#but my grip on gil's voice isn't strong enough to maintain in bartimaeus' narrating style :'d

[brawltogethernow]

Meet-Cute ((The Author Fails the Marshmallow Test))

There’s like five chapters to go between the chapters of A Corrupt Politician, a Demon, and a Terrorist on AO3 and this one, but it’s been done and having it lying around is getting to me, so here it is. It contains vague spoilers for developments in the intervening parts of the fic if you care about that.

Gil appears in the pentacle in the guise of a large lobster. Which is actually aping the preferred guise of a friend of his, a little. But Zoing did get it from Gil to start with, so.

Xerxsephnia tuts where she’s standing in the opposite circle. “Can’t you be human?” she says. “You’re so much more palatable when you’re human.”

“Nnnooo-oo,” drawls out Gil, waving a feeler. “I can’t ‘be human’, because I’m not human.”

“Oh, you know what I mean, Gil,” she says, flicking a gloved hand with demure dismissiveness. “There’s a dear.”

Seffie is overly fond of the humanoid form Gil made up to needle Tarvek, still kept aged at a rate with him mainly out of a nebulous feeling of petty spite. Especially when it only has the expected number of teeth. Begrudgingly, he shifts into it anyway, because it is more effective to talk to people when you look like, well, people.

“Thank you,” says Seffie.

Gil has really lucked out on masters so far, oddness aside. Relatively, at least, which isn’t saying much. Passingly humane enslavement! Woo.

“Now that we’re all civilized,” she continues. “I’ve only a simple job for you today, I’m afraid. Crowd control. There’s going to be a rendition of an old favorite from the Mekanikopera for the public, today, in St. James Park, and lately the commoners have been…restless.

“Rioting,” says Gil. “The commoners have been rioting.”

“And firebombing the odd government building,” agrees Xerxsephnia, who really isn’t all that bad, for a magician. Not a lot of them will take cheek from a spirit, but Seffie seems to see him as almost a person, most of the time. “So it’s your job to prevent that. Patrol the general area. You’re to discourage any signs of public unrest that you see, subtly if possible, and put a stop to any actual unrest that you fail to prevent. I don’t have many spirits on my roster right now with sufficient subtlety and good sense, so I’m counting on you.”

The servants of magicians have a...high turnover rate. One reason many of GIl’s peers try not to get attached, even though they’re all in the same boat. It's pragmatic, but lonely.

There’s a lot of room for interpretation in Seffie’s wording that would allow him to be excessively harsh with the commoners. It would be nice to think that’s entirely because she trusts him not to be, but.

He doesn’t mention this, because he’s not going to tell her to tighten her wording. Instead, he says, “This opera wouldn’t happen to be that drek about Valois and Euphrosynia, would it?”

Seffie hesitates. “It has technically challenging musical numbers.”

“Challenging to listen to, maybe. And it’s propaganda.”

“Yes, well, propaganda is what keeps us here, isn’t it?”

“It’s propaganda with a ridiculous premise.” Seffie has forgotten he isn’t an “us”.

The Storm King Opera is about an epic tale of love between a human and a spirit. It ends with King Valois entering the “Spirit Realm” that manages to be defined both loosely and ludicrously inaccurately, questing for the off chance he can be with his unearthly beloved, which

A) Is impossible

B) Were it not impossible, would undoubtedly be fatal.

Though that’s probably not how the historical Valois died, given that incident with his mortal remains a few years ago. Yeesh. Yeuch.

“Oh, Gil,” says Seffie irritably. “If you’re going to be intolerable be on your way now.” She makes a gesture, and speaks the words of dismissal with a practiced ringing tone of import that he supposes is coming along rather well. And then he’s yanked off the material plane.

 *

Agatha stumbles into another square. She lost her locket, and she’s fairly certain the man responsible came this way, but now she’s seeing things. Fanciful shapes and textures have been flickering in the corners of her vision with increasing regularity, with a likewise more and more difficult-to-ignore escalation of phenomena. And she just screamed when a man in an official uniform grinned at her and then flickered and seemed to have green skin and ears like a goblin and was bearing a mouthful of fangs and then everyone in the vicinity looked at her like she was crazy, and she hates that. She always has, so you’d think she’d have gotten better, by this point, at avoiding it.

She tries to straighten up and instead almost crashes into a man she didn’t notice right in front of her, what is wrong with her today? He’s scanning the street with an expression of bored attention, at least until he turns to ogle her frantically pinwheeling her arms to avoid slamming her face into his chest, and is probably some kind of security guard. She’s going to get arrested. Her parents will be so worried.

The probably-a-guard has a ridiculous mop of flyaway brown hair, is a bit younger than the average age of the crowd here, around her age, and is dressed rather averagely. He stares at her without moving to help as she overbalances and crashes to the ground, which strikes her as kind of boorish. She glares up at him, and channels all of her ire for her entire day through her eyes up at him, just because she’s fed up and she can. “You,” she hisses venomously, “could help, you know. Instead of gawping. I am not a side show.”

The man, the nerve of him, simply blinks at her, and then swivels his head around, as if to check if there’s someone standing directly behind him.

As if she could even possibly have been talking to anyone else.

“Yes, you,” she says, propping herself up on her elbows, or part of her upper half at least, and he’s actually starting to look slightly alarmed now. Good.

He blinks at her, owlish. “Are you…talking…to me? he says hesitantly.

Agatha deepens her glower at him, pulling her mouth into a snarl. “Who else would I be talking to?” she demands.

He blinks at her again, and then he looks up and into the distance and furrows his brow like he’s going to do something but then doesn’t do anything for several solid seconds. Then he looks down at her again and waves his arm to the side of himself. “Can you see this?” he asks.

Of all the things — “Can I see your arm?”

“Wow,” he says.

Agatha, who is tired of humoring the mentally incompetent, says, “Are you going to help me up or not?”

“I think I’d better not,” he says, cringing regretfully, which is stupid.

Agatha launches herself to her feet with a snarl, knocking over a display of flower pots bordering the foot of a street stall. “Are you employed by the government?” she snaps. “Because I’m looking for a stolen item.”

He’s beginning to look faintly panicky. “I —”

Then part of the crowded street explodes.

 *

Gilgamesh grabs the girl with the Sight and tucks her under himself, flickering visible on the first plane and hoping someone appearing who wasn’t there before will be less noticeable in the sudden panic than a pedestrian being yanked around by (and by all likelihood continuing to yell at) thin air. Seffie probably won’t kill him where he stands for blatantly abandoning a task a host of other magicians had their own spirits on, but he’s still got to think of a workaround fast, before the pain starts.

Smoke is billowing out of the broken window of a shop at the edge of the square — magic supplies, it figures — and the malcontents responsible have already vanished into the crowd, except for one straggler who’s been tackled to the ground by an overenthusiastic boar-man -shaped foliot.

“Hey,” he says to the girl in his arms. “You know what I think this probably was? Foreign terrorists.”

“What?” she says, starting to shove at him to get herself free.

“Russian insurgents, I think,” he says with relish, and starts hustling her out of the square.

“Are you insane?” demands the improbable commoner. “There have been attacks all this month and it was probably the same as —”

“Definitely Russian,” insists Gil. He shoulder checks a nice old granny out of the way. “Or Irish! Brits hate the Irish, right?”

“What?!”

“So this definitely isn’t public unrest,” continues Gil. They’re almost out of the crowd now. “Why, foreign nationals hardly have anything to do with the public at all! And I am disgusted,” he says feelingly — they enter the mouth of a dingy alley — “that London would have to put up with this foreign terrorist attack.”

They stop. Gil backs away from the girl a step, his guise’s hands still on her upper arms, and grins down at her winningly. A loose flyer blows past their feet.

“Rrriiiiight,” she eventually says, with deep suspicion. Then, “Let go.”

He lets go.

That was, objectively, quite dense. He’s going to be in trouble, and — But he just, he had to get the girl with the Sight out of there. How the hell has she made it this long without being silenced by the government, or recruited by an insurgent group, and without seeming to have any idea what she can do? Sight isn’t like Resistance, it’s not like you can go your whole life in a magically bustling city and have it just not come up. But she sounds like a local and everything. Has she been living under a rock?

Her ability isn’t weak, either. She spotted him when he was invisible on the first plane — and intangible, leading her to crash spectacularly trying to avoid a collision with thin air — and then continued to follow along when he was doing something different on the fourth through sixth as on the second and third, which isn’t exactly a dime-a-dozen ability.

She almost certainly can’t see into the seventh plane, though, or she would probably have screamed. Even Gil can admit that there is such a thing as too many teeth, and the rawest incarnation of his essence as it manifests on Earth is it.

He does think all the lightning is cool, though.

“What kind of stolen item?” he asks, following after a hunch.

She levels him with a deeply skeptical look. “You don’t want to go after the ‘foreign nationals’? she asks, pronouncing the term with air quotes big enough to use as wall pegs.

“Nope!” says Gil blithely. He waves a hand, for good measure. “I’m sure the police can handle it.” Werewolves don’t really need a djinni’s help tracking people, now do they? Gil wouldn’t want them barging in to help him fly. So Bangladesh wouldn’t want any help gruesomely murdering innocents. “My job today,” he iterates one last time, “is public unrest: You’re a member of the public. What’s making you unrestful?”

She glares at him again. Is he really that bad? Is it his face? Should he try out a new one? But she does, begrudgingly, say: “…My locket was stolen. I was mugged. By a man with…some kind of creature.”

“A creature?” interrupts Gil, intrigued.

“He opened up a bottle and it flew at me,” she says, words plain but shoulders hunched. “And it tried something with a light but I threw it off.”

A detonation, or a combustion. “You threw it off?” says Gil. She isn’t. She mustn’t. Is she? Maybe the attack just missed.

“Yes,” she says, preemptively defensive at what she probably sees as unnecessary prompting. Oh, she’s hunching because she’s expecting him not to believe her. “And then they ran off, to around…here….” Her eyes track back to the entrance to the smoky square, now bleeding faint sounds of insistently calm evacuation, and widen.

Gil’s seen it, too. Oh, wow. Jewelry-stealing, artifact-wielding, bomb-setting terrorists.

“Seems like there might be just one set of troublemakers. Do you think?” ventures Gil.

“You mean the ‘unruly foreign nationals’?” she says in a cloying singsong without bringing her gaze back from where it’s rapt on the entrance to the main street.

“I think they might,” admits Gil, “be public unrest. Would you like to help me investigate them?”