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.

Chapter 3: August 27: Overcast with a chance of thunderstorms

"I just want to make sure I understand this clearly. Do correct me if I'm wrong," said the voice of Vetinari from somewhere to Robert's left. Robert turned to face that direction, because he'd been taught it was polite to look at people while they were talking, not that it really mattered at the moment. "You have this… electricity. You use it for lighting, for communication, for tools like computers and loudspeakers. Electricity is so important, in fact, that you don't even put windows in most of the rooms, relying instead on electric lights. Am I getting this right so far?"

Robert hazarded a soft "uh huh" while Sylvia wondered about the pronoun choice.

"This precious, vital energy source you channel through wires, which you hang 25 feet in the air on unprotected and unsupported poles. In fact, the only thing stopping them from falling over is some dirt and each other, which means that, should they fall over—and I am aware that this is a rare occurrence, probably only every time the wind blows—they drag their neighbors down with them."

There was a brief and guilty silence. Vetinari's tone of voice was mild and not at all sardonic, but the words themselves rang with sarcasm.

"Oh, another thing," Vetinari's voice continued. "During a thunderstorm, it is the job of a meteorologist to provide viewers with the information they need. To do this, we need divers equipment, cameras and things, which operate on electricity. So, and I ask this purely in a spirit of inquiry, you understand, how are we going to accomplish this with the power out and both meteorologists suspended in a metal box a few stories off the ground?"

There was another embarrassed silence.

"We have a back-up generator," Robert's voice offered.

"Do we? Capital. Shall we go turn it on?"

"It, er, turns on by itself."

"What, automatically? Without outside persuasion?"

"Uh huh."

"So… that means that it's on right now, does it?"

"Er." Robert glanced around at the dark interior of the elevator and felt that his generator refute had left something to be desired. "People are probably working on it right now," he tried.

There was silence from Vetinari's corner. When he spoke again, his voice was slightly distracted and came from above their heads. Robert guessed that he'd stood up. "Oh? Are they looking for an on switch, then?"

"Yeah, probably."

"Splendid. I'm sure that, in the dark, with the freezing rain and howling winds, they shall accomplish this in no time."

There was the sound of metal scraping against metal, and then a long, drawn-out sound, like two forces straining against each other.

"Mr. Vetinari?" Sylvia asked. "What are you doing?"

"Tell me," Vetinari responded, "is there any way to get off this elevator without electricity?"

"Down," replied Robert darkly, thinking of the three-story drop below them.

"Indeed? Is there a hatch on the floor?"

"Er, no. I was talking about, you know, the fall."

"Indeed? So, what were you thinking of falling through?"

"Um. I was just… I mean, it was a joke."

"Ah," said the voice of Vetinari, as if suddenly edified. The straining sound grew louder, before there was a sudden rush of wind and the hissing sound of elevator doors retracting.

Robert made a startled noise. "Did you get the door open?"

There was no response. A few moments later, Vetinari's presence, felt in the form of an obstruction in the slight breeze, was gone.

"Mr. Vetinari!" Sylvia screamed.

"Yes?" said the voice of Vetinari, now a bit higher than before.

"Are you—? I thought you fell!"

"I assure you; this is not the case." The voice steadily rose.

"What are you doing?"

"Climbing up the wall," said the voice of Vetinari, quite calmly.

"How?"

"I came prepared," was the response.

A few minutes passed, dragging their feet, and then there was another scraping sound. With the ding of an elevator reaching its floor, there was again the sound of elevator doors sliding open. Light fell on them, slightly strained from its trip down.

"It appears that the power is back on," said the voice of Vetinari.

"Yeah," said another voice. "We're running on generator power until they fix the cables."

"Yet the elevators aren't working?"

"Yeah, we're trying to save power, so we turned them off. There's a sign on the doors, see?"

"And you are aware that there are two people trapped in that elevator?"

"Oh my god, are you serious?"

"Quite."

8.8.8.8

By the time a ladder had been found and everybody got out on solid ground, cameramen had been assembled. Robert was in front of the cameras for several consecutive hours, while Sylvia gave Robert his prompts as soon as Vetinari was done writing them. After a while, Robert gave up paraphrasing it, and just read the words straight off the sheet. Quite a few people were mildly amused by, "Happily, conditions should am… amela… amelio… hang on a moment, Sylvia? Oh, uh, conditions should clear up by noon, and we'll see clear skies by late afternoon," because when the wind and rain are combining forces to rip the trees out of your yard, just about everything is amusing.

Finally, when the storms stopped growling outside and Robert and Vetinari were declared done for the day, or at least, until the 6:15 report that evening, Sylvia sat at her desk and buried her face in her hands.

Vetinari… the man had wrenched the elevator door open. How? It was possible he'd had something with him, a large, flat piece of metal, maybe, but if he had things like that with him, what was to say he didn't have knives? And then he'd crawled up the walls, using something else he'd "come prepared" with, and then he'd levered the other door open too, while hanging from the wall.

No matter how she looked at the situation, Vetinari seemed dangerous.

Sylvia's eyes lit upon her bookshelf, where The Gift of Fear and Fear Less stared back at her. She pulled Gift down and flipped to the appendix. The author of both books, Gavin de Becker, was a predictor of violence. He'd worked successfully with presidents. Surely it wouldn't be too hard for him to figure Vetinari out?

As she dialed the phone number, she wondered what Vetinari was doing at that moment. Probably something creepy, like spying on them all through a window, she thought, and shuddered.

8.8.8.8

Havelock Vetinari was in fact standing in a garden. The garden was in front of a pale green house on Demilune Drive; house and garden were owned by Mr. and Mrs. Fiorentini, from whom he was renting a room. He had been standing there for about half an hour, watching the Fiorentinis garden, before Mr. Fiorentini had turned around and spotted him. This had caused him to drop his shears for some odd reason, as if perhaps Vetinari's presence was unsettling, or just the fact that he'd stood there for so long without being noticed. At Vetinari's query, Mr. Fiorentini had explained that he was pruning the shrubberies to help them grow better, and not because he disliked them, and now was trying to explain why his wife was picking spiny thistle plants out of the ground.

"Well, they're weeds, see? We want to be rid of them."

"Why?"

"Er. Because they're ugly, and they're taking up room and, and nutrients and whatever."

"Which your flowers would otherwise have gotten."

"Yeah. Exactly."

"So you're pulling their leaves off."

"Yeah?"

"Might I point out the parallel between pulling off and clipping off leaves?"

"What?"

Vetinari sighed. "Aren't you basically pruning your weeds, Mr. Fiorentini?"

"Er." Mr. Fiorentini looked flustered. By this point, Mrs. Fiorentini had looked up as well. Her weeder's metallic edges glinted dangerously in the sunlight, and a leaf fell from its pronged end.

"Well," she said, laughing in the highly embarrassed way of one caught doing something incredibly stupid. "At least for now, you can't see the weeds, right? And it's not like there's anything else I can do…"

Vetinari's stare went on for a little longer than necessary. Then, wordlessly, he crouched down in front of the thistle. His back covered what he was doing, but when he stood again, he was holding the weed didactically by its root. "If you pull it out the root, the weed can hardly grow back again," he explained, picked up the plastic bag by Mrs. Fiorentini, and moved on to the next weed.

Within half an hour, Vetinari had, without gloves or a weeder, removed all the weeds from the garden, to the Fiorentinis' astonishment. Finally, he dropped the plastic bag, carefully knotted, back on their lawn, and looked at the two.

"You're bleeding!" Mrs. Fiorentini yelped, perhaps unwilling to discuss what Vetinari had just done. Vetinari looked down at his fingers as if he had never seen them before. They were, indeed, bleeding slightly where thistle after thistle had pricked.

"I offered you gloves," Mrs. Fiorentini said, after a pause, as if he was accusing her.

"Madam," he said as he walked back to the house, "I hardly imagine that gloves would've helped. The spines would just have poked through. Besides, your gloves are knitted, which pretty much means that there are small holes in them." He stopped by the water faucet at the outside of the house, and carefully rinsed his fingers under it. Then he went in.

It is interesting to note that not a single thistle ever grew again in the Fiorentini's garden. Word gets around.