Arizona Tarot V.
I've been writing a bunch of these, but they're all stuff that happens later in the deck, so in the hope of preserving some small semblance of narrative (ahahahaha) I'll just put up this for now.
Time travel stuff... (yes, I've changed Sobriety's initial tag to 'Muse' as it's more elegant than 'Shalott'.)
Preparations took some time and an amount of financial scrabbling.
Beyond the obvious of horse-riding lessons and fire-arms training, there were a thousand lesser issues that needed to be addressed.
They bought antique dollar coins from ebay and looked in wilderness survival guides. They sketched maps and made note of railroads and stagecoach routes. They checked dates and made lists of people to seek out or avoid. They played poker against each other and practiced prestigidation until they had each mastered how to deal invisibly from the bottom of the deck and could tell if a pack had been punched, shaved or marked. They threw bits of slang at each other and questions about Frontier etiquette until their friends and families thought they’d both gone round the bend. They bought clothes, cribbed recipes and researched basic prices for groceries and amenities until dollars, nickels and dimes became more natural to them than pennies and pounds.
Waterhouse’s Muse was asked if she was having an early midlife crisis. (“A midlife crisis? Don’t be fucking ridiculous - there is no ‘mid’. As far as I’m concerned the fiasco began when I was dragged into this world and will continue to remain pretty much critical until I’m dragged out of this world in a pine box. Life is a fucking crisis from cradle to grave. Now. Tell me again how close you have to be for a .45 to be anywhere near accurate...”)
In short, they worked at it. They weren’t always successful and there was a certain amount of passing the buck. The Witchy one was infuriatingly unpredictable with poker and would either lose or win everything for an evening straight, whereas the Muse could be relied upon to make steady gains throughout a night whatever the weather. The Muse couldn’t bake biscuits that didn’t taste like rocks to save her life at it took three tries to fix coffee that didn’t taste of watered down charcoal, the Witch could. The Muse was better at remembering names and dates, whys and wherefores, the Witch at looking at a person or place and instinctively stating ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on the level of potential danger and interest they possessed. Between them both, they managed.
Despite the work, the time and effort and the endless endless preparations, neither of them actually expected it to work. The Time Travellers Theory of Pi/e had, after all, only scraped hours together before at most; it had never been called upon to fabricate over a century’s worth of time and play it backwards.
On the appointed day Maz drove them to Liverpool, the back seat of the car littered with their travel-bags and with sheets of calculations, packages of pie and bottles of coke. Despite all this, despite how peculiar they both felt when Maz dropped them off at the docks with final instructions, despite the way the traffic and the people looked rather hazy and unreal to both of them, it was still a supreme surprise when they found they were in 1882.
=====
I've no idea which one of them shoots someone first. But this is the first time Mal does it...
She had, in the quiet moments before sleep, wondered about this moment. Wondered what she would do.
Mal had a theory, one she’d formed long ago in a vague and nebulous fashion when quite young and which had crystallized over the years as more evidence came to support it. It all came down to capital punishment and the stability of society.
If one lived in a stable society that did not have capital punishment, killing someone was generally felt to be the most heinous crime a soul could commit. But in an unstable society where such an act became commonplace, words like ‘justifiable’ crept in more and more until ‘they had it coming’ was a plausible defense. Similarly, shooting a man for stealing your horse when the law was going to hang him anyway put Cain’s sin in an entirely different light. The thief was dead either way, it was just a question of whether you saved the Marshal the trouble or not.
She’d once been asked by a friend (who loved a good debate,) why killing was bad. Forget society’s rules or religious dogma: why do you personally feel that killing another person is wrong? And she had realized that she didn’t really have a more satisfactory reason than ‘because it will make other people deeply unhappy’ and ‘I would (briefly) be pissed off if someone did it to me’.
With all this in mind, she’d had some doubts over her ability to kill another human being unless they were patently screaming crazy and bearing down on her with a bowie knife. Even then she’d worried she might just stare at them, too stuck in disbelief to save her own hide.
As it turned out, fate smiled upon her. A broken, bastard smile to be sure, but a boon none the less. The idiot with the gun - drunk enough to be mean but not drunk enough to miss - wasn’t drawing several inches of blue-steeled barrel on her. He was aiming at Sobriety.
Mal’s thoughts ran so fast it was as if she was in her own personal time zone, aloof and untouchable by lesser mortals. Her neurons reported for duty thus: What an idiot. He’s a fucker. He’s a fucker with a gun. He’s drawing - he’s going to shoot one of my best friends. I only have two. I can barely cope with life with two stellar best friends what the hell will I do with only one? He’s a fucker, she’s glorious - bang.
At that point time caught up with her and Malediction realized she was holding her nickel-plated Colt, the kick from which was reverberating up her arm and the cordite smoke from which was starting to burn in her nose.
She watched the unfortunate cowboy drop in a haze of red. Neurons reported thus: Wait - did we just draw and fire and not shoot our own foot off?! Way to fucking go! ... He looks wrong. Flat somehow. Was that funny cloud of red his soul? He doesn’t look real. He looks as real as a lump of steak. He was walking and talking a minute ago, and now it’s all gone. Where did you go? Are we really just magic lumps of meat?
She must have been standing there for some time, because the next thing she remembered was Sobriety holding gently onto her wrist and helping her re-holster the Colt. “Mal. Mal?”
The sound was like an audible scribble, a mess she couldn’t quite decipher.
“Mal. It’s okay now. It’s okay.”
Her eyes felt like they’d been glazed open. Where did he go? The real bit of him - the magic bit? Where did he go? Her brain jabbered to itself.
“Mal?”
She shivered. “It’s cold,” she mumbled blankly.
Sobriety grabbed a whiskey bottle from the nearest table and forced Mal’s hands around it. “Drink,” she commanded.
“I need a cigarette,” she said by rote.
“Drink first, then you can have a damn pack if you like.”
In the far corner of the saloon, a young gent in a natty suit jotted furiously in a notebook, looking from the two girls to the dead cowboy and back again with disbelief and glee. Malediction Benedict’s reputation had just been solidified, hot-cast in lead, and he’d been there to see it.
The Enquirer would run the story first thing in the morning.
Time travel stuff... (yes, I've changed Sobriety's initial tag to 'Muse' as it's more elegant than 'Shalott'.)
Preparations took some time and an amount of financial scrabbling.
Beyond the obvious of horse-riding lessons and fire-arms training, there were a thousand lesser issues that needed to be addressed.
They bought antique dollar coins from ebay and looked in wilderness survival guides. They sketched maps and made note of railroads and stagecoach routes. They checked dates and made lists of people to seek out or avoid. They played poker against each other and practiced prestigidation until they had each mastered how to deal invisibly from the bottom of the deck and could tell if a pack had been punched, shaved or marked. They threw bits of slang at each other and questions about Frontier etiquette until their friends and families thought they’d both gone round the bend. They bought clothes, cribbed recipes and researched basic prices for groceries and amenities until dollars, nickels and dimes became more natural to them than pennies and pounds.
Waterhouse’s Muse was asked if she was having an early midlife crisis. (“A midlife crisis? Don’t be fucking ridiculous - there is no ‘mid’. As far as I’m concerned the fiasco began when I was dragged into this world and will continue to remain pretty much critical until I’m dragged out of this world in a pine box. Life is a fucking crisis from cradle to grave. Now. Tell me again how close you have to be for a .45 to be anywhere near accurate...”)
In short, they worked at it. They weren’t always successful and there was a certain amount of passing the buck. The Witchy one was infuriatingly unpredictable with poker and would either lose or win everything for an evening straight, whereas the Muse could be relied upon to make steady gains throughout a night whatever the weather. The Muse couldn’t bake biscuits that didn’t taste like rocks to save her life at it took three tries to fix coffee that didn’t taste of watered down charcoal, the Witch could. The Muse was better at remembering names and dates, whys and wherefores, the Witch at looking at a person or place and instinctively stating ‘yes’ or ‘no’ depending on the level of potential danger and interest they possessed. Between them both, they managed.
Despite the work, the time and effort and the endless endless preparations, neither of them actually expected it to work. The Time Travellers Theory of Pi/e had, after all, only scraped hours together before at most; it had never been called upon to fabricate over a century’s worth of time and play it backwards.
On the appointed day Maz drove them to Liverpool, the back seat of the car littered with their travel-bags and with sheets of calculations, packages of pie and bottles of coke. Despite all this, despite how peculiar they both felt when Maz dropped them off at the docks with final instructions, despite the way the traffic and the people looked rather hazy and unreal to both of them, it was still a supreme surprise when they found they were in 1882.
=====
I've no idea which one of them shoots someone first. But this is the first time Mal does it...
She had, in the quiet moments before sleep, wondered about this moment. Wondered what she would do.
Mal had a theory, one she’d formed long ago in a vague and nebulous fashion when quite young and which had crystallized over the years as more evidence came to support it. It all came down to capital punishment and the stability of society.
If one lived in a stable society that did not have capital punishment, killing someone was generally felt to be the most heinous crime a soul could commit. But in an unstable society where such an act became commonplace, words like ‘justifiable’ crept in more and more until ‘they had it coming’ was a plausible defense. Similarly, shooting a man for stealing your horse when the law was going to hang him anyway put Cain’s sin in an entirely different light. The thief was dead either way, it was just a question of whether you saved the Marshal the trouble or not.
She’d once been asked by a friend (who loved a good debate,) why killing was bad. Forget society’s rules or religious dogma: why do you personally feel that killing another person is wrong? And she had realized that she didn’t really have a more satisfactory reason than ‘because it will make other people deeply unhappy’ and ‘I would (briefly) be pissed off if someone did it to me’.
With all this in mind, she’d had some doubts over her ability to kill another human being unless they were patently screaming crazy and bearing down on her with a bowie knife. Even then she’d worried she might just stare at them, too stuck in disbelief to save her own hide.
As it turned out, fate smiled upon her. A broken, bastard smile to be sure, but a boon none the less. The idiot with the gun - drunk enough to be mean but not drunk enough to miss - wasn’t drawing several inches of blue-steeled barrel on her. He was aiming at Sobriety.
Mal’s thoughts ran so fast it was as if she was in her own personal time zone, aloof and untouchable by lesser mortals. Her neurons reported for duty thus: What an idiot. He’s a fucker. He’s a fucker with a gun. He’s drawing - he’s going to shoot one of my best friends. I only have two. I can barely cope with life with two stellar best friends what the hell will I do with only one? He’s a fucker, she’s glorious - bang.
At that point time caught up with her and Malediction realized she was holding her nickel-plated Colt, the kick from which was reverberating up her arm and the cordite smoke from which was starting to burn in her nose.
She watched the unfortunate cowboy drop in a haze of red. Neurons reported thus: Wait - did we just draw and fire and not shoot our own foot off?! Way to fucking go! ... He looks wrong. Flat somehow. Was that funny cloud of red his soul? He doesn’t look real. He looks as real as a lump of steak. He was walking and talking a minute ago, and now it’s all gone. Where did you go? Are we really just magic lumps of meat?
She must have been standing there for some time, because the next thing she remembered was Sobriety holding gently onto her wrist and helping her re-holster the Colt. “Mal. Mal?”
The sound was like an audible scribble, a mess she couldn’t quite decipher.
“Mal. It’s okay now. It’s okay.”
Her eyes felt like they’d been glazed open. Where did he go? The real bit of him - the magic bit? Where did he go? Her brain jabbered to itself.
“Mal?”
She shivered. “It’s cold,” she mumbled blankly.
Sobriety grabbed a whiskey bottle from the nearest table and forced Mal’s hands around it. “Drink,” she commanded.
“I need a cigarette,” she said by rote.
“Drink first, then you can have a damn pack if you like.”
In the far corner of the saloon, a young gent in a natty suit jotted furiously in a notebook, looking from the two girls to the dead cowboy and back again with disbelief and glee. Malediction Benedict’s reputation had just been solidified, hot-cast in lead, and he’d been there to see it.
The Enquirer would run the story first thing in the morning.