14 KiB
[RT][HF] A Practical Guide to Evil: Book 4: Interlude: Kaleidoscope III
-
Author: u/Zayits *
-
URL: https://practicalguidetoevil.wordpress.com/2018/05/28/interlude-kaleidoscope-iii/
-
Score: 69
-
Created: 2018-05-28T04:02:06
Post:
Comments:
u/GeeJo [+14] Custom Flair (8 hours later)
So the Procerans have two armies split by a lake full of frozen corpses. Cat's last brush with open warfare saw her use Winter-fueled mass necromancy.
This cannot possibly go badly.
u/tadrinth [+9] (9 hours later)
The Procerans do have a bunch of priests with them.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+3] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (11 hours later)
Cat and Masego know how to make people into zombies with water. I don't know if making corpses into zombies with water would be more or less horrifying but I would not bet against one of them having figured it out, and the last set of zombies we saw cat make were intelligent undead, which generally are harder for priests to turn.
u/Fellan607 [+7] (15 hours later)
I thought that the zombie water had to be drank to work? Like it was a potion of zombification when combined with a ritual or something?
u/Empiricist_or_not [+1] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (18 hours later)
True but I wonder considering the lake was a plan, if Masego might find a way to replace "living human drinking" with "corpse drowned in"
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+12] Father of Learning (an hour later)
I'm so proud of our characters! Nauk is now general Princekiller and good ol' Abigail of Summerhome is now a Tribune and getting laid all over.
Just makes me smile.
Also: Am I the only thinking that the Lesser Steppes are going to want to join Callow, since they're A. A source of Orks so Catherine can have the complete monster set and B. On the right side of the Wasalti for it anyway, they just need to take down The Wall.
u/panchoadrenalina [+8] (2 hours later)
Also: Am I the only thinking that the Lesser Steppes are going to want to join Callow, since they're A. A source of Orks so Catherine can have the complete monster set and B. On the right side of the Wasalti for it anyway, they just need to take down The Wall.
that would require callow to "jump" over either daoine or praes to "annex" the steppes.
that kind of bordergore is basically tempting fate to call a bunch of crusades to fix that issue.
u/Tallergeese [+13] (3 hours later)
I don't think it would be that far out of left field for Daoine to come back into the Callowan fold. The Duchess of Daoine has had a front row seat to Cat doing some ridiculous stuff and is cooperating fully with repelling this Crusade, which probably wouldn't have directly been a problem for Daoine anyway. She's acknowledged that Cat has Deoraithe blood too. The Grey Pilgrim thinks that she's becoming personally loyal to Cat.
u/Oaden [+4] (9 hours later)
Daoine is a kind of independent vasal of sorts isn't it?
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+6] Father of Learning (3 hours later)
Daione is already part of callow, hells, no longer needing to man the wall might be what cat promised Kegan
u/ashinator92 [+11] (44 minutes later)
It's time for the Foundling Gambit. I'm calling it.
u/Empiricist_or_not [+10] Aspiring polite Hegemonizing swarm (59 minutes later)
I'm almost welling to bet on a Hellhound Ham messing up the Procerans, the hero's might survive, but I'm betting it's Juniper who makes the princes Graveyard, or at least sets it up as a breakfast for the queen of air and darkness.
u/ashinator92 [+3] (11 hours later)
You're on.
My prediction:
It'll be the standard tactic of one side retreating to double up the other, except Procerans can't give chase because buried munitions. What's more, The Callow army are relatively free to use the Marshland too because they're the one's with the repeating siege engines.
Portals are a viable strat destpite cat being dead, so one side of the Proceran host can be sandwiched, then munitioned up. The remaining quarter is attacking the priests(they're +Indriani, to mess with the Rogue dude). That one 'Possibly Assasin' dude from the chapter before might also come into play somehow, and Hakram might level up from all the fighting.
<End of prediction>
u/earnestadmission [+1] Singular "they" user (a day later)
“Possibly Assassin”... who?
u/CouteauBleu [+22] We are the Empire. (an hour later)
Juniper cast a look at the Taghreb, eyes lingering on soft skin of her bare wrists. Such delicate appearance, for such a dangerous woman. The urge to sink her teeth into the warm veins warred with the urge to feel the softness with her own rough hands.
Is it just me or does this story has a statistically improbable number of lesbian characters?
“Send out a line,” she told the captain. “And since I’m in such a giving mood, they can eat whoever they kill.”
Yay! Casual war crimes!
(aw, I can't stay mad at Abigail)
u/Tallergeese [+35] (an hour later)
Is it just me or does this story has a statistically improbable number of lesbian characters?
Who's to say what is statistically improbable in Guideverse? If you have to, just imagine that Dread Empress Malodorous I, the Desperately Horny, really wanted to increase her pool of potential partners and dumped something in the water a thousand years ago thereby altering the course of Praesi genetics forever. Call it a day.
Anyway, the only confirmed lesbian I can recall is Malicia, maybe Killian (she could still be bi, I think). Cat is bisexual (although she definitely seems to prefer women) and Archer is pansexual. There's like fifty recurring characters in this story. Probably more. Throw in Warlock (gay), Tikiloshe (pan), and Masego (asexual), and the number of LGBTQ characters is still way less than ten percent of the characters, although they do make up a fair chunk of the main cast. I don't recall any trans or genderqueer folks though, especially not in the main cast.
Everything else, like this Juniper passage, is just ship teasing. Aisha was boinking Ratface anyway, so she's probably straight. Cat's also our most frequent PoV, and she eyeballs every lady she sees; it's not necessarily reciprocated, as we saw with Princess Rozala.
This calls to mind the complaints that too many of the important and competent characters are women in proportion to men.
Honestly, we've had so many stories that totally lack this kind of representation. It's not a big deal to tip the scales the other way every once in a while. Even if Guideverse had precisely the same historical demographics as our universe, outliers happen. The main cast doesn't have to perfectly line up with the most statistically probable distribution of anything.
“Send out a line,” she told the captain. “And since I’m in such a giving mood, they can eat whoever they kill.”
Yay! Casual war crimes!
(aw, I can't stay mad at Abigail)
I hope we see General Abigail by the end of this. Is desecrating enemy corpses a war crime in this universe? It is in ours, but we don't have major powers that employ orcs in their professional armies. Anyway, it'd probably be a mercy to just get eaten by the damn orcs, since you know everyone else is gonna become part of Cat's undead reserve forces.
Edit: oh yeah, Malicia also sleeps with Ime, but she could be bi or Malicia-sexual, since evidently everyone in the Guideverse is.
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+22] Father of Learning (2 hours later)
Dread Emperor Tenebrous was transsexual. He was a giant spider trapped in a man's body. I'm proud to say his transitioning was successfully completed and his children are why smuggling through underground tunnels is such a dangerous prospect in Ater
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (2 days later)
That one anecdote kind of felt like a cheap jab at transsexual culture (or at least this image people have of trans-identifying people as being fickle and self-important and not really transsexual but desperate for attention).
u/TaltosDreamer [+1] (10 hours later)
That is not transsexual. Transsexual has to do with gender, not species.
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+11] Father of Learning (12 hours later)
We never learn if he meant male or female spider
u/Zayits [+9] (18 hours later)
Robber mentions it was a she-spider, so definitely a transsexual.
u/TaltosDreamer [-6] (13 hours later)
So you have no idea at all and no proof to back up the assertion... Not trying to fight, just not liking the connotations of the interspecies part and no known gender switch involved in it.
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+3] Father of Learning (13 hours later)
It was a joke, Jesus
u/Flamesmcgee [+2] (18 hours later)
It'd clearly be a closely related kind of dysmorphia.
u/TaltosDreamer [+1] (18 hours later)
The main difference is our sense of gender/sex is partly biological and all the various chromsomal patterns of the human sexes have those biological components, while humans do not have any spider components to get biologically confused.
Sorry, I didnt expect this to become a topic. I thought the first person would just come up with a silly name that isnt transsexual and we could move on to the story, but I seem to have made him and some others unhappy.
u/panchoadrenalina [+10] (2 hours later)
there was a trans general under the crazy lord of the free cities that banished the bard (forgot name) but the character was very minor.
u/Oaden [+5] (4 hours later)
A warcrime is a warcrime cause an international body of nations decided to see it as warcrime. There are no existing agreed conducts of war between Procer, Praes and Callow. Barring the agreement between Pilgrim and Cat regarding sacking cities, summoning demonic/divine intervention, surrender and torturing prisoners, and that only appies if the orcs capture the human before eating them instead of killing them before eating them.
u/Ardvarkeating101 [+8] Father of Learning (an hour later)
I was just about to comment "Well now he's just fucking teasing us"
u/sparr [+1] (a day later)
Is it just me or does this story has a statistically improbable number of lesbian characters?
All depends on how prevalent you think they are in the real world. Are you under the impression that the 2-5% reported by various self-identification studies is actually representative of their prevalence?
u/CouteauBleu [+2] We are the Empire. (a day later)
I'm not going to go through the whole story again to confirm, but I'd say the reason the proportion of lesbians in this story feels high (to me, and a bunch of people who upvoted me) is that while the proportion of characters mentioned as lesbians to total female characters is low (something like 1/10?), the proportion of lesbians/bi characters to female characters whose sexuality is mentioned at all is high (I'd say at least 1/2 or 1/3).
Also, most characters whose sexuality is mentioned are female, which might be part of the perceived effect.
But by contrast, male characters whose sexuality is mentioned are mostly heterosexual: Hakram (probably), Ratface, Nauk, Robber, Black are mentioned as heterosexual, vs Warlock as homosexual, no bisexual male characters that we know of.
u/inscrutablescooter [+9] (9 hours later)
As much as I love this story, I feel like this is a sort of litmus test for whether PGtE qualifies as a rational fic.
Based on everything we know about the capabilities of each side, can we really figure out what Juniper's plan is?
If the win comes from Cat or Masego emerging from their respective comas at the most dramatically pivotal moment, fine and good. It's been lampshaded, and in a way this is a huge part of the lore of PGtE. But it is also entirely out of character for Juniper to commit massively to a strategy that invites certain doom if one specific event out of her control doesn't materialize.
Either way, can't wait for the next chapter
u/melmonella [+5] Tremble, o ye mighty, for a new age is upon you (15 hours later)
Well, assuming this is Battle of the Camps, second camp has to get involved. I expect that juniper would ruin their supplies (thus ensuring they would lose on a strategic level due to attrition if they continue marching deeper into Callow), and then threaten to ruin her supplies too if enemies don't stop the attack, while promising to share supplies if crusaders concede defeat here. This would negate the main reason crusaders have for fighting (to get supplies - you can't eat food that is on goblinfire.)
u/werafdsaew [+4] (14 hours later)
Only rationalist fics have to be solvable.
u/Cariyaga [+2] Kyubey did nothing wrong (9 hours later)
Personally, I think that it's likely that she's going to target both sides' food supplies and leave the Orcs to Orc it up.
u/Frommerman [+4] (13 hours later)
The Enemy is coming from both sides, so she could just retreat straight through the marsh into the enemy camp, crush their remaining supplies, and then stall for a day until the crusaders desert or turn en masse. Doesn't matter how many OP heroes there are without an army to back them up.