1 Soul Bound
1.2 Taking Control
1.2.4 An Artful Carnivale
1.2.4.18 Critique of pure cant
Tiers of wooden viewing galleries lined the buildings surrounding a rectangular grassy area large enough to fit soccer pitches with room to spare for the spectators. At the end to her left a large ring had been marked out with bales of hay, but the rest was composed of rows of stalls and tents, with some of the larger attractions backing onto the buildings themselves. Between the rows were boarded walkways and at the end to her right appeared to be a raised stage with space in front of it for an audience to watch or dance.
Bulgaria led them across the midway, which still had post holes from some ancient rail used to keep jousters from crashing their horses into each other, to the long side of the rectangle opposite the gap where they’d entered. It was less crowded here than by the entrance, and they started working their way along the stalls.
“Meet the famous bearded lady!”
“Be shocked yet edified by the finest display of stuffed monsters in the five cities. For just one osella piece you can see the mermaid!”
“Half man, half goat - win a game of chess against him and gain a golden Florin. Just ten ducato a go.”
“Not one chicken head, not two chicken heads, but before your very eyes I shall swallow three heads in under twenty seconds.”
Tomsk: “Ah, geeks and freaks. This takes me back.”
Kafana: “To school? That’s not very nice.”
Tomsk: {No, no. I dropped out of school early. This was later; before I was headhunted by Cirque du Soleil, I was part of the Russian NoFitState Circus. Freaks are performers where the attraction is that they are unusual, such as being extremely tall or having twelve fingers. Geeks are performers where the attraction is that what they do is unusual, to the point of appearing insane. A fire eater could be billed as a freak by claiming they have mutant fire-proof skin, as a geek by having them eat burning coals with relish, or as a normal performer by putting the emphasis upon their daring, skill and artistry. Just a matter of presentation, in many cases - whatever sells best in that location.}
Kafana: {So which were you?}
Tomsk: {I didn’t really have a home, so I was very keen to work. I tried everything, from wrestling displays to doing setup. They were an awesome bunch - anti-authoritarian punks who took the piss out of everything the state did. I’d been learning weapons at a local dojo, and they kept teaching me circus skills which I worked into a knife act, slowly improving it. By the end I was throwing knives at moving targets while apparently drunk and blindfolded, comically missing, then running up the stairway they’d formed by sticking into a wall which set them on fire because of the spilled vodka, revealing me to be wearing a costume from Chinese mythology under my drunkard’s disguise. After that the lighting changed, I’d fly through the air on a hidden wire, summon knives to my hands using elastic, juggle them swallow them, dance with the bobbing target always narrowly missing it, music would start and programmed LEDs in the handles would make these wonderful pre-programmed trails as the lights cut out when the target exploded. The whole thing turned into a narrative, with walking through fire as metaphor, and the target eventually being healed and forgiving me before I mysteriously went up in a blaze myself leaving me back in the drunkard's rags apparently asleep and dreaming.}
Kafana: {I don’t think I’ve ever heard you talk as much about anything. You really loved that life, didn’t you?}
Tomsk: {It had its downsides. Hard work, uncertain pay. Some pretty bitter people, who had nowhere else they felt safe or accepted. But hey, we should probably pick something we can talk out loud about, or Alderney is going to curse us for frustrating the viewers.}
They made their way slowly around the edge, listening to the patter of the men standing outside the bigger tents, watching the tactics used to manipulate the flow of crowds and persuade people to part with their money in order to enter. She started to notice similarities as Bulgaria pointed things out, and on a few occasions they stood still for five minutes, apparently eating snacks from a stall, while she used her new surveillance spell to listen into the operators talking to each other in their private cant.
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It still wasn’t enough for a lexicon and she explained to Bulgaria and Alderney what she needed. When they reached the stage they paused to watch two of the Vecci she’d previously seen in the Plaza of the Public dancing a pasodoble, and she told Dinah to test the hypothesis that the argot had been produced by obfuscating a pre-existing creole between the local Torellan dialect and one or more of the other regional languages, such as the one she’d heard the older Vecci speaking in their own encampment back in Basso.
After watching the troupe perform a second dance, the Pirata Quiero Ser, they carried on around, picking up Wellington and Bungo as they passed the entrance gap. Wellington had fully recovered, and they’d been looking at buildings together, trying to quantise qualities such as field of view, territoriality and affordances. She cast maintenance on her original buffs, except for the intense but short duration boost she’d given Wellington which Bungo assured her had now fully worn off. Then she drew everybody into harmony and offered up a prayer to the deities for a gentle gradual focus upon their acquiring skills from the shared-out sights and their joint observations of the crowds. She wasn’t going to repeat the mistake she’d made in the Botanic Gardens and get bushwhacked by a sudden massive upgrade.
Partway down the side, while watching a particularly skilled talker jam eager groups into a tent to have their fortunes read, something clicked. It wasn’t that she lost sympathy for the people being milked, but she could now see them as the talker saw them; when they needed to be drawn in, when to wax lyrical and when to pile on the urgency to close the sale. Additional annotations appeared in her sight.
System: [Skill “Truesight” has reached level 15.]
Over the next few minutes she gained annotations indicating who looked likely to believe which category of rumour and where they’d spread it; how the properties of a building affected the flow of people around it and what they felt comfortable doing in different zones; and even an indicator of which nooks would make the best ambush or nesting spots for different monsters, that must have come from Tomsk.
System: [Skill “Truesight” has reached level 16.]
Alderney: “Oooh! That’s really useful, Tomsk. I think I can see how it could apply to spotting human ambushers too. Or, conversely, where best to lurk if you want to remain hidden by shadows.”
Bungo: “I agree. But, err, aren’t we meant to be progressing quests and going up levels today? Why are we here, rather than interrogating Beltrame?”
Bulgaria: “I’m hoping to time our visit to the Fiorio so it coincides with news reaching Torello about the arrival of a particular trade ship, so we’ve a little free time to spend. This is a great place to warn adventurers about, and if we wait long enough Kafana might learn the language which would give us an edge when talking to the chief here. How’s that going?”
Kafana: “Slowly. It is the sort of problem that, when you crack enough small bits, suddenly everything else falls into place. It would help if we could test some of my guesses, to eliminate possibilities.”
Alderney: “I can do that. Have your expert system, Dinah?, watch my stream and feed me appropriate lines and I’ll pose as a fellow Arsenal resident.”
It went more smoothly than she thought. Bulgaria would pick a pair of staff gossiping at unpopular stalls, go up to them and plant an assertion or ignorant comment they were bound to discuss after he left. Kafana would use her spell to listen into their discussion then Alderney would wander up a minute later and try out the line Dinah crafted for the situation. The first few stalls were misses, but they hit jackpot when they came across a garrulous codger running a coconut shy who mistook Alderney for being a youngling and took it upon himself to correct her atrocious pronunciation.
Kafana had included the rest of the party in her listening spell, the same way she’d included Wellington at lunch time, and twenty minutes later they all received a message:
System: [Tongue gained: “Lovariszo” - You may now set the user interface system to auto-translate this for you.]
Kafana: {Sys, I enjoy learning about languages. Could you auto translate, but also include anglicised versions of any specialist vocabulary?}
System: [I believe you are the first person on Covob to ask for that. I will try. I might need to request an additional module or help from ooc-Zer.]
She projected her gratitude, channelling emotion into her words like when spell casting - the knack was becoming an ingrained reflex. {Thank you Sys!}