even know what’s going on yet!”
Can’t imagine that they’ll remain ignorant for long.
“I…I did something wrong. I must’ve, that’s why this is happening.” The king paced around the library fitfully, his hand to his forehead. “I knew this would happen, I knew it! Was only a matter of time before someone figured out I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Why did I have to be born in a goddamn royal family?”
The librarian decided to stop this self-pity party in its tracks by slightly shifting the conversation to his plans, which he must have made before coming here.
“Sent Annaliese and the kids away, so I’m really the only target left,” he sighed. “Unless you count everybody having a good time in the ballroom. Christ, do I tell them? I didn’t want them to get all panicky, but what if we can’t keep ‘em out? They’ll get panicky anyways and then maybe slaughtered and then they’ll hate me for not telling them.”
That would probably be the least of their worries at that point. Are the rebels so well-armed that there’s really a possibility of them breaking in?
“Yes! They’ve got explode-y things! And they’re organized! I, I think, they’re gonna get killed out there!”
Who?
“Both! I dunno! Why can’t we just talk things out? I’m good at talking! Or, at least, better at that than planning an, an anti-rebellion…thing! Talking never got anybody killed!”
It could.
“All I’ve done is sit there and listen to people around me say ‘I suggest blah blah blah tactic, Your Highness’ or ‘We should probably place more guards blah blah blah, Your Highness’ and all I could do was just kind of nod. I didn’t understand a word of it! Well, I did, I mean, I knew what the words meant, but what is it going to mean out there? I don’t know! No matter what happens, people are going to be pissed at me and I want to fix this, but I can’t!”
The librarian didn’t agree with this pessimistic outburst.
“So what do I do? If I beat them back, they’ll just add this to whatever their list of grievances is and pop up again at some later point. If I surrender, they’ll kill me. If I come out and say I’m willing to do some negotiations, which, by the by, nobody wants me to do, they’ll probably not believe me, or they’ll have demands that I wouldn’t even know how to satisfy, and then I disappoint them, or I guess piss them off even more since they’re probably already disappointed in me, and then they’ll kill me, or maybe they’ll ask for something I can give but then I piss off Baron So-And-So and the other side hires an assassin to kill me. Even if I don’t die now, I’ll die eventually, and then I’ll be known as the worst king forever more, I’ll literally be called that in future history books, and – “
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far...there are certainly worse kings than you.”
In the shadows of the bookcases, two red pupils glinted. They belonged to the king’s other regular conversationalist. The boy was homeless, his clothes ragged and his bare feet calloused, but he was remarkably perceptive. He was, unofficially, the king’s informant, being someone who apparently heard many things in the street. The rebellion hadn’t been one of them.
The king had long ago given up on figuring out how the boy kept sneaking in and out of the castle. It was just one of the boy’s many oddities. “Did you honestly hear nothing about anybody planning this?”
The boy shrugged helplessly. “You should probably invest in an informant who can go inside churches.”
The king finally sunk down into a chair. The whole ordeal was somehow physically exhausting. He wasn’t looking forward to going back to his actual advisers. “I angered the church? Shit.”
The librarian asked the boy if he knew more.
“It’s not like anybody is interested in having a nice chat about their motives out there,” he replied. “Look, those guys down there don’t have a lot of training and they don’t have more firepower than your guards. I don’t think they have some sort of secret weapon either, so, you know, you’ll win.”
“But that’s not what I want,” said the king. All three were silent until finally, the king sighed and left the library.
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Eureka hated dying. She was sure that Syvex was probably the same. And so, the nearby explosions were good motivation for hurrying inside the shed-living-room-thing before things got messy. Granted, things could get messy inside a living room as well, but this didn’t seem to be any regular sort of living room. Perhaps it was explosion-proof.
Eureka shut the door behind her and held it there, as though it would blow open again. Syvex, for his part, looked slightly disoriented. “We’re not in the shed.”
“What? We walked through the shed door. So we’re in the shed.”
“The shed was in the middle of that forest place. I’m looking through the walls right now here, and we are nowhere near a forest.”
Eureka thought about this for a little while and then just accepted it. As long as the weird shit wasn’t happening to her, then things could be as weird as they wanted it to be.
The place was dark, which the two of them took to mean that nobody was home. Or that the inhabitants were sleeping. Or maybe they were actually awake, seeing as the lighting in this time period seemed to be kind of shit. Which she thought might be a problem if she wanted to continue reading the book, but she found that…apparently it wasn’t. Which was disconcerting, but admittedly useful.
Syvex wanted to stop the revolution. It was hard to not notice that. Eureka hated dying. She also hated standing in the middle of a meaningless fight. So there were two reasons for not getting involved. In fact, it was probably safer to have the two of them calm down and chill out in the future (or the present or whatever). Then she would definitely not die for whatever-the-hell.
“It doesn’t look like anybody’s here,” Syvex said, returning from some quick scouting. He picked at the suit that he was still wearing.
On one side was the monarchy. She hated authority. It was a system of authority that had hounded her back home over nothing. The other side was the church. She hated the church. There was no reason to not hate the church. No matter what religion, all of them knew how she could live her life better than how she was living it right now. And they loved to let her know that. If those two things just left her alone, then she was fine with them. Hell, she always loved the idea of becoming a hermit. No government. No churches. No people. The only problem was that she was too dependent on a civilized life. And she hated herself for that.
People were probably dying right now, but they were people she didn’t know, and probably people she hated, considering she hated people on principle. So she shouldn’t care that people were dying. The church was being stupid and the monarchy was being incompetent, so she shouldn’t care that they were fighting right now, especially if they were both too stupid to just act like adults and reason out a solution together. The things that the magic ghost box said maybe were probably true, sure. But it still had nothing to do with her or anything, right? Because everybody had good and bad sides. It’s just that nobody considers anybody else as being complex like that. It’s easier to make a simple snap judgment and move on. Annoying laugh? That guy is bad. Likes the things I like? That guy is good. Hates children? Bad. Not part of my religion? Bad. The king was just the same. Bad and good things. The church was the same too. Made both sides sympathetic. But it had nothing to do with her. This whole thing was still stupid and she had no sympathy for stupidity. Right? Right.
“Any ideas on what to do?” asked Syvex, and she was certain that he meant ‘what to do about the rebellion.’ He wanted to stop her from dying. He wanted to stop the rebellion. He wanted to stop people from ‘making mistakes,’ turning history into something nice and happy and wiping away pain, because pain is hardship and hardship is bad, not good, and if they have the power to make things better, why don’t they? Disregard the lives people made in the future to give their shitty ancestors a better past?
(Well, why did you grab a book about the past if you didn’t care about it so much?)
Her head hurt. She was not in the mood for heroics.
“Let’s just calm down and get out of here before everything explodes,” she said.
The king strode his way into the library, dismissed his guards. There was a meek protest. It was silenced quickly.
The fact that the king had escorts in the first place implied something was wrong. Though such a conclusion could also be reached by taking in his haggard face and stooped shoulders.
Something had shaken the castle a few moments prior. The castle itself was solid enough so that such a disturbance could barely even be considered an earthquake. There had been a few more like disturbances, but then they had halted. Perhaps this had something to do with what was worrying the king, as well as the reason why the king was here in the first place. Whenever something worried him, he couldn’t help but talk to the librarian. It didn’t make a lot of sense for the king to pour his heart out to his confidante in the middle of a crisis when he was likely needed to make decisions, but, well, that was Max. The librarian didn’t mind his unofficial role as an adviser/consoler/listener/pillow-to-scream-into, but he certainly preferred the congenial conversations over this.
Before the librarian could politely ask what the matter was, the king started. “This is all my fault.”
The librarian asked for clarification: what is all your fault, exactly?
“This…this rebellion. There’s a rebellion going on right outside and they’re going to burst in and kill me! The guests don’t even know what’s going on yet!”
Can’t imagine that they’ll remain ignorant for long.
“I…I did something wrong. I must’ve, that’s why this is happening.” The king paced around the library fitfully, his hand to his forehead. “I knew this would happen, I knew it! Was only a matter of time before someone figured out I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Why did I have to be born in a goddamn royal family?”
The librarian decided to stop this self-pity party in its tracks by slightly shifting the conversation to his plans, which he must have made before coming here.
“Sent Annaliese and the kids away, so I’m really the only target left,” he sighed. “Unless you count everybody having a good time in the ballroom. Christ, do I tell them? I didn’t want them to get all panicky, but what if we can’t keep ‘em out? They’ll get panicky anyways and then maybe slaughtered and then they’ll hate me for not telling them.”
That would probably be the least of their worries at that point. Are the rebels so well-armed that there’s really a possibility of them breaking in?
“Yes! They’ve got explode-y things! And they’re organized! I, I think, they’re gonna get killed out there!”
Who?
“Both! I dunno! Why can’t we just talk things out? I’m good at talking! Or, at least, better at that than planning an, an anti-rebellion…thing! Talking never got anybody killed!”
It could.
“All I’ve done is sit there and listen to people around me say ‘I suggest blah blah blah tactic, Your Highness’ or ‘We should probably place more guards blah blah blah, Your Highness’ and all I could do was just kind of nod. I didn’t understand a word of it! Well, I did, I mean, I knew what the words meant, but what is it going to mean out there? I don’t know! No matter what happens, people are going to be pissed at me and I want to fix this, but I can’t!”
The librarian didn’t agree with this pessimistic outburst.
“So what do I do? If I beat them back, they’ll just add this to whatever their list of grievances is and pop up again at some later point. If I surrender, they’ll kill me. If I come out and say I’m willing to do some negotiations, which, by the by, nobody wants me to do, they’ll probably not believe me, or they’ll have demands that I wouldn’t even know how to satisfy, and then I disappoint them, or I guess piss them off even more since they’re probably already disappointed in me, and then they’ll kill me, or maybe they’ll ask for something I can give but then I piss off Baron So-And-So and the other side hires an assassin to kill me. Even if I don’t die now, I’ll die eventually, and then I’ll be known as the worst king forever more, I’ll literally be called that in future history books, and – “
“Oh, I wouldn’t go that far...there are certainly worse kings than you.”
In the shadows of the bookcases, two red pupils glinted. They belonged to the king’s other regular conversationalist. The boy was homeless, his clothes ragged and his bare feet calloused, but he was remarkably perceptive. He was, unofficially, the king’s informant, being someone who apparently heard many things in the street. The rebellion hadn’t been one of them.
The king had long ago given up on figuring out how the boy kept sneaking in and out of the castle. It was just one of the boy’s many oddities. “Did you honestly hear nothing about anybody planning this?”
The boy shrugged helplessly. “You should probably invest in an informant who can go inside churches.”
The king finally sunk down into a chair. The whole ordeal was somehow physically exhausting. He wasn’t looking forward to going back to his actual advisers. “I angered the church? Shit.”
The librarian asked the boy if he knew more.
“It’s not like anybody is interested in having a nice chat about their motives out there,” he replied. “Look, those guys down there don’t have a lot of training and they don’t have more firepower than your guards. I don’t think they have some sort of secret weapon either, so, you know, you’ll win.”
“But that’s not what I want,” said the king. All three were silent until finally, the king sighed and left the library.
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Eureka hated dying. She was sure that Syvex was probably the same. And so, the nearby explosions were good motivation for hurrying inside the shed-living-room-thing before things got messy. Granted, things could get messy inside a living room as well, but this didn’t seem to be any regular sort of living room. Perhaps it was explosion-proof.
Eureka shut the door behind her and held it there, as though it would blow open again. Syvex, for his part, looked slightly disoriented. “We’re not in the shed.”
“What? We walked through the shed door. So we’re in the shed.”
“The shed was in the middle of that forest place. I’m looking through the walls right now here, and we are nowhere near a forest.”
Eureka thought about this for a little while and then just accepted it. As long as the weird shit wasn’t happening to her, then things could be as weird as they wanted it to be.
The place was dark, which the two of them took to mean that nobody was home. Or that the inhabitants were sleeping. Or maybe they were actually awake, seeing as the lighting in this time period seemed to be kind of shit. Which she thought might be a problem if she wanted to continue reading the book, but she found that…apparently it wasn’t. Which was disconcerting, but admittedly useful.
Syvex wanted to stop the revolution. It was hard to not notice that. Eureka hated dying. She also hated standing in the middle of a meaningless fight. So there were two reasons for not getting involved. In fact, it was probably safer to have the two of them calm down and chill out in the future (or the present or whatever). Then she would definitely not die for whatever-the-hell.
“It doesn’t look like anybody’s here,” Syvex said, returning from some quick scouting. He picked at the suit that he was still wearing.
On one side was the monarchy. She hated authority. It was a system of authority that had hounded her back home over nothing. The other side was the church. She hated the church. There was no reason to not hate the church. No matter what religion, all of them knew how she could live her life better than how she was living it right now. And they loved to let her know that. If those two things just left her alone, then she was fine with them. Hell, she always loved the idea of becoming a hermit. No government. No churches. No people. The only problem was that she was too dependent on a civilized life. And she hated herself for that.
People were probably dying right now, but they were people she didn’t know, and probably people she hated, considering she hated people on principle. So she shouldn’t care that people were dying. The church was being stupid and the monarchy was being incompetent, so she shouldn’t care that they were fighting right now, especially if they were both too stupid to just act like adults and reason out a solution together. The things that the magic ghost box said maybe were probably true, sure. But it still had nothing to do with her or anything, right? Because everybody had good and bad sides. It’s just that nobody considers anybody else as being complex like that. It’s easier to make a simple snap judgment and move on. Annoying laugh? That guy is bad. Likes the things I like? That guy is good. Hates children? Bad. Not part of my religion? Bad. The king was just the same. Bad and good things. The church was the same too. Made both sides sympathetic. But it had nothing to do with her. This whole thing was still stupid and she had no sympathy for stupidity. Right? Right.
“Any ideas on what to do?” asked Syvex, and she was certain that he meant ‘what to do about the rebellion.’ He wanted to stop her from dying. He wanted to stop the rebellion. He wanted to stop people from ‘making mistakes,’ turning history into something nice and happy and wiping away pain, because pain is hardship and hardship is bad, not good, and if they have the power to make things better, why don’t they? Disregard the lives people made in the future to give their shitty ancestors a better past?
(Well, why did you grab a book about the past if you didn’t care about it so much?)
Her head hurt. She was not in the mood for heroics.
“Let’s just calm down and get out of here before everything explodes,” she said.