Geez, second chapter already? I'm on fire baby!! Seriously, don't let my narcissism keep you from enjoying this chapter.
Oh, and here are shout outs to my reviewers.
Big Cat: I appreciate the honesty. Thank you, and I tried to tone down on the description just for you.
Mad Possum: Why thank you, I appreciate the compliment. As with Mr. Cat, I tried to tone down on the blocks of text, and I'm happy you two trudged through them.
Sage: It does my heart good to see you here in the DW section, comrade. I proofread this bloody thing three times, just for you. If you can find anything wrong with it, I will personally kick myself in the head.
Now off you lot go.
"Pardon, how many did you say you claimed as part of your legions of followers?" the secretary said, looking at the three before him. There was what appeared to be a titan in a desert tunic trimmed with bear fur, a rather smartly dressed young lady with a book satchel, and an old man in a ratty suit.
Austania sighed. "Look, it's in the thousands, okay?"
The secretary nodded. He wasn't a god himself, he just worked for them. He'd been working for them since day one, and he'd never seen anything like this. "So you three would like to apply for the," he checked the papers in front of him, "three bedroom bungalow on the left edge of the city, right?" Because Cori Celesti was situated in the middle of the Disc, rim wards was any way outwards, and hub wards was any way inwards. Instead, they used directions as if you were facing forward in front of the main gate.
The three nodded. Of course, they knew that something like this hadn't been done. Normally, a god would just ascend to Dunmanifstein, the gods' city on top of Cori Celesti, once they had gotten enough followers to not have to worry about the other gods. Their studies had shown them that if they succeeded, they would be the first small gods to live there.
"Well, you were the first to actually fill out the paperwork, for which I thank you." The whole ascension and demand of a place on Cori Celesti always plopped a big thing of paperwork into the poor secretary's lap. "But I won't lie to you. You three don't have a chance. Unless you have at least a hundred thousand or two to your name, the other gods will just laugh at you."
"We realized that," Michael said. "But we have a plan," he tapped the side of his nose, calculated specifically to annoy people by hopelessly failing to look clever.
The secretary decided he honestly didn't care what these upstarts decided to do. The nose tap had worked. "Whatever. They'll be at the game room. They almost always are. Good luck."
The pantheon of small gods struck out into the city. Dunmanifstein was a nice enough. The whole place had a rather pretentious feel to it though. The baroque work was overdone a bit too much and there were statues everywhere. None of them were amazing, Leonard of Quirm would do better with a hangover and wearing a pair of dragon breeding gloves. It reminded them of a place a young lawyer would like to live in to show how far he had come so quickly.
They finally found the game house. The gods of Discworld tended to content themselves with playing games or doing things associated to their domains. Bilibous drank a lot, Fate brooded and thought of little ironies for people to experience, Blind Io sat around and looked authoritative. What this essentially meant was that the gods weren't particularly intelligent. They didn't have to be.
The Ankh-Morpork Agency gods, on the other hand, realized they had to be at the very least well educated to be counted among their ranks, even if they had no intention of telling anyone. As Michael had put it "It's like fighting a bear without a weapon. You don't have to be intelligent, but you do need to know where the soft parts are and how to expose them. I tend to punch them in the kidneys and bite their nose. Maybe give them a head butt or three." Which isn't to say Michael is stupid, he just tends to think in long term plans that encompass all of two minutes.
So the small gods had a pretty good idea what they were going to do. They opened the doors, went down the hallway, and stood, waiting. After about two hours, they heard a voice say, "Well, what do you want to play now?"
They opened the doors and swept in. "Can I make a suggestion?" Michael said with a cocky grin. Timing was important. If they had come in and just waited for two hours for them to finish, the effect would have been diminished.
The gods in the room were all circled around a large model of the Disc. There wasn't anything on the board at the time, since they had just finished the game. Looking at the little white chips which were actually souls that claimed fealty to them, it looked like Io and Fate were vying for supremacy. A young woman with completely green eyes was in second, with Om and Offler grappling for third place.
Blind Io, chief of the gods, didn't move, but a few of his eyes floating around him swiveled around to look at the newcomers. "Here now, who's this?"
"Well, seeing as to how we didn't know they were in the city, we can safely assume they're gods," came the same voice who had suggested another game. It was Fate, and he gazed dispassionately at the newcomers through eyes that reflected the depths of space in them.
"We are gods, yes," said Austania. The plan was quite simple, though it required that all three of them played their parts perfectly. Like Michael had said, they were going to expose the gods' weak point and go for it "We've come here with a challenge to you."
A god's weak point is its pride. Their whole existence depended on people believing in them, so they had to except a challenge from another god. Either that or act contemptuous.
"A challenge?" sneered Fate. He was opting for the latter. "From three small gods who can't even claim one hundred thousand believers? Give us one good reason to take your challenge."
"We can give you three," Austania said. "One, though we are small gods, we have a very solid base. We will grow in the next few years, unencumbered by corrupt clergy, rivalry with other churches, and internal disagreements with dogma. We will get bigger, and quickly. We're giving you the best chance to wipe us out, if you can." The last statement hit its mark. Fate's eyes narrowed a bit.
"You seem to be rather confident, for small gods," he said with a trace of menace.
"Beware the confident foe who grins with ten behind him but one hundred in front," said Old George, who was rummaging through the snack cart, found a bowl of rather expensive looking chocolate truffles, and popped one into his mouth. "Er, anyone else want one?"
"Like George cited," Michael said, ignoring George, "what reason do we have to be confident? We came asking for a bloody bungalow, and we're willing to give up everything we've worked for just for that. And maybe a Pseudopolis chapter. Perhaps it isn't us who should be afraid, yeah?" The plan was working brilliantly. They had the attention of all the gods in the room at this point.
"The third reason," Austania pressed on, "is that unlike you, we got religion."
"You, got religion," Fate said, listening to how it sounded.
"What are you lot talking about?" Blind Io exclaimed. "Got religion?! You're gods! You bloody are religion!"
"One can't see the back of one's own head by looking forward," George stated with his mouth now filled with chocolate truffles. He took a look for something to wash them down with, and settled on a cup of punch.
"What's the deal with the old one?" Om asked.
"He prefers to speak in quotes," Austania said. "What he meant was that we took the perspective of a human. Human's aren't omnipotent, but they are clever, and I think that's our equalizer. So, what do you say? Do you accept or don't you?" Once again, note how she demanded the answer from them, instead of asking for one. There was only one way for this argument to go now.
"We'll show you puny upstarts what for," Io said, his craggy features growing deeper. The young woman with the green eyes smiled. It seemed she knew what they were trying to do. The Agency pantheon unconsciously decided that she was one to watch out for.
Offler grinned. He had been getting bored playing with the same people for so long. At this point, he practically knew every move that would be made by each player before it was made. Even the Lady's seemingly chaotic moves were merely complex occurrences of a few very simple rules and variables. It would be fun to have some new blood in Dunmanifstein. "Tho, what do you thuggest?" he said, his teeth getting in the way of the more difficult consonants.
George already had a box out with the words "O Brother, Where Art Thou?" emblazoned on the top.
The other gods crowded around as he read the rules in his deep phlegm filled voice. "The challenging gods choose a group of brothers equal in size to their group to be each sent on a different mission that ultimately leads them together, while all challenging gods attempt to thwart them. The game ends when the brothers are united and figure out what they must together do with what they have gained in their various travels."
"Sounds right up our alley" Michael grinned, "welp, time to pony up." Ten small white chips appeared in his hand and he proudly placed them in the center of the board.
Fate, Io, Offler, and the Lady each put in ten. The pool was now fifty thousand souls.
"Winner take all, I thuppose," Offler said.
"And if you do lose, you'll have to pay of the debt you'll gain by working as slaves to us for twelve hundred years," Fate said with a thin smile. The other gods nodded. It sounded traditional enough for this challenge.
"We'll worry about that when it happens," Austania said, again to the annoyance of the other gods. She looked at the board and finally placed her finger in one place. "We'll take them."
Jonathon opened the door to his apartment and called in, "I'm home, if anyone cares!"
"You got da food?" came a noise like a well made tuba. The owner of said voice was Shellie, one of Jon's roommates. She was a troll, about eight feet high and broader across than most of the patrons of The Mended Drum. She was built like the idealization of mother nature, tall with broad shoulders and a rather curvy frame but also supplemented with the craggy muscles of an ox carved from rock. She wore the standard bra and loincloth of all female tolls, but supplemented this with a cotton button shirt, unbuttoned to keep cool, and a straw hat with one butterfly wing on the side.
"One rat floater, one pumice and silt floater, and one pork pie floater. I think that ought to cover it." Brian, like most immigrant cooks, catered to all species. It helps if you cover all your bases.
"You got the extra tomato sauce on the rat, right?" came the voice of Jonathon's other roommate, Lidda Hortsdaughter. She was part of the new trend in dwarf girls to show her gender, and wore a very sensible leather skirt and had put bronze filigree of cornflowers onto her iron helmet. No make up though, because she thought it was too excessive. "Brian never puts enough."
"Don't worry, I remembered," Jonathon said. He put the food on a table and threw himself onto a venerable sofa. "Please say you put the kettle on before I came in."
"We were just enjoying a cuppa 'fore you came in," said Shellie and gave Jonathon a nice cup full of milky sweet tea. The cup wasn't fine china, but it was well sculpted, quite graceful, and the glazes were tasteful and subtle. "Complements of Chalky. He gave us a new tea set in payment for dose prints you gave him"
"So what took you so long to get the food, anyway?" Lidda asked as she opened one of the cardboard cups.
Jonathon regaled them with the whole story, starting with bringing the unlicensed thieves to their knees all the way up to the sergeant at Brian's.
"Well, thank the gods she actually didn't search the place," Lidda said while looking around.
They lived in a decent apartment complex, it was a tiny bit musty and the walls were rather thin, but Lidda's forge kept the cold out. All around them were half done projects and all sorts of contraptions. Shellie's kiln was beside the forge, and Jonathon's press was beside that. There was a work bench with an assortment of tools any artificer would have been jealous of. Everything from leather shapers to wood carving tools were there. And the hammers! There were carpentry claw hammers for furniture making, Lidda's hammers for smithing, and even a few tiny hammers that Shellie used for making her miniscule stone charms.
In the middle of the whole bloody ensemble was the still. It was a huge mass of glass flasks, iron tanks, and copper tubing, where the three made a concoction of cranberries and apples that had been passed down from one Kimmel to another for six generations now. It was called Holy Hell, as that was what the first Kimmel said after drinking it, right before falling backwards through the window he was beside. It was a good thing it was on the first floor, or it would have ended there. As it was, it was this sour headache brew that brought the most money to the three unlicensed craftspeople.
Jonathon nodded gratefully. "If she had, just about every guild would have wanted a piece of us. Literally."
"At any rate, Shellie and I have something we'd like to talk to you about," Lidda said.
"Sure, what is it?"
"Well," Shellie said awkwardly, "you know how Hogswatch is coming up in two weeks, yeah?"
Jonathon nodded. Of course he bloody knew! He had been working nonstop so that he could save up money to go down to Quirm and see his mum and father. "I do. Why?"
"Well, we've been saving up see," Lidda said looking down.
"We ain't been back to Copperhead since we came to da city three years ago," Shellie said awkwardly. She was fiddling with the pieces of iron rod she used as chop sticks when eating Brian's floaters. The only cutlery that could survive a troll pumice and silt floater would have to be pure diamond. These worked almost as well and poor immigrants could easily afford them.
"Why are you so uncomfortable about asking me to go back home for Hogswatch?" Jonathon asked quizzically, "I'm not your keepers, it's fine with me."
"Well, dat's not what da real problem is," said Shellie as she fiddled with her hat.
"It's our parents."
Jonathon just looked at the two of them. This wasn't even beginning to make sense. He told them this.
"We've wrote to them and they want to meet you now," Lidda finally said.
"But we know you'd want to see your folks too, though," Shellie said hurriedly, "and we'd understand if you'd rather go dere."
Jonathon thought about this. He did want to see his parents. The Kimmel Clan had a tradition of meeting twice a year, on Hogswatch and Mam's Birthday. His entire extended family, cousins, aunts, uncles, and his own brothers and sister, all of them came together. Kimmels may not always be in touch with each other, but when it was required, they did it properly. "I really don't know guys. This is a big thing in my family, you know?"
"Fair enough," said Lidda, but Shellie had an idea.
"Why not bring all our families here?" she asked excitedly.
"Like here?" Jonathon asked skeptically. "Our apartment isn't all that huge. Actually, its kind of cramped."
"Not here!" she said, "and you people call me fick! No, bring dem to some posh ballroom or something uptown. All three of our families, yeah?"
They thought about this. It sounded ridiculous until you really considered it. Then it sounded even more ridiculous. Nonetheless, it did appeal to everyone's plan. They could all see their family, and their families could see their roomies.
"If we pooled our money, finished all our projects on time, and could somehow sell our extra fifteen gallons of scumble, we could probably pull this off," Lidda said, her dwarfen brain doing figures as good as any of the Patrician's clerks. "Ballroom, catering, everything."
"Yeah, but where the heck are we supposed to find someone who'd buy that much bootleg booze?"
Then a knock came on the door. Jonathon opened it and his eyes popped out. There, on his doorstep, were Moist von Lipwig and Adora Belle Dearheart, the Post Master of Ankh Morpork and owner of the Golem Trust Fund, respectively. Moist was wearing an unassuming suit, and Miss Dearheart was wearing her token severe grey dress.
"Is this the house of Jonathon Kimmel?"
"It might be. I can assume that you're not here to cart my partners and I over to the various guilds of our fine city to have them tar, feather, slap, poke, prod, impale, and probe us in all orifices, right?"
"We might if you don't happen to have a large amount of liquor for sale," Ms Dearheart said. "Slick here's having a Hogswatch party at the office, and the guild rates are murder right now. They say it's supply and demand because of the holidays, I say it's screwing over the customer."
"An old Ankh-Morpork tradition," Jonathon said proudly. There was, after all, a reason the city's anthem was "We Will Rule You Wholesale".
"Hopefully you won't be to zealous in that particular tradition, because the tarring, feathering, slapping, poking, prodding, impaling, and probing are still an open option" Adora said with all the humor of a rock.
Jonathon changed his tact from Lovable Kidder to Subservient Merchant. "Please come in. As it is, we have a good deal of product we would be more than happy to give you for a very reasonable price."
"Oh gods no," Lidda said, "I'll do the negotiating. Come here, you two." She took the two to her room and closed the door. They talked for about thirty minutes. Both parties pretty well knew what the price was going to be, a good deal cheaper than guild booze, but fifteen gallons of scumble isn't chicken feed. If it was, those birds would die preserved, because that much alcohol would kill any bacteria living in them. That stuff could turn one of Ankh-Morpork's famous disease ridden pigeons into a pickled squab. As it was, the price was reached, the Post Master said they'd send the money in two days, which was the only time he got any thing out of his mouth with his paramour beside him. Then they left. Two people who could probably buy and sell everything they owned and themselves twenty or thirty times over had just walked out. Not that Jonathon and his friends cared. They had more important things to think about.
Once they left, Shellie and Jonathon looked at their dwarfen roommate.
"Well?" Shellie finally asked.
Lidda grinned. "Let's see if we can find a ballroom that can hold a small dwarfen mine, a troll family, and a Lancre clan!"
"It must be fate!" Shellie said happily.
Jonathon smiled at this. Fate? You two have been working like dogs since you came to the city for three years now, dodging guild enforcers, running from thugs or fighting when the need arose, and listening to disparaging comments about your size, skin, hair, and religion. And you still believe in fate?
"Nah," he said with the smile still on his face. "Fate's complete bunk."
"Cheeky little bugger," Fate muttered when he heard this said. "That tears it. He's mine."
Austania grinned. "I like him already. So it looks like it's you and me."
Fate looked at the goddess loathingly. This little upstart in her skirt and cotton blouse with the blue vest was getting on his last nerve. Her eyes, like the eyes of all gods, showed her true nature. They were two perfect birds eye pictures of the Disc. They were staring back at him impassively. She had no idea how angry Jonathon's comment had made him. It was going to be difficult to fight an enemy who wasn't afraid of you, let alone one who didn't believe in you.
Offler's naturally wide grin grew even wider. He might have been challenging them, but only because he wanted in on this game. He knew it was going to be the most fun he'd had in a while. These upstarts were something special. "It appearth to be my turn then. Let'th have a look then…"
And another chapter comes to a close. This is coming along surprisingly well.. And remember that every time you don't review, a kitten implodes on itself. Can you honestly live with that guilt?