RS, Author, Novelist, Prosaist

Once you have completed a work and preferably published it, you are an author. It's like being a virgin. Can't go back. Being a writer is a profession or an avocation. It's like being pregnant. It begins. It ends. It can become past tense; was.

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[Since @floofpaldi@mindly.social is recuperating tonight, I'm answering "again" for a different story and MC. I wanted to do a little world-building. 😋 —RS]

The devil-girl is the young autistic daemon woman MC in Reluctant Runaway (planned). She attended public school through most of second grade with her best friend from infancy, but when he left (disappeared really) without telling her why, she became convinced he'd betrayed her. She got fed up with acting normal, masking her actions, accommodating her classmates' feelings, and having to suffer straining to interpret children's mercurial expressions, body language, and illogical reactions.

She quit school.

Her guardian approved. He immediately engaged scholastic tutors, crafters and artists, etiquette specialists, military instructors, and physical trainers to take residence at the estate, after which the devil-girl soon spent every… waking… moment learning or practicing or training, sometimes hosting mock state dinners or making the rounds of the tenant farms and mines on the lands she was to eventually superintend. She was destined to govern, so taking the opportunity to control her education made perfect sense and allowed him to disregard the devil-girl's late parents wishes that she be treated as a normal girl. Her parents had died heroes when she was five, earning them lands and responsibilities that that the highest powers passed on to their little girl, who would quit school when eight years old.

What ran away the estate years later was extraordinary well educated, principled (though those principles were mutable), and quite dangerous. A true devil-girl.

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When I was younger, I would happily give a talk using a series of index cards with prompting mnemonics or a short list of details. Not at my age, though. The last talk I gave, I read a script. Nevertheless, I prefer to write freeform; working from a treatment is best, with a character sketch and her agenda with a described end-of-story goal. I like discovering the story, pretty much like I liked discovering the conversation I was having with the audience talking from prompt cards. Writing from a structured outline would not work for me. The very act of writing the outline is discovering the story. Having completed it, I'd lose interest.

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She's friendly, outgoing, sometimes silly, helps those who ask reasonably, is tolerant of stupidity and pride, and is rarely stern except with her students or recalcitrant dragon ambassadors. She even tries to understand why people do the bad things they do, trying to find the flower hidden in the weeds as she offers chances for such people to redeem themselves.

If you find her flustered, that's usually an act. Rarely, it is exhaustion. Decisions and planning are her life, and because she cares about people, she makes the tough choices (killing some, starting wars) even it those affected by her choices call her evil.

For her, the continued existence of humanity is a top priority, tempered with ensuring they live good lives even if that conflicts with her top priority, even if it wrecks the world they live in, or kills populations. She's been at this for uncounted uncountable years.

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This doesn't mean she doesn't lie, but this is only to protect people. It doesn't mean she isn't a criminal; she works for the mob. She won't steal from you, or others, but she will do what she's ordered; that's generally is not stealing, and for other things she will misinterpret nuances to preserve her integrity.

She has made so many, she considers herself stupid. She's done things that make her state she's lost all dignity, which helps her do the hard things. She sees her pride as evil, and tries not to be prideful—except of her fitness or her flight skills (well earned).

She can't. Fight, that is. She gets in trouble when she forgets that, but it's always to help another.

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A friend pointed out this great reference material for writing fictional drug experiences. @chuff throws me tasty treats all the time! Read the tumblr if you can.

https://www.tumblr.com/tafkarfanfic/808442046492884992/oh-my-god-people-please-your-elderly-auntie-has

The actual site cited is: https://www.erowid.org/experiences/

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[Bolt, day angel woman, MC:] Romance is a strange word the way you're using it. You really asking that a man would work to interest me passionately? Romancing him is my prerogative. I'm a woman. A man "romancing" me? That's aggro. Even in these progressive times, that's a bad tactic. Makes me less likely to ride him, 'less he's a good friend and I've been hinting. Kinda shows he didn't pay attention in Men's Studies where guys learn how women work, or… I don't know… he's stupid? I'll admit I'm a bit conservative, not having grown up in the big city. The woman asks, end of question. Him asking out of turn, that's a big turn-off. I don't care if the laws are on a woman's side; men are almost always bigger than me, most always stronger, and it shows a lack of good sense to be pushy. Feels like forcing. Scary. I'll admit I accept hints, but if a man gets uppity, that's a turn-off. I'll be sure he gets a bad reputation for trying that!

As for me doing the romancing? I admire the male body. Regardless of muscles or soft curves, if he looks like he would be fun and I'm feeling it, I'll hunt him. Biggest turn off? Might be crass, but a guy's… well. How can I put this delicately? I dislike the sense of giving birth backwards. That's an instant no. Average is fine.

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The spouse has dubbed him Sir Rainbòwleo, accent on the "bow." Doth thee approve?

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POSITIVE.

Case in point, this report, a breakthrough in my confidence level: @sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe

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You and I are fellow pantsers, I understand. As I write stories in my Reluctance Series, I learn a lot about the denizens of tbe world, their societies, their quirks.

How much of your Elderkin world did you discover as you wrote? Since you're working of the third book, do you ever wish you could go back to change previous details? If so, how will you retcon?

Before I started writing, I also thought out a lot of things. I wrote a "bible" about how the eponymous reluctance works, details about the various varieties of humans, and a glossary of terms to use and not use.

How much did you figure out before beginning? Did writing the story force you to discard much? Does it surprise you? Was preparing worth the effort in retrospect?

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Yes. As a series of related stories, as a series of sequels, and as a series of serialized episodes / chapters in a continuing story to which I'm not sure of the ending. My current Reluctance Series, as the name suggests, is intended to be a series of related novels, novelettes, and side stories with continuing characters and different, and sometimes returning, MCs.

This only works if you have an extensive world in which the stories take place, and a robust cast of quirky characters who grow in scope and accumulate problems or goals as each story ends.

Not a lot of HEA.

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Oooo. An opportunity for worldbuilding! Bolt did the day angel equivalent of Track and Field in high school. She did flight sprints, long distance relay, and obstacle stunt flying. If the team, Glidepath, had worn teeshirts as a uniform when competing, the garments would have had an extra set of wide sleeves slightly behind and slightly below her arm sleeves to insert her wings through. The design on the shirt would have been a thunderhead outlined in shadows cast by the sunset, clouds a burnished orange and gold. Written across would have been the motto, Flies Very Fast, Does Stunts, with the school and team name below: Hover Stars Glidepath.

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As an SF author, I've tried penning a few time travel stories. So hard. Each time, the logic of traveling in time ends up pretzeling the "timeline" into destroying the protagonist's past and creating a new past and future that could make the protagonist not exist at all. The story ceases to be time travel at all, or becomes unworkable. So, @QuasiTemporal@wandering.shop, how do you approach the plot logic to allow time travel without imploding reality? Or, asked another way, how do you hide the paradoxes and get away with it? Tips and tricks, please!

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A day angel woman affixes you with a glare that could melt iron. She points at her glued spiked up hair obviously dyed black staining her scalp, at her tarnished silver facial piercings, at lines of black face and body paint, at her black leather wear and chains—with her blue and white feathered wings flared up and out in an effort to make her look bigger than you, in an effort to make her look dangerous. Succeeding. In spades.

You decide to forgive Bolt for not answering the question and move on to the next MC, who hopefully isn't punked out.

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[I'm going to call it a magic system to simplify terms; the story is SF. —RS]

Yes. The "magic" system in the Reluctance Series is calculative. Equations describe both reality and how to modify it. Understanding of math (calculus, geometry, statistics, etc.) is necessary for anything complex. I'd love to consult with a mathematician to make my presentation sound better! Half way through the tootfic I posted to ereyesterday's #PennedPossibilities post (@sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe) is an example of a character working a miracle from the thaumaturge's POV, with Maths™! Check it out.

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Wondering why RS hasn't been answering prompts much the last few days? Well, I've now rewritten the first chapter of Reluctant Courier (for the Mob) for the fourth time. OMFG! Now I believe Bolt is a talented photographer who lives only for the street photos she takes, and flying. She's damaged, apathetic, with a lousy job we don't what it is yet, her memory metaphoric Swiss cheese— discriminated against to boot. She's now met the trans reporter who'll be her foil, and is facing a presumably dangerous miracle cast by a daemon with the previously cited reporter.

This is a good result. :blob_sweat:

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In the current era of her world, it is to a man who's been playing hard to get that a woman would give a bouquet of flowers. Rainy Days, however, loves to be wooed. Considering her position and how people are irrationally afraid of her, she'd definitely take it as a positive—especially if someone not an enemy took it as a step toward the bedroom.

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Not silly: Women get to choose, and, no, their self-agency doesn't negate his, but their choice is theirs alone and you can't have it or take it or break it, nor can you logic it or bible it away.

If the question meant writing battles: The Oxford comma. Definitely. I would have included two spaces after a sentence as the current one-space rule makes impossible certain grammatical and attribution constructions following the end quote. But. It's too exhausting to argue it anymore and I have broken myself of the habit.

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None. Maybe I should consider it…?

No! When I did that crap, imposing goals, writing daily do or die, setting quotas I could never meet, I burnt out.

For over a decade.

Better I should think about writing, think about stories, even happily daydream… but write when the story wants out.

YMMV 😓

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[I'll let Boss Mead, Don of the Thousand Eyes Syndicate, the insidious antagonist of the WIP Reluctant Courier (for the Mob), talk about some of the unrevealed backstory, and what motivates him. —RS]

I don't own people. I don't think of them as objects, but the syndicate confederation that usually does what I think is good for us seems to. When this day angel who flies fast and succeeded in stealthily delivering any message, even one to a client under constabulary protection, started doing courier jobs for us, I talked about how she might be an asset. I pointed out that we ought not lose her. Soon after, I got handed an envelope of photos that made it look like she committed a crime. Now Lightning Bolt does what we ask. I've made sure she got treated will, not misused. A dozen years later, I think that if I gave her back the envelope, she might still work for us, but doing that would make the syndicate unhappy.

A Doña friend back east told me about a certain level-head young woman who excelled at keeping the peace in her sprawling organization, that solved problems bloodlessly, a prodigy who might be a greater thaumaturge than the ruler of the world were she not so self-limiting. Now she's come to our city to study at the Academy for Thaumaturges. I've discussed her with the syndicate heads. The syndicate needs an enforcer who doesn't botch jobs or accidentally kill clients. I'll get the devil-girl to work with us, even if I have to convince her myself. The secret of who she was might be our key.

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[Rainy Days, the Director of Home and the Nine Outer Worlds, the main series antagonist, and a woman:] What part do you not understand about being an absolute ruler? I own everything on ten worlds. Any thing I want, I have. I grant stewardship of my property and the value created. I delegate authority in return for following my wishes, orders, and intent. It's how I implement the stewardship laws, preventing the abuse of property or value to control others to their detriment. This implies I own people, too. It may be true; you don't want to cross me, or hurt people I favor or causes I champion—you may not end well—but do I like to let people be people. They do such interesting things. I like to be surprised. I like happy people. It's too many things for me to monitor everything. I let the system do that, to maintain the homeostasis of the body politic. In this era, it works pretty well. I rarely have to wrest stewardship back from those who use my things as weapons, or to distort people's minds. I'm sorry if people see me as evil when I must do a course correction.

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My work never finding an audience.

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Have you ever been in a plane flying in a storm, or seen one in a movie? My day angel MC has wings and flies. Been there. Enough said.

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[Devil-girl, currently a mob enforcer, autist, SC POV:] I looked at Bolt [the MC] squarely. "That's a weird question."

"I? Well. You went to huge trouble to attend the Directorate's school of thaumaturgy. Since we're working together, I thought it might be good to know…"

I wasn't the type to have personal goals, simply work goals. I made a point of studying everything— "But maybe that's the problem."

"I didn't mean to be nosey—"

I hugged her tightly, wings and shoulders, with my cheek against hers, before she could pout. Unlike me, being forced to work for criminal organizations had damaged my day angel coworker badly. All jock and often faulty unschooled intuition, she couldn't find the advantage even in the best of the worst situations, to turn a lose to a win, and tended to fold into fears. I tried to be as friendly as she, so it made logical sense to reciprocate, to see if it would help.

"Silly girl," I whispered into her ear. She was keenly aware of being a decade older than me, so I felt her react to the girl diminutive I'd used to take her out of fear mode. I chuckled, releasing her. "I know about your reporter friend. Learning from him the craft of interviewing is good."

"Don't tell anyone about him."

"I won't. So… is there a skill I could learn? Ah! I'd defo be mastering working simple miracles well."

"Simple?" Bolt clearly wanted to laugh but with me was always circumspect. "I've seen you go from here"—she popped out a wing, pointing—"to there. Pop! Blam!"

"That takes singularity maths, and I'm still working on getting that miracle right. Since I got scared into making it work the first time, I'm never sure the next time will work. You wanna example? How about turning a wheel on a cart, or better yet, creating a simple sprite."

"In your apartment building, you made so many—"

"Sprites? Simple ones?" I fear I scoffed.

I took a deep breath, found a standing mnemonic drifting in my mind, felt recollections of numerical matrix fragments melting into proper predicates, then with a sense of the random, and a feel for the impatient breeze cooling my skin and buffeting her wing feathers in the morning twilight, I made a snap-judgement codicil to take the place of targeting. Balancing happened instantly, congesting my horns. With a wish, I released an avalanche of bright digits crackling and shooting like burning embers across my arithmocosm, filling my halo.

I worked a miracle.

An apparition of rainbow light—a palm-sized spherical aquarium, filled with luminous colored oils circulating in frothy plumes—snapped into existence. The polychrome sprite drifted from between us and quickly away. Bolt fluttered back with a squee, mouth agape, the eldritch light illuminating her face, her fuzzy blue eyebrows becoming caterpillars trying to kiss. The sprite made like a butterfly, dancing back and around and askance on the wind, toward the nearest building as the escapement ran down, plumes slowing, and the precious few splendors I allowed it burnt away.

Pretty good for a dozen-dozen sloppy quick draw approximations. I'd be hard pressed to duplicate it exactly.

Not exactly? That was easy.

"Wow…" Bolt's voice was like smoke drifting from her mouth.

I asked, "Do you have any idea of how complex that was?"

"Pretty easy, knowing you."

"Dozens of open irises arranged parallel to the sphere surface, unrelated maths for the colors, a recollection for the target to provide multi-axial oscillations to simulate the butterfly movement. I could go on. It all came to me in a hot mess. But, a simple colorless monochromatic sprite afixed 45° above my forehead that will turn as my head turns, what most 4-year olds master?" I made a very wet raspberry sound.

"You did that going up the stair to your apartment!"

"Did I?"

"Um." She frowned, looking askance as she thought, her tongue blipping out for an instant. "Well, it was yellow, and it orbited around your head—"

"Yeah, that."

"You gave it to me, and it followed me to the squats!"

"Exactly. Turning a wagon wheel to make a cart roll is a thing daemons do to make coin. Can't. Do it. For trying!" I growled. "Once, I had a so-called friend who helped me figure out how to make complex things work, when Simple failed. Had to nearly die to learn my best trick. Not sustainable."

"The dying bit?"

I nodded. "Simple is Hard."

"Which is why you're going to a thaumaturgy high school at your age?"

I narrowed my eyes at her, grinning nevertheless. "How old do you think I am?"

My grin was strategic. I didn't accidentally confirm she'd guessed right.

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Occasionally, to others, I am asked to. Mostly messages, short passages. I've studied public speaking. No Obama am I.

For myself? Yes. My own work. Practically always. It is how I review if I got the story, the rhythm, and the grammar correct. By ear. By spend a great deal of time dramatically reading aloud.

As I just did this scrivening.

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Bolt doesn't cook. Men usually fill that role in her society and would be more likely to do that, but she doesn't have any family members in her life and the guys she has would visit food kiosks, an association cafeteria, or a pop-up restaurant. Because her income is restricted, she's often buying a bag of crumbs for herself. That's a grab bag of old bread, dried squid, soup packets, dried fruit, chopped vege: essentially grocery leftovers, as specified by Health Services nutritional guidelines, and require no cooking whatsoever.

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#PennedPossibilities 1058
Finding a passage I love will require too many spoons today, but I think this random passage I revised recently is nifty. Bolt is day angel woman. It's not that she's liberated, it's that she's rather typical in her woman-centric society and as the narrator, she's sharing her thoughts and life uncensored, thus the CW.

I didn't remember having written the cryptic note to myself before falling into sleep. Yes, the blackouts worried me. I could no longer apathetically accept them. Not accepting them was better, even if I didn't know what caused them, right? It annoyed me they might be a fact of my life, more so if Boss Mead were involved.

I shuddered. Too much early morning thinking for this jock courier. Making myself crazy, I was. I stretched, joints popping. It felt good. Life was too crazy already with me having ridden Blue, then Boss Mead, then almost Shugh! Abundance… I did like abundance, though. What woman didn't?

Good sleep and lots of passion left a body invigorated. I grinned all the way to the squats. I spotted Molt and gave a final stretch on my toes, finger tips touching the low bronze and patinated tin ceiling as I stretched my wings maximally down the hall, all primary and secondary feathers splayed out, coverts raised. As the feathers revealed themselves completely, their owlish checkered pattern resolved into dark blue, sky blue, and pale blue and dirty white plumes, the transparent oiled keratin bits gleaming, the silvery wave guides sparkling in the overhead light. I looked magnificent. Days away from being thirty, admittedly, but today seventeen seemed recent indeed. I grunted my satisfaction.

I looked, caught his glance across the facilities. Molt splashed his wings from the trough, flicking away drops, before toweling off. We feathers called it a bird bath for good reason:If you've seen a wren play in a basin of water, you know. Leaning toward the scratched metal mirror, he rubbed his bristly jaw, then glanced again as I walked in, saying, "Hello."

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Yes.

I think both Theodore Sturgeon and Ray Bradbury read poetry when I sat in on their seminars, but it was so long ago, I am not entirely sure.

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Bolt would expect her brother to raise her child, in the unlikely event she bore one in the first place. She's avoiding pregnancy because she has no desire to raise a child blackmailed by the mob as she is. Contraception and termination comes up in the story. Her brother was 5 when she ran away at 17, but he would expect the job if he knew she still lived; she feels bad maybe dropping the news on him one day without warning—not about actually expecting he would do it. Child rearing is the societal norm for men, not unlike women decades ago expecting to grow up to become housewives. Bolt's lucky she has a brother; people are so infertile many people are only children, or twins which is common (1:5:17 ➝ single birth:fraternal:identical). The WIP touches on psychology of male child rearing, for example Bolt's friend Blue. He's a praetorian, a man with a rare essential job and he worries about having one day to quit the job to raise his sister's child, or how horrible it would be to say no to her.

Cc: @floofpaldi@mindly.social: Thanks again for another great question, though I didn't answer exactly as intended. Answering it, I finally realized how the segmentation between genders in the society works and sparks certain discrimination and expectations the characters struggle against.

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The two hydrangea photos use an iPhone 17 to create a 3D effect by taking a Live Photo of wind blown flowers and using the bounce effect. Unfortunately sometimes the shot will show the subject moving against the background for a gorgeous 3D effect, and sometimes the phone will hold the subject steady and move the background—which is plain weird. Does anyone know what technique is necessary to create the desirable effect? Theories?

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Yes?

Gratis: If you write it, I'd like to read it.

Over many months, people began to realize the girl wasn't the person she had been before the coma. She wasn't. For her, it was always the sense of being in a different body, wearing a shell, sometimes with bouts of emotional claustrophobia. While she had previous memories of the middle school girl she now was, she had previous memories all through university that overlapped: research, internships, mentorships, graduations, men. She felt vaguely swindled that she hadn't turned in her finished Ph.d. thesis the day before… before—before whatever happened. The girl's friends liked the new brainy her, who deftly handled all the juvenile jocks and bullies, but the girl's older sister was convinced she'd developed multiple personalities. Sis hadn't dropped down to possessed, yet, but that goth look and crystals presaged bad things. Her supposed technological flashes, in 1952 from 2025, were rapidly getting her noticed. The science faire had been a bad idea. Some of her math hadn't existed until she pasted the calc sheets to the poster. That she'd done it with a slide rule was what amazed her. People used the word "prodigy" for the girl. Now, with talks of scholarships in a male dominated engineering field that didn't want her, she wasn't sure she was up to changing history—or if the voice growing in her ear was the girl before the coma.

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Reluctant Courier (for the Mob) is science fiction. That my day angel MC Bolt can fly boils down to physics, mathematics, and engineering of mental spaces thanks to a few changes in the laws of nature. There's a dark matter dark energy connection, but I'm keeping it deep background for now. However, the sensibility of the novel leans toward slice-of-life with adventure getting in the way. This specific WIP could classify as cozy mystery SF, but the cozy tag may not make it past the first draft. It is also feminist in outlook, and I classify it as gender fiction, which may be a genre only of my creation.

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Step 1: Allow yourself to become convinced in your soul that prose can be lyrical. Stop denying it without proof. Prose differs from poetry in that metrics are integral to the style, and rhyme, but that's it. Accept it. Prose allows both meter and rhyme, too; Poetry marshals the army of thought through meter to the field with soldiers of rhyme. That's the difference.

Step 2: Find lyrical prose. Enjoy that author not only for the story but the beauty of the telling of the story. Start studying.

Step 3: Read The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsythe. The author presents rhetorical style, um… Eloquently? You'll find the book fun! These are your ABCs. Tools in hand, attitude fully adjusted, you too will discover the lyricism, like love, deep within your prosy rosy heart.

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The percentage of shared DNA between siblings is 31% to 61% and between aunts/uncles/nieces/nephews is 17% to 34%. Since the percentages matter to the story, it was good I looked it up. Since I'd made an error, I'm going to have to change a few things.

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Bolt used to live on the northwest coast in the cliffs that formed after the ocean receded past the continental shelf, a place populated by home trees and day angels. I haven't named it, yet. When she rolled a van down a hill and threw a torch through a guild window, she ran. Superfast trains cross the continent, and you could travel faster passing through demonic gateways faster (city on world A, to world B, back to the same world but city C), but she came to Home City under her own wing power. It's inland from the south coast. She lives in Lowtown; let's just call it the low-rent district. Where she lives now is a daemon majority-region, unlike the place she lived which was predominantly day angel. Day angels are discriminated against, but Home City does have a vibrant day angel food culture, so she's not completely homesick.

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Bolt flies back and forth all over the capital in Home City, to the Residency (aka The Palace) and the University district, the business district uptown, the Strand where the best restaurants, theatres, and people are, and Lowtown where she lives. Not the nicest neighborhoods. She also flies a dozen leagues west to the old suburbs abandoned 200 years ago thanks to population decline. Over the ruins and reforestation is a relatively private airspace to practice flying tandem. She'll soon visit the forests of the Wild twenty leagues southwest for a dangerous delivery. The interstellar gateways are nine leagues west of the city, and it's a point in the story that she's never seen one until one shows up Mid-City, and a gateway is a miracle you can't forget seeing. For her, it's like you or I never having needed to visit an airport. She may yet do so.

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When a news article reports an event or something someone important said, then immediately segues to

People didn't hold back from sharing their thoughts on social media,

it's annoying, maybe even malpractice.

Why should anyone care about random cherry-picked pithy or funny opinions of people who nobody knows, aren't knowledgeable, likely inexperienced, certainly not expert in what happened, probably ignorant of the history of the matter, and are nothing verifiable other than a fast thumbtyper able to react quickly enough to be noticed by a lazy journalist?

Look up "trusted sources" and "fact checking." Do your social media sources fit the bill?

Seriously, folks, especially if you call yourself a journalist: don't care what the Internet thinks! You might even be quoting bots. The Internet is partly responsible for getting us in the mess we're in today, to boot. Stop it. Just stop it. Delete your X-Twitter. Turn off your phone. Quote Wikipedia; you'll at least sound intelligent.

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It only counts if she died for it right? Because she's technologically immortal, not some magical being (it's SF despite interesting word choices), she doesn't remember what happened or why after she was retrieved from the battlefield. Nobody calls her a chimera to her face, but she's obviously one, rebuilt from more than one person (at least a daemon and two day angels because she's got horns, a red wing, and a blue one.) She'd risked everything to end whatever world war had broken out, and the civilization that fostered it; she would have done that only to prevent humanity from becoming extinct.

This is a tootfic story featuring the antagonist afterward: Not Carrion @sfwrtr@eldritch.cafe

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I'm getting caught up in the word "had" here, as in the sense of both forced and required, but allowed to pick.

Rainy Days was born poor to a carpenter having committed the sin of being female in a society that gave women little self-agency. No coin for musical instruments. By her twenties, nobody in her world could require her anything.

Pigeon the Pilferer has the delicacy and manners of a dropped hammer, and is likely as dense. While he might have been required in upper school, nobody, no teacher and certainly no punk, was going to force him against his will. Having a rattle to use, stalking his prey through shadowy alleys like a snake, seems somehow appropriate, but for him it would be a choice

Boss Mead has a suitable middle class education, but was never the sort to excel. His school years are a tabla rasa to me. I can imagine economics forcing him after graduation to make coin and requiring him to learn something simple to create it. Piano-man piano seems his speed. Easy. He's a chill and affable person. His one real talent makes it easy for others to find reasons to make him happy—let's call it charisma for now—and convincing someone to teach him to play piano in a restaurant or a lounge would have been easy for him. Piano-man piano is basically learning how to play the keys and read the music sufficiently to pick out the melody. Then, it's memorization, and it's practice. With an added level of learning how to play "fancy," things like multi-finger chords, rhythm, dynamics, and such—which could have been picked up by listening to his mentor play—Boss Mead could have learned the music easily and learned to reproduce it for hours with feeling, creating a night long ambience and fugue. Yes, I can see Boss Mead starring in a hazy bar, a red whiskey in a crystal glass over the rocks on a coaster, sitting beside a torchere candelabra, playing until late, and making his first contacts for subsequent shady deals. Not canon, yet.

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I am defining "a fight" as a physical altercation where someone wants to hurt you, not simply sparring. Verbal, emotional, or logical combat, including gaming or betting doesn't count as a fight, even if bankruptcy, being thrown in jail, or enslavement could result.

Most of the cast has fought, though Boss Mead may not have. He's a sweet talker. Surprisingly, Bolt attacks someone who hurt her friend, rather than running as she usually does. Shugh is a gentle man, but he did defend himself in school from bullies. It's a society where being trans is no big deal other than being rare, but there's always an idiot who can take offense at any thing, like breathing. Neither Night on Fire nor her sister Light Insight have fought, though the latter woman did get abused. The only one who's been a perfect pacifist is Blue's brainiac little sister. At only15, and a bit of a runt, she's as skilled as the devil-girl. She has avoided fighting by studying all the time, and by being reputed for blowing up buildings. Accidentally. Reputedly.

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To cackle: To sound like a bird, e.g. a cockatoo, whilst laughing.

Just did. Mistook a woman for a bird just now. So true.

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