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thecrenellations · 4 years

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Thick as Thieves Undead-Blog, Part Two | when your liveblog wakes up to drink some broth then goes back to sleep smiling because it trusts you | my notes from reading the book for the first time, Spring 2017

Format: Page number. My ridiculous thoughts (Context???)

Part One

Chapters 6-13:

Ch. 6 - Very intense chapter in which Kamet and Costis are captured by the slavers and escape

163. Costis <3 Muscles Good looking! (wow what a way to start this post)

one hot piece of attolian manflesh ... confirmed (people would call him this on LJ! I forgot about it for several years until reading this passage)

164. omg earring swallowed!

166. amanuensis? (perennial thanks to mwt for all the vocab words)

168. shit. severed hand.

172. wtf Costis don’t kill him

173. how do you silently kill someone like that?

174. wow fuck

men dead not even breathing hard. (compare to KoA assassination)

Everyone is a monster!

176. Thieves.

Ch. 7 - Lots of good conversation, potentially symbolic animals, and a surprise Eugenides

183. Grt scene (apologies)

184. now who’s asking rude questions? (about killing people)

186. lying to him <3

ok! unreliable narrator!

wait i thought they didn’t have slaves in Attolia?!

187. “I was unappreciated” ... I’m always lonely

so cute

188. me when mwt writes: what is this blatant unabashed fanservice?

WHO IS THIS BOY?!

189. Onarkus =/= Sandy?

190. okaaay #confirmed Gen!

191. AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

Boots

195. he caught a snake (associated with a certain king and assumed bootboy “you viper” “you are a poisonous little snake” ... another ominous dead animal)

Is Costis’s earring for Eugenides (I was thinking of the god!)

196. a goat and a snake .... how poetic

Costis stalks goat ...

197. hmmm.... goat and hand and last trace of Nahuseresh (OMINOUS)

does Irene know her husband was a bootboy?

203. no this what? (“trouble with a maid” story exchange)

Marin?

204. he was prepared to run away??

how old was he?

well this is a lot to chew on

205. K using past tense for N

C asking about slaves killed after emperor’s death... does he know?

Ch. 8 - This road trip was going great until SOMEONE fell in a well

208. Are Taymets taller than Eddisian mountains?

210. time passing, broad and focused

212. MY Attolian

classic minor mwt characters

215. singing Costis???

216. swearing gimme a break

please don’t let the Namreen kill them later...

217. Kamet says very little of what HE did/his interactions w them!

218. wot nice cut! (“Eleven days later...”)

gods?

219. “water finds a way” a saying from Eddis? how does C know that? also brings to mind QoA weather passages

Why doesn’t Kamet ask/wonder WHY Gen wants him?

223. They’re gonna do it? They’re gonna make it? So close!

224. does Eddis have comparable irrigation engineering?

227. NO!

228. u idiot you meant to leave him before!!!

at least look in the freaking well!!!

229. Kamet’s Face! wow he’s really in shock (at weapons shop)

230. SUCH FAMILIAR PHRASING! birds :( (I was caught up in the birds and completely missed the spilled wine!)

Ch. 9 - Retrieving Costis from the well, Ennikar appears again

231. “You’re certain he’s dead?” nice CUT

this time i heard him say?

was he talking?

232. thoughtfully tensing his lower lip?

who tf is this guy - another god?

mm grr I’m Kamet I have no friends

ok so he’s what’s his face Enkidu?

heroes walk the streets

234. AAH why

say his fricking name?!

god you’re so bad @ this

236. THIEF

237. FRIEND OMG

238. omg so good flour!

SO CUTE I WOULD LOVE TO SEE THIS

239. OMG Costis. Nice. (Costis tries the Gen method of deflecting concern)

241. “as if we were close friends traveling together???”

242. Costis ... knows a hero when he sees one?

But ... delighted? not horrified?

Ch. 10 - Hanging out with Godekker

247. SO MANY HELPFUL STRONG MEN (Enter Godekker)

249. PAY THE FASTENER

253. god so snarky

254. Kamet’s chops

fuck how is this book going to end???

256. You’ll never feel safe ... Gen + Relius’s fears?

258. Fuh!

259. Ok do i have hope?

he doesn’t have Tethys lesions does he?

263. aahhhh

Costis trusts him!!!! <3

aaahhh

264. Noli? where did he get that from?

smarrrt

265. yeah u did tell Godekker your name!

wtf is this god advice!

268. The So, so, so count in this book is OUT OF CONTROL!!! It may be a record.

Ch. 11 - Kamet’s stressful voyage

270. Lol Sophos is better @ assuming Attolian ships are there...

272. yesssss earring GOOD

274. yeah sure Kamet you still haven’t left!

I did not want to leave the Attolian!

276. watching Costis

277. my heart’s gonna break don’t leave, Kamet!

278. “as if the gods had cursed my wandering feet” nice. also iambic pentameter

also laying it on a bit thick there

280. Sea in the Middle of the World!

he’s so scared though. :(

the fuckin nerve!

Costis + Gen and their s3cr3t sign

281. nooooo it’s ok to lie, it’s endearing in this world!

also Costis seriously why do you think he would be ok w/ this!

I’m coming home! (to Attolia. In cursive, see image at top of post.)

282. war?

Ch. 12 - Dramatic times in Attolia

284. “I thought we were I + E” :o

shit where is his honor now (”I would have let you go”)

285. hey there Teleus...

my heart

285. yeah but C probs knows all those guards ... he thought punching Gen was the most embarrassed he’d been... (in retrospect, I don’t think he was embarrassed AT ALL during this scene. Costis fight mode was activated.)

yeah I mean she has given us the Magus all this time! (reflecting on the fact that Costis’s name has yet to appear)

286. Yesss angry Costis poking Teleus!

This is Something to imagine

287. THIS IS REALLY BAD (”the queen”)

OK...

holy shit

when is this???

she’s not THAT old!

288. THE room? (“filled with all the horrors I had fled in Ianna-Ir”)

289. 298 pages until this! (“Costis”)

289. Please stay alive Irene!

On some level I do feel that my childhood is ruined w the confirmation they banged. :( Gen is like 20! (Listen. I love them. I'm very happy for them. This is not exactly breaking news. 20-year-olds, and this one in particular, can obviously do anything they want. This note brought to you by me being Too Ace For This and having been both younger and older than him since first reading the books a very long time ago...)

292. Gggennn

293. Is this court respect a recent development? WHAT DID I MISS? (they watched him fight the entire guard, is what, c’mon me. Costis hit him on the head with an amphora.)

yeah we get it people underestimate Eugenides

OH MY COSTIS

294. is this Annux by any chance?

Boys ur making a scene!

King of Attolia vs of Attolians?

295. very ... dramatic

this is ... a private convo?

297. yup he’s Eddis’s best stalker!

Ch. 13 - Everything else that happens in this book!

298. “Do they know?” yeah wtf Gen

it’s like the new “and every1 was naked” (in KoA)

“and every1 was watching”

300. Gen: Yo Helen can u bring me that one coin?

Helen: sure. no prob

301. “Poor Costis”

yeah Melheret always sneaks up

302. “You’ve come from the prisons, not how an honored guest is usually received” UM ACTUALLY...

305. Kamet.... (crying in his room)

306. “the kind of Attolia sitting on the footboard” oh my god yeah classic

307. Irene comes thru with the stats

Was Kamet at the battle at Ephrata?

310. talk with the kitchen staff good god i would like to know. So bizarre.

lol toting around an ambassador all nite? What would Teleus say?

while Irene’s sick ...

WTF will Costis do now?

312. names ... Kamet ... Ormentiedes?

Creeeeeeeeepy Relius (probably about “there are some questions you might answer for us” but possibly about the cutting up and feeding to wolves comment)

314. business arrangement uh sure

Yeah ok write it all down

316. talking to Costis?

(a note: the version I read was an advance reader copy, and the only major difference was that it did NOT include the scene with “the young Erondites”)

318. Attolia smiled at him!

anything worth doing is worth overdoing lol

319. alternate readings of poem?

322. orange trees!

cabbages!

324. sent Onarkus away RECENTLY???

Is Brinna Sandy!

Seriously.

Cooks r weird (thinking about the entry for cooks in the Tough Guide to Fantasyland)

326. the magus!

an ACHING void

oh I know I’ll just GO!

poor Gen can’t have any friends...

331. they have duffles in Attolia

and with Attolian duffles, the story ends! Thanks for reading, feedback is welcome. I promise I have more developed thoughts about this book. For another weird journey, listen to my Thick as Thieves playlist, maybe.

#this half is truly a mess.#queen's thief #thick as thieves #mwt #something i

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prinzenhasserin · 7 years

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Dear Worldbuilder!

This is just a general thing to tell you what I like/don’t like. I’ll be super thrilled if you find something adjacent you want to make instead! Most of my prompts are for writing, but art is also very welcome.

For all my requests there’s a potential to set them in canon, but also pre-canon or post-canon, and I don’t have a preference.

Likes:

competence porn

people not realizing they’re the most competent at their job/hobby

people failing their way to success

epistolary, journal entries, encyclopaedia entries, textbook articles

outsider POV

people not usually found in law enforcement solving crimes

dragons, fairy tales, magical realism

I kind of don’t dare to put politics here after what has happened and is happening right now, but I love the kind of pragmatic politics with idealistic background, and I’m a sucker for idealistic pragmatism, but I would totally understand not touching that with a pitchfork.

moral conflicts, orange and blue morality

people coming together to solve problems

noodle incidents

convoluted backstories you wouldn’t expect

Dislikes/DNW:

grimdark endings

rape, especially rape as backstory

hopeless, crapsack worlds

melodrama (stuff that takes itself too serious)

sex in a library

Leverage

This perfect show hits all of my weak spots and I may or may not have rewatched it more than ten times. Do not worry about getting facts wrong, though -- my memory is a sieve.

My favourite character is Jim Sterling. There is absolutely no need for including him in your story. I focused less on the requested characters and more on the worldbuilding prompts, but if you rather want to focus on any of the other characters, I love each of them on their own, too! (And together! And I love that Sterling is so eminently hateable.)

Characters: Jim Sterling, Alec Hardison, Eliot Spencer, Parker, Sophie Deveraux

Prompts:

WB: Aliases and their imaginary lives

It is known that one of Parker’s aliases had to go do jury duty. Are all of the aliases Hardison creates registered to vote? Do they get parking tickets? Do they all have jobs? How deep does this go?! Do they have housing, are they paying taxes -- do they have student debt?

Is Hardison creating aliases as some sort of cathartic response -- does he do it for fun? Does he ship them with each other? (Is he secretly a writer...)

WB: Interpol

RL Interpol doesn’t have field agents, does Leverage Interpol have agents, or is Jim Sterling just overly awesome at pretending to be an upstanding citizen?

If it is in fact, a real criminal enforcement agency, what are some of his reports like? Maybe he actually isn’t there to investigate Leverage Consulting, but is instead taking down the politicians they are after?

Is Interpol’s relationship with the Leverage team sort of a running joke in the intelligence community? Or like, the go-to-excuse for derailing an operation?

WB: Criminal Files

Oh man, I would love to peak into what kind of criminal files the various characters have (if they even have one), on different criminal databases

Maybe Parker’s fingerprints are at so many crime sights at once, people think the finger print is a statistical error

WB: RPF fanfiction in-universe

That weird thief in “A Girl’s Night Out” is definitely a Parker stan, and stalks all her crimes across a variety of message boards.

Lots of fans start out with just one of them; Parker, Hardison and Sophie are kind of infamous, and they probably had a following before teaming up, but it really starts getting intense when there are rumours of them working together (!!) to take down even worse criminals (!!) That’s when Hardison organises the first con

There are probably volunteers for identity theft

(oh god. ship wars.)

tumblr-sites dedicated to finding out if what Parker can do is actually humanly possible

the desperate hunt to find out which WoW avatar Hardison is playing

in-universe fanfiction, in-universe meta, chat-streams, twitter messages

WB: Contacts of Leverage Consulting

How do they find clients?

Do they get clients via submission based websites? How do they check their information?

Queen’s Thief

My prompts focus more on pre-, or during canon time periods, but if you want to play in the future, that’s also great!

Characters: Original Pirate Character, Original Female Characters, Original Thief Character, Eugenides the God

Prompts:

WB: Diplomatic Relations

There is probably trade happening outside the for main countries. How does that happen? Is Ornon part of a larger battalion of cousin-diplomats? Do they speak different languages, or dialects? Where there misunderstandings based on changed language?

Where is the University of Ferria and why can Eugenides send someone there for exile? Are there other places people can be send to because of political turmoil?

Are any of them send back because they had been exiled by different kings?

How do the other countries react to the Sophos method of negotiation?

Or the fact that the Sovereign of Attolia, Eddis and Sounis is a Thief/Eugenides?

WB: Island States

How do the Island States keep their independence from both Sounis, Attolia, and the Mede for so long?

The answer might definitely be: Pirates. How does it work? Is it like a law-free zone, or do they have strict policies in place? Do they buy their lumber for the boats from Eddis, like all the rest of the countries? Or does their entire fleet contain ships other people built.

What makes them different from Attolia, Eddis, or Sounis? Is there a difference? (Ocean traditions, gods, system of government)

WB: Engineers

Who built all the passageways through Eddis? Are there lifts working with water displacement?

How about those clocks. How does a vaguely Byzantine Empire get clocks. Or guns.

Where do they go to study? Is there an engineering section in Eugenides’ library in Eddis? Who do they read? What kind of subject do they fail -- Euclidean algebra?

WB: University of Ferria

Does it have a library?

How about the History Department. Do they have questions about the change in power re:Attolia? Is Erondite the Younger helpful?

What’s the relationship to the country Attolia?

Do all the children of the higher echelons go to university?

WB: myths

How do normal thieves interact with their god? Maybe Eugenides isn’t such an aberration, and Eugenides the God comes to all his thieves and tells them to stop whining, or iterations thereof.

What’s up with that falling stuff? Myth, or myth busted? Did the Queen Thief really fall of dancing on a roof, or did she intentionally kill herself?

How did Eugenides become the god of thieves? Is he just responsible for thieves, or also for other things?

Discworld

Look, I obviously have a soft spot for competent despots. Also, I find it a shame that Susan Sto Helit, Sam Vimes and Lord Vetinari never met in canon, because they are all sort of nobility. Any of these characters would be great! So would different characters.

Characters: Lord Vetinari, Susan Sto Helit, Sam Vimes, Rufus Drumknot, Original Characters

Prompts:

WB: Patrician’s Palace

I would love to see how the architecture looks like, anywhere among at least six floors, plus cellars, sub-cellars, and liveable attics. Floorplans! Secret tunnels! Who all lives here? Is there a visitor’s log?

We know there’s no orang utans in the menagerie, but what lives there?

How about those dungeons? The cells look from the inside, there’s a pit Reacher Gilt fell into, and Moist von Lipwig obviously didn’t -- are there more ways towards “escape”? Where are all the secret tunnels?

The gardens were designed by “Bloody Stupid” Johnson. Anything else he made better?

What about the axe Sam Vimes buried in the middle of the table in one of the palace chambers? It’s still there as a conversation piece. What kind of conversations happen around it? Is there a feature about it in the newspaper? Does it start a trend in interior decorating?

WB: Children’s Literature

Susan Sto Helit likes to edit fairytales. Does she ever publish a revised edition? In the first edition of Grimm’s fairytale there is a story called “How Some Children Played at Slaughtering” and it’s exactly what you would expect. Does Susan tell this story? Does she get protesting parents, and how does she deal with them?

There are some children’s books with barely changed villains based on real politicians. Is there one with Lord Vetinari featuring as the bad guy (or maybe the hero)?

How about “Where’s my cow?” -- does the story change when Sam’s son grows older? It got reviewed by the Ankh-Morpork Times -- does the newspaper have a regular children’s literature page? Is the version Sam Vimes tells his son the one that Rob Anybody reads in the chalk? Does that book have a fan community (what would that even look like?)

WB: Newspaper Articles

Page Six -- Ankh-Morpork style: Do they report on what kind of beer upstanding citizens drink? Is there a column for where Sam Vimes is expected to be today?

It’s not technically a newspaper, but Twurp’s peerage lists nobility without judgement, and I would love to read an entry for any of the people nominated.

Does the Times report on itself sometimes? What about reporting on the new tax system? Do they ever have to deal with computers and the Internet?

Are there other newspapers? Do they report about the same events differently? Are there opinion pieces from weird people? Do they get letters to the editor?

Obituaries: Is there an upcoming deaths section for wizards and witches? Do they invite people to their death celebrations? How do they deal with the Undead?

Rivers of London

This book series is so rich with details, and it’s amazing. If there’s any of my ideas you absolutely disagree with, feel free to ignore them and focus on something else instead!

Characters: No characters, Original Characters

Prompts:

WB: The White Library (Rivers of London)

Bibliotheca Alba

I’m not really sold on the location of Meckenheim. Convince me? To explain: Peter and the Professor talk about it being in the city of Cologne (the capital city back then) until the French invaded, then moved it to Weimar (the capital city of the Weimar Republic and also the Third Reich), upon which it was moved to Bonn (the capital of West Germany). That is utterly ridiculous. Weimar was under occupation by the Russians at that time, and like hell they would have given up that kind of power, and the capital city of people’s mind remained in Berlin. Bonn was a rather puny city, and only became the capital because Konrad Adenauer (the first head of state) happened to be born there. There is a library housing every work in german language published since 1918, and it’s split into two locations: one in Frankfurt am Main, the other in Leipzig. But maybe it’s different for the magical part? Still, who in his right mind would want to have a magical library in Bonn? Nobody, that’s who. Also, a strong contender for where a magical library could be housed: Bielefeld, the city that doesn’t exist

this leads me quite nicely to, how did they move a large amount of magical books from Weimar to Meckenheim during the post-war confusion? were other magical being involved?

also would love a library catalogue, how a magical library looks, a non-human librarian

WB: the London Underground

Is the Underground sentient, and if so does it eat other things besides people?

What kind of traditions, stories do the pale people have? are they human? do they know?

WB: Magical Trade

I’m sure there’s plenty of clothing and accessories needed to ensure the masquerade works, and the magical population isn’t outed as such. Where do they go buy clothes? Is there advertisement?

Did the Folly police magical markets, back when there were more of them? Are there anti-fraud spells, or artefacts? If the Folly didn’t regulate this kind of stuff who did/does?

Do people trade with the fae? How does that work - does it ever work out in favour of the human?

Do the Rivers sometimes trade on their territory?

WB: Demi Monde

what other strange people are there? What about genii locorum of bridges, streets, buildings

do places with a lot of magic gain sentience? How about the Folly? Skygarden?

there are hedge wizards, what about hedge witches? are there sirens? People who see the future? what about that marketplace where Zach Palmer was found, are all of them magical? how do they blend in? (Do they blend in?)

Are there like, Werewolves of London? (around in Chinatown, hungering for some chinese food)

What about magical tourists. Do they get a pamphlet on where to find like-minded people? Is there a magical tourism bureau, staffed by idk, the River Crane?

#worldbuilding exchange #dear letter #exchange letter

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