Title: lovely weather we're having, isn't it?

Summary: The age-old starter of non-conversation suddenly becomes a large part of Vetinari's life, as do talking boxes and brightly painted bits of metal that go vroom.

Warnings: None, except that it's really weird.

Prologue

Esme Weatherwax dropped slightly yellowing leaves into her cauldron. In one hand, she held a rapidly shrinking and quite elderly head of cabbage. She used the other to peel the leaves off and drop them, one by one, into what was to be soup, but was, at present, water nearing its boiling point. She did this with the distracted air of one who has made countless cabbage soups in the past, and has a general idea of how things go while making cabbage soup. In fact, she even had the swirl of the water perfectly ascertained, so that the amount of time she took to rip off another leaf of lettuce was the exact same amount of time needed for the soup to rotate a carefully judged number of degrees. This way, the leaves fell evenly over the surface of the lightly ebullient water, instead of all falling one on top of the other so by the time the soup was done, some leaves were still raw and some had completely disintegrated.

Because of this, she wasn't paying too much attention; cabbage soup making didn't require much attention when you've been doing it for most of your life, especially if you'd lived as long as Esme had.

Because she wasn't paying much attention, she was quite surprised when there was a gurgling sound, and then the sound of someone trying to suck up a few drops of liquid and getting instead a strawful of air. Esme looked down to find that the cauldron draining, as if someone had pulled the plug, though of course there was no plug. It was a cauldron. You don't put a plug in a cauldron.

This was a Sign, Esme had no doubt. One of those occult symbols that the common person took one look at and said, "I should take this problem to the Witches, I should." Only usually, this meant that they came to her, Esme. Well, perhaps that meant that she would have to come to herself as well.

"So, Esme," she asked herself conversationally, "what does this mean?"

When she looked down again, she found that all the water had gone, leaving a shriveled heap of cabbage at the very bottom of the cauldron. Sighing, she put out the fire beneath the cauldron, and reached in to take the cabbage out…

…oh.

The cabbage was parted into two lumps and shaped suspiciously like a wahooni with a clean cut right through the middle.

"Trouble in Ankh-Morpork?" she asked herself wryly. It was a joke, albeit not one that most people would find too funny. (Esme did joke. It was just that no one else seemed to appreciate or even notice her sense of humor.) Then again, if she was joking about it, that probably meant something. In order to joke about it, you have to at least believe in it a little…

Sighing, she reached for her crystal ball.

Meanwhile, in a city monikered "The Big Wahooni," the Patrician disappeared. However, as he did most things, he did this quietly, so there wasn't even an uproar until morning.

To be continued...