Fic: Rough: "RP"
Words: 746
'Verse: This is just me screwing about with Luduan, in a non-Taxon, totally self-contained universe.
Notes: What the hell. This is completely first draft babble, no editing, and I'm not happy with it, but I thought I'd post it, see if I can get the ball rolling on writing again. And I seem to either write all in dialogue or no dialogue at all. Some happy medium must be reached.
It's all a story. That's the very first rule of the game.
No one roleplays the South African apartheid. No one recreates death marches on their weekends. People recreate stories, in which the world may be harsh and twisted and dark, but always with an edge of glamor, with an idealistic, perfect beauty and sense at the core.
John understands that. When he was younger, he wanted his story to be real. That's how you can tell the newbies. They posture and pose and try so very hard, and if you puncture their stories, they puff up, angry and embarrassed. Later, as he got used to the limitations of the form, he learned that the only way to keep someone from poking holes in his story was to keep the awareness of it in his mind. He looks at someone across a room, and the two of them smile, because they both know they're playing a game. The black and the fishnet and the fangs and the dark of the club, the red-irised eyes and the way everyone moves with a heightened awareness, a smooth assumed physicality, a mimicry of movie stars and dancers-it's a communal interpretation, a web of stories. None of its real-it's hyperreal. It's both ludicrous and beautiful.
The rule lets the two of them fall back to one side of the dance floor as though by one accord and meet with the cordial grace of aristocratic strangers. It lets John offer his signet ring to the man and accept his kiss, and it lets him return the gesture, slipping deliberately on the kiss to touch skin instead of silver. It lets the two of them retire to the side of the club and watch the dancers with an air of indulgent superiority, drink and talk, unrushed. It lets them lean in and whisper snide comments on the dancers in each other's ears and laugh. It lets John compliment the other man on his performance at the end of the evening, when the two of them lean against the wall outside, a distance away from the stairwell down to the club. He played his chosen role well, the occult specialist, the retired collector, distant and disillusioned and hard-edged in the decadence of a Nightside club. The rule lets John be Luduan be someone else entirely for the evening, a vampire turned in the middle of the French Revolution, a small baron and a minor power, content in his knowledge and power, and then be Luduan again, when he pays the other man the compliment.
It lets him know enough to back off when the other man refuses to drop the act. Lu's not going home with someone who doesn't know when the game ends, when to take the cue to switch from storytelling to the messy non-narrative of real life.
The other man forces the game to continue, though Lu doesn't know how. He's outside the club and then he's waking up on a Roman-style reclining couch in a room full of artifacts. Masks on the walls and carven figures, squat and almost-humanoid, and stone platters full of burnt bones on low tables, a honeycombed case full of scrolls against one wall, and Lu's just as in place here, in the clothes he wore to suit the evening's story, as he was in the club. And that shouldn't be. The story only exists in its setting, and that setting is specific and fragile, created by the convergence of storytellers all in one place at one time. Once it touches the world outside, the story melts away, to be continued or not, as its participants choose, some other night.
But Lu's still dressed in the story and the room's part of the story, and when he runs a finger along the line of his upper gums, because they ache like he remembers his wisdom teeth aching, when they'd threatened to come in, the custom caps he'd been wearing come off in his hand-along with his canine teeth.
As new teeth slide down from his gums with a click he can feel in his jaw, a deep bone pop like a shoulder socketing back into place, he feels sick.
This isn't what he wanted. If the world runs by the rules of the story, than either the world is beautiful but always predictable or the story is senseless and unending.
If the world is the story, then there's nowhere left to play.
'Verse: This is just me screwing about with Luduan, in a non-Taxon, totally self-contained universe.
Notes: What the hell. This is completely first draft babble, no editing, and I'm not happy with it, but I thought I'd post it, see if I can get the ball rolling on writing again. And I seem to either write all in dialogue or no dialogue at all. Some happy medium must be reached.
It's all a story. That's the very first rule of the game.
No one roleplays the South African apartheid. No one recreates death marches on their weekends. People recreate stories, in which the world may be harsh and twisted and dark, but always with an edge of glamor, with an idealistic, perfect beauty and sense at the core.
John understands that. When he was younger, he wanted his story to be real. That's how you can tell the newbies. They posture and pose and try so very hard, and if you puncture their stories, they puff up, angry and embarrassed. Later, as he got used to the limitations of the form, he learned that the only way to keep someone from poking holes in his story was to keep the awareness of it in his mind. He looks at someone across a room, and the two of them smile, because they both know they're playing a game. The black and the fishnet and the fangs and the dark of the club, the red-irised eyes and the way everyone moves with a heightened awareness, a smooth assumed physicality, a mimicry of movie stars and dancers-it's a communal interpretation, a web of stories. None of its real-it's hyperreal. It's both ludicrous and beautiful.
The rule lets the two of them fall back to one side of the dance floor as though by one accord and meet with the cordial grace of aristocratic strangers. It lets John offer his signet ring to the man and accept his kiss, and it lets him return the gesture, slipping deliberately on the kiss to touch skin instead of silver. It lets the two of them retire to the side of the club and watch the dancers with an air of indulgent superiority, drink and talk, unrushed. It lets them lean in and whisper snide comments on the dancers in each other's ears and laugh. It lets John compliment the other man on his performance at the end of the evening, when the two of them lean against the wall outside, a distance away from the stairwell down to the club. He played his chosen role well, the occult specialist, the retired collector, distant and disillusioned and hard-edged in the decadence of a Nightside club. The rule lets John be Luduan be someone else entirely for the evening, a vampire turned in the middle of the French Revolution, a small baron and a minor power, content in his knowledge and power, and then be Luduan again, when he pays the other man the compliment.
It lets him know enough to back off when the other man refuses to drop the act. Lu's not going home with someone who doesn't know when the game ends, when to take the cue to switch from storytelling to the messy non-narrative of real life.
The other man forces the game to continue, though Lu doesn't know how. He's outside the club and then he's waking up on a Roman-style reclining couch in a room full of artifacts. Masks on the walls and carven figures, squat and almost-humanoid, and stone platters full of burnt bones on low tables, a honeycombed case full of scrolls against one wall, and Lu's just as in place here, in the clothes he wore to suit the evening's story, as he was in the club. And that shouldn't be. The story only exists in its setting, and that setting is specific and fragile, created by the convergence of storytellers all in one place at one time. Once it touches the world outside, the story melts away, to be continued or not, as its participants choose, some other night.
But Lu's still dressed in the story and the room's part of the story, and when he runs a finger along the line of his upper gums, because they ache like he remembers his wisdom teeth aching, when they'd threatened to come in, the custom caps he'd been wearing come off in his hand-along with his canine teeth.
As new teeth slide down from his gums with a click he can feel in his jaw, a deep bone pop like a shoulder socketing back into place, he feels sick.
This isn't what he wanted. If the world runs by the rules of the story, than either the world is beautiful but always predictable or the story is senseless and unending.
If the world is the story, then there's nowhere left to play.