Re: MORITURI TE SALUTANT!! [S!4]
12-26-2012, 06:55 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by Agent1022.
Laughter and hubbub floated from a golden glow between two close-set walls. The little corridor necessitated they squeeze through in single file. As they edged between the wood, trying to avoid splinters, Sam realized the strange woman was uncomfortably close behind her, and fought the urge to turn in confrontation. She wasn’t the type to...well, that sort of thing only ended well in stories, she told herself.
<div style="margin-left:40px">If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an</div><div style="margin-left:40px">improbable fiction.</div>
The crowd below them fluttered in the streets between aedicula-studded stone edifices and strangely prefabricated-looking brick brownstones, an improbably varied cross-section of Italia across time and possibility - Renaissance artists clad in silk mingled with grubby soldiers from the Second World War, businessmen from all eras commiserating from one Armani suit to another Gucci briefcase, even one or two toga-clad Romans strutted their way through the crowds with olive laurels on their heads. It was a splendid reenactment of Italy Through The Ages, but it still struck the two visitors as being subtly wrong - too many caricatures of reality to fully fool the eye.
<font color="#150030">Lorenzo indicated it all with a majestic sweep of a tattered sleeve, narrowly missing a flaming torch. “The Gagliardi dynasty, mia bambinas. We have lived here...a very long time.” His timbre and posture changed at this, slipping into the strange reverie of one reading from an imaginary script. “So long we have forgotten how we once came to be.”
There came that odd moment where everyone waited for the others to speak. A bubble of silence rode in on the wake of his words, before popping on the shore of self-consciousness. “Mi- mi scusi. I - I thought...” Deliberately, the soldier took a deep breath, meeting both their gazes with confusion-filled eyes. “You...really are strangers, aren’t you.”
<font color="#722600">“W-well, yes. Why did you think we weren’t?”
“I thought...perhaps the - the macchinista di scena...”
Sam furrowed her brow a moment. “The machinists...of scenes?” she hazarded.
Lorenzo nodded. “More later, mia bambinas. First there’s someone you need to see.”
+=+=+
“Merda! Fanculo chi dice il contrario, perché tutto questo è andato a completare e merda assoluta! Can no one remember where they put the early scripts?”
Il Duce Francisco Gagliardi, of the Gagliardi Family, Francisco to his compares, ‘that testa di cazzo of a caporegime’ to everyone else, clamped a sputtering cigar back between his jaws and frowned at the underlings sorting through towering stacks of yellowed paper. Before him, the scripts shuffled and flew as the clerks doubled their pace amidst the snowy drifts of the Full-Stop Angels, searching for any sign that would explain the strange newcomers that Lorenzo Fettucibaci had been seen bringing in.
“What if we don’t find them in the scripts, Francisco?” Antonio Patricio Majeur Antoine Gagliardi, the caporegime’s consigliere, right-hand man, bodyguard, occasional impromptu hitman when the situation arose: a beefy man, and intensely loyal - as the script said he should be. “Not even the earliest ones we can find?”
Francisco considered this unthinkable possibility for a moment. “Well...well, mio amico, we’ll just have to bring them in...”
=+=+=
The streets of the town sprawl tangled and turned with a surveyor’s eye for strange geography; in some places the ground was not so much packed dirt and rock as it was canal, the houses raised on stilts above the silt. The three of them ascended a wooden bridge onto a dock set above the turgid waters below, Lorenzo picking up a lantern and indicating a printed metal sign:
“Venezia.” Lavi’s little brogue fought with the free-flowing Italian syllables, coming out as a heavily-accented intermingling of the two. “Avvertenza! Acqua alta...si prega di utili...utilizzare...
“Si prega di utilizzare passerella,” the soldier volunteered. “Venice is a water city. We get about by bridge, by gondola, by gangway.”
“I’ve never seen such script before.” Slowly, she looked around, taking in the abrupt delineation between the Gothic river properties and the Baroque houses inland. “This city is called...Venice? In the land of Il Maledicta?”
A chuckle. “Past the lagoon, closer to the center is Napoli - Naples - and beyond that, Chicago.”
“Ch-Chicago?! But that doesn’t make any sense!”
Lorenzo’s free hand reached out to steady Sam’s flailing limbs; she recoiled, bumping into Lavi, who in turn flinched, and a few dust bunnies in the corners of the dock reflexively twitched, unnoticed. On a windowsill above them, a potted petunia wilted slightly.
The young soldier coughed. “Scusa mi. I should have known better.” A deep breath, and he regained composure, turning to the robed adventurer: “Il Maledicta is not a land, mia bambina, nor is it a country-”
“It’s a theater.” The vague memory flowered; dull, dampened by the collective recollections that swarmed inside her crowded mind, but there nonetheless - the edges were smudged and faded but she remembered looking up as the skeletal woman sat on her throne and said, <font color="#919968">“Somewhere in Il Maledicta is a man,” “well, a sort of man,” Sam mused aloud, trying to remember, “by the name of-”
Lavi didn’t know why she reached for her fellow stranger then, and put a shushing finger to that babbling, meandering mouth, but a horrid-tasting thought had flickered across her mind in a roaring instant, a foreign instinct, and her hand had moved on its own. She’d had to stop the other from coming up as well.</font>
On the rooftop of a house before them, a uniformed man caught the strange company’s eye and shouted. “Lorenzo! Lorenzo Fettucibaci Gagliardi, come up here!”
“Papa!” the young soldier called back with some relief, backing away from the others, peering into the semi-darkness above the dock. “Papa, you’re here!”
A rope ladder unfurled itself from the roof, and an even tattier uniform came into the light of a torch held high at its top, by a man who could only have been Lorenzo’s father. “I got your message, il mio sedano. Come on.”
“I-I’m sorry, I...I don’t know what came over me-” still hesitating, the adventurer drew back her hand, tucking it back into her robe’s cavernous sleeves. “It was - it was what you said.”
Sam shook her head. “Forget it. I don’t even remember.”
While Lorenzo scrambled up to the roof easily, traversing a rope ladder proved slightly more difficult for the two women, one of which was almost naked and the other almost overclothed in ragged robe. As they clambered carefully over the last rung, the paternal Gagliardi stepped closer into the lantern’s light, illuminating the network of small scars that divided one cheek into a tic-tac-toe grid. “We must hurry,” he addressed them, “The borgata already know you are here.”
Lorenzo piped up, “Venice is connected to the Public Library. This is Family turf; not like Chicago, but the capodecina keeps a close eye on things. So, sta ‘zitto, both of you. Or silenzio, is maybe better.” True to his word, he stopped talking as they began making their way from roof to roof, jostling one another on narrow bridges strung over quietly burbling canals. As the left the artificial bonfire glow of Naples behind, the darkness around them took on a thicker composition, velveteen and oppressive.
She lay in the dark, then, every night after that, remembering. Remembering. No matter how many others’ lives she drew from every day, from shirt to skirt to suit to tie to hat to dress to jeans to vest to shoes to socks to boots to heels to gloves to coats; the memory would not drown amidst all the rest she took into herself. And they knew, she was so sure they knew, and they did nothing, and she had to go, she had to leave them and she had to forget and she had to become - someone else - someone who hadn’t - hadn’t -
<font color="#722600">“You’re crying.” Lavi held up the lantern, the light glimmering off the silent tracks running down her partner’s cheeks. She didn’t know when she’d started to think of her that way, but they’d come all this way together. In a way, they had shared vulnerabilities, in more ways than one. Both could see there was something odd, different, wrong with the other - a tenuous bond, but there.
“S-so what?” Oh, fuck these tears, she was. Boys don’t cry. But she wasn’t that Sam anymore, was she? Could she ever go back to that strange half-life, balancing a stolen identity between her name and her memories mixed with countless others? “L-Lavi...” What was she now? A wreck - “I don’t-”
“Shh.” It struck her that she was shushing her again. “Take my hand.” But this time, under her own volition. The outstretched hand she offered was nothing but her own. “We’ll cross this one together.”
The waters below had never seemed so unmovingly treacherous, like a beast in wait, and Sam was thankful for Lavi’s supporting hands on her waist as they crossed the narrow gangplank above - right up until the moment she slipped on a wet patch, twisted and fell-
“I’ve got you!” Lavi almost shouted, but caught herself in time, letting loose possibly the loudest stage whisper in existence. But her arms were around Sam, and that was the important thing, and-
And she was facing her, crimson eyes to gray, and gratitude and relief and perhaps something else pushed her forward right there on the narrow plank, and they nearly both fell off.</font>
“Ah, amore,” father whispered to son. Blushing the same shade as Sam’s irises, the two extricated themselves from one another, stepping down to the flat, wide roof of an oddly baroque palazzo.
“This is the Ca’ Rezzonico - we will meet our gondolier here.” Lorenzo explained.
“Once we are on the canals past here, it will become molto difficile for the borgata to chase us.” Detecting their confusion, the elder Gagliardi concentrated for a moment. “Mi scusi. It will be...troublesome, difficult? For us to be caught.”
“Why are you helping us?”
“Ah...we are the Fettucibaci branch of the Gagliardis, and we are no friends of the borgata.” Carefully, reverentially, he pulled a folded, yellowed booklet from the inside of his coat and opened it up. “THE CAST SUMMARY,” he read, somehow pronouncing the capital letters without raising his voice, “Alfonso and Lorenzo Fettucibaci Gagliardi are two of the counter-revolutionaries from the war in Naples, belonging to the anti-Mafia Fettucibaci merchant branch of the Gagliardi family. They operate a railroad of smuggled goods and refugees, supplying the three-way conflict in the heart of Naples from their home Venice.”
Sam spoke up as Lavi stared at the little booklet in confusion. “So you’re taking us to...a library?”
“Not a library, mia cara, the Public Library. Between all of us of Il Maledicta, we keep many of the scripts and sides there.” Lorenzo leaned in conspiratorially. “Among other things.”
“No, Lorenzo, not all the scripts.” Alfonso leaned in as well, holding the lantern above their heads to create a little alcove of light. “Some of us - not just the borgata, but others, not even of the Gagliardis that live elsewhere, hoard the scripts for themselves. Trying to find the one true Full-Stop Angels.” He shook the lantern slightly, sending shadows flickering across the palazzo roof, and his face grew set into an angry frown. “They say these secret-keepers, they...sequester bits of the Library for their own, or build little biblioteca privata in their own little worlds.”
“Papa says it’s not right.” Lorenzo added. “That if they really wanted to find the one true script of them all, they’d bring theirs to the library and let others see them too.”
“Of course!” Alfonso accompanied the interjection by heaving a gob of spit into the canal.
Followed by a splash and a muffled curse, and the sound of someone shaking tobacco-stained phlegmy material out of his hat.
“That’ll be our gondolier then, won’t it?” Sam observed cheerfully.
The gondola bumped against the dockside as the four of them scrambled down, Alfonso looking innocent all the way. In one end, the gondolier considered the salvageability of the hat, before tossing it into the canal and turning to face the present company.
“All right, Alfonso Fettucibaci,” Antonio said, “let’s go.”</font></font>
Laughter and hubbub floated from a golden glow between two close-set walls. The little corridor necessitated they squeeze through in single file. As they edged between the wood, trying to avoid splinters, Sam realized the strange woman was uncomfortably close behind her, and fought the urge to turn in confrontation. She wasn’t the type to...well, that sort of thing only ended well in stories, she told herself.
<div style="margin-left:40px">If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an</div><div style="margin-left:40px">improbable fiction.</div>
Twelfth Night, Act III, Scene IV
They stood on a little mezzazine, one of many built into the walls of a gargantuan hall or cavern, in which myriad houses and buildings were placed in a haphazard polar grid. In the very center of it all, far away, there stood a cobblestoned courtyard lit by torches, braziers, and a merrily-burning bonfire in the center, constructed from the half-melted skeleton of a fallen chandelier and countless sacrificed candles. On the opposite side of the cavern to them lay brightly-lit structures, taller than the rest and somehow more cosmopolitan. Somewhere, there was the inexplicable sound of running water and the ocean.The crowd below them fluttered in the streets between aedicula-studded stone edifices and strangely prefabricated-looking brick brownstones, an improbably varied cross-section of Italia across time and possibility - Renaissance artists clad in silk mingled with grubby soldiers from the Second World War, businessmen from all eras commiserating from one Armani suit to another Gucci briefcase, even one or two toga-clad Romans strutted their way through the crowds with olive laurels on their heads. It was a splendid reenactment of Italy Through The Ages, but it still struck the two visitors as being subtly wrong - too many caricatures of reality to fully fool the eye.
<font color="#150030">Lorenzo indicated it all with a majestic sweep of a tattered sleeve, narrowly missing a flaming torch. “The Gagliardi dynasty, mia bambinas. We have lived here...a very long time.” His timbre and posture changed at this, slipping into the strange reverie of one reading from an imaginary script. “So long we have forgotten how we once came to be.”
There came that odd moment where everyone waited for the others to speak. A bubble of silence rode in on the wake of his words, before popping on the shore of self-consciousness. “Mi- mi scusi. I - I thought...” Deliberately, the soldier took a deep breath, meeting both their gazes with confusion-filled eyes. “You...really are strangers, aren’t you.”
<font color="#722600">“W-well, yes. Why did you think we weren’t?”
“I thought...perhaps the - the macchinista di scena...”
Sam furrowed her brow a moment. “The machinists...of scenes?” she hazarded.
Lorenzo nodded. “More later, mia bambinas. First there’s someone you need to see.”
+=+=+
“Merda! Fanculo chi dice il contrario, perché tutto questo è andato a completare e merda assoluta! Can no one remember where they put the early scripts?”
Il Duce Francisco Gagliardi, of the Gagliardi Family, Francisco to his compares, ‘that testa di cazzo of a caporegime’ to everyone else, clamped a sputtering cigar back between his jaws and frowned at the underlings sorting through towering stacks of yellowed paper. Before him, the scripts shuffled and flew as the clerks doubled their pace amidst the snowy drifts of the Full-Stop Angels, searching for any sign that would explain the strange newcomers that Lorenzo Fettucibaci had been seen bringing in.
“What if we don’t find them in the scripts, Francisco?” Antonio Patricio Majeur Antoine Gagliardi, the caporegime’s consigliere, right-hand man, bodyguard, occasional impromptu hitman when the situation arose: a beefy man, and intensely loyal - as the script said he should be. “Not even the earliest ones we can find?”
Francisco considered this unthinkable possibility for a moment. “Well...well, mio amico, we’ll just have to bring them in...”
=+=+=
The streets of the town sprawl tangled and turned with a surveyor’s eye for strange geography; in some places the ground was not so much packed dirt and rock as it was canal, the houses raised on stilts above the silt. The three of them ascended a wooden bridge onto a dock set above the turgid waters below, Lorenzo picking up a lantern and indicating a printed metal sign:
“Venezia.” Lavi’s little brogue fought with the free-flowing Italian syllables, coming out as a heavily-accented intermingling of the two. “Avvertenza! Acqua alta...si prega di utili...utilizzare...
“Si prega di utilizzare passerella,” the soldier volunteered. “Venice is a water city. We get about by bridge, by gondola, by gangway.”
“I’ve never seen such script before.” Slowly, she looked around, taking in the abrupt delineation between the Gothic river properties and the Baroque houses inland. “This city is called...Venice? In the land of Il Maledicta?”
A chuckle. “Past the lagoon, closer to the center is Napoli - Naples - and beyond that, Chicago.”
“Ch-Chicago?! But that doesn’t make any sense!”
Lorenzo’s free hand reached out to steady Sam’s flailing limbs; she recoiled, bumping into Lavi, who in turn flinched, and a few dust bunnies in the corners of the dock reflexively twitched, unnoticed. On a windowsill above them, a potted petunia wilted slightly.
The young soldier coughed. “Scusa mi. I should have known better.” A deep breath, and he regained composure, turning to the robed adventurer: “Il Maledicta is not a land, mia bambina, nor is it a country-”
“It’s a theater.” The vague memory flowered; dull, dampened by the collective recollections that swarmed inside her crowded mind, but there nonetheless - the edges were smudged and faded but she remembered looking up as the skeletal woman sat on her throne and said, <font color="#919968">“Somewhere in Il Maledicta is a man,” “well, a sort of man,” Sam mused aloud, trying to remember, “by the name of-”
Lavi didn’t know why she reached for her fellow stranger then, and put a shushing finger to that babbling, meandering mouth, but a horrid-tasting thought had flickered across her mind in a roaring instant, a foreign instinct, and her hand had moved on its own. She’d had to stop the other from coming up as well.</font>
On the rooftop of a house before them, a uniformed man caught the strange company’s eye and shouted. “Lorenzo! Lorenzo Fettucibaci Gagliardi, come up here!”
“Papa!” the young soldier called back with some relief, backing away from the others, peering into the semi-darkness above the dock. “Papa, you’re here!”
A rope ladder unfurled itself from the roof, and an even tattier uniform came into the light of a torch held high at its top, by a man who could only have been Lorenzo’s father. “I got your message, il mio sedano. Come on.”
“I-I’m sorry, I...I don’t know what came over me-” still hesitating, the adventurer drew back her hand, tucking it back into her robe’s cavernous sleeves. “It was - it was what you said.”
Sam shook her head. “Forget it. I don’t even remember.”
While Lorenzo scrambled up to the roof easily, traversing a rope ladder proved slightly more difficult for the two women, one of which was almost naked and the other almost overclothed in ragged robe. As they clambered carefully over the last rung, the paternal Gagliardi stepped closer into the lantern’s light, illuminating the network of small scars that divided one cheek into a tic-tac-toe grid. “We must hurry,” he addressed them, “The borgata already know you are here.”
Lorenzo piped up, “Venice is connected to the Public Library. This is Family turf; not like Chicago, but the capodecina keeps a close eye on things. So, sta ‘zitto, both of you. Or silenzio, is maybe better.” True to his word, he stopped talking as they began making their way from roof to roof, jostling one another on narrow bridges strung over quietly burbling canals. As the left the artificial bonfire glow of Naples behind, the darkness around them took on a thicker composition, velveteen and oppressive.
She lay in the dark, then, every night after that, remembering. Remembering. No matter how many others’ lives she drew from every day, from shirt to skirt to suit to tie to hat to dress to jeans to vest to shoes to socks to boots to heels to gloves to coats; the memory would not drown amidst all the rest she took into herself. And they knew, she was so sure they knew, and they did nothing, and she had to go, she had to leave them and she had to forget and she had to become - someone else - someone who hadn’t - hadn’t -
<font color="#722600">“You’re crying.” Lavi held up the lantern, the light glimmering off the silent tracks running down her partner’s cheeks. She didn’t know when she’d started to think of her that way, but they’d come all this way together. In a way, they had shared vulnerabilities, in more ways than one. Both could see there was something odd, different, wrong with the other - a tenuous bond, but there.
“S-so what?” Oh, fuck these tears, she was. Boys don’t cry. But she wasn’t that Sam anymore, was she? Could she ever go back to that strange half-life, balancing a stolen identity between her name and her memories mixed with countless others? “L-Lavi...” What was she now? A wreck - “I don’t-”
“Shh.” It struck her that she was shushing her again. “Take my hand.” But this time, under her own volition. The outstretched hand she offered was nothing but her own. “We’ll cross this one together.”
The waters below had never seemed so unmovingly treacherous, like a beast in wait, and Sam was thankful for Lavi’s supporting hands on her waist as they crossed the narrow gangplank above - right up until the moment she slipped on a wet patch, twisted and fell-
“I’ve got you!” Lavi almost shouted, but caught herself in time, letting loose possibly the loudest stage whisper in existence. But her arms were around Sam, and that was the important thing, and-
And she was facing her, crimson eyes to gray, and gratitude and relief and perhaps something else pushed her forward right there on the narrow plank, and they nearly both fell off.</font>
“Ah, amore,” father whispered to son. Blushing the same shade as Sam’s irises, the two extricated themselves from one another, stepping down to the flat, wide roof of an oddly baroque palazzo.
“This is the Ca’ Rezzonico - we will meet our gondolier here.” Lorenzo explained.
“Once we are on the canals past here, it will become molto difficile for the borgata to chase us.” Detecting their confusion, the elder Gagliardi concentrated for a moment. “Mi scusi. It will be...troublesome, difficult? For us to be caught.”
“Why are you helping us?”
“Ah...we are the Fettucibaci branch of the Gagliardis, and we are no friends of the borgata.” Carefully, reverentially, he pulled a folded, yellowed booklet from the inside of his coat and opened it up. “THE CAST SUMMARY,” he read, somehow pronouncing the capital letters without raising his voice, “Alfonso and Lorenzo Fettucibaci Gagliardi are two of the counter-revolutionaries from the war in Naples, belonging to the anti-Mafia Fettucibaci merchant branch of the Gagliardi family. They operate a railroad of smuggled goods and refugees, supplying the three-way conflict in the heart of Naples from their home Venice.”
Sam spoke up as Lavi stared at the little booklet in confusion. “So you’re taking us to...a library?”
“Not a library, mia cara, the Public Library. Between all of us of Il Maledicta, we keep many of the scripts and sides there.” Lorenzo leaned in conspiratorially. “Among other things.”
“No, Lorenzo, not all the scripts.” Alfonso leaned in as well, holding the lantern above their heads to create a little alcove of light. “Some of us - not just the borgata, but others, not even of the Gagliardis that live elsewhere, hoard the scripts for themselves. Trying to find the one true Full-Stop Angels.” He shook the lantern slightly, sending shadows flickering across the palazzo roof, and his face grew set into an angry frown. “They say these secret-keepers, they...sequester bits of the Library for their own, or build little biblioteca privata in their own little worlds.”
“Papa says it’s not right.” Lorenzo added. “That if they really wanted to find the one true script of them all, they’d bring theirs to the library and let others see them too.”
“Of course!” Alfonso accompanied the interjection by heaving a gob of spit into the canal.
Followed by a splash and a muffled curse, and the sound of someone shaking tobacco-stained phlegmy material out of his hat.
“That’ll be our gondolier then, won’t it?” Sam observed cheerfully.
The gondola bumped against the dockside as the four of them scrambled down, Alfonso looking innocent all the way. In one end, the gondolier considered the salvageability of the hat, before tossing it into the canal and turning to face the present company.
“All right, Alfonso Fettucibaci,” Antonio said, “let’s go.”</font></font>
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So very British / But then again | People are machines Machines are people | Oh hai there | There's no time
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Superhero 1920s noir | Multigenre Half-Life | Changing the future | Command line interface
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