…or, Friendly Conversation
Thirty minutes seemed like enough time for Violet to come back down a little and get her shirt back on. It also gave Marlot time to hunt me up for dinner. She took the news that I’d invited friends along better than I’d expected. I suspected she didn’t think much of Barley.
There wasn’t time for much of a game, so we built a house of cards while we waited.
“Think we’ll be able to get them to play?” Marlot asked.
“I have a feeling we wouldn’t be able to take them for much,” I said. “Anyway, do you want to play cards with a telepath?”
“I want to play cards with somebody,” Marlot said. “Supposedly there’s a huge floating cups game somewhere on campus, but it’s sure as heck not here.”
“Freshmen dorm,” I said. “How many kids played cards in high school? I bet we’d get more takers on the other floors.”
Violet announced her arrival with a knock on the open door. She brushed a purple-tinted lock out of her face and ducked her head as she stepped through the threshold, like she thought she would bump it on the top of the frame. She was carrying a rectangular red fabric lunchbox with rainbows on the sides.
“What’s up?” she said. She’d put on a slinky purple turtleneck with ribbed sleeves that swallowed most of her hands.
“Hey,” I said. “Have you guys met?”
“We’ve bumped into each other,” Marlot said. “I like your hair.”
“Thanks,” Violet said. “I like your leg. Hat. I like your hat.”
“Yeah, it’s my favorite leg hat,” Marlot said.
“Where’s Barley?” I asked.
“She’s just disposing of some evidence,” Violet said. “You wouldn’t believe how she can smuggle beer.”
“I’m sure she’s the life of the party,” Marlot said. “Talking of smuggling, you aren’t planning on sneaking your own food into the food court? Because that’s a hanging crime around these parts.”
“Oh, yeah, I don’t eat anything that’s been magically or alchemically processed,” Violet said.
“So that was certified organic, all-natural beer?” I asked.
“Darn skippy,” Violet said. “The way Mama Kh intended it. Actually, I used to not eat anything that had to be killed to be harvested, but that was just too hard to keep up.”
“What does that leave you, anyway?” I asked.
“Seeds, fruit,” she said. “Some leaves, though I kept going back and forth about those.”
“You could still eat milk and eggs under that definition,” Marlot pointed out. “Actually, you could eat meat, too, as long as you had a very understanding cleric standing by.”
“Oh, no way,” Violet said, shaking her head. “I haven’t eaten meat since third grade.”
“Is that a telepath thing?” I asked.
“It’s a me thing,” Violet said. “Our school was kind of rural, and we had a field trip to a slaughterhouse. Most people would just block that kind of thing out, but I’ve never been big on that kind of thing. I don’t like walls. Never have. In fact, when I graduate and make a little money, I’m going to buy a big patch of land out in the middle of nowhere where it’s cheap, and make a house with no walls.”
“Just a floor and ceiling?” I asked.
“No ceiling,” she said. “Maybe a floor.”
“So, you’re going to have a patio in the middle of nowhere,” I said.
“The way I figure it, you get a modern house built and it’s going to have all these spells layered onto it to keep pests out and the weather off anyway, right?” she said. “So why not skip the walls and just have the spells?”
“What about privacy?” I asked her. I remembered who I was talking to, so I added. “Security?”
“Middle of nowhere,” Violet said. “It doesn’t get more secure and private than that.”
“If I lived in the middle of nowhere, I’d want big stone walls,” Marlot said. “Actually, I kind of want those, anyway.”
“Like a prison,” Violet said.
“Like a fortress,” Marlot said. “Maybe I’ll be an old school-style wizard, with a big old stone tower.”
“Rock,” Violet said.
“You can sit down, you know,” I said, gesturing to the empty couch.
“Thanks,” she said. She sat down on the floor beside our card house.
“So, you’d really live in the middle of a bunch of defensive spells, without a real house?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” she said. “Maybe get some friends together to help share expenses. We’ll either do it here or in one of the desert provinces, somewhere that still has more land than laws. Just set up our own little society.”
“Yeah, and you’d see how much good your own society does when you get raided by bandits,” Marlot said.
“She’s cheery,” Violet said to me.
“She’s Marlot,” I said, and shrugged. Violet’s plan sounded like the smokiest of pipe dreams to me, but I didn’t see any need to piss all over it.
“Is it true that telepaths don’t lie?” Marlot asked. The way she said it, I knew she knew it wasn’t. She was just tweaking Violet the way she tweaked me about my elveness.
“That’s a lie made up by telepaths,” she said. She shrugged. “I’m maybe more honest about what I’m thinking, but only because I have to stop and think to even realize other people don’t already know it. It’s absolutely insane to me that I can be sitting there in the middle of class thinking up the weirdest shit in the world, and nobody knows it but me.”
“What kind of thing do you think about in class?” Marlot asked.
“Oh, anything, really,” Violet said. “Sometimes I imagine the building’s on fire or under an orc attack and I plan out my escape route. Other times I figure out how I would assassinate the teacher and then work out an escape route.”
“Sounds like there’s a whole lot of escaping going on,” Marlot said.
“You never heard of escapism?” Violet asked.
“Touche,” Marlot said, and she grinned. Violet had won a point of approval from Marlot.
“Oh, here comes Barley,” Violet said. Seconds later, Barley stumbled into sight. She was still wearing Violet’s bra, and a scarf. She was out of breath.
“So many stairs,” she said. “I’m never going to get used to stairs, no matter how long I spend indoors.”
“You should come live with me,” Violet said. “My house won’t have any stairs.”
“You guys all ready to go, then?” I asked.
They nodded. I grabbed my keys and we set out.
“Anybody mind if I smoke?” I asked once we were outside. Nobody did. I realized that Violet already had a cigarette lit.
“So, Violet told me you got turned into a deer, James,” Barley said. “Is that true?”
“Of course it’s true,” Marlot said. “Telepaths never lie. They can’t. Don’t you even know that?”
“Well, of course I do!” Barley said. “I just wasn’t sure she’d heard right.”
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “It’s an elven thing, apparently.” I held up my wrist with the stag bracelet on it. “It’s not a big deal, really.”
“Try telling that to Amaranth,” Barley said. “She’d have a lot of fun with that, let me tell you.”
“Do you have to tell us?” Marlot asked.
“Yeah, come on,” I said. “Enough about Amaranth. She doesn’t matter.”
“She doesn’t,” Barley agreed. “So, that was what you were talking about this morning that you didn’t want to get into?”
“Yeah,” I said. I gave Violet a look. “It was.”
“Sorry,” Violet said. “I didn’t know that was a secret.”
“Didn’t pick that up?”
“Hey, I’m not always eavesdropping on your room, every single second that you’re in there,” she said. “I do have other interests. The sun doesn’t revolve around you and you alone, you know.”
“Well, since we all know about it,” Marlot said. “Who thinks he’s crazy for not dumping the guy?”
“It does seem like a pretty big breach of your personal body autonomy, James,” Barley said.
“Body, shmody,” Violet said. “What’s in a body? If I could turn into a bird, I totally would.”
“But there’s a difference between turning into something and being turned into it,” Marlot said.
“There can be,” Violet said. “But if somebody came along and turned me into a bird, I’d totally thank them, anyway.”
“No, you wouldn’t,” Marlot said. “Because you’d be a bird.”
“I could be a mynah bird or a raven,” Violet said. “Or a crow.”
“I don’t think crows can talk,” I said.
“No, they totally can,” Violet said. “My high school had crows for a mascot, and so there was a flock of them that hung out on campus. The janitor taught them to swear at people and then laugh evilly.”
“Murder,” I said.
“What?” Violet asked.
“A group of crows is called a murder,” I said.
“Unless they have a really good lawyer, who can bargain them down to manslaughter,” Marlot said.
“Anyway, there are flocks of intelligent crows in the woods, and they didn’t seem to know any language besides crow-ish,” I said.
“Are you calling me a liar?” Violet asked.
“No, I’m saying in my opinion, under ordinary circumstances, crows can’t talk,” I said. “Maybe they were ravens, or maybe they were magically altered, or maybe the janitor knew a voice spell or two to fuck with them.”
“Or maybe you don’t know everything about crows,” Violet said.
“Amaranth tried to teach some crows to talk,” Barley said.
“Did she succeed?” I asked.
“No,” Barley said.
“Well, there you go,” I said.
“I wouldn’t take that as proof either way,” Barley said. “She tried to teach the pigs to read and write, too.”
“I believe you, Violet,” Marlot said.
“No, you don’t,” I said. “You just want to keep the argument going.”
“That’s true, but I’ll take it anyway,” Violet said.
“He didn’t believe me when I said there were nymphs on campus,” Marlot said.
“What were the crows like?” Barley asked. “The ones in the woods?”
“Like crows,” I said. “Only smarter and more psychotic. Territorial, too. You have to negotiate for passage through their territory.”
“How do you do that if they don’t speak?” Violet asked.
“There was some cawing involved,” I said.
“How did you pay?” Barley asked.
“Bread,” I said. “Bread as in bread, not money. Iason did it, really. I was just along for the ride.”
“That doesn’t seem like a very good basis for a relationship,” Barley said.
“We had words about it,” I said. “It was a rocky start, but I think we have an understanding now.”
The conversation continued as we passed the fountain and headed towards the union. The girls were good company. As much as it seemed like we were bickering in every direction, it wasn’t a bad conversation. I could already tell the difference between the sniping that had occurred between Missy and Marlot and this. There was a certain amount of boundary-testing left to be done, but nobody was prickly or thin-skinned enough that we couldn’t bicker a little.
When we got upstairs and Violet pulled out two little bowls of rice and nuts, Marlot asked her if she wanted some milk for her cereal. Violet tried to return the favor with a summary of the probable living conditions of the chicken on Marlot’s salad, but it was fruitless. Agora was a pretty rural-ish town, too. Marlot and I knew where our food came from.
“Don’t mourn the chickens,” Marlot said. “Just know that when they die, they go on to a better plate.”
ook!
First?
And oh boy, we’ve gotten Violet and Marlot to interact. That’s interesting.
Gone on to a better plate… Argh! Thats so cheezy it’s painfull… I could have said it myself…love it.
I liked this quite a bit :^)
An eloge, good work!
I love these four. They remind me of my friends in high school, except our vegetarian wasn’t telepathic and our nymph was actually a recovering anorexic. xD
Whee! Late night updates… School tomorrow… G’night everyone…
Oh, that is at least worth a groan.
I foresee much amusing discussions hereinafter
I think there’s a problem none of the group noticed with Violet’s all-spell house. Spells (in MU) need something to attach to and they work best if what they do is enhance natural attributes of that thing. The various actions Violet wants the house spells to perform are attributes of walls and roofs.
ARF, MOOK, whatever
Baaaaaa!
And why didn’t I think of that?
‘No, you nymph maniac, you can’t “borrow” Iamie, and no, his bracelet doesn’t have a “horse” setting.’
@luddite your right that they are enhanced to their function, but you can just make the spells themselves, they are just harder and more diffuclt to do
I can just imagine that discussion between Amaranth and Iason…
@Greenwood Goat – I was thinking something like that too. I think Amaranth would be almost as happy with a Stag. Perhaps we’ll find out eventually, and just maybe Amaranth will be able to live her fantasy – THAT will be interesting
@ Luddite 8, Suryn 10: Perhaps she would settle for a pipe cube. No walls, but something for the spells to kind of hang on (like curtains). Heck, they could even have an invisibility spell on them so you don’t even know that they’re there.
That’s their relationship summed up in one sentence. And again, love Violet.
RE: the Spell House
Perhaps she could just have a pergola over her patio. Then they can have vines crawling all over it. With the right nature magic, the pergola could even be a live plant that would grow over time as their little society expands. Maybe some sort of modified bamboo.
Hooray for the return of MoarMu!@!!!!!111one
And Violet hanging with Barley means that Vi knows that Barley tried to rape Mack… or Barley doesn’t think about it (or remember it?).
Now, the other thing about Vi is that she knows how nasty everybody really is… so Barley’s attempted rape might not bother her too much.
Wow. I really can’t see taking third-graders on a field trip to a slaughterhouse.
Do we know that Violet can read Barley? She is an outsider after all.
@17 i dont view itg as so weird. different cultures, different morals, farm children from a young age are exposed to such things, but city children hardly ever and i think its part of the reason why city children dont care nearly as much about the food they eat.
Beappleby, all children should be taught where their food comes from. If you can’t stomach the truth, don’t eat it. I can’t recall “not” knowing that animals are slaughtered for meat.
In fact, all children should be fortunate enough to be taught a lot of things about the practicality of how and why the world works the way it does. The ignorance we see on a daily basis, even from supposedly intelligent people who are running our country should be prime testament to that.
EEEEEEEK! Yay for Violet/Marlot Convo!
Keep It UP!!
Violet doesn’t
Eat meat but her screed against
It proves quite fruitless
Barley at dinner:
She seems to take the word “scarf”
Quite literally
Mynah disputes can
Lead to such raven that some
End up eating crow
… Damn, do I want a house like that. I mean, I like my privacy a lot, but to have something so free…
“Unless they have a really good lawyer, who can bargain them down to manslaughter,” Marlot said.
Classic.
Oh, the killer puns, by our lovely world-inventor, and the magnificent Z…
and I love the wit from Marlot…
@ 17 beappleby: The school may not have taken third graders to a slaughterhouse; third grade might have just been the age Violet understood what she was picking up from older kids’ thoughts about the slaughterhouse trip or the age she realised she could opt out of being an omnivore. Or the MUniverse’s third grade could be inequivalent to the US third grade.
Ever heard of “take your kid to work” days? When one of the local employers is a beef ranch, guess what – that’s a prime destination. There are other benefits to a grounded childhood. Appreciation of food is one thing, but also no farm kid ever wondered where babies come from.
[ And Violet hanging with Barley means that Vi knows that Barley tried to rape Mack… or Barley doesn’t think about it (or remember it?).]
Violet has already been “conned” by Barley, and thinks Barley’s innocent. Now, with continued association, she might realize she got the wrong impression, but 1st impressions are pretty sturdy pretty often. And we can’t think that Barley is going to think about the incident too often.
We do know that Jeremy will still have an anti-Mack attitude some time in the future. That’s consistent with neither Violet nor Jeremy finding out Barley was not giving an unbiased versions.
The thing with Barley is probably not the fact that Vi can’t read her. I think it has to do with the fact that Barley does not believe it was an attempted rape, in Barley’s mind what she told Vi is the truth. And Vi can only see what’s in the mind of a person, she can’t say if it’s the truth or not.
So MoreMU has just fallen by the wayside again then?
MR/Ms anonymous dot: why would you think that? MoMU has always been sporadic, it even said so for a while: “Updates whenever”(I think that tuesday, wednesday thursday, friday thing at the top is a mistake: that’s when MU updates)
AE just finished the epic chapter of Doom over in the other story, it took longer than expected because she wanted to get it right.
MoMU will be along in time.
I used to play in the village slaughterhouse when I was young; 8 or 9 maybe. They wouldn’t let me near when killing animals but I saw them come in and saw the carcasses being hung up and eviscerated. Didn’t do me any harm! And it means I’ve always known where meat comes from.
Letting a child wander in would probably risk having the place closed down nowadays, but there was a lot less regulation back then.
I feel a bit sorry for people who think meat is somehow made in a factory, but I’m no vegetarian. Though I do eat less meat than I used to, partly because I know the environmental cost of meat (especially beef) is so much higher than that of grain and vegetables.
Dang it, still nothing…
I do hope a schedule of SOME kind gets reestablished for this.
Please?
Jamie is an extremely tolerant man as ALL his friends would drive me batty.
hmmm… I hope this updates soon. A 1 month hiatus, then 2 updates and then nothing again?
I appreciate that writing the EPIC chapter in normal MU put MoarMU on the backburner, but now that it’s done, can we have some updates please? or at least some kind of schedule? Even 2x per week would be super!
Please?
I’d settle for once a week. Or biweekly. As long as it’s relatively consistent.
Back off people, this is a side venture, not the main story, and Ms. Erin has been updating the main one, regularly. You could try doing other things while you wait.. remember that big orangy thing in the sky? the sun? go visit it for a little while and when you come back, you can sit down for a good read.
As to the slaughterhouse, I grew up on a beef farm, and often saw the process beginning to end. We frequently bought calves young enough that we had to bottle feed them (very large bottle!) and even named them a lot of times. doesn’t bother me in the slightest to bite into that nice juicy steak! My wife grew up as a “city kid” and if you mention the origin of the meat during the meal, she can’t finish eating. It is what it is, if you want the burger, you should understand it came from a walking breathing creature.
Whoa there, attack dog. Insulting people (even ridiculous insults–what does commenting on missing update days have to do with not seeing the sun?) hardly seems like something AE would want. Seeing as, you know, you are attacking readers for wanting to read more of her work. Great job there, Chief.
Being aware of where your food comes from is one thing, taking third-graders TO a slaughterhouse (which is how I originally read it) is quite another. (I now agree that she quite likely “read” the facts from peoples’ minds rather than going on a field trip.)
And yes, when something that has been updated very consistently is suddenly dropped for a month, then has an update, then another update just when you might expect one, and then is dropped again for an unspecified amount of time, we are going to comment about it. We are going to be worried that the author is okay, that the author is planning to drop the story; and very, very frustrated that we have not been told anything by the author.
I’ve been reading through the archives of the original ToMU, and keep finding Author’s Notes explaining about whatever new schedule she was trying out. I would LOVE to see something like that here. Even if it said this story wouldn’t be updated again for two months – at least we’d know and wouldn’t stop clicking over hoping there would be something new.
As I said earlier, the frustration is mainly that we no longer can have any reasonable expectations that this storyline will update with any consistency. And as I said earlier, I would be quite happy with updates only once a week, or every two weeks, or once a month, as long as I knew what to expect.
I read a lot of webcomics and a couple serial webnovels. Every author/artist/creator has a right, in my mind, to their own update schedule. On the other hand, my view is also that you need to keep your word. If someone says on their site that they will update 3 times a week, but there hasn’t been an update or any news for a couple weeks, I start to get annoyed. It doesn’t take very long to get on and put up a one-line post that says “Hey, swamped with random stuff right now, webcomic will be back in X days.” It’s courteous to your readers, who are giving you money to see your product continue. And, if nothing else, it keeps readers on your site. After a while of no updates, readers will start to wander off, and possibly only check the site again rarely.
I’m not saying authors/artists have an obligation to readers, but at the same time, readers are not always unjustified if they feel they’re being maltreated.
Okay, I finally thought to check AE’s blog and it says that More ToMU will be updating “soon”… so now I will continue my resigned, hopeful clicking…
Just to fill in time between refresh clicks, you could try a click on the line beneath the comments that says, “RSS feed for comments on this post.”
That will give you some idea of how your browser handles RSS feeds. Then try the MTofMU master feed:
http://more.talesofmu.com/feed/
Please note: this is intended to be friendly advice with not a trace of sarcasm or condescension.
MistyCat, you have completely confused me. What’s the point of that post?
Andy, several people have mentioned over the last month that they have spent time fruitlesly refreshing in the hope of an update. My suggestion was that those people could set up the RSS feed provided so that their computer did the work instead. I use the Opera browser which handles feeds exactly as I like, and I imagine that other browsers will be just as useful to others.
It’s like a personal email at the moment of update and removes the need for “resigned, hopeful clicking…”
Make sense?
I appreciate the tip, but I’m at college, using school computers – I can’t set up a daily feed or whatever…
I do try to check out ToMU every day, and after that I automatically click over to here. Which has been mostly fruitless for some time now.
@ MistyCat:
I could set up an RSS feed, but I prefer to view all my webcomics and webnovels on their actual pages.
@ beappleby
Understood. I imagine that a fair percentage of readers are in your position of reading on someone else’s computer, which does kind of limit the options. You have my sympathy.
% Andy
You don’t need to read from the actual feed. If you wish, treat the feed purely as a notification. When the feed tells you there’s fresh MU-ey goodness awaiting you can refresh the actual page.
Once again, that’s something I’m not inclined to do. I actually do like going through my bookmarks list, trying to remember which ones update when. (If you saw my list of webcomics, you’d understand why I have trouble remembering–I have over 50 bookmarked) It’s actually kinda nice to suddenly think “Oh, hey, I forgot to check this comic earlier today.” The notifications would kinda take the fun out of that, and I’m paranoid that I’d get a glimpse of the comic/story itself before going to the site. There’s a lot of plot-based comics on my list that I don’t like looking at until the whole picture is loaded.
Anyway, even if we DID have a feed, we’d still be in the same position we are now: when, if ever, will More ToMU update?
IGoogle’s homepage is a very good way of keeping track of RSS feeds on a public internet. I have several blogs that I keep track of that way. Not here, though, I like the surprise of seeing what has and hasn’t updated.