It turns out that cranking out short things on a whim once a week is enjoyable. Have something shamelessly meta.

Terrible. Artfully Terrible.

Lyn had always thought she was tall enough. Her mother had been tall for a Lycian, and Lycian women were among the tallest in all of Elibe. So as far as height was concerned, Lyn was fairly certain she had her bases covered. It gave her a slight edge in swordplay and convenience about the castle when she felt it necessary to rearrange the trinkets on the mantle, however rare that urge was.

And so, she was a little frustrated at being forced to balance upon a pair of (uneven) wooden stilts for Act Two, Scene Three.

"I'm going to fall," she said, staring at the steps up to the stage. Hector shrugged at her sympathetically.

"Nonsense," quipped Mark, who didn't even look up from his stack of parchments. If he had, perhaps he would've seen that she was wobbling even standing in place. "You'll do fine. Chop chop, let's get this practice going."

Lyn hesitantly took a single step and thought better of ascending the steps. "Is this... necessary?"

"Of course it is," he said, his voice taking on a grandiose tone. He looked up for a moment and steadied his spectacles upon his nose. Giving a certain highbrow frown – and all of Eliwood's Elite had learned to fear that frown, for nothing good ever came out of it – he preached, "In this scene, you must loom, Lady Lyndis. It is not merely enough to glare at Hector. No, that would be entirely too" – dramatic pause – "reasonable. In order to convey the irony, the excess of bourgeois melodrama, you must absolutely loom over him."

"On stilts," she said.

"On stilts."

"Can't I just sit down?" Hector asked from the stage. In the back of his mind, he figured he'd rather sit than stand through Mark's extensive tirades, anyway. (The last time he'd complained about them, said tirade only grew longer.)

"Absolutely not!" Mark slammed his stack of parchments down on his table, letting out a hiss of pain as his knuckles inevitably slammed harder than a pile of papers. "Ow, ow ack – anyway, as I was saying … must really watch those fingers ... you see, in order to comment properly upon the absurdity of the entire situation, we must go above and beyond the absurdity present in the source material itself. We must go beyond the beyond: beyond space, time, and logic, like a mention of aeroplanes in a faux-medieval fantasy."

Lyn wondered for the third time what medieval was supposed to indicate, anyway. "I'm afraid I don't understand this, Mark."

"I don't expect you to understand my art," he said very seriously. "It takes a true connoisseur to comprehend its genius." Sucking contemplatively upon a knuckle, he added, "Perhaps I should add aeroplanes." He snapped his fingers. "Of course! Aeroplanes. Yes, yes, my masterpiece is still incomplete. Let us break for now. I will send you revised scripts by next morn. Dismissed!"

Lyn hopped down from the stilts with a sigh of relief, massaging her ankles. Hector yanked his axe out from the floor, where it was not merely stuck, but embedded into the stage (Mark had made it clear that he should not storm out but rather, exeunt with the tempestuous rage of a wronged Bernese noble) and hoisted it over one shoulder. "Is this guy worth putting up with?" he grumbled, jerking a thumb over to where their green-cloaked tactician chatted with Eliwood, no doubt giving him director's remarks on the nature of his character.

"Shh," she hissed. "Don't let him catch you talking like that!"

"What? Talking how?"

"Please don't remind him about ending sentences on prepositions," she whispered, "or he might edit every conversation to include at least two."

He stared blankly at her and shrugged. "Look, I fell asleep in letters class, but... I don't see what the problem is. How else do you say 'Come in'?"

"The problem is that we agreed to put on this play in exchange for his help during the war," Lyn pointed out. "And if he keeps changing it, we're never going to be done with it."

Hector grimaced. "Good point. I just want to get this piece of crap or art or whatever over with." Lyn winced a little and glanced to make sure that Mark was still engaged with the other lord. Fortunately, he didn't seem to hear. An 'unenlightened review', further stripped of legitimacy due to Hector's second ending preposition of the afternoon, would truly elicit an insufferable lecture from their director. The fact that no accomplished playwright ever praised Mark's works didn't seem to discourage him. "Do you think anyone wants to watch this? Other than that guy, anyway."

Lyn considered this. "I don't think anyone understands it like he does," she said quietly. "He's obviously trying to make it particularly terrible, but..."

"You can just say it's a pile of rubbish," Hector offered. "No one can tell the difference."

"I don't know if I want to say that." Lyn propped the stilts against the backdrop, a Sacaean landscape made unrecognizable by the deliberate misapplication of her court artists' talents. "I've seen the plays he's trying to mock. They are rather horrible, and he is doing this deliberately."

"Who cares? If it's bad, it's bad." Hector set his axe in the weapon rack by the stage and worked at the straps holding on his armor. "I'd rather watch an opera Serra wrote."

"You can't mean that seriously." She actually couldn't remember the opera Serra composed for last year's harvest festival, on account of being unable to follow its meandering plot, forgettable cast, and confused logic. She wondered, in fact, if Serra's opera was meant to be Mark's subject of ridicule.

"I mean that." Hector dropped his armor into the prop box with a clang. "I'd like a spar before I go back to paperwork. You?"

"Gladly." Lyn gave a pitying glance toward still-lectured Eliwood as she followed Hector out of the theater.

Note: For the record, this has nothing to do with the FFN writer "Mark of the Asphodel," whose parodies I am rather fond of.