V-Day Recap
Feb. 17th, 2007 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
danalwynIt was Valentine's Day this week. Although this is not the worst day of the year for me, it's probably in the top ten.
The problem with Valentine's Day is not the couples (a category which I either have the fortune or misfortune to be absent from), but rather the singles. Particularly the young singles. Particularly the young, desperate singles.
For some reason, Valentine's Day send certain people spiraling into the pit of despair. They become desperate enough to hang out in bars in the seedier side of town (the kind of places where the only effective pickup line tends to be 'How much?'). Deperate enough to drink themselves into oblivion and then cry themselves to sleep until their pillow. Desperate enough to flip through their copy of the Ars Magica until they get to the chapter labeled "Things That You Should Never, Ever Try" and skip to the section on love magic.
Which is generally where we have to come in.
Most of the early evening was spent cleaning up after love potions. Love potions, as might be expected, are very, very, dangerous. Not so much because of their effect, but because of their potency, and because they are incredibly difficult to brew. In terms of difficulty, even a basic love potion is almost as difficult as making a binary liquid explosive in the restroom of an airplane at fifty thousand feet. It has much the same side effects though. A little slip-up and you'll wish you were only falling out of an airplane.
The entire name "love potion" is somewhat of a misnomer. They would really be better off referred to as "lust potions", which is a much better description of their effects. Since different people have different limits when it comes to that sort of stuff. For instance, to brew something so that an average-looking twenty-year old woman can snare an average twenty-year old guy, all you really need is about a fifth of Jack Daniel's. The rest can usually work itself out on its own. For teenagers, slipping a few sips of Feldmar's Ecstatic Love Potion to a secret crush is usually the equivalent of giving an enraged Tasmanian Devil an adrenaline shot, and probably just about as painful.
First we were dealing with the after-effects of badly brewed love potions and miscast spells, including a confused boy who grew a rather spectacular set of antlers. Then it was time for the more embarrassing work of dealing with what we refer to as "Lover's Malady", which is a number of fun things you can suffer when your paramour has slipped you enough concentrated aphrodisiac to power the baby boom. That's actually sort of amusing in a peculiar sort of way. It's amazing the kind of trouble people will get into if you give them enough rope to hang themselves.
And then, in the evening, came the problem cases. You know the type. The ones where people become so desperate for someone, for anyone, that they try and conjure their ideal lover. You can guess how well that works.
So I spent about thirty minutes about eight o'clock being very embarrassed to be male, while trying to figure out what to do with this girl some idiot had brought to life out of his imagination. Connoisseurs of the female form assure me that there is an ideal bust:waist ratio that forms the epitome of beauty. I don't know that much about this, but doctors assure me that there is a critical bust:waist ratio after which the body simply won't support itself. This particular maiden that he brought to life had a waist I could wrap my hands around, and a bust that I probably could not reach my arms around. It was fortunate that she had fallen down immediately upon materialization; else she probably would have snapped her spine like a twig.
Daren and I took about twenty minutes grinding through the math to reverse one of the more common breast-augmentation spells (you would think that given the number of times we've had to go through this we would remember it, but we never do) and shrunk her down to something that could at least stand up, when Alice came running in the door.
"We've got a problem!" she shouted. "A big problem!"
I winced. It was starting to get a little late, which meant that the evening's celebratory fireworks were probably starting. And that, in turn, meant that any magic based on sex was probably going to get stronger, and more uncontrollable, as the night went on.
"How big?" Daren asked, having finished helping our deaugmented beauty to a bed.
"You've got to see this!" she exclaimed, and then darted out the door. Knowing that this was a bad, bad sign, I winced again and followed.
We had been working in the waterfront district of San Diego, by one of those new condominium developments that have grown up in the past few years. Since no one yet has built something in front of them, you still have a good view of the bay. You could see the lights from the downtown high-rises reflected in the lapping waves of the bay, the signal lights of the navy vessels at Coronado island, and even the bright lights from the airport reflecting against a few wisps of cloud.
And the three-masted sailing ship with her gunports open and the Jolly Roger flapping from her mainmast bearing down on the closest pier. That was new.
"God damn somebody's got big fantasies," Daren commented, observing the ship.
"Where's Charity?" I asked.
"At the pier," Alice answered.
"You go take care of the Hillcrest call. Daren and I will go and back her up," I said. I hated it when we started to have...complications.
Charity was pacing at the end of the pier. She did not look happy at all. No sooner did the massive pirate vessel scrape up against the pier than she was yelling at it.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she demanded. "This isn't a free pier you know!"
A handsome man with long dreadlocks poked his head over the top of the railing as a long gangplank was laid down to level of the pier.
"It be free to us lass. We be pirates, scourges of the seven seas, here to plunder this city and ravage her beautiful lasses."
"Someone does have an interesting fantasy life," I muttered.
The gangplank hit the pier, and began to shake under the tramp of marching feet. There were a dozen bare-chested pirates with cutlasses and elaborate pistols stuck in their belt, with long lustrous hair, coming down the ramp. There was one angry woman in worn-out jeans and a faded nylon jacket coming up the ramp. Inertia dictated that the general direction of motion should have been down, but instead it ended up being upwards. Charity can have that effect sometimes.
"Look. I don't care who you think you are, or why you think you're here. You turn this ship around right now and set out to sea again, or I'll keelhaul the lot of you."
"You don't even know what keelhauling is," I muttered.
"I'll use my imagination," she replied.
"Arrr...nobody tells us what to do," another pirate, this one with at least four pistols tucked into his crimson belt sash, strode up to Charity. "If we want to ravish your womenfolk, that be what we be doing. Perhaps starting with you. A bit o' real sea lessons might take some of the bite off of your tongue."
There was a lot of noise following that remark.
"No, stuffing someone head first into a cannon and then firing them straight into the air does not count as keelhauling," I said. My remark was punctuated by the sound of something very heavy falling from a high altitude and striking a very solid wooden deck. It was sort of a concussive splat. "But it was very imaginative."
"Now then-" Charity began when she was interrupted by the sound of a cannon firing. Something whistled by the ship and promptly decapitate a lamppost on the street behind us. We turned.
There was another pirate ship making its way into the harbor, turning to expose her broadsides.
"It's Oleg One-Eye," the captain shouted. "That foul-mouthed, back-stabbing, son of a landlubber. And he's got the drop on us. Quick boys, return fire, return fire!"
A cannon broadside roared from both ships almost at once, gray smoke rippling across the line of the ship in concert with thunderous claps. The air was suddenly full of iron moving very fast, the splinters of shot ripping through wooden railings, and heavy cannons recoiling away from the gunports. It was very loud. Most of the shot missed, except for one poor unfortunate who was up on the mast when a cannonball ripped through the end of the yard, sending him plummeting over the side. From the agonizing sounds of pain, he landed in a cluster of rose bushes.
"They're fifty yards away," Charity yelled, waving. "How could they miss?"
"Melodrama," Daren muttered.
"That's it. I'm ending this right now," she fumed.
"You can't," Daren answered.
"Why not?"
"Because," and he gestured with his eyes. There, entering the harbor, were at least five other pirate vessels, all flying the Jolly Roger.
"What the hell is this?" Charity exploded. "Does everyone subscribe to some crackpot newsletter that I don't? Is there a new Pirates of the Carribean movie in theaters or something? Just what the hell is wrong with this place?"
"I hate wild magic," I muttered under my breath.
"Quick, bring us about," the captain was shouting, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was tied to a pier. "We'll send all those scurvy sea-dogs to Davy Jones's Locker!" I winced. That fake pirate talk was beginning to get to me.
There was a patter of feet behind us. Alice sprinted onto the pier, panting.
"We've got a big problem!" she yelled.
"I noticed."
"No, it's not this. It's...I don't know, I couldn't stop them. They must have seen the ships coming in."
"Stop who?" Charity asked. I was beginning to have a really bad feeling about this.
"They must be anime fans or something..." Alice was still explaining, when I caught the pirate captain turning back to us out of the corner of my eye. I turned back to him, but his gaze was going right through me. I could tell, just from his expression, that whatever had captivated his interest had consumed his perceptions, that there was only room for one thought in his mind at this moment, only room for one all-consuming urge, and that I and everything I stood with had just been pushed out of his awareness. Then he raised one hand in dreadful portency and cried out in a great voice:
"NINJAS!"
From behind me, and answering voice called "PIRATES!
All action on the ship stopped. I could see all the pirates turning simultaneously and locking onto their new targets.
"I'll be back for the halftime show," I tried to excuse myself.
"Oh no you don't. I'm not having this get out of control," Charity stomped her foot.
A flight of shuriken whirled by us from behind. In answer a cannonade roared down the line of pirate ships.
"I'm not paid enough for this shit," I complained. Then I grabbed the shoulder of the nearest pirate, who was firing his pistol at some unseen ninja, and gave him a fist-propelled tour of San Diego Bay. After that, it got really confusing.
The worst part of all this is that when you come to your real job the next day exhausted and bedraggled, you can't even complain about how hard of a night you had. All you get are knowing smirks.
The problem with Valentine's Day is not the couples (a category which I either have the fortune or misfortune to be absent from), but rather the singles. Particularly the young singles. Particularly the young, desperate singles.
For some reason, Valentine's Day send certain people spiraling into the pit of despair. They become desperate enough to hang out in bars in the seedier side of town (the kind of places where the only effective pickup line tends to be 'How much?'). Deperate enough to drink themselves into oblivion and then cry themselves to sleep until their pillow. Desperate enough to flip through their copy of the Ars Magica until they get to the chapter labeled "Things That You Should Never, Ever Try" and skip to the section on love magic.
Which is generally where we have to come in.
Most of the early evening was spent cleaning up after love potions. Love potions, as might be expected, are very, very, dangerous. Not so much because of their effect, but because of their potency, and because they are incredibly difficult to brew. In terms of difficulty, even a basic love potion is almost as difficult as making a binary liquid explosive in the restroom of an airplane at fifty thousand feet. It has much the same side effects though. A little slip-up and you'll wish you were only falling out of an airplane.
The entire name "love potion" is somewhat of a misnomer. They would really be better off referred to as "lust potions", which is a much better description of their effects. Since different people have different limits when it comes to that sort of stuff. For instance, to brew something so that an average-looking twenty-year old woman can snare an average twenty-year old guy, all you really need is about a fifth of Jack Daniel's. The rest can usually work itself out on its own. For teenagers, slipping a few sips of Feldmar's Ecstatic Love Potion to a secret crush is usually the equivalent of giving an enraged Tasmanian Devil an adrenaline shot, and probably just about as painful.
First we were dealing with the after-effects of badly brewed love potions and miscast spells, including a confused boy who grew a rather spectacular set of antlers. Then it was time for the more embarrassing work of dealing with what we refer to as "Lover's Malady", which is a number of fun things you can suffer when your paramour has slipped you enough concentrated aphrodisiac to power the baby boom. That's actually sort of amusing in a peculiar sort of way. It's amazing the kind of trouble people will get into if you give them enough rope to hang themselves.
And then, in the evening, came the problem cases. You know the type. The ones where people become so desperate for someone, for anyone, that they try and conjure their ideal lover. You can guess how well that works.
So I spent about thirty minutes about eight o'clock being very embarrassed to be male, while trying to figure out what to do with this girl some idiot had brought to life out of his imagination. Connoisseurs of the female form assure me that there is an ideal bust:waist ratio that forms the epitome of beauty. I don't know that much about this, but doctors assure me that there is a critical bust:waist ratio after which the body simply won't support itself. This particular maiden that he brought to life had a waist I could wrap my hands around, and a bust that I probably could not reach my arms around. It was fortunate that she had fallen down immediately upon materialization; else she probably would have snapped her spine like a twig.
Daren and I took about twenty minutes grinding through the math to reverse one of the more common breast-augmentation spells (you would think that given the number of times we've had to go through this we would remember it, but we never do) and shrunk her down to something that could at least stand up, when Alice came running in the door.
"We've got a problem!" she shouted. "A big problem!"
I winced. It was starting to get a little late, which meant that the evening's celebratory fireworks were probably starting. And that, in turn, meant that any magic based on sex was probably going to get stronger, and more uncontrollable, as the night went on.
"How big?" Daren asked, having finished helping our deaugmented beauty to a bed.
"You've got to see this!" she exclaimed, and then darted out the door. Knowing that this was a bad, bad sign, I winced again and followed.
We had been working in the waterfront district of San Diego, by one of those new condominium developments that have grown up in the past few years. Since no one yet has built something in front of them, you still have a good view of the bay. You could see the lights from the downtown high-rises reflected in the lapping waves of the bay, the signal lights of the navy vessels at Coronado island, and even the bright lights from the airport reflecting against a few wisps of cloud.
And the three-masted sailing ship with her gunports open and the Jolly Roger flapping from her mainmast bearing down on the closest pier. That was new.
"God damn somebody's got big fantasies," Daren commented, observing the ship.
"Where's Charity?" I asked.
"At the pier," Alice answered.
"You go take care of the Hillcrest call. Daren and I will go and back her up," I said. I hated it when we started to have...complications.
Charity was pacing at the end of the pier. She did not look happy at all. No sooner did the massive pirate vessel scrape up against the pier than she was yelling at it.
"What the hell do you think you're doing?" she demanded. "This isn't a free pier you know!"
A handsome man with long dreadlocks poked his head over the top of the railing as a long gangplank was laid down to level of the pier.
"It be free to us lass. We be pirates, scourges of the seven seas, here to plunder this city and ravage her beautiful lasses."
"Someone does have an interesting fantasy life," I muttered.
The gangplank hit the pier, and began to shake under the tramp of marching feet. There were a dozen bare-chested pirates with cutlasses and elaborate pistols stuck in their belt, with long lustrous hair, coming down the ramp. There was one angry woman in worn-out jeans and a faded nylon jacket coming up the ramp. Inertia dictated that the general direction of motion should have been down, but instead it ended up being upwards. Charity can have that effect sometimes.
"Look. I don't care who you think you are, or why you think you're here. You turn this ship around right now and set out to sea again, or I'll keelhaul the lot of you."
"You don't even know what keelhauling is," I muttered.
"I'll use my imagination," she replied.
"Arrr...nobody tells us what to do," another pirate, this one with at least four pistols tucked into his crimson belt sash, strode up to Charity. "If we want to ravish your womenfolk, that be what we be doing. Perhaps starting with you. A bit o' real sea lessons might take some of the bite off of your tongue."
There was a lot of noise following that remark.
"No, stuffing someone head first into a cannon and then firing them straight into the air does not count as keelhauling," I said. My remark was punctuated by the sound of something very heavy falling from a high altitude and striking a very solid wooden deck. It was sort of a concussive splat. "But it was very imaginative."
"Now then-" Charity began when she was interrupted by the sound of a cannon firing. Something whistled by the ship and promptly decapitate a lamppost on the street behind us. We turned.
There was another pirate ship making its way into the harbor, turning to expose her broadsides.
"It's Oleg One-Eye," the captain shouted. "That foul-mouthed, back-stabbing, son of a landlubber. And he's got the drop on us. Quick boys, return fire, return fire!"
A cannon broadside roared from both ships almost at once, gray smoke rippling across the line of the ship in concert with thunderous claps. The air was suddenly full of iron moving very fast, the splinters of shot ripping through wooden railings, and heavy cannons recoiling away from the gunports. It was very loud. Most of the shot missed, except for one poor unfortunate who was up on the mast when a cannonball ripped through the end of the yard, sending him plummeting over the side. From the agonizing sounds of pain, he landed in a cluster of rose bushes.
"They're fifty yards away," Charity yelled, waving. "How could they miss?"
"Melodrama," Daren muttered.
"That's it. I'm ending this right now," she fumed.
"You can't," Daren answered.
"Why not?"
"Because," and he gestured with his eyes. There, entering the harbor, were at least five other pirate vessels, all flying the Jolly Roger.
"What the hell is this?" Charity exploded. "Does everyone subscribe to some crackpot newsletter that I don't? Is there a new Pirates of the Carribean movie in theaters or something? Just what the hell is wrong with this place?"
"I hate wild magic," I muttered under my breath.
"Quick, bring us about," the captain was shouting, seemingly oblivious to the fact that he was tied to a pier. "We'll send all those scurvy sea-dogs to Davy Jones's Locker!" I winced. That fake pirate talk was beginning to get to me.
There was a patter of feet behind us. Alice sprinted onto the pier, panting.
"We've got a big problem!" she yelled.
"I noticed."
"No, it's not this. It's...I don't know, I couldn't stop them. They must have seen the ships coming in."
"Stop who?" Charity asked. I was beginning to have a really bad feeling about this.
"They must be anime fans or something..." Alice was still explaining, when I caught the pirate captain turning back to us out of the corner of my eye. I turned back to him, but his gaze was going right through me. I could tell, just from his expression, that whatever had captivated his interest had consumed his perceptions, that there was only room for one thought in his mind at this moment, only room for one all-consuming urge, and that I and everything I stood with had just been pushed out of his awareness. Then he raised one hand in dreadful portency and cried out in a great voice:
"NINJAS!"
From behind me, and answering voice called "PIRATES!
All action on the ship stopped. I could see all the pirates turning simultaneously and locking onto their new targets.
"I'll be back for the halftime show," I tried to excuse myself.
"Oh no you don't. I'm not having this get out of control," Charity stomped her foot.
A flight of shuriken whirled by us from behind. In answer a cannonade roared down the line of pirate ships.
"I'm not paid enough for this shit," I complained. Then I grabbed the shoulder of the nearest pirate, who was firing his pistol at some unseen ninja, and gave him a fist-propelled tour of San Diego Bay. After that, it got really confusing.
The worst part of all this is that when you come to your real job the next day exhausted and bedraggled, you can't even complain about how hard of a night you had. All you get are knowing smirks.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-18 04:46 am (UTC)*dies and iz ded*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-18 04:54 am (UTC)You win.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-18 06:16 am (UTC)The great question of life goes unanswered.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-18 07:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-18 01:47 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-18 04:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-19 06:06 am (UTC)*convulses with laughter*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-19 03:50 pm (UTC)Neither option gives me much hope for more serious stuff...
lacontessamala
Date: 2007-02-20 12:37 am (UTC)I can't speak to the complexity of your fiction, since I've read little of it, but I think you're very good at showing good characterization through well-chosen descriptions and actions. In short, quit beating yourself up. You're a hell of a writer.
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-19 02:29 am (UTC)*memory'd*
(no subject)
Date: 2007-02-19 03:48 pm (UTC)Haven't seen you around in a while. Good to hear from you again.
FREE MOBILE GAME
Date: 2007-03-08 03:35 am (UTC)