Wherein a fascinating lecture is held (Ch. 4)

“And Dorean asked his companion, who by now was fed up with his nonsense, a simple question that had been nagging him for a while now. “But what will we really, you know, find once we reach the place? We don’t know anyone who’s made the trip. We’re only here by what must be Enneta’s blessing and Ghorino’s strength. And… I’m just starting to wonder whether we really know what our goal is.” He paused a bit then, for his companion was already shaking his head sadly. Dorean strained and sweated underneath his heavy pack, wishing for the comforting cold of his homeland. He tried to remember what he was asking his companion about… wait, his companion? Who? Dorean was alone on this quest. Alone, in the sweltering heat. Alone, in this strange songless land. A land far away from spirits and gods.”

 

Excerpt from partially burned scroll in Jennepet’s archive of northern stories, accurate as of 511 to the sacrifice of the first Pontiac.

 

“I’m well and truly tired of your constant bombardment. You’ve already caused untold damage to everyone and everything that’s good in the world. I’d expect slightly better of one of your stature, as meaningless as it might be. Still, the queen of the rats should be more dignified than any old gutter trash, no?”

 

“It’s not my fault that you’re the worst judge of character I’ve ever known. Your failures are almost poetic dear preacher. Like a ferret stuck in a trap, instead of relaxing your problems away your tear your way ever deeper into the spiky pits of ineptitude. I’m just… busy, thinking about what you’ve told me. Can it be helped that you’ve blundered in just the most spectacular way? It’s only natural to want to observe so fascinating a specimen.”

 

Chy blanched and shrank back a bit at this. The girl felt a pang of pity, and perhaps regret for her rebuke, for she picked up without letting the sting set in:

 

“You know what, let’s go back a bit. I think this reminds me of a structure, and it’s always useful to keep those in mind!”

 

Despite the friendliness inherent in this overture, Chy chose to seize on whatever negative aspect he could, as a hawk seizes the one live rat out of a mountain of carcasses.

 

“I can’t stand that about you. It’s not enough that you tear the empire and church apart, you treat everything as though it were part of a game of pattern recognition. But guess what? I don’t fit any of your damn patterns, and none of my prophecies do either. Because it’s real, and not some story.”

 

Despite these bold claims, Chy was not as uniquely unclassifiable as he imagined himself. And Opal could already point at a semblance of structure in his misadventures in the city of Tellyphill.  Even after his disastrous initial meeting.

 

Chy’s moment of clarity in the meeting hall had quickly dissipated. A moment in direct contact with the high and powerful of the city had put a spring back in his step, and a holy, fevered pitch back into his manner.

 

Not to say his meeting with the captain had done him much good. Bloodied and bruised, his dignity was somewhat marred when he put on his regular show of force. But the captain had believed him about his mission. That was not to say he was cooperative. He had begun by explaining that Tellyphill was in a rather delicate spot. There were charts and graphs. Maps and receipts. There was a long stream of complaints from concerned citizens. There was a river of diplomatic overtures from the neighboring kingdoms, city states, warlords, bandit kings, river barons, autocrats, technocrats, religious nutcases, and every shade of powerful or ambitious man in between. The captain had then delicately explained that despite the city’s obvious devotion to the prophet and her message, there was only so much he and his slavishly overworked underlings could process and achieve with their limited resources. Chy had of course seen right through this blatant and frankly insulting attempt to garner increased taxation rights from the church and had said as much. This had given the captain some pause. He strode over to his bookshelf and made as if he were looking for something. Chy, ever the student of theatrics, had let him complete whatever show he had felt was necessary. Chy understood only too well how much putting on a performance could help with confidence and presentation of important arguments. But he was surprised when the captain grabbed a book from a lower shelf, one buried beneath layers of dust and grime. A surprisingly fluid movement, the captain grabbed the book and opened it at a page near its end. Only then did Chy notice the fatness and age of the book. It must have been some repository of knowledge or bureaucracy, for the pages were the size of chopping blocks and their number could only be guessed. Guessing is a form of gambling, so Chy did not guess.

 

“The Wretch creeps at our southern border. It’s the last place where we still hold sway over the minor lordlings and holy pretenders. But it’s a delicate act, and I don’t know how much longer we can keep it up.”

 

Chy’s shadow loomed large in the stark white light of the wall. How did it work? The luminescence didn’t come from any source he could think of. The wall just seemed to… glow. This slightly disorienting feature of the study was yet another strange feature to Chy’s already staggering mind.

 

“We must pick our battles carefully, Sir DeFeu. Warlords of the central plains have been getting bolder this past decade. Soon, the smaller northern towns will have to pay them tribute as well. That is, unless we can somehow deter them. Show them that whatever little they may gain by squeezing the pathetic copper and sulfate mines pales in comparison to the retribution they’ll face. Tellyphill suffers much. I’m sure you can see that we’d never deign to anger our most loved and trusted of beneficiaries at so encumbered a time?”

 

Chy had not properly responded to this, which was all the more fun for Opal when she heard this. She struggled to hold back tears of laughter as she heard that Chy had somehow missed the insinuation. So raucous was her amusement that a guard rushed over, and he didn’t hesitate to make rather intimidating gestures. Opal summarily quieted down, and Chy settled down into a boiling resentment towards the creature that shared his cell. Finally, in a voice similar to that used to woo sweet unsuspecting children to their demise in a witch’s cauldron, he degraded himself to ask Opal as to her merriment.

 

“That was quite the laugh you had back there. We’re not so strict in our upbringing at Pontiac’s point to have all humor bleached of our personalities. Spare me a thought, and explain, as you marsh people so like to, what humorous structure you’ve divined from my action?”

 

She put a hand to her head and turned to stare at him. Then she flopped on her side, all mirth gone from her expression. In its stead, a warmly calculating look took over her face, as if she was pondering just the right way to arrange a particularly bountiful bouquet of wild flowers. But she wasn’t in her treetop home, surrounded by the lush beauty of the cultivated wildlife; she was in a dingy prison cell in a rotting carcass of a city, next to a man that considered her one of the primary antagonists of the world. And yet she felt all the happier about it.

 

Chy had grown uncomfortable with her quizzical observation of him, the moments of intense analyzing proving to be far too much for his constitution. Just as he was about to turn his attention back to the bumbling life outside the cell, Opal sat up from her slumped position, picked up a stick, and tapped the ground with it in the manner a teacher might tap the desk of the lazier kind of student. And in a flat cadence befitting such a teacher, she spoke up:

 

“Structures aren’t just meaningless concepts to throw around. That’s always been my view on the matter, outspoken as it is. You probably have some experience of someone not truly acquainted with our traditions trying to analyze some conversation or story using our methods. Well, rest assured that if they brought up more than two, perhaps three distinct structures, they’re being… overly enthusiastic let’s say.”

 

She was up on her feet, now, pacing. Her short stature somehow cast into the image of power. Chy couldn’t tell exactly why, but she carried herself in just the right way, making just the right sweeping gestures, as to seem intimidating instead of laughable. And she gained some momentum:

 

“A properly paced story, or even just one that has some sensible semblance of plot, will follow a main narrative structure. The journey, the calling, the conflict, the battle, the investigation, and similar variations are the main ones. It’s very difficult to tell a story that doesn’t fit one of these main structures in some way, though it’s been extensively studied at home. Probably in Worstone too, they have the luxury of such frivolities.”

 

Looking deeper into the decrepit cell, she stopped her monologue for a moment. The illusion she radiated seemed to lose some of its authoritative luster. But she quickly turned back to stare Chy right in the face.

 

“But that’s getting off track. You see, you can also find structure in smaller parts of the story. A character will probably have some associated structure: the fool, the lionheart, the friendly or hostile rival, the tragically fallen, the triumphantly ascendent, the wiseman, and many others. Unlike story structure, there’s a lot of possible variation here. But despite that, most of these possibilities are rarely seen, or at the very least there are some common groupings with some standard variations on them. The only context in which hearing about many structures and their interaction usually makes sense is here: how different kinds of characters tend to interact.”

 

And now she took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Chy was sat at his bunk, seemingly raptured by this lecture. But this attentiveness was not the eager drinking in of a student before a master that one might expect. Opal continued regardless.

 

“The last main sense in which using a structure makes sense is when looking at a scene. This is the one most applicable to situations in real life as some sort of practical analytical tool, but it does rely on the other two categories to fully make sense. A scene is nothing without its characters. A scene is nothing without the meat of a plot around it. But reality is as ever a cruel mistress, and we don’t get neat characters or neat plots. We barely get neat scenes if we’re being truly honest, but conversations are close enough; they have some clear begging, some sense of rising action that reaches a climax, and then some ending. Not quite the structure of every scene, but it’s also not quite the structure of every conversation, so close enough.”

 

Chy was planning on interrupting in some manner before considering the context. She had been going on for a bit with all this general background, not really getting around to his question. But he determined that interrupting would only further push her from the path towards enlightenment, so her kept his tongue to himself. A truly heroic victory, for next Opal reached the point of her long-winded introduction.

 

“With just the right amount of context, we can construct a reasonable sounding narrative around events. It’s probably at least partially false or oversimplified, but it’s something. So let’s take your recent escapade and analyze it. Let’s set the opening scene… you’re reaching the city. You’re a foreigner in a foreign land? No… you think you know where you are. And you feel… haughty? Yes, very haughty, quite high and mighty and better than this rabble and the audience is just begging for you to get knocked down a peg. Oh, this is quite fun, you’re loved to no love”

 

Emotion deep and true was coursing through the air. Chy’s initial skepticism swept up in the enthusiasm now animating Opal’s excited monologue. Not quite gone, but rather at that most distant edge a thought can be. He knew he was thinking something, knew there was a thought he was trying to hold onto, but what that thought was he was no longer too sure. The realization of this was yet to hit him, that disconnect feeding yet deeper into the fascination that now engulfed his mind.

 

“Yes, loved to no love. But who’s doing the loving here? We always must remember the relationship between the story and the reader. I’m the reader. You’re the story. Tellyphill’s shield is the story. They’re the ones with no love. I’m the one that loves. But they also love what you’ve stirred in them, don’t they? Don’t answer yet, don’t answer yet. They wish you were gone. But why? There’s deeper scheming here, but that does no good under this lens of structures. That’s what people miss! They think everything fits into structures! It doesn’t, damn them! If we took everything into account, we wouldn’t be doing anything special, would we? The whole idea is that we try to fit things into a pattern! We’re chopping off the ugliness, the randomness of reality!”

 

This assertion demanded more than just the stick waving and occasional tapping that had animated Opal up to this point: as she made that last remark, she spread her arms wide and cast her gaze heavenwards. She had also come to stand on the bunk that Chy was sitting on. In the elation of intellectual excitement, neither had noticed the physical distance slowly eroding along with the emotional distance. But Opal had yet to answer Chy’s original question, despite his nodding along. Opal may have noticed, for she began a digression.

 

“Well, what are we doing then? With just what you’ve told me, I’m going to analyze the behavior of everyone involved. The most important one is Illdo. Why was he set off by you? It’s because you’re the outsider here. This is a classic, a true classic: unification under threat. It goes like this: a group of enemies, perhaps friends in the past but now bitter from years of competition and grinding pressure, are confronted by an outside force. They may not love each other, but this outsider? He wants to change everything. And he’s wrong about everything! He doesn’t know what he’s talking about! He’s telling them the solution is simple when he doesn’t even know what the solution is! And the worst part? He’s in charge now, no consultation needed, no warning ahead of time. What are these people going to do? They’re going to fight, they’re going to sabotage the new boss, and they’re going to set aside their differences until he’s gone.”

 

The gleam in Opal’s eye shone so bright it could blind bats with a particular adeptness for the electromagnetic spectrum. Chy too was standing and pacing now, circling Opal just as she now circled him. A silent partner in the rush, an audience so receptive was just what Opal needed for this performance.

 

“And the new guy? He just doesn’t get it. He’s stuck imaging himself as someone else, someplace, somewhen else. He’s just completely off. Oh it’s… it’s just so perfect. Do you see why I’m so excited about you? About your misadventures? You’re a walking caricature. You fit the slot. Perfectly.”

 

This finally said, Opal permitted herself to sink into a slump. Chy was dumbstruck.

 

But not so much that he had lost his tongue. “I… Wow. True wisdom truly was given to women.” Opal pushed long hair behind her ears as she basked in this praise. Obviously pleased with herself, she attempted to sit with majestic dignity. Her stature finally failed her, and it came off as comical; the spell had been broken. She was not a wisewomen in a world defining library. She was just a disheveled scrap of a woman lying on a thin sheet in a dingy dungeon.

 

“Just… why were you laughing about my later encounter then? I don’t think that really fits that structure. And you said that mixing and matching scene structures isn’t the way to do things, so…?”

 

Now opal looked upwards at the still enraptured Chy. The look she gave him seemed condescending in a way he couldn’t quite pin down, the visceral first reaction he had towards her slowly bubbling back through his rapidly fading awe and excitement.

 

“What? Oh no, unification under threat is more of a… well it’s a thematic structure but… well it’s more complicated to say the least. It’s more of a story structure than a scene structure. You see-“

“Yes okay, but why did you laugh?”

 

Now Opal was reminded of her initial impression of Chy. She laughed again, the sound true and youthful as opposed to the casual scorn Chy expected.

 

“Why did I laugh? Look at a damn map! I think you’ll find it quite funny yourself.”

 

The dance of power and politics has always been delicate. Many times have kings and priests feuded over resources, over respect, over influence. Looking back over maps and diagrams, it’s easy to convince oneself that the game was a strategic and calculated one. And there would indeed come a day where such calculations were made. But those days had not yet come. The miscalculation that day was even more catastrophic than realized.