singindemonhq (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
singindemonhq) wrote2007-09-24 10:41 pm
singindemonhq) wrote2007-09-24 10:41 pm
Entry tags:
Theatrical Muse - 196; One Wish
I remember one Gig that took me a world that - well, you could call it a world. It was a style I think of as classical Chinorientese. It was one of those flat places, supported on the back of some economy sized elephants, with the whole thing on the back of a turtle.
There used to be a lot of those once but the numbers have been falling. I think what happened is that people stopped believing in them. One really good evangelical movement can wipe out a whole mythology. When their belief structure fails it can make it real difficult for the humans that are standing on it, though.
(Of course it’s difficult to think of a world-size turtle and some giant pachyderms as being “small gods”, especially if you’re trying to smoke in a Gig Team up past a bad-tempered elephant with stomach trouble! All I can tell you for sure is that there was a lot of hot air about but those beasts don’t sing.)
I hadn’t seen that particular dimension before, back then, but I’d got the usual set of priorities – check the place out, work on a target or two, do some recruiting – and just maybe this’d be the dimension where I’d pick up a Queen but I wasn’t holding my breath on that one.
We’d heard that the place had some real interesting creatures and some of the elementals had picked up anthromorphy. I’d even been told about weather with a sense of the dramatic. That could be real useful in my job, so I’d got plans to audition some during the Gig if I got the chance.
One of the things that the producers don’t seem to have known was that a demon called D’Hoffryn had found the place first. He’d done some recruiting, too. The Vengeance demons all have their little specialities. If they get the choice they’ll grant wishes for revenge against cheating spouses, or abusive parents, or violent people, or evangelicals or whatever.
I don’t know what he’d recruited in that place but it’d be interesting to know what the wishes were and who they were aimed at, and why. I know about one of them, of course.
The weather elementals were easier to recruit than I’d imagined. There was a rainstorm that, who and it acted stage-struck. I never did figure out how to pay the storm but it didn’t matter. It latched onto us right away and it helped. If I sang,
“That blacksmith has an appointment with Death!” and the line was accompanied by a roll of thunder and a vicious flare of lightning, nobody ever seemed to wonder if Death was due to get his scythe sharpened and his horse shoed by the guy sometime after the Gig.
The trouble was, even the weather elementals there seemed to have feelings – they gave a good imitation, anyway.
One of the Gig targets was a guy called Gloink the Gutter. I thought he was a savage-looking brute. He was short but burly, built like a Middle-Earth dwarf and covered with scars and tattoos. He was a dirty fighter who could have been a splatter at any of the worst bars - but Gloink loved his knife. His favourite line was,
“Hey man, you act like you got guts, but let’s just check that out;” then he’d stab on the last word. I’d planned on a scene for him that was all urban neo-brutalism, the kind of stark set-up that looks almost as though it’s been filmed in black and white. (Parts of the city were just right for that set, it was one of those places that give a whole new depth to urban blight – and speaking of depth, the river running through the place was so polluted that the warf-rats could walk to the other side.)
The rumbling of the storm was supposed to follow Gloink right through his scenes and I was counting on dramatic lightning flashes during the climax when he’d sing about how his personality got that way. The Minions were laying bets on whether he’d get a real hot number. I thought myself that we were in for fireworks – and that’s when the weather got contrary.
First, the thunder started to hush when Gloink spoke, almost as though the storm wanted to hear him. Then, Gloink sang a little love-song to his knife and the clouds cleared from the sky as he warbled.
He ended the last verse by kissing the blade – and a glorious double-rainbow spread over the sky and framed him as he did it!
By then I’d started to suspect that we’d got trouble.
You can probably guess the rest. As soon as Gloink came onto the scene he was framed by a rainbow. Then the weather cleared, the sunlight gave him a spotlight and if there were any flowering trees in the area the petals started to blow in his general direction… I guess that weather elemental had a real thing about the bad boys.
(I guess that’s when I made my own wish, too - and I got it, but there was nobody around and nobody sang, “Done!” That storm didn’t follow me home. It didn‘t decide it liked me better and blow through the portal after me and it didn’t start wishing for itself and decide that it wanted to be the most intangible queen in history.)
The storm stayed right there in that dimension, a faithful prop for every scene that Gloink played. The guy got so heated about it that he almost ended up with real hot number - but of course that got rained out.
From our viewpoint it didn’t matter. Gloink was a Gig target and he did end up a changed character - especially after the blue-birds got in on the act and started fluttering around him twittering every time he went out. He lost his street cred completely. He couldn’t put a foot into his old haunts without hearing laughter, at first. From his viewpoint some of the reactions he got later may have been even worse.
I went back on another Gig a few years ago. I saw old Gloink around the city, with his little band of acolytes and his begging bowl. From what he sang he really believed that he’d been chosen as a saint, loved so much by the Powers that he’d been forced from his life of crime into holy denial and celibate worship, crowned with a rainbow for a halo and a choir of blue-birds…
(Me? I’d just wish that nobody will ever direct a vengeance wish at me!)
Sweet the singing demon
Fandom, BTVS.
Words 1066
There used to be a lot of those once but the numbers have been falling. I think what happened is that people stopped believing in them. One really good evangelical movement can wipe out a whole mythology. When their belief structure fails it can make it real difficult for the humans that are standing on it, though.
(Of course it’s difficult to think of a world-size turtle and some giant pachyderms as being “small gods”, especially if you’re trying to smoke in a Gig Team up past a bad-tempered elephant with stomach trouble! All I can tell you for sure is that there was a lot of hot air about but those beasts don’t sing.)
I hadn’t seen that particular dimension before, back then, but I’d got the usual set of priorities – check the place out, work on a target or two, do some recruiting – and just maybe this’d be the dimension where I’d pick up a Queen
We’d heard that the place had some real interesting creatures and some of the elementals had picked up anthromorphy. I’d even been told about weather with a sense of the dramatic. That could be real useful in my job, so I’d got plans to audition some during the Gig if I got the chance.
One of the things that the producers don’t seem to have known was that a demon called D’Hoffryn had found the place first. He’d done some recruiting, too. The Vengeance demons all have their little specialities. If they get the choice they’ll grant wishes for revenge against cheating spouses, or abusive parents, or violent people, or evangelicals or whatever.
I don’t know what he’d recruited in that place but it’d be interesting to know what the wishes were and who they were aimed at, and why. I know about one of them, of course.
The weather elementals were easier to recruit than I’d imagined. There was a rainstorm
“That blacksmith has an appointment with Death!” and the line was accompanied by a roll of thunder and a vicious flare of lightning, nobody ever seemed to wonder if Death was due to get his scythe sharpened and his horse shoed by the guy sometime after the Gig.
The trouble was, even the weather elementals there seemed to have feelings – they gave a good imitation, anyway.
One of the Gig targets was a guy called Gloink the Gutter. I thought he was a savage-looking brute. He was short but burly, built like a Middle-Earth dwarf and covered with scars and tattoos. He was a dirty fighter who could have been a splatter at any of the worst bars - but Gloink loved his knife. His favourite line was,
“Hey man, you act like you got guts, but let’s just check that out;” then he’d stab on the last word. I’d planned on a scene for him that was all urban neo-brutalism, the kind of stark set-up that looks almost as though it’s been filmed in black and white. (Parts of the city were just right for that set, it was one of those places that give a whole new depth to urban blight – and speaking of depth, the river running through the place was so polluted that the warf-rats could walk to the other side.)
The rumbling of the storm was supposed to follow Gloink right through his scenes and I was counting on dramatic lightning flashes during the climax when he’d sing about how his personality got that way. The Minions were laying bets on whether he’d get a real hot number. I thought myself that we were in for fireworks – and that’s when the weather got contrary.
First, the thunder started to hush when Gloink spoke, almost as though the storm wanted to hear him. Then, Gloink sang a little love-song to his knife and the clouds cleared from the sky as he warbled.
He ended the last verse by kissing the blade – and a glorious double-rainbow spread over the sky and framed him as he did it!
By then I’d started to suspect that we’d got trouble.
You can probably guess the rest. As soon as Gloink came onto the scene he was framed by a rainbow. Then the weather cleared, the sunlight gave him a spotlight and if there were any flowering trees in the area the petals started to blow in his general direction… I guess that weather elemental had a real thing about the bad boys.
(I guess that’s when I made my own wish, too - and I got it, but there was nobody around and nobody sang, “Done!” That storm didn’t follow me home. It didn‘t decide it liked me better and blow through the portal after me and it didn’t start wishing for itself and decide that it wanted to be the most intangible queen in history.)
The storm stayed right there in that dimension, a faithful prop for every scene that Gloink played. The guy got so heated about it that he almost ended up with real hot number - but of course that got rained out.
From our viewpoint it didn’t matter. Gloink was a Gig target and he did end up a changed character - especially after the blue-birds got in on the act and started fluttering around him twittering every time he went out. He lost his street cred completely. He couldn’t put a foot into his old haunts without hearing laughter, at first. From his viewpoint some of the reactions he got later may have been even worse.
I went back on another Gig a few years ago. I saw old Gloink around the city, with his little band of acolytes and his begging bowl. From what he sang he really believed that he’d been chosen as a saint, loved so much by the Powers that he’d been forced from his life of crime into holy denial and celibate worship, crowned with a rainbow for a halo and a choir of blue-birds…
(Me? I’d just wish that nobody will ever direct a vengeance wish at me!)
Sweet the singing demon
Fandom, BTVS.
Words 1066