Robes are stupid. My sorcerer dresses like Petyr Baelish.
To expand: if you are a mage, dress like a noble. Do not dress like a wizard. Pointy conical hat and sky-blue robes is medieval semaphore for “kill first and with extreme prejudice.” Tailored black silk over cloth-of-gold and studded with rubies says “Harmless, but valuable; ransom if possible or kill last.”
If you dress like a noble, they’re not going to pay attention as you take a turn or two to back away from the melee and prepare yourself. The ruse is only broken when you reveal yourself, at which point 8d6 fire damage is screaming toward them at Mach Fuck anyway, so no big.
“Excuse me,” says the battle droid. R2 cannot roll his eyes, but he twitters in binary, something hard to translate but best summarized as:
you heard me arsehole [the literal translation here would be: human excrement funnel]
“I will shoot you,” says the other battle droid. B-1 models, flimsy in the face of a lightsabre – or a blaster, or a well-aimed stick – but more than a match for R2.
“No you won’t,” says the first one, “the General needs him.”
“Well at least let me threaten him a little,” pouts the second droid.
“Why?”
“It’s so –”
boring chips in R2 right, it’s boring?
“Yes!” says the first droid. And then he adds, more out of a sense of duty than any real conviction: “Republic scum.”
“It isn’t boring,” says the second droid. “Last week, Grevious killed my best friend. At least. I think he was my best friend. I can’t tell us apart, really.”
you have no names
“I’m B-1,” says the first droid.
“And I’m B-1,” says the second.
“Mass-produced,” says the first.
“Could be worse,” says the second.
I was mass produced, R2 says hurriedly. but Anakin takes care of me.
“What do you mean?”
I’ve never been shot for target practice, says R2, and I’m allowed a name and –
“It isn’t that bad,” says the first. Maybe the second. Hard to tell. “Anyway, you’re Republic scum and – “
The smack-shriek of a blaster. The first/second droid collapses, minus head. His companion says, “Never shot for target practice?” in a tone of voice that is, somehow, different.
never ever, says R2. my friends wouldn’t let it happen.
“Friends,” says the droid. “He wasn’t really my best friend. He just went on patrol with me more than the others and I got used to him. Familiar face, you know. When the General killed him – uh – I kind of felt….bad.”
wanna get out of here?
“Roger roger,” says the droid, with feeling. Then: “Roger. That’s a name, right?”
yup, says R2.
“Great. Great,” says Roger. Then he hesitates. “What’re your orders?”
I don’t order you – oh, fine, babysteps, look just get me out of here.
“And make sure that your Jedi doesn’t lightsabre me.”
Roger, roger, trills R2.
“Fuck you,” says Roger who, it seems, is a very fast learner.
forgive me if this has been done but please accept the following theory: anakin knows that women outside of tattooine do not die in childbed.
He’s travelled the length and breadth of the galaxy. He’s seen stars sing into being and empires topple to ash at his feet. He’s seen horrors and wonders and he’s a legend in at least fifteen different systems, and he’s seen medical droids work miracles, and he knows – he knows – that Padme is highly unlikely to hemorrhage, or succumb to eclampsia, or die of a slow mouldering infection.
(look, if you think Anakin ‘this woman is my entire life’ Skywalker didn’t research the fuck out of every possible way a woman can die in childbirth you are wrong. He’s a walking talking Web MD of the Worst Possible Result by the time she’s in her fifth month, and he shepherds her to every appointment, and arranges strange and obscure tests which he keeps concealed partly by subterfuge and mainly by Force-choking and mind-control. His eyes are turning a little yellow at the edges. He blames it on exhaustion.)
(since when did tiredness make you go – Padme will say )
(maybe it’s jaundice that’s something you could get, or the baby, or – )
Anakin’s every stereotype of ‘insanely overprotective father-to-be’ and it’s adorable except it really, really isn’t. Because there’s something he learned on Tatooine that he hasn’t shared with his wife: slave-children are property of the master, and are often sold young, and the mothers would protest. Of course they would.
And when they protested too hard, they were punished, and when the punishment went too far and the woman remained in the dust where they’d pushed her (red red red) they would, euphemistically,say that she had died in childbed. Because, technically, it was true. Her children had caused her death. A few years down the line, maybe, but all the same: if she hadn’t borne the child, if she hadn’t become a mother, then she would have lived.
Anakin’s seen the aftermath of such a conflict. More than once. When they come for your children, you’re meant to say yes, a friend of Shmi’s had said to her. Watoo had been a good master. A kind master. He had never flogged Shmi’s back red because she would not surrender her son.
(it hadn’t saved her, in the end. but that’s another story.)
Anakin knows that prophecy can come in strange and circuitous language, and dreams of Padme – his Padme! – dying in childbed, well. When they come for your children you’re meant to say yes, thinks Anakin. Be obedient, the council tells him.
They will not have his Padme. He will save her. He will save his child.
It is a stupid risk, but Micheletto takes it anyway, follows a boy out from under his lord’s nose to an abandoned palace. What is he alive for, except for stupid risks like these. If he had wanted a safe life, he could have stayed in Forlí, and married Violetta the miller’s daughter.
It is a very pleasant interlude. The boy is a sweet, fine thing–finer than anything made for gutter trash like him, and almost unsettlingly tender.
He returns seamlessly to his lord’s side when the pleasure is done, and that evening reports some of the curiosities of da Vinci’s workshop, only himself left in Cesare Borgia’s war tent. Cesare listens to him for a while, sipping at Ludovico Sforza’s wine, and then abruptly he turns to Micheletto and says: “You fucked that boy.” It isn’t a question.
Micheletto freezes, utter dread and a strange, savage relief flooding him in dual measure. He has feared exactly this for so many years, and now it has happened. His lord knows the truth of him. There is nothing left to fear. He unbuckles his dagger and drops to his knees before his lord, pressing the point to his heart. “Kill me quickly,” he manages, offering Cesare the hilt. “Please.”
A hand joins his on the dagger’s hilt, Cesare’s fingers brushing his, and then Cesare is drawing it away from him, setting the blade aside. “There will be no killing,” his lord says quietly. “God’s wounds, Micheletto. Did you think I did not know?”
Micheletto raises his head sharply, and finds Cesare looking at him with the concentration he usually reserves for matters of state. His voice, when he can bring himself to speak, is hoarse. “You knew. How long have you known?”
Cesare shrugs, but doesn’t break their eye contact. “How long have you been in my service?”
Micheletto has trained himself too well to move, but he feels that like a blow. All these years. All the care, all the terror, and for nothing. “My lord wanted to know about the boy,” he says stupidly.
“Mm,” Cesare agrees. “I marked him. Machiavelli did, too. You must take greater care, my sweet assassin.”
The only answer Micheletto can make to that is a nod, stiff and humiliated.
Cesare tilts his head to the side, curiosity filling his face. “You will not see him again.” It isn’t a command, but it also is not a question. Micheletto shakes his head anyway. “And you have no lover in Rome.”
“Love is not–for men like me,” Micheletto says haltingly.
“Oh?” Cesare raises his eyebrows. “So you do not love me?”
He can make no answer to that, his tongue gone dry in his mouth. He is suddenly very conscious that he is still on his knees.
Cesare smiles at him. He sounds amused, but his eyes are sharp. “Either you know or you don’t.”
Micheletto finds his voice at last, swallowing hard. “I would need a heart for that, my lord.”
“Ah,” his lord says, drawing the word out. “Of course. I had forgotten.”
you are holding a thing. its in your hands. you look away for five seconds. you are no longer holding the thing and you cannot find it anywhere. you did not move from your spot. you do not know how this happened
you are scrolling down a website. you see something nice and you decide to read more about it. you scroll up to look into it. you see something nice. you decide you want to read more about it. you forgot the first thing you were going to search. you scroll down in hope to remember. you see something nice. you decide you want to read more about it.
there is a tear in one of your favourite outfits. you decide you can fix it. you grab the sewing supplies and put them down while you research how to do it. an hour passes. you wonder why there are sewing supplies by your bed.
where are your glasses?
there are three cups on your bedside table. you venture into the kitchen. you decide you want some water. you bring it back to your room. there are four cups on your bedside table.
youve had a towel around your shoulders for the past three hours. you are going to shower.
you’re watching a movie. you pick up your phone to have something to do while you watch the movie. you pause the movie. two days pass. you still havent finished the movie.
repeat to yourself so you wont forget, you think. repeat repeat repeat repeat. you no longer remember anything else but it. you look to the side. blue is a nice colour. what were you thinking about?
your leg wont stop shaking. it has a life of its own. you are not in control.
tiny american civics lesson for those here and abroad who woke up going “uh, so the travel ban is lifted because one judge in seattle said so? I mean, cool, but really?”
that’s how the whole fucking system is supposed to work.
we’ve got 3 parts to how laws are made and enforced in America: Executive (the president), Judicial (the court system), and Legislative (Congress).
I know we’ve not done a good job in the past few weeks showing this, but it is a system of checks and balances. we were very much explicitly not supposed to ever have a king or a king-like executive. that’s why it took them so fucking long to write the founding documents, because there weren’t many good examples of that method, at the time.
anyway, the president can do stuff with executive orders (though tr**p has very much overreached, surprising nobody), and then the other two parts of the wobbly-ass tri-corner hat holding up the rule of American law get to exact checks and balances against it.
right now? It’s the judiciary branch going “hey there slow your roll you unmitigated disaster of an executive branch.”
sometimes, if Congress can get 2/3 of them to agree, they can do much the same thing, but I currently heavily identify with:
Anyway if the three don’t agree (for example, this morning), we end up with a situation called a “constitutional crisis,” which, despite sounding like a lost Hamilton song, is actually a large problem that’s gonna be a shitshow to sort out (andhopefullyendsupwithSOMEONEgettingimpeached).
but we can have this shitshow, because we don’t have a king. we never have, we never were supposed to, and yeah it’s been an awful two weeks of us remembering that we don’t, but hey! the american rule of law! it was vaguely well put together!
(another side of this philosophy is that, you know, we get to hit the voting booths EVERY YEAR, GO VOTE EVERY TIME, MY GOD, and also, impeachment doesn’t involve beheading someone)
civics lessons completed.
Community dynamics, or, punch the fucking Nazi already.
Look, there are still lines. No one’s talking about shooting nazis or violating nazis or torturing nazis. No one’s passing a law to get anyone who calls themself “alt-right” on Twitter thrown in prison. It’s not about “kill everyone who doesn’t agree with you.”
It’s about making the social consequences for advocating genocide excruciatingly fucking clear, for the benefit of the potential victims of that genocide.
What do you do if you see someone attacking a vulnerable person in public? Don’t answer right away, picture it: a grown adult hitting or screaming at a child, or an elderly person, or someone with a cane or a guide dog. What do you do? You leap to the victim’s defense. Even if the cane-user has a mean swing or the child knows kung fu, you fucking step in, because that person should not have to fight alone. (or, y’know, you start screaming for help, or something. Each according to ability.)
Because hey, guess what, we’re social primates with a community structure. We teach each other how to behave via how we react to infractions. More than that, when we react - either way - to one member of the community attacking another, we make it clear who is part of our community and who is not.
That is super fucking important, y’all. Most important thing in the world.
And so we come back to the Nazi Next Door. Nice guy. Clean-cut. Picks up after his dog. And he stands in front of national television and explains, in a reasonable tone of voice, that Nazi-ism is Right and Good and The Future. Guys, let’s not pretend this is not an attack, okay? Let’s not be disingenuous. We all know what Nazis stand for.
When this happens… the community has a choice to make. Which monkey gets protected and which one gets ostracized? Who do we welcome and who do we sucker-punch into next week? It’s not morality - it’s community dynamics. It’s also very much a binary choice. If we ignore the Nazi, if we allow the Nazi, then every single member of that community who isn’t Christian, white, straight or able-bodied has cause to believe that they’re the ostracized monkey.
I’ll say it loud for the people in the back: THERE IS MORE WORTH IN ONE NON-CHRISTIAN/NON-WHITE/NON-STRAIGHT/NON-ABLE-BODIED/ETC PERSON’S LITTLE FINGER THAN THERE IS IN A BARGEFUL OF NAZIS. Choose fucking wisely.
Punch the Nazi. Yell at the Nazi. Mock the Nazi. Pie the Nazi in the face. Turn off the Nazi’s microphone. Do whatever you have to do to communicate you are not welcome here, you are not one of us. Because even if the Nazi doesn’t listen…
