Discworld and Member Articles
|
The Plaid Identity - beginning
|
|
|
|
|
Written by plaid
|
|
Thursday, 29 September 2005 |
Forward
I. The following is just one of those board fics. Please don't resent me for any questionable portrayals of you as a character. its all in the name of fun. And also for the sake of my creativity, which needs all the fresh air and exersize it can get
II. I do write this in a fairly spontaneous way, but keep in mind that continual revision is going on. I can't help it. I read things over again and decide they should be worded differently. Nothing major will be changed, but as a warning I just have to say that this story is alive and sometimes small bits move around.
In the words of Tonyblack:
quote:
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Advice to anyone new reading Plaid's wonderful story.
1) Always look at the edit dates.
2) Read it all.
3) Ask for more.
4) Be prepared to be hooked.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
III. The previous draft, in its original thread with original comments and Interactive Deathmatch Feature (of which there may be another, if the plot so occasions).
IV. A fitting quote about my archetypal setting:
Peter Acroyd, in English Music~
"This is a famous island," he declared, "for it is much written about. ...the spirit of one writer or another may pass into a place such as this. It is an enchanted island .... it thrives upon the descriptions of many Englishmen .... continually being recreated in other men's words while its identity can never change."
Beginning and Subsequent Bits
I woke up with sand in my ears. And in my hair, and my nose, and my pants. I only had one sock on, and it was wet. All of me was wet, come to that. Wet and itchy, and full of sand. My mind absorbed these details carefully, trying to find an appropriate shelf on which to store them. To my horror it found the shelves empty, and even the librarian missing. I sat up and looked out at the tide coming in.
I'm on a beach, I thought. 'I'm on a beach,' I announced to the seagulls. 'I'm on a beach and it's cold and I don't know who I am!'
With some difficulty I got up, shivering in the coastal wind. Luckily I did succeed in locating both of my boots, but not the other sock. I tried to rinse the one I had out in the tide, but this only resulted in my sock and my trousers and my hands getting rather muddy. The tide was trying to push me out of its way. It started to rain. Shoving my sandy toes into my sand-filled boots, I ran for the trees above the shore.
To its credit, the forest was in a small way shelter from the wind and rain, but it was dark, damp, and it smelled terrible.
I made myself relatively comfortable beneath the fronds of an enormous bush. It was drier and warmer down here, if dirtier, and I unbuttoned my soggy coat and wriggled out of it, dislodging much sand and a few crawly things, which I grimaced at and shooed away. Everything in my wallet that wasn't a muddy coin was a mass of dissolving paper mush and runny ink. I looked through the rest of my pockets and found some rusted nail clippers, a broken key chain, also rusted, and a book. It was small, wet, and falling apart. The cover said T oly Boo f O in gold lettering, and I could just make out the embossed letters h, e, H, k, o, and m where the gold had once been but no longer remained. The contents were unreadable. The leather cover was bent and stained with ink and the pages soaked to lumpy pieces. I put it back in my coat pocket and tried to clean the gritty muck from under my fingernails.
'I w-w-wonder if I c-c-c-c-could sss-s-ss-st-t-t-tt-start a fire,' I said, finding comfort in my new habit of talking to myself. Maybe, once it stopped raining.... I looked up at the sky and its deceptively warm-looking thickness and I knew that it would never stop raining. The clouds looked like they were going to swallow the land up and digest it and poor me in the heighths of its cold bowels. I scowled at the weather. I scowled at my boots as I took them off and poured forth mounds of sand and shells. I scowled at my soggy toes. I scowled at my soggy coat as I pulled it over my knees. I shivered and rubbed my hands over my arms.
And then I heard a moan and a loud, rickety laugh. I stood up, not wanting to share the night in a dark wood with some unknown lunatic. A short walk in the direction of the outburst revealed beyond the trees a grubby figure sitting in a shallow puddle, holding a llama on the end of a rope. He was talking in a deep whisper. My eyes widened and the llama stopped in mid-sentence to look up at me.
I felt it necessary to say something. 'I.....' I began. 'I'm hungry,' I blurted, suddenly distracted by my grumbling stomach. I looked around absently, not knowing what to say anymore. The llama was still staring at me. The man--no, boy, I decided--next to him was twiddling a stick in his puddle of mud; I don't think he knew I was standing there.
The llama spoke. 'Don't worry, there'll be pie once the rain slows up. You like plaid, do you?' he asked, nodding pointedly at my clothing. I looked down at it myself and opened my mouth to make a few non-commital ums followed by a gaping pause and a blank look. He went on, 'Not many girls could pull off those trousers with that shirt. But on you, and with that belt, it looks... right. Though,' he paused and blinked, considering my attire thoughtfully, 'probably the sand helps.'
The only thing I ended up saying in response to this was, 'Who are you?' I wasn't sure if llamas normally possessed such powers of articulation, but I didn't much care. After all, if this was just a dream so much the better---I'd be glad to wake up beneath a warm, dry, and clean comforter.
'Brad. Brad the wonder llama. And who might you be?'
I had no answer to that, and anyway ignored it and focused on the much more interesting bit about wonder llamas. 'Wonder llama?' I said skeptically. He looked anything but wonderous. Wet, yes, and slightly forlorn because of this, but not very awe-inspiring at. As I was raising my eyebrows in question to the creature's status as 'wonder llama,' the filthy figure in the puddle stood up and introduced himself.
'My name,' he said, extending his hand drippingly for me to shake, 'is Hermes. You don't know who you are, do you?'
I was surprised at his insight, and could only shake my head in silent astonishment. He nodded in a sympathetic way and went on. 'Happened to all of us. Most of us, I mean. Not Brad. Brad says it's the water... lethal, or ...leaky.... something like that, he called it. He says it's best to just eat the pie.'
'Pie?' I wondered aloud. 'What pie?'
'You'll see, Plaid,' the llama told me. 'Let's get out of this rain, shall we?'
He proceeded to lead the man holding the end of his rope through a gap in the trees, deeper into the woods. I followed them, thinking about food, wondering about pie, and almost forgetting all about the coat and boots I had left under a bush. Luckily I remembered these before too long, and, smiling because I *could* remember at least this, shouted, 'Wait! My boots---' and ducked back through the trees to find them. The wonder llama couldn't expect me to tramp through soggy underbrush with bare feet, could he?
Re-donning the boots and the heavy wet coat, I rejoined my new friends and we re-commenced our march. Nobody said anything until we reached a makeshift doorway of driftwood and cardboard. Hermes went up to it and shifted it away from the entrance to a cave. The air inside felt warm and we all hurried in out of the rain.
Once Hermes shut the door the rain's patter faded into a soft hum. Brad the wonder llama led us through the black interior of an underground passage. The floor was strewn with sand, which was damp in some places but for the most part dry and much warmer than the beach outside. The air smelled heavenly. My stomach continued to grumble and I began seeing hallucinations of food in the darkness. I couldn't see the llama or Hermes, but I felt their presences just ahead of me and followed the sounds of hooves and flopping sandals.
It was only a few minutes before we reached a large, dimly lit room where a few dozen people were congregated. As we entered some of them looked up and gave a 'hiya' to Brad and Hermes. A few of them glanced at me curiously, some of them smiled. I was intent on taking in the space before me. There were incense burners all over the place. They were shelves made of driftwood in the corners, log benches all around the room, and on the stone wall opposite the entrance there were a multitude of paintings and sketches merging into a very detailed, very colorful, very chaotic and dominating mural.
'Nice place, this is. I've only been here three days and I'm getting along fine,' Hermes said. He took my elbow and brought me into the center of the room. Brad whistled loudly (I'm really not sure how he, as a llama, accomplished this, but he did it very expertly) and the room fell silent.
'Brad calls this young lady Plaid, on account of she's wearing quite a lot of it,' Hermes introduced me briefly to the crowd.
'Do any of you ladies have an extra set of clothes she could use? I expect you want a dry set of clothes, Plaid?' Brad asked.
'Well, yeah...if...' I mumbled.
'I do, Brad,' one girl volunteered. 'Nothing in plaid,' she said to me, 'but if you want to I'll let you borrow them until yours dry out.'
I smiled in thanks and followed her.
'I was lucky,' the girl continued, 'I washed up on shore with most of my luggage. I've got three or four days worth of clothes and a bottle of shampoo. Which is very nice to have, let me tell you, though I do have to use it sparingly. There isn't much left.'
'How long have you been here?' I asked. We were descending a tight, disjointed spiral staircase cut into the sandy soil.
'I don't know anymore, it's been a long time. I don't remember anything from before I came here, so as far as my memory's concerned I've been here forever. Oh---you can call me buzzfloyd, by the way. Brad didn't know what he should call me, so he let me choose my own name. I like the sound of buzzfloyd.'
'So Brad gives you all names? What makes him the one in charge?'
At the bottom of the staircase was a door, and as buzzfloyd opened it she looked at me. 'Well, why not? He is the one that brought us here and shared the pie of Ba with us. He's a very good llama, you know.'
'I guess so,' I said, since he had been nice to me. We were now proceeding through a dark, sloped corridor. 'Hey, what is all this pie everyone keeps mentioning?'
buzzfloyd turned off into a room and pulled a curtain away from the small window. It was still raining, I could see.
'Well,' she began, sitting down on the floor, 'I think you'd better just wait and see for yourself. You'll enjoy it. I never get sick of pie, and I've been eating it for as long as I can remember.'
The room we were in had actual walls, made of brick. There was a row of porcelain sinks along one side of the room and across from them a rack of some sort, upon which were hung a collection of clothes. buzzfloyd told me to pick whatever I thought would fit me and that I could change behind one of the doors there.
Upon investigation I realized we were in a public washroom. Buzzfloyd had hung her entire wardrobe over the fronts of the stalls. I peeled my soaking, dirty clothes off and thankfully donned buzzfloyd's clean, dry jeans and a wooly jumper while the two of us chatted about how much it usually rained and what kind of pie she was guessing we'd get once it stopped.
'Do you have a favourite kind of pie?' she asked.
'I don't remember,' I admitted as we retraced our steps.
There was an argument going on when we reached the room full of incense. At least it seemed like an argument to me. There was a tall figure berating a shorter humble looking one and everyone was crowded around, watching and murmuring.
The taller guy spoke. 'This is all your fault, Nester,' he said sternly, almost shouting. 'You were on fred duty this week. He could have died in that mess! what do you have to say for yourself?!'
Nester cowered, fearful, and appologized in a trembling voice.
'Saying sorry won't help you. The entire dining hall is wrecked, and it's all because of you!'
At this point buzzfloyd gasped and pushed her way into the crowd to find out the details. I heard bits of conversation: '..was awful..' '...just collapsed on him...' '...yeah, good thing orrdos came, thank Ba...' '...thrown in the yak pit for sure...'
I wondered who Fred was. And what had happened to him. And what could be so bad about a pit full of yaks? I looked around for brad, hoping to ask him to explain things, but he was nowhere to be found.
Someone yelled, 'Do a quickmatch, Doors! Yak pit or the big Garner!'
'Or the zombies!' someone else added.
The man I presumed was called 'Doors' looked thoughtful and then nodded.
'That's the way it will be decided. Nester, stand up.' The nervous man did so, and Doors continued. 'Even if you did neglect my elephant in a most serious way, I will let you vote first.'
The crowd giggled as Doors gave Nester a choice between the yak pit, the volcano, and the river of zombies, describing each in careful detail. Nester squirmed and flinched, trying to shut his eyes to the images of filthy, smelly yaks, and sharp, icy flames, and eerie, slippery, silently grasping ghosts... Everyone grew quiet as they watched him weighing the options in his mind.
'Come on,' Doors prodded him. 'You've got fifteen seconds. Decide, so everyone else can vote.'
Nester sighed and mumbled his choice dejectedly. Doors wrote it down on the back of a large palm leaf and told everyone to wait their turn and not try and vote all at once.
 |
|
|
Subscribe to this comment's feed