Cheery
Cheery Littlebottom sat in her lavatory-turned-laboratory, thinking. She had her chin in her hand, and the other hand tapped idly on her knee.
Cheery was depressed. It was uncommon dwarfs to get depressed, because there's very little time to think down a mine. City dwarfs mostly worked or got drunk. Cheery had plenty of time to think, and she was currently spending it being depressed.
Oh, she had fun messing about with chemicals, making things go funny, change colour, explode or go bloop. Cheery was especially good at the latter two. The problem was, she wanted something else. Up until several days ago she hadn't known what it was, which made it much harder to pine for. Now she did, and she was making up for lost time.
She'd been out with some friends- the number of dwarfs coming out about their gender was steadily growing, and Cheery now had some lovely girl friends- and they'd gone to see Stibbon's Band, the new Music With Rocks In band. It had been good. Really good.
The problem with that was the wizard at the back of the band, who had been seated behind a semi-circle of what looked like marching drums on stands. There were some brass plates on stands, and two that clanged together. He had hit them with a pair of sticks. Not randomly, but to a rhythm that changed depending on the song, and they were catchy rhythms.
Cheery moaned, dropping her head into both hands. Since the first song, she had been trying to force out the beats that bopped out of her mind, making her hands twitch in time as though she were holding a pair of sticks. It was playing merry hell with her alchemical work. Now, whenever she heard a tune, a beat would come into her head to go with it. Even just listening to the guards singing the song about Lord Vetinari not having balls- the one that made Carrot blush and Angua grin- she had to sit on her hands to stop them tapping.
Sighing, Cheery hopped off the privy and opened the door. She'd seen a set of drums like that wizard's in a shop in Sensible Alley, off Morphic Street, and she had some spare money set away for a rainy day…
It's definitely raining now, thought Cheery as she left the Watch House and headed off towards Morphic Street at a run.