…or, The Urge To Herbal
Wednesday morning, Missy seemed cheerful at breakfast. She reminded me to ask Iason if he wanted to come to lunch, but didn’t say anything about what we’d done the night before.
After breakfast, I made it over to West Campus in good time, and decided to have a quick smoke on Wexler Hall’s wraparound porch. There were No Smoking signs in the area around the door, but a big extended area at one corner of the building had ashtrays.
It was a sunny day, but it had rained during the night and the area was fragrant with the scent of wet vegetation and a sweet heady smell that I couldn’t place. The picnic tables nearest to the porch railing had wet benches, but the one in the center was dry.
“Alright there, Bowman?” Professor Bryony said, surprising me. I looked up to see her sitting on the wide porch railing, leaned up against a support post. Wisps of blue smoke curled up off her lit pipe.
“Uh, just fine, Professor,” I said, not sure what she was asking. “How’re you?”
“Just fine, thank you. I think we should have a good session in field herbalism,” she said. “It’s a nice enough day for it.”
“Yeah.”
“Don’t know if it’s my place, but I think you have a couple of admirers,” she said. “Don’t know why my classes always get the fancy lads. No offense meant.”
“None taken,” I said. “Though, I don’t really think of myself as, uh, ‘fancy’.”
“Well, whatever you tallfolks call it, then,” she said with a shrug. “Morning, Miss Honey!”
The burrow gnome from basic herbalism had evidently snuck onto the porch while we were talking.
“Hello, Professor Swain!” she said cheerily. “How are you?”
“Just fine, Miss Honey,” the professor said. “How’s your own self?”
“I’m doing lovely, thank you,” Honey said.
“I wanted to ask, if I saw you outside of class, if you’re any relation to poor Johanna Calloway,” the professor said. “I saw her singing once, and I thought I saw a bit of a resemblance.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Honey said. “She was my auntie, ma’am.”
“Oh, did she pass away? I’m sorry to hear that. It’s been ten years or more since I’ve been through that shire,” she said. “But everyone knows the Calloways, all up and down the river.”
“Oh, are you river folk?” Honey asked. The scorn in her voice surprised me. I guessed “river folk” meant something beyond “folk who live by the river.”
“Sure am not,” Bryony said. “But that’s how word spreads, isn’t it? Up and down the river. She married a riverman, didn’t she?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“First sign of madness, that,” Bryony said. She gave a chuckle, then immediately put a hand to her mouth. “Oh, pardon me. Shouldn’t be speaking ill.” She hefted her pipe. “This blend makes me a little stupid, sometimes.”
“It’s alright,” Honey said. “We all said it at the time, too.”
I coughed into my hand and shifted on my seat. I didn’t understand what they were talking about, but it seemed personal. I thought about getting up and leaving, but that might have just caused further embarrassment. Also, I hadn’t finished my cigarette.
“Professor, I’m not sure we should be talking about this,” Honey said, eyeing me.
“Oh, it’s alright. Lads like him know how to be discreet,” the professor said, with a wave of her pipe. “Seems like it’s been a bad stretch of years for your kin. First poor Johanna, and then there was that terrible business, with the barn.” She paused and took a puff on her pipe. “That poor man.”
Honey looked as uncomfortable as I felt.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” Bryony said. “I wasn’t thinking. That Heather Calloway must be your cousin. If you see her, tell her she’s in my prayers. Your whole family is.”
“Er, I will,” Honey said. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Professor Bryony abruptly stowed her still-lit pipe inside her jacket, then turned and swung her bare feet around to dangle them off the railing.
“Give us a hand, Mr. Bowman?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure if she was asking me to lift her down, but I said “Sure,” and came over. She held out a hand, and when I took it, she swung herself down.
“I hope I didn’t upset you,” she said to Honey. She reached into her jacket and pulled out a paper bag and offered it to her. “Have a ginger biscuit.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” Honey said, accepting a cookie from the sack.
“Mr. Bowman?” Bryony said, holding the bag to me.
“No, thanks,” I said.
“Alright, then,” she said. “Well, it’s getting on towards class time. Mind you finish that before you go in, Miss Honey. I don’t have enough of those for everybody.”
She did have enough loganberry tarts for everybody, since we spent the first half of the class in a lecture on ways to recognize and evoke the natural properties of herbs.
“When you deal with a herb in its natural state,” she explained, “only its very strongest properties are going to be useful. For instance, a herb that’s deadly poison might also be good for heart ailments, but you wouldn’t want to just give it to somebody to chew on. Question?”
“Yes, Professor,” a girl said, lowering her hand. “Do we need to be learning about heart ailments in this class?”
“Well, the subject here is useful herbs,” Bryony said. “So, yes.”
“But aren’t healing herbs a little outdated?”
“Well, there are certainly more options these days,” the professor said. “But if somebody has a bum heart, divine healing’s not going to do anything for them until they have an attack. The right blend of herbs can help even things out so they never have one, or if they do, keep them alive until they can get help. Most folks who know they have heart problems carry something for emergencies. Sometimes it’s a potion or healing device, and sometimes it’s a herb.
“Herbs and herbal preparations are cheaper than alchemical potions, and are easier to pack up and carry with you than the divine protection of the Nine, or your Lord Khersis or what have you. Out in the country, everyone has a little cache of useful herbal products, and more than a few folks know how to find the most useful plants in an emergency. On the subject of potions, more than a few alchemists use herbs as a base in their work, too.”
She made sure that everybody had finished their tartlets and had enough tea before she had us get out our herb trays and started handing out beakers of alcohol from a tray on her desk. She took one of these for herself, and took a swig of it before she explained how we were going to use the dried dandelion to make a digestive aid.
“Don’t drop anything into your jar just yet,” she said. “The spirits can draw out the properties of the herbs, but in this case we need to focus on the properties we want. Dandelions can do all sorts of things, but in this case it’s only two things we’re interested in: settling the stomach and making you have to go to the loo. So, pick your flower up and hold it. Feel it in your hands. Look at it. Close your eyes and smell it. Taste a little bit of it. If you open your mind to the herb, it should start to tell you about itself. Try to focus on those feelings: a nice, calm stomach and a powerful need to relieve yourself. If you get a whiff of general healthfulness, take hold of that, too.”
She went around the classroom sipping from her jar as we worked with our herbs. I picked up my dried dandelion and looked at it, turning it over in my hands. Just touching it and looking at it didn’t do anything for me. I held it with both hands, each end between a forefinger and thumb. I closed my eyes, and felt an electric shock as information slammed into my brain. I cried out and dropped the dried flower.
Louis jumped in surprise, knocking the table and rattling our jars and trays.
“Steady there, Mr. Bowman,” Bryony said. “These are dandelions, not snapdragons.”
“Sorry,” I said. “It was just a little overwhelming.”
“You do much magic before?” she asked.
“No,” I said, shaking my head. “This is my first class doing any.”
“Right,” she said. “Well, before you pick it back up, take a few deep breaths and concentrate. You might need to gather your energy up inside you before you open yourself to something else’s energy, or it can slam right into you.”
“Okay,” I said.
I closed my eyes and breathed deeply, trying to feel my own energy. We’d done some very basic energy manipulations in a half-semester unit for college-bound seniors, but I hadn’t kept the exercises up over the summer. It took me about five minutes before I was sure I had it. My skin was starting to tingle, especially my hands, and I could feel a gentle pressure inside my head.
This time, I felt a crackle as soon as I touched the dandelion. The connection was immediate, but less overpowering. It came through as a jumble of feelings. I focused on the ones Professor Bryony had specified: a full bladder and a calm stomach.
“Right,” she said. “It looks as though most of you have got it. Now, make sure you concentrate on what you are doing, and when I’m done speaking, put the dandelion physically into your jar while pushing those feelings through it into the liquid. Got that? You want to take it slowly and gently on the physical side, while being forceful and focused on the mental. You may see a change in color or some other reaction. That’s normal. Everybody got that? Right. Let’s get to it.”
I tuned out the rest of the room as I focused on the dried plant in my hand and the jar on the desk. I held it by the stem and lowered the other end through the mouth of the jar. The head of the flower contacted the surface of the liquid and I felt a jolt run up my arm. I pushed back against that flow, forcing my own energy down through the flower and into the liquid. Before more than the tip had been submerged, a pleasing caramel color began to ripple out through the clear fluid. The alcohol itself was motionless, but the color swirled around inside it.
I kept hold of the stem until my fingers were almost in the alcohol, and then I let go. As soon as I released it, the swirling discoloration vanished.
Did that mean the effect had been undone?
“Professor?” I said politely, staring at my jar.
“Yes, Mr. Bowman?” she asked, toddling over.
“It changed back,” I said. “The color. Is that okay?”
“Perfectly,” she said. “It shouldn’t actually change color, unless a bit leaches out of the plant. You were just seeing the herb’s essence mingling around, that’s all. Some people see that as a color. What color was it?”
“Uh, brown.”
“A nice brown or an ugly brown?”
“A nice one,” I said.
“That’s good, then,” she said. “You’ll learn how to read such things over time, but if you like what you see, take it as a good sign.”
“Fucking Khersis!” somebody yelled at the back of the classroom, as the alcohol from his jar erupted up out of it, spraying half of the contents in his face.
“I told you to go slow, Mr. MacDonald,” Professor Bryony said. “You can leave early to wash up, so your other teachers don’t think you’ve been drinking, but I’m going to have to dock you a snack on Friday, for swearing.”
MacDonald glowered as he gathered his things up and headed to the door. Professor Bryony waited until he was gone before she spoke again.
“Right,” she said. “What he did wrong: if you put the herb in slowly, it draws the energy transfer out over time. If you shove it in, it all hits at once. With a common dandelion, you’re not going to get anything worse than a faceful. With more powerful or volatile herbs, well, there’s a reason we started with the dandelion instead of the vervain.”
She had us put the top on our jars with the dandelion still in them and write our names on the lids.
“I’ll be evaluating these tomorrow,” she said. “So I can tell you how you did on Friday. You generally want to wait at least a night to see how the solution turns out. More energy can speed up the reaction, but you have to be careful about that.”
The professor took two more unopened jars down off the counter and slipped them inside her jacket. They didn’t make a bulge. I happened to notice that Honey also took one of the extra jars when she turned hers in, only because I almost tripped over her as she was slipping it into her bag.
“Oh!” she said. “Excuse me.”
“Sorry,” I said.
I didn’t mention it to the professor, because I wasn’t a snitch and because apparently Calloways couldn’t do anything wrong in her book. I did stick around as the rest of the class left.
“Need help with anything today, Professor?” I asked once we were alone.
“No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t have anything to carry this time but this,” she said, picking up a small canvas folding chair. “Though, you can walk me down to the shack if you feel like it.”
“Alright,” I said.
She pulled her lit pipe out once we left Wexler, so I had another cigarette.
“So, are the Calloways a family?” I asked her.
“Callaway,” she corrected. “Yes, they’re a great old family. Good people. Very respected.”
“And what exactly is in those jars?” I asked.
“Well, it used to be brandy,” she said. “But they told me I couldn’t use that anymore, since this is a dry campus. So, now I use vodka.”
“Ah,” I said.
It was a short walk, but we were meeting outside, so I didn’t have to put my cigarette out immediately. I did when the other students started to show up. Iason was the last one to arrive. I went to say hi, but he turned away and totally avoided my eye. I would have asked him what the fuck was up with him, but Professor Bryony had us head out immediately. We went right to the first large clearing and got down to business.
“Right,” she said. “We don’t have a whole lot of time, so we’re going to get right to it. I want you to pair off and pick a five foot square of the ground to cover, one that has plenty of plants. I want you to use your field guides to catalogue everything in it, and then meet back here in the middle with a sample of something you think is interesting and useful, which we’ll discuss as a group. Try not to take more than half an hour cataloguing. Twenty minutes is better. We don’t have nearly enough time for this class.”
Despite having ignored me on the way over, Iason immediately headed towards me.
“Mr. Bowman, why don’t you work with Ms. Andrews?” Bryony said before he reached me, indicating Kira with a nod of her head. She ignored Iason’s scowl. Thomas Zachary—Zach—stepped up to partner with him instead.
“Hi,” I said, approaching Kira.
“Hello,” she said. There was no sign that she recognized me from anywhere but the class. “Where would you like to go?”
“Anywhere’s fine.”
We picked out a patch that included some tall flowering weeds. She kept her head to the ground and didn’t speak, except to say the name of a plant as she identified it, and to tell me to slow down and speak up when I IDed one. I tried to engage her in conversation, mentioning that we were on the same floor in Pelinor.
“Are we?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m only two doors away from you, on the corner.”
“That’s interesting,” she said in a tone that indicated she was lying.
She was sweating badly, and kept brushing her hair out of her eyes, which were squinted almost closed. Finally she dug around in her pack until she found a bandanna, a visor, and a pair of sunglasses. She tied back her shiny black hair with the bandanna and then put on the other two items.
“Light bothering you?” I asked.
“It’s a very bright day,” she said. From the way she said it, this was code for “fuck off and die.”
“Yeah,” I said.
It was clear and blue, but the sun wasn’t even above the treetops. I could see why Bryony might not want Iason with me, if she’d been paying attention on Monday, but I’d have to make a point to ask her not to put me with Kira. It would probably be most polite to just tell her that I wouldn’t pair up with Iason and see if she’d let me pick my own partner.
The professor kept us in the clearing until the end of class, after making sure that everybody knew the way back. Iason came striding over to me as soon as she’d packed up her folding chair and headed back towards the path. He’d taken off his shirt and tied it around his waist, exposing his chiseled alabaster chest and his intricate blue tattoos.
“What a little pest,” he said of the professor, his eyes following her.
“She’s not bad,” I said. “She just didn’t want us messing around during her class.”
“Well, we’re out of class,” he said. “Would you like to mess around?”
“Why were you ignoring me at the shed?”
“Would you like to mess around?”
“I asked why you were ignoring me,” I said.
“Was I?” he asked, cocking an eyebrow.
“You were,” I said.
“I wanted to see if you would pout,” he said.
“I guess you were disappointed, then,” I said.
“Was I?”
“I’m going to lunch,” I said. “Do you want to come?”
“Always.”
ook
“It’s a very bright day,” she said. From the way she said it, this was code for “fuck off and die.”
…ouch, harsh.
Love the title.
Wonder how far up this one is gonna be.
“Well, it used to be brandy,” she said. “But they told me I couldn’t use that anymore, since this is a dry campus. So, now I use vodka.”
great line
ARG! I’ve turned into a refresh monkey! MOOK
Seems like Jamie has some magical potential with herbs! I like how that teacher thinks. Also, I want to know why Honey took that jar of liquor.
“Professor Bryony abruptly stowed her still-lit pipe inside her jacket, then turned and swung her bare feet around to dangle them off the”
Looks like an object was left off there – probably the porch railing that the good Professor was sitting on.
“Herbs and herbal preparations are cheaper than alchemical potions, and are easier to pack up and carry with you than the divine protection of the Nine, or your Lord Khersis or what have you.”
By the Nine Divine!
Oblivion ftw!
Great chapter, as always.
I suppose she means digitalis.
I guess this pretty much makes it official; Kira is part under elf. Doesn’t really mean anything, to us anyway. I wonder what her perspective on the whole Dee issue will be, whether she has one, and what her opinion of subterranean elves is.
Missing text ~ Professor Bryony abruptly stowed her still-lit pipe inside her jacket, then turned and swung her bare feet around to dangle them off the
Missing quotation marks? ~ “No, thank you,” she said. “I don’t have anything to carry this time but this,” she said, picking up a small canvas folding chair. Though, you can walk me down to the shack if you feel like it.”
couple of typos
it’s a herb.
should be, it’s an herb.
so I didn’t have to put my cigarette immediately.
should be, so I didn’t have to put OUT my cigarette immediately. Or some variation of that type. just missing the word OUT somewhere.
I seriously love the herbalism classes! Professor Bryony is a hoot and I can’t wait for things to pan out more between Jamie and Iason.
Thanks for another great chapter AE. And thanks doubly much for MOAR MU! I love getting to see the world from another perspective and I’m starting to love Jamie almost more than I love Mack and all her cohorst (except for Steff, Steff might always be my first love!)
Yay, more class details!
yay for magical electric shocks?
“Professor Bryony abruptly stowed her still-lit pipe inside her jacket, then turned and swung her bare feet around to dangle them off the
“Give us a hand, Mr. Bowman?” she asked. ”
Is something missing after “the” in that first paragraph?
@amber: “A herb” is correct if you’re pronouncing the aitch.
Bad Honey. That’s a very bad Honey! You’re supposed to be sober now!
Also:
“Just fine, thank you. I think We should have a good session in field herbalism,”
“We” should be lowercase, there, unless the Professor’s into BDSM and subscribes to that stupid “W/we T/talk L/like T/this” bullshit.
Type-o
I doubt you meant for that we to be capitalized.
@2 I wonder if she is a)hungover, b)sensitive to light because of subterranean heritage c) just pissed off by the amount of noise coming from his room or d)other.
@3 I enjoyed that line immensley as weel, enough so that I stopped reading to go tell someone else about it.
The more I see of her the more I like prof Bryony, and the more I see of him the less I like Iason.
@18 – Yeah… someone needs to punch Iason in the face. Preferably Jamie, Missy, and Marlot all at the same time. With a brick. On fire.
He’s turning into MOARMU’s version of Puddy – abusive, manipulative, and over-sexed :p
Just have to agree with several above: Iason hasn’t redeemed himself a bit in my eyes. Which is why I dislike his character but appreciate the story element he presents. And prof. Bryony is a hoot.
It’d be interesting to learn a little bit more about Kira – seems pretty certain she’s got subterranean elf blood giving her the skin colour, not Pelagian blood, and I’d like to get a view on their traditions, culture and people from a perspective other than the noblewoman point of view we get from Dee.
“Oh, I’m terribly sorry,” Bryony said. “I wasn’t thinking. That Heather Calloway must be your cousin. If you see her, tell her she’s in my prayers. Your whole family is.”
“Er, I will,” Honey said. “Thank you, ma’am.”
isn’t Honey really Heather Calloway? in the ToMU bonus story “apples in spring” wasn’t she called Heather throughout the entire thing but tagged as Honey at the bottom? *runs off to check*
It would appear that
Bryony is not above
Some
verbalherbal abuseHeather Callaway
Was a little barn-burner
In more ways than one
Loganberry tarts
Help offset the subsequent
Dandelion whine
@21 I checked, and yes, Heather is Honey. Apparently she is trying to escape her notoriety as a criminal(with the presumption of barn-burner leading to a death, given the text of this story). Her criminal record has been mentioned, just not what it contains. It is also possible that AE made a mistake and inserted the wrong gnome gname.
I like Iason okay, but I definitely think that someone needs to smack some sense into him, especially after the incident over in ToMU.
“It shouldn’t actually change color, unless a bit leeches out of the plant.”
Not 100% sure, but I believe the word you want in this case is “leaches” – and I want to grow up to be Prof. Bryony!!! (Heck, I’ve almost got the physical resemblance down already..) Great stuff.
” suryn said…
“Well, it used to be brandy,” she said. “But they told me I couldn’t use that anymore, since this is a dry campus. So, now I use vodka.”
great line”
I agree compleatly. Almost fell out fo my chair laughing. I just wonder what it was she had in her pipe. Hmmm. . .
Another great chapter, as always. And I love Prof. Bryony (now I hope some of my profs’ll be just as intresting and informative
)
I can’t figure out why, but for some reason I’m waiting for this update even more anxiously than I do the Original ToMU…maybe because it’s so new? At any rate, it’s excellent!
@19 – I don’t see Iason as being quite the same as Puddy (regardless of whether or not his character is likable), mostly because I think Jamie can look after himself in a way that Mack simply couldn’t. So, while Puddy was purposefully taking advantage of Mack, Iason is… just looking for fun with a pretty boy? And Jamie seems pretty willing to go along with that, if a little miffed overall.
@23 – No, Lexy didn’t make a naming mistake there. “Honey” is the same person as “Heather”, which explains why she looked so uncomfortable when Bryony mentioned the incident.
Hg
Hmmm, I like the ordinary-day episodes when there is so much wonderful subtext. Heather/Honey and her “um yeah, if I see her…” snerk- like next time she’s in front of mirror perhaps? I wonder though if this isn’t deliberate by Byrony? Like maybe she’s pretending to be high and absent-minded to see if Honey will own up to who she is? Byrony is her professor, and surely has a class list, or did Heather take some sort of plea-bargin that included a name-change to protect the guilty-er-innocent?
Kira could be underelf-blooded or not… we don’t know if they interbreed. With some of the things Dee has said and their views on reproduction being such a sacred thing I’d somehow suspect not. Even with the known quantity of elf-hormones and stamina, we also know they are all into anal except when deliberatly and knowingly trying to procreate. So even if it were hypothetical rape of soldiers on humans or other elves it would probly be still anal. The only way I could really see it happening(given the culteral background we’ve been given) is a lower class male who was exiled or run off for the surface saying a great big “Fuck You!” to all his heritage and ran around impregnating everything he get his hands on. Can’t wait to find out.
Iason is one of those pricks who confuses having one with being one. He has obviously had far to many of his 30-odd years of life full of horny boys telling him he is like totally the god of sex yo! and has let it all go to his head(both of them in fact). Though I still hold by my statement in TruMU that Iason at the dance is/was/will be drunk off his ass. We know he speaks better Pax than that, and sure he is arrogant and condescending but not crude that we’ve seen. And yeah he thinks he’s so funny… but so far he has been(funny in an assholish way, but still funny) and to laugh at such a lame joke- that he himself made- to me that spells D-R-U-U-N-K-E! But I shall wait to see if he develops any character or if he’s just a fuck-head.
And of course, OOOOook!
I have to admit, the whole “a herb” thing threw me for a minute too. I’m much more used to it being pronounced “an erb” rather than “a herb”. I picked up on it after a couple seconds though. I’m loving these herbalism classes, they totally rock. I want to take one
As much as I don’t like Iason he’s no Puddy. And I find quite strange that people keep looking for one (a Puddy) especially when AE has shown that she is way more creative then that.
OOK!
I have to say, I am enjoying Iason’s presence. He’s so delightfully cheesy and arrogant and his one-liners make him hard to hate, for me at least. Sure he’s an arrogant, self-centered, selfish tool, but he seems like an inoffensive one.
Can’t wait to see more cameos and crossovers between MUs.
*sigh*
I suppose it’s too much to ask to have genuinely likable characters.
Which, really, is a testament to how realistically they are written, because I generally don’t like actual people either. =/
I was thinking maybe Kira was part vampire or something. She has black hair, and I can’t remember her skin color, but I don’t think it was that dark? Was it? Just a wild guess. Iason is really interesting. I
m looking forward to learning about his and Jamie’s relationship especially after reading the latest chapter in ToMU. He seems really manipulative.
Iason perhaps at this point fills the ‘role’ of Puddy in that he’s a pushy ‘love-interest’ of the main character who has difficulty with the concept of No. Other than that the Iason-Jamie dynamic differs quite a bit from the Puddy-Mackenzie one. From ToMU it seems Iason and Jamie seem to stick with each other for awhile despute Iason’s behaviour, whereas Mack dumped Puddy first chance she got when she realized it was an option. Mack clung to Puddy for emotional reasons untill she realized she didn’t need Puddy for that anymore, Jamie…? I dunno, I guess he puts-up with Iason for the hot elven buttsechs.
Also, Iason knows full-well what he is and who he is.. he just takes it to the ultimate extreme. Puddy is borderline delusional psychotic.
Hmmm, Lunch is certainly going to be interesting..
Iason’s stunt with the ‘shuuuuuun..’ at the begining of class seems to have been butch stag-rider dominance posturing, trying to elicit a, “OMG, he’s snubbing me! Oh Noes, Oh Woe, Oh Angst! [/wrist]” reaction.. but Jaime’s reaction was more like, “Dude, WTF?” But Missy wanted him to invite Iason to Lunch, which must be sending signals to Iason of, “Yes, got ‘em!”
Wow, Iason at the end is kind of obnoxious with his double entendres.
At first I thought the teach split him and Jamie up so there wouldn’t be two elflings together, to try and spread out the advantage, since Kira’s passing as human. Speaking of which, what could she be…what creatures are sensitive to light and stereotypically have black hair (may or may not be relevant). At first I was thinking dark elf, and isn’t her skin on the darker side? That’s probably it since I don’t think vampires are in this universe, heh.
Yeah, what I meant was not that Iason was treating Jamie like Puddy treated Mackenzie, but that he was similar in some ways, and probably *would* treat Jamie like that… if Jamie was as spineless as Mackenzie was at first.
MOOK!
i really don’t like iason….but i loved seeing him and ian in mu…
Hmmm…I think Prof Byrony is now my favorite character in the MUniverse, with Jamie at second and Dee at a very close third. Sadly, Amaranth is so far down the list that I think there’s empty spaces ahead of her.
I kinda wonder what Byrony was smoking…
I’ll just speak as the minority and say I haven’t found out enough about Iason to dislike him, I rather like him still. In fact, I see most of his behavior as honest to the point where it upsets societal niceties a bit. But I have always valued honesty, even when outlandish and teasing, over manners and politeness. Yes, it’s aggravating to deal with, but if it were on my own preferred scale of “best behaviors” to “worst behaviors,” I would place his behavior on the “better behaviors” end (You know, as in good, better, best!).
Of course, I don’t like his behavior in the original MU right now, but I’m waiting to see it from another perspective, and while I’m waiting, I don’t think about it much when reading _this_ story.
@ Cenge
Add me to the minority. I think Iason is fantastic so far!
…although I’m striking “Crossings” from canon. XD
I sincerely dislike Iason, and I hope he is messily eaten by something or other. Maybe and Otyugh.
Just a minor punctuation issue in the section:
“Well, there are certainly more options these days,” the professor said. “But if somebody has a bum heart, divine healing’s not going to do anything for them until they have an attack. The right blend of herbs can help even things out so they never have one, or if they do, keep them alive until they can get help. Most folks who know they have heart problems carry something for emergencies. Sometimes it’s a potion or healing device, and sometimes it’s a herb.
A ” at the end seems to be missing.
I’m betting my chips on Jamie being right about Kira’s heritage.
I LOVE this little bit of background on Honey. I also think it’s pretty clear that she’s really Heather.
I mean, remember in the main story, when Mack jokingly asked if she’s hiding from the police, and Two responded seriously that they know where she is, she writes home regularly.
I wonder if this isn’t a sign that she’s slowly, quietly fallen off the wagon. Maybe since that party in Underhome? Mack’s proven that that mead’s strong stuff.