Challenges 68, 64, 63, 62, & 61.

[amazon_syren]

[Edit: I seem to be having some trouble with the tag-system...]

Fandom: Discworld (MR)
Pairing: Lofty/Tonker
Challenge: 61: Night
Rating: G
Word Count: 100
Title:

Comments

[ilthit]

Okay, since I have *glances* 20 minutes and I got everything else done, a round of C&C. I just broke my caffeine fast to get my brain in gear, so this is actually possible. Mmmm caffeine and sugar.

Freedom: Really like the episode of Lofty looking at the match, seeing it as female and alive. Or perhaps she's using "she" as the general pronoun for every person ungendered as well as female?
Randomly, I figured she and Tonk would have stolen male clothing from the school, since - well, actually, I can't remember if the book ever mentioned if the school was also a laundry, but I've always associated it with laundries because of the similarity to Magdalene laundries. What do you think? There have been a number of short fics and impressions written about their escape, but never have I seen in entirety their finding their way in the army. Nice.

Her Real Name: Goes nicely in the continuity of Mal's awakening to Polly's charms - fast, to be sure, but there is a progression. I don't think you've covered the "I know that - but how do you?" moment, which I see as the starting point of her noticing Polly, and recognising her as someone who notices things.

Now or Never: Did they follow the recruiter's cart, or know that it was passing through? How? Or did they just escape to Plun, see the cart, and then decide to join up? It sounds here like the former. Another thing I'd... well, I was going to use it in the Mal-doesn't-join-up AU... I'd like to see in fic the Duchess's subtle influence in getting the girls together. She can move very small things; a latch in a basement window, perhaps, a sudden strange fancy, the choice between two paths? I'm convinced she had something to do with the girls all being thrown together. Okay, this is more speculation than C&C. Hum. And I only have five minutes left. ...There's a lovely gentleness, protectiveness that I sense - imagine? - in the little fic - overlaid with practicality, of course. Magda seems like Tilda's knight, somehow; so very caring towards her charge.

(Three minutes!)

With Real Soap: A soldier's dream! Hot water and soap! Wow. Heh. Thank goodness for the bubbles. I'm a little confused, though; who was in room seventeen? What has it to do with the bathing room? How come the inn has a bathing room - don't they usually just bring hot water up to the rooms for the guests who wish to bath?

And, while I'm at it, what's your trouble with the tag system? After you've posted, click on the tag icon on the post, and choose the appropriate tags. If you need more than one tag, keep the shift key down when choosing the additional tags; otherwise a simple click will do.

13:30! Must dash. Be back later.

[amazon_syren]

Caffeine and sugar... and milk! Gotta have the milk! :-)

Re: Tag-system:
1) Didn't know about the shift-key. Excellent.
2) The problem (possibly due to my writing them all in, instead of doing the shift-key thing) is that (I got the challenge numbers wrong the first time I posted them and) when I went to fix the challenge-numbers, rather than getting rid of the original tags, it just added to them (Despite my deleting the contents of the field first).
So that's my trouble. :-)

Re: Comments: Wow! That was awesome! :-D

Re: Lofty and the fire-is-female: Yes, for Lofty, fire (because she loves it so, because it's so charming and alluring and beautiful and attractive) must be female.
She can't conceive (sp) of it any other way.

I figured they got the clothes out of some sort of a poor-box (though I could be wrong). The laundry scenario makes more sense as anyone out looking for two run-away abominable-girls would be fairly likely to ignore a couple of bare-foot boys wandering purposefully through the woods talking about snares and how to set them. Or something...
Hrm...

Re: Her Real Name: This one actually fits right between "The Watcher" (which deals with the "I know that... How do you?" bit) and "Honesty" which is when Mal finds out Polly's real name. :-)

Re: Tonker as Knight: Yeah... Something like that. Those two are both interesting combinations of strong and fragile-due-to-previous-breakage. Lofty's strong in the sense that she can bend, she's... emotionally strong, even if she is a little pyro. She broke at that mill, and then broke worse when they took Svetcha away (that was really the only thing that came of it -- besides burning the damn mill down -- that she was able to think of as remotely possitive). Tonker, on the other hand... When she got to the Grey House, and Lofty noticed her, she was already pretty damn shattered. I think that having Lofty to protect -- sort of the way she wanted to protect her little sister from their dad, in a way -- is what gives Tonker her strength. (Well, that and the engine-force of her anger...) But, yeah. Knights, by nature, wear armour. And Tonker needs armour. This is how she gets it. :-)
Re: Duchess: I could, in theory, write a Wazzer PoV fic about how the Duchess has told her that she will meet the people she needs to complete her mission. Possibly relating their discriptions in a sort of poetic/riddling form... (Although that might be tricky, because I don't think that's the way she and the Duchess talked to each other, at all).
Hm...
I'll have to think about this... :-)

Re: Room Seventeen: Oh, bugger! I'd meant it to be Polly and Mal. (This is the morning after they met Clarrisse, by the way).
Any ideas as to how I can make it more obvious? Possibly a mention of seeing two soldiers signed into that room under only their last names?
The Sweet Beet is... not a totally posh inn, but the owner (whose name I can't actually remember at the moment) has certain delusions of grandeur (or upward-mobility, at least) and *wants* it to be a posh inn. So he installed a bathing room (complete with a water pump and a good fire to heat the water over)... on the top floor (kind of an odd place for it, I realize).
I'm pretty sure the Duchess does the tub-&-water up to the rooms thing. The Sweet Beet (possibly because it's closer to the capital) is going for a "Posher than thou, but still technically affordable" kind of feel. :-)

[ilthit]

No milk. I don't drink coffee; just the caffeine. :D And milk would not go with my energy drink.

Re: Runaway girls: and this, of course, must be why they joined up. Nobody was looking for a couple of soldier lads who were a bit closer perhaps than is customary to mention in polite society.

Granted, Tonk is a bit on the aggressive and ravagey and kill-modey side for your average knight errant... as they're portrayed in fiction, and that was the scenario ("her knight") I had in mind, anyway; real knights probably were pretty ravagey.

If Wazz can hear the Duchess by listening very, very closely, it makes sense the others could hear her too, if only on the edge of consciousness.

Room seventeen: I DID originally think that was Polly and Mal, but then I read it more closely and got confused. It's the middle part of it. First they're in their room, and then it seems no time has passed between that and having the two of them in the curious space called bathroom.

And, well, looking over the bathroom thing, which your explanation certainly does make plausible, why would the maid first walk in without asking leave and then be surprised to find people bathing?

[amazon_syren]

Anna wasn't surprised to find people bathing -- and it's a communal bathing room, so people using it (depending on the hour, at any rate) would have to deal with having multiple people in room with them.
Anna was surprised at finding two people sharing one tub (particularly two people of different (haha) sexes, sitting so very close together).
She'd heard the noises about an hour earlier (10am). Now it's about 11am and the couple, whoever-they-are, seems to have run out of energy.

Except that they haven't, they've just moved things to a different location.

Uh...

That's why Polly was blushing, you see. It wasn't just that a stranger had seen her naked (because, really, there wasn't that much to see of either of them above the soap), it was because she'd been giving Mal a good scrub (wink, nudge) under the water while Mal was washing Polly's hair. Which probably wasn't that obvious, come to think of it. ;-)

[ilthit]

I've read it again with more care and I realise that she'd heard it before and now was a later date, but read in a hurry the first impression is of teleportation. Ah well.