Author's Note: Well, this is chapter two. After much thought, I have decided what I am going to parody. Fits in quite well, I think. It actually makes sense. I'm glad I had the sense to make Elsie Mags a seamstress; else my plotline wouldn't have worked. What is it, you ask? Muahahaha! I shall never tell! You'll just have to come back and read the rest of the chapters. Which I know you will. Else I'll knock you into the valleys of knurd.
Additional Note: I will be temporarily blending Mrs. Cake and Mrs. Palm until I find some other reasonable explanation as to why Mrs. Cake has an inn. It is imperative to the story that it be Mrs. Cake whom owns the inn that Elsie finds herself at. Don't ask me why because I don't know either. It simply is.
(Dis)Claimer: Oh, how I wish that horrid 'dis' in front of that beautiful 'claimer' would vanish never to be seen again. But someday I'll be writing my own books and you all will have to disclaim me… (evil smile) For now, however, Carrot, Vimes, Mrs. Cake, Mrs. Cake's Hat, Fred Colon, the Brass Bridge, Vetinari and Bloody Stupid Johnson do not belong to me. Yet. Elsie Mags is thoroughly and entirely mine. All mine. Thank you.
"Carrot?"
"Yessir?"
Vimes gave the object laying on his desk a long, hard stare, growing increasingly uneasy under Captain Carrot's anticipatory ogle.
He sighed. "You've always been a sharp young lad."
"Yessir."
"Always directly on top of things."
"Yessir. I try, sir."
"Never let a crime pass you by."
"Nossir."
Vimes sighed again; a heavy and weary sort of sigh, laden with the coffee that he wished was alcohol. He leaned back on his chair, tilting back on two legs and gave the object an experimental glare in case it suddenly turned into something else. It didn't.
"Carrot…"
"Yessir?"
"You know, you're one of my best officers."
"Thank you, sir."
"Except when it comes to Clues."
"Yessir. Sorry, sir."
"But you always were a smart one."
"Thank you, sir."
"So why, then," he paused, and moistened his lips, "have you brought me a pair of pants?"
Elsie ran out into the lavish courtyard of the House in fury, ignoring the slight rain that was beginning to fall. Seamstresses, indeed! How dare they mislead her into such a filthy trap! How dare they assume that any respectable young lady such as young Miss Mags would sink down to such a level! How dare they!
She swung open the iron gate with quite surprising strength for her rather slight build, ignoring the calls of the girl who had shown her in. She slammed it behind her, relishing the great ugly scrape of metal and rust and ran, across the slick cobblestones and through the rain that was suddenly pouring harder and harder. How dare all those men believe that she was so poor as to offer her body for a bit of food! How dare they! So great was her fury she did not notice when great noble houses began to shrink and impoverish, when well-paved roads became narrower and dirtier and streetlights began to flicker.
But the rain had dampened her flame of vehemence as the torrents continued to drench her, and eventually she slowed, the anger replaced by curiosity. Here was a part of town, not quite the Shades she had been warned about, but ratty all the same, with massive stone gargoyles that peered at her in their extreme patience. As she walked, she might have imagined it, but she heard the feathers of a pigeon alight on one of the statues, then let out half a desperate squawk. She whirled around. The gargoyles were still, glaring innocently at her with big stone eyes, but she couldn't help noticing the few feathers floating down from a rocky jaw that hadn't been there before.
The rain did not ease as she trudged on, and her practicality quickly overshadowed her indignant rage. She must find a place to stay. After a few more hesitant turns down a few suspicious-looking alleyways, she came upon a creaking wooden sign that said simply:
INN.
She climbed up the front stairs and had poised her hand to knock when the door flew open and she was greeted by a Hat. It had flowers on it. It spoke to her.
"Yes, dear, plenty," said the Hat.
"Excuse me, but do you have any rooms available?"
"Just a few dollars a night."
"How much do they cost?"
"Mrs. Cake."
"Who are you?"
Elsie stopped, and ran through the last few lines of conversation in her head.
"No, nothing of that sort," said the wiry woman she had only just noticed was under the Hat.
"So you'd be a shamaness, then?"
"Not a witch, neither, though I've got some good friends who are."
"A witch, by any chance? I've heard of them"
"Ah, Elsie. A hearty name, I've always said."
"My name is Elsie Mags."
"Yes, I have powers of premonition. Oh, dear, is it on again?"
There was a pause.
"Come on, then, ask it already," snapped Mrs. Cake. "I hates it when you young people make me answer questions you never ask. There you go, lassie."
"Do you have mystical powers of premonition?"
Mrs. Cake's face screwed up a bit in concentration. "There we be," she said after a few seconds. "Everything's all right now. Oh dear, don't keep standing out there in the rain, come inside before you catch your death of cold."
And in this manner, Elsie came to stay at the humble abode of Mrs. Cake.
Colon sighed deeply as he took refuge under the Brass Bridge, lighting a smoke and reflecting on the tranquility of the rain. Or rather, on the lack of tranquility. Unlike Ankh-Morpork's usual unpleasant drizzle this was a real storm, heavy and violent with a side order of lightning. He relaxed a bit as he watched the smoke rings disintegrate as they hit the metal underside of the bridge, feeling not at all guilty about not doing his coppering like Vimes insisted he do. After all, there were sure to be some landmark thieves out there somewhere. You never know when a couple of bandits might well make off with the bridge, and then the citizens of Ankh-Morpork would simply have to walk across the river. (1)
Fred Colon. Big old Fred Colon. Just a copper, amiable and loose and not fit enough to catch you if you nicked something out of his pockets and walked away. He shrunk down farther and glowered at all who dare laugh at him. He needed a new image. He needed to reconstruct his personality. He needed a doughnut.
Fred sulked under the Brass Bridge, treating himself to a quiet smoke and thinking up ways to make himself different.
Lord Havelock Vetinari pored over political documents by candlelight in the shadows of his study, sipping steaming black coffee from a mug.
It was Klatchian coffee.
It is well known that coffee is a remedy for being drunk, if you take a large dosage along with a cold shower. Less well known is the fact that, even while drunk to the point of retching, a couple sips of Klatchian coffee could catapult you past drunk, straight through sobriety and into knurd.
Vetinari had swum the misty oceans of drunkenness and tread the iron valleys of sobriety, and he found he didn't much like either. Vetinari was one of the few men on the Disc that could actually drink Klatchian coffee without driving himself to madness, and very likely the only man in the Universe who preferred knurd to anything else. It helped him think clearly.
Knurd was a sort of super-enhanced form of sobriety. The average man could hardly stand being sober most of his life, let alone knurd. But Vetinari was quite different, as you may come to see. Quite different indeed.
Now he examined the tiny print that covered the sheets of paper on his desk. From these each night he derived who his enemies were, (2) who his friends were, (3) what tactics he should use and the like. After all, as the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork you had to be either very intelligent or insane. Vetinari prided himself on being a bit of both.
He paused, and looked out the window over the courtyard that had been designed by a certain Bloody Stupid Johnson. The sundial, miraculously, hadn't exploded at noon that day and was ticking away like a demented time bomb. It might have had something to do with the rainy weather they had been having lately. However, even with a thick cloud cover, the sundial always managed to do the one thing it could do reliably: keep entirely the wrong time.
He turned back to the tedious writings and again immersed himself in politics, taking a sip of the Klatchian coffee every once in a while. Some catastrophe or another was about to hit Ankh-Morpork again; he could feel it in his bones. However, for now he concentrated on the doings of his latest enemies, content.
(1) Something certainly possible, but not very appealing.
(2) Quite a lot of people.
(3) Almost nobody.
Author's Note: All right. If you've managed to read this far, please have the decency to leave a review with some respectable constructive criticism. Please no 'this iz gud plz update or I kill u.' I appreciate the sentiment and all, but it doesn't really help my writing style. Even 'ur style sux get a new 1' is better than the former. Anyway, hope you enjoyed this second chapter of mine! Am I staying true to Pratchett? I've studied his books for a long time but I'm afraid I haven't go the whole 'surprise them at the end of the paragraph through dialogue instead of telling them like an idiot' thing. I did try, in the last chapter with the pink scarf, and in this chapter with the pants. Funny how I love to use articles of clothing, though you'll find that that's what this whole story is about. They're definitely not ordinary pants…
Thanks to my wonderful reviewers!
KC