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Oct. 28th, 2005 08:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cpolkTitle: Non Serviam
Email: tori.siikanen@gmail.com
Fandom: Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun
Rating: PG-13
Content: Fencing.
Disclaimer: This is an obscure fandom, so it might not instantly click. but if you dig it, get the book. it's good. This post is a glossary to the slang, and this post is the first chapter.
7.
Non Serviam
After that moment of incandescent understanding, I swiped and groped like a fool for the next four units.
"Enough, we've been stumbling around like promoks."
"You mean I've been stumbling around like a promok," I grumbled. Saz was, as usual, graceful as a horned cat. "I couldn't find my graks with a map."
"If you stumble, I stumble," he said, "Because my instruction faltered."
"Crazy Glar," I said, and grinningly punched his shoulder.
"Are you hungry?" he asked.
"I'm expiring at your feet," I declared, and he chuckled and slung an arm over my shoulder, steering me out.
"Blue Sky?" I asked.
"Blue Sky," he agreed, and we raced along the rampwalks, jostling Older People who tut-tutted at us as they were supposed to, because we were behaving as we were supposed to. Jang are notorious for their lack of decorum and the domination of frolic in their lives. Saz skipped off a rampwalk and into a boutique, where he browsed the counters for jewellery, asking to see this and that of silver and agate of resin, in colours like Ocean and Sky and Sapphire Tears; blue, all of it blue as my gem armour, holding up jewelled claws like the flower-flies that danced in Ilex Park to my hair and shaking his head, declaring everything unsatisfactory and demanding to see more, don't you have any moon's stone or Snow Jade and What about stones in Lilac Mist--
"What are you doing?" I whispered at him as he set the Q-Rs bobbling at his every whim, holding very still at the cool metal twixt neck and hair, shocked by the silk of his fingers only when he was clumsy.
"You know very well," he said with a twinkle, and so I started calling for his colours - black and metals, pointing at the lace-of copper cage slide - demanding to see a pectoral of enamelled jet and steel and silver, shaking my head over all that was not right, and dropping things in a great bangling crash that we'd all bend down to pick up.
I must have had twenty things secreted among my braids when we had left, and I knew that my tally of stolen booty numbered seventeen--and all of it hidden on Saz. I was certain he hadn't noticed the serpent bracers, either. We walked out of the shop and into a skytram, presenting each other with the things we'd stolen with a prestidigitator's flourish, laughing at what we'd been able to take without paying.
"I despise paying," I said, and leaned back in the gel-swing.
"And why do you despise paying, old ooma?"
I thrilled to the endearment. Twenty-two more units, and I'd hear it in his arms. I fell asleep with my design tablet, adding refinement after refinement to my new body, adding more fancies, paring them down to the sleek simplicity of perfection, and dabbing here and there with effects. I'd discarded all colours that he didn't prefer out of my feminine wardrobe, leaving me with blues, opal, pearl, silver.
Coolly elegant, I'd drive him zaradann wanting to know who the mysterious miss was--and then he'd recognize how I moved and know, by my step and my bare fingers what I had done.
"Why should I?" I said, tense in my gel-seat. "Why should I praise them and thank them for all they do for me? Everything they provide--which I might add is manufactured from everything else, and all they want is a little of my emotional energy, my part to contribute."
"Without your part, the whole system would fail," he quoted hypno-school at me. "Payment booths extract the energy of our emotions and convert it into useful power--"
"That's it," I sprawled upward to stare at him on his couch. "Emotional energy. Every kiddie learns it, along with their seven dimensional contemplative geometry and their attractor coefficients and how to lace a corset. It doesn't say joyful emotional energy, or praises sung to on high, just emotional energy. Any kind will do."
Saz looked around the empty car, flicking his gaze to the corners where the Eyes watched. "You're right."
"But you go into a pay-booth angry, and what do they do? Give you ecstasy and encourage you to go higher, to whip yourself into a frenzy of gratefulness, and next thing you know you're praising the Committee and your Stupid Q-R Guardian you can't get out of your house even though you're long past old enough to live alone--"
"You--"
"Yes, Saz. I did PD," I snarled. "This isn't my first trip through here. I and I bet the me that was me in the Before, well--" I started pulling the rest of the baubles from his clothes, setting them down on his chest, where a flower-bird was surely caught battering against the cage of his bones-- "I bet I stole then too. I bet I hated paying. I bet I thought the same thing in the before as I do now about those Vixaxn pay-booths." I was whispering the ozone ripple of the truth, once uttered, never revocable.
"What?"
"It is how they force us to worship them," I explained. "The Q-Rs. The Committee. They could use our sorrow, our rage, our boredom... but they only want our praise. They believe that they are entitled to it."
Saz stared. When the tram stopped at a station, I ran on gazelle legs while he fumbled with the jewels I had heaped on his chest.
you may continue, if you like, to Celibate Male.
Email: tori.siikanen@gmail.com
Fandom: Tanith Lee's Biting the Sun
Rating: PG-13
Content: Fencing.
Disclaimer: This is an obscure fandom, so it might not instantly click. but if you dig it, get the book. it's good. This post is a glossary to the slang, and this post is the first chapter.
7.
Non Serviam
After that moment of incandescent understanding, I swiped and groped like a fool for the next four units.
"Enough, we've been stumbling around like promoks."
"You mean I've been stumbling around like a promok," I grumbled. Saz was, as usual, graceful as a horned cat. "I couldn't find my graks with a map."
"If you stumble, I stumble," he said, "Because my instruction faltered."
"Crazy Glar," I said, and grinningly punched his shoulder.
"Are you hungry?" he asked.
"I'm expiring at your feet," I declared, and he chuckled and slung an arm over my shoulder, steering me out.
"Blue Sky?" I asked.
"Blue Sky," he agreed, and we raced along the rampwalks, jostling Older People who tut-tutted at us as they were supposed to, because we were behaving as we were supposed to. Jang are notorious for their lack of decorum and the domination of frolic in their lives. Saz skipped off a rampwalk and into a boutique, where he browsed the counters for jewellery, asking to see this and that of silver and agate of resin, in colours like Ocean and Sky and Sapphire Tears; blue, all of it blue as my gem armour, holding up jewelled claws like the flower-flies that danced in Ilex Park to my hair and shaking his head, declaring everything unsatisfactory and demanding to see more, don't you have any moon's stone or Snow Jade and What about stones in Lilac Mist--
"What are you doing?" I whispered at him as he set the Q-Rs bobbling at his every whim, holding very still at the cool metal twixt neck and hair, shocked by the silk of his fingers only when he was clumsy.
"You know very well," he said with a twinkle, and so I started calling for his colours - black and metals, pointing at the lace-of copper cage slide - demanding to see a pectoral of enamelled jet and steel and silver, shaking my head over all that was not right, and dropping things in a great bangling crash that we'd all bend down to pick up.
I must have had twenty things secreted among my braids when we had left, and I knew that my tally of stolen booty numbered seventeen--and all of it hidden on Saz. I was certain he hadn't noticed the serpent bracers, either. We walked out of the shop and into a skytram, presenting each other with the things we'd stolen with a prestidigitator's flourish, laughing at what we'd been able to take without paying.
"I despise paying," I said, and leaned back in the gel-swing.
"And why do you despise paying, old ooma?"
I thrilled to the endearment. Twenty-two more units, and I'd hear it in his arms. I fell asleep with my design tablet, adding refinement after refinement to my new body, adding more fancies, paring them down to the sleek simplicity of perfection, and dabbing here and there with effects. I'd discarded all colours that he didn't prefer out of my feminine wardrobe, leaving me with blues, opal, pearl, silver.
Coolly elegant, I'd drive him zaradann wanting to know who the mysterious miss was--and then he'd recognize how I moved and know, by my step and my bare fingers what I had done.
"Why should I?" I said, tense in my gel-seat. "Why should I praise them and thank them for all they do for me? Everything they provide--which I might add is manufactured from everything else, and all they want is a little of my emotional energy, my part to contribute."
"Without your part, the whole system would fail," he quoted hypno-school at me. "Payment booths extract the energy of our emotions and convert it into useful power--"
"That's it," I sprawled upward to stare at him on his couch. "Emotional energy. Every kiddie learns it, along with their seven dimensional contemplative geometry and their attractor coefficients and how to lace a corset. It doesn't say joyful emotional energy, or praises sung to on high, just emotional energy. Any kind will do."
Saz looked around the empty car, flicking his gaze to the corners where the Eyes watched. "You're right."
"But you go into a pay-booth angry, and what do they do? Give you ecstasy and encourage you to go higher, to whip yourself into a frenzy of gratefulness, and next thing you know you're praising the Committee and your Stupid Q-R Guardian you can't get out of your house even though you're long past old enough to live alone--"
"You--"
"Yes, Saz. I did PD," I snarled. "This isn't my first trip through here. I and I bet the me that was me in the Before, well--" I started pulling the rest of the baubles from his clothes, setting them down on his chest, where a flower-bird was surely caught battering against the cage of his bones-- "I bet I stole then too. I bet I hated paying. I bet I thought the same thing in the before as I do now about those Vixaxn pay-booths." I was whispering the ozone ripple of the truth, once uttered, never revocable.
"What?"
"It is how they force us to worship them," I explained. "The Q-Rs. The Committee. They could use our sorrow, our rage, our boredom... but they only want our praise. They believe that they are entitled to it."
Saz stared. When the tram stopped at a station, I ran on gazelle legs while he fumbled with the jewels I had heaped on his chest.
you may continue, if you like, to Celibate Male.
