Admittedly, she hadn't thought through the logistics, so it briefly catches her off guard when he takes a seat on the floor. The arrangement is faintly absurd — but, somehow, less absurd than his recent toe performance. So she settles into it with a touch more aplomb than she otherwise might have managed.
Jasnah extends her hand. She wants the deck. She wants the authority of the deal.
"If I win two out of five hands," she proposes, cool and precise, "you read me a chapter from a book of my choosing."
Verso shuffles one-handed, taking his time both to show off and to feed her impatience. He knows it'll irritate her to sit there with her hand outstretched waiting for him to be done.
He raises an eyebrow at her chosen 'prize', openly skeptical; firstly, it's something he'd be willing to do anyway, and secondly, it's something that he can't really imagine why she'd want. Sure, he's read plenty a book aloud to Alicia, and he fancies himself a damn good narrator, but he highly doubts his narration style will appeal to Jasnah. He does the voices.
"You can ask for something better than that, you know," he says. Then again, maybe she just wants to revel in the oddity of watching a man read. Like a dog playing poker. "—And you don't have much faith in yourself. It's usually best two out of three."
And irritate her it does. Enough that, after a short while, impatience sharpens into action and she curls her fingers back toward her palm. Give them here. She is, as ever, a paradox: demanding, yet almost constitutionally incapable of asking. Part of that is the unavoidable arrogance bred into her station. Another part is more insidious. She is a queen who cleaves to a doctrine insisting it is good (necessary, even) to sacrifice the individual for the greater whole. With that framework lodged so firmly in place, how could she ever justify wanting anything for herself?
Perhaps that's why she cannot summon a wager more elaborate than this: a familiar, steady voice easing her into an afternoon doze with lines and lines and lines of...let's be honest, Vorin determinism. Surely delivered dutifully and without embellishment.
Still, his criticism pricks. Just enough to raise a thin tendril of self-consciousness. Rather than defend the wager itself, she pivots. She chooses instead to dismantle what she believes is the weaker flank of his argument.
"Out of three?" Her nose wrinkles, dismissive. "No. It's either out of five or out of ten."
Holy numbers again, probably. Let's all be grateful they're not on Scadrial where everything would be in sixteens.
"Ten?" he asks incredulously. They are not doing best two out of ten, sorry.
He continues painstakingly shuffling the cards, this time passing them from hand to hand. Just making sure they're really, truly, super shuffled! It has nothing to do with payback for her making him wait in the mess deck, nope.
"This is a Lumièran game with Lumièran cards," he points out, "and I thought you enjoyed learning about other cultures."
With a pointedly innocent smile: "Best two out of three. And if I win, you'll agree to call for me before you get up again." A far more pragmatic wager than hers.
— Jasnah takes a tactical, steadying breath before folding forward and reaching, despite the injury, to catch his wrist. The grip is light, but deliberate. Hard-won, and arguably ill-advised, given that he is currently negotiating over the terms of her last ill-advised exertion. Still. There is something about his pointedly innocent smile that provokes something like an urge to erase it entirely.
Affectionately, of course. Unfortunately, these sorts of instincts and emotions are rarely straightforward.
"Agreed," she says, the word ground out with resolve. Then, without releasing him: "But I deal."
"Hey," he can't help warning. Babe, you're gonna dehisce. "You could have asked nicely."
As usual, there's nothing here that she wants that wouldn't have been freely given if she'd just expressed a desire for it. But this is a card game, not a therapy session, so he lets it pass, handing her the deck.
As she deals: "I have to admit, I expected you to bet for something more academic." A shrug. "A treatise on gestral culture, or a live demonstration of my..." He waffles a bit before landing on, "Regenerative qualities."
Considering his earlier display of fancy shuffling, there is very little left for her to do. Jasnah skips ahead to the practical portion and deals them each two cards. It's a touch awkward, given the disparity in their elevations, but she adapts — setting the remainder of the deck on the divan beside her knee. The end table is just a bit too tall to be sensible while he's seated on the floor.
Her visible card is a four; the hidden one, a six. She notes both, then deliberately waits for his verdict first, following the order he laid out back on the ship.
In the interim, she counters: "I am absolutely not about to obligate you into such a demonstration via a card game."
Apparently that is a bridge too far. Or perhaps she's simply developed a conditioned aversion to pressing the subject. She keeps discovering new and inventive ways to unsettle him when she does, and even Jasnah can recognize a flawed experimental variable when it repeats itself.
Verso turns over his top card: a King. He realizes only just now that the king is holding his scepter the exact same way Renoir holds his cane. Ugh.
"It's not..." That big of a deal, honestly. Except the reason that she even thinks that is because he'd made it into a big deal; he hems and haws for a moment, contemplating what to say. "I don't mind that you have questions."
And he doesn't! If he can entertain and delight with his immortality, then good. It's just— "I reacted poorly before, because..." He taps his cards a few times, then says, "I had an unpleasant experience, once. My companions saw my immortality firsthand, and I was abducted and interrogated."
He conveniently leaves out the part where he escaped with a little murder.
"But it isn't fair to judge you on someone else's merits." A beat, then he looks down at his cards again. "I'll hit."
There it is. That half-obscured, quickly pivoted flicker of sincerity when he speaks about himself. As if lifting a cup in a shell game and revealing, briefly, where the trinket actually lies. It sharpens her attention to a knife's edge. Her appetite, too. And despite his reassurance, she resolves to ease off. To go slowly.
(But something bone-deep and quietly lovely settles in her chest at the simple fact of being told I don't mind that you have questions.)
She chews her bottom lip, thinking. Then, reaching to the small pile of cards on the divan, she deals him a third card. A third for herself as well.
Jasnah is self-aware enough to recognize how easily she can sound like an interrogator. Self-aware enough to note how thin the semantic line is between between abduction and being stranded in a strange world, dependent on a single, familiar person. Silently, she resolves to do better. Be better. It's the kind of quiet promise Ivory would have approved of. Meet your potential, he would say.
"—Is there," she begins, carefully, "any manner of demonstrating your regenerative qualities that you find...acceptable?"
No. Even that is the wrong word. Acceptable? Surely it still hurts. She frowns, recalibrates.
Lightly: "Well, as long as I'm not being torn in half by a Nevron, it's a step up."
It does still hurt, yeah, but he likes to think he's gained a sort of tolerance to it. Or maybe he's just gotten good enough at mentally leaving his body that nearly anything has become endurable. He takes a look at his cards—the King of Spades, a 3, a 4—and sets them back down.
Nevron. The monsters out on the continent? Her nose crinkles at the thought of him torn in two. No, thank you. Not the kind of evidence she'd be eager to witness. Although it does make wonder all kinds of inevitable questions. Namely, what happens if both halves are separated? Do both heal into two separate men? Does one falter and die, while the other regrows its missing portion? Maybe those questions are a bit too steep for this inchoate, tentative peace-making on the topic.
"Same," Jasnah says as she flips her three cards against her knee for him to see: a six, a four, a ten. Twenty, total. She's quite chuffed with this one.
Carefully, approaching her curiosity from a more careful angle: "Would you regrow a lost limb whole-cloth or would you require the original limb in order to heal it...back together? So to speak."
Verso flips his cards, too, and shakes his head at the defeat. With a competitive glint in his eye, he holds up his finger. One. One out of three, currently. He reaches for the deck beside her, then carefully slides her cards off of her knee. Of course it excites him to be so close to touching her knee; at this point, the excitement is so often and so predictable that it's hardly notable to mention.
As he reshuffles the cards, he answers, "That... depends. I have some measure of control over it." Not enough to stop it from happening completely. Staying alive isn't a choice, but the body in which he does that is, hence the unhealed scar. "If a limb were to, say, disintegrate entirely, I would regrow it."
This time, he holds the deck back out to her. Go ahead, deal. "But if it's still around, I prefer to bring the parts together. Feels less weird that way."
To be fair, she simply assumed his scar predated his immortality. Something, perhaps, about the housefire he once described. Given how such healing works on Roshar — old wounds cement into one's self-image, and then remain fixed — it seems like a straightforward assumption.
But his measure of control is interesting. She nods along to his description, watching as he generously shuffles for her. Card shuffling would be a masculine art, to be sure. When he finishes, she takes the deck with a murmured word of gratitude. Loud enough to b heard; not so loud as to detour their conversation.
"—Can you be tattooed? Is that what you mean by having some measure of control over it?"
A serious, legitimate, academic inquiry. She knows of a man whose nascent Knight Radiant abilities foiled every attempt to set ink in skin. It would just wipe away, apparently. Jasnah had not been able to secure a primary source on this anecdote, of course, on account of her thinking Kaladin Stormblessed is a self-righteous annoyance and she can't be bothered to ask him herself.
Good question. "I've never tried," he admits. "There aren't exactly any gestral tattoo artists on the Continent." Then, explaining, because he's not sure if he ever has— "They're made of wood. They wouldn't know what to do with human flesh."
He wouldn't actually mind a tattoo or two, honestly, but it's never really been an option. The last thing he wants is a sentient paintbrush coming at him with a needle. Sure, he could heal any artwork mistakes—which they'd probably make—but the trauma would last forever.
"...Wood," she repeats. It's the tone of someone who is both surprised but not surprised. Like, oh this sounds unlikely but so much so far has also been unlikely so of course this, too, is true.
Anyway. As she registers that mild not-surprise, she hands him first one card, then another. Appropriately interspersed with the cards she deals herself, of course. She turns over her top card, again using her knee as a makeshift play surface. A three.
"Hn," Jasnah makes a small, thoughtful sound. "Talking, animated wood?"
Well. Talking for a certain definition thereof. She hasn't forgotten his boast about only Monaco learning to communicate with humans.
"Sounds like Awakening."
Not a Rosharan magic, but one she's passingly familiar with.
"Hit me," he says immediately upon seeing his cards, then sets them down, a Seven of Diamonds facing up.
"Awakening is... animating an object?" 'Awakening' it, so to speak? "They're not objects." This, at least, he's adamant about. Yes, they might be made of wood, and yes, they might be unable to die, and yes, they might be unable to reproduce in any way one might expect of a living creature—
But those are his babies, okay.
"They're... their own breed of creature." And if they don't make sense, then it's because a little boy made them. "Most people in Lumière think they're mythical."
Jasnah peels a card from the top of the deck and holds it lightly between two fingers before offering it to Verso.
"There is often a kernel of truth in most mythic things," she allows — still, somewhat, wrestling with the implication that undying wooden beings are, in fact, beings at all. It sounds uncomfortably adjacent to Awakening, at least as Wit once described it. Demonstrated it.
Once he takes his card, she deals one to herself as well.
"I once witnessed a man breathe life — briefly — into a cloth doll," she says, thoughtful. "I assumed this might be something similar."
Although the gestrals themselves were never inanimate, the concept of being dolls that have had life breathed into them isn't so far off. He'd rather not get into that, though, for obvious reasons, so he says his favorite thing: "Yeah, I don't know."
He wishes—not for the first time—that he could explain everything, but he doesn't know how to without digging himself into a deeper hole. If he explains that the gestrals were purposefully designed, then he'll have to explain how he knows that. And if he explains that he knows that because his mother is the Paintress who designed all of the humans in Lumière including himself, then he'll have to explain that he's just as close to a doll as the gestrals are. And if he explains that, then—
It gives him a migraine just thinking about it.
"I'll stand." And when Jasnah finally decides to stand herself, she'll find that he has a seven and two sixes. He's pretty pleased with this hand.
"It isn't a Rosharan art," she says at last, easing into the silence with the measured calm of someone who — just now — feels safe enough to indulge her special interests unrelated to knives, plots, or the statistical likelihood of being murdered in a foreign city. "It's from an entirely different world. Where we use stormlight, they use something called BioChromatic Breath. And when you mentioned Chroma before..."
Her voice tapers as she glances down at her cards, considering them with the same faintly critical focus she brings to so many things. Two threes and a ten. Unsatisfactory. She draws again. A two — bringing her neatly to eighteen. That will do. She turns her hand face-up, satisfied.
"I suppose," she concludes lightly, "I wondered whether there might be some overlap after all."
Her satisfaction evaporates when she realizes he's beaten her by one. That earns him a quiet-but-earnest Storms, said beneath her very normal, very not BioChromatic breath.
Pleased with himself, he gathers the cards up again and begins the shuffle. She might like to learn if she doesn't already know how, he considers, but he saves that particular lesson for when she's healed. And maybe when they've got cards made of actual stock, too. He'd consider himself an expert in playing cards, and even he has a little difficulty with shuffling such flimsy ones.
Handing them back, he asks, "How did you learn so much about other worlds?"
Jasnah finds that she enjoys the quiet cooperation of it. He shuffles; she deals. It takes only two rounds for the rhythm to settle in, the deck passing back and forth between them without comment, each anticipating the other's turn as if they'd practiced this together for years rather than minutes.
When he asks how she's learned so much about other worlds, she pauses only briefly. There are two answers, both true, both incomplete. She chooses the simpler one.
"By sitting with worldhoppers and asking them many questions."
The third and final round begins. She deals with practiced economy, then turns her top card face-up.
"Ah," he says, although that isn't really much of an explanation in his eyes. It's the only one she's giving, so he might as well accept it for now. Choosing not to interrogate goes both ways.
"And here I thought I was special." With a mild little smile, he sets down his cards. Nine on top, eight underneath. Not the best hand, but not the worst, either; it's too high for him to risk busting on their final game, playing pragmatically. "I'll stand."
He is special — though Jasnah strongly suspects he wouldn't care for the particular ways in which that is true. Most off-worlders she's heard about arrived by intent: they located Cultivation's Perpendicularity, prepared themselves, and chose to cross. Verso, by contrast, seems to have been...deposited. An anomaly of circumstance rather than ambition.
She deals herself a third card. Only then does she stand, turning her hand to reveal a five and an eight alongside her seven. An expression flickers across her face. Smile-adjacent, carefully restrained. The look of a woman suppressing a boast. She's pleased with the outcome, but she is trying, very earnestly, to be a gracious victor.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Her three cards mark time against the curve of her knee.
"I have a request," she says, cutting her own satisfaction short with a small, deliberate clearing of her throat. "Unconventional. Presumptuous, really. But would you let me amend my wager after the fact?"
The thought has been needling at her ever since his critique of what she'd asked for before. A chapter, read aloud. It no longer satisfies her. She wants something else now.
"It's not very sportsmanlike to change your wager once you've already won," he points out as he flips his cards over, a bit of a sore loser. His soreness is alleviated only by the fact that this is a game of chance, too, and that letting Jasnah win now (did he let her win?) means she'll want to play with him more in the future.
"But," he continues, "you've piqued my curiosity."
Which cuts through all accusations of poor sportsmanship, obviously. He's a little worried that now she's going to request he chop a limb off in front of her—he's not opposed, necessarily, but he doesn't really feel like bleeding all over Jochi's floor and then having to clean it up—but he shoves that down in favor of finding out what she wants.
She waves away his mild accusation of unsportsmanlike behaviour. Who does he think she is? A Windrunner? Her oaths have little to nothing to do with honor. Well. Aside from the First Ideal. She can already hear Dalinar lecturing her on journey before destination and the many ways this might obliquely violate it. Fortunately for Jasnah, Ivory was never such a stickler.
(He's fine. He'll be back. Just wait.)
"You and I can understand one another," she begins, framing her change of heart by pointing out the obvious. "I assume it's due to some quirk of Connection."
She does not linker here. Explaining Connection is a headache and a half. Tl;dr — outsiders can, intentionally or not, hijack Connection to a place they're visiting and effectively speedrun language acquisition. Jasnah assumes that's what happened to him.
"But your native tongue still surfaces from time to time," she continues. "Whether you notice or not." It's obvious to her; she's less certain it is to him. She lifts the seven of diamonds between two fingers. "For example, the characters in the corners are unintelligible to me. I infer the value only because I can count the shapes."
That is likely a sufficient preamble. Ultimately, her request is no more or less intrusive than the original. It's simply...different. Different, and longer-term. Although it's the kind of broader knowledge Wit would always deny her when she asked.
"I would amend my boon to learning your language." She lifts a hand before he can object. "I'm a confident autodidact. I would need only the alphabet and a few sample passages to begin."
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Admittedly, she hadn't thought through the logistics, so it briefly catches her off guard when he takes a seat on the floor. The arrangement is faintly absurd — but, somehow, less absurd than his recent toe performance. So she settles into it with a touch more aplomb than she otherwise might have managed.
Jasnah extends her hand. She wants the deck. She wants the authority of the deal.
"If I win two out of five hands," she proposes, cool and precise, "you read me a chapter from a book of my choosing."
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He raises an eyebrow at her chosen 'prize', openly skeptical; firstly, it's something he'd be willing to do anyway, and secondly, it's something that he can't really imagine why she'd want. Sure, he's read plenty a book aloud to Alicia, and he fancies himself a damn good narrator, but he highly doubts his narration style will appeal to Jasnah. He does the voices.
"You can ask for something better than that, you know," he says. Then again, maybe she just wants to revel in the oddity of watching a man read. Like a dog playing poker. "—And you don't have much faith in yourself. It's usually best two out of three."
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Perhaps that's why she cannot summon a wager more elaborate than this: a familiar, steady voice easing her into an afternoon doze with lines and lines and lines of...let's be honest, Vorin determinism. Surely delivered dutifully and without embellishment.
Still, his criticism pricks. Just enough to raise a thin tendril of self-consciousness. Rather than defend the wager itself, she pivots. She chooses instead to dismantle what she believes is the weaker flank of his argument.
"Out of three?" Her nose wrinkles, dismissive. "No. It's either out of five or out of ten."
Holy numbers again, probably. Let's all be grateful they're not on Scadrial where everything would be in sixteens.
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He continues painstakingly shuffling the cards, this time passing them from hand to hand. Just making sure they're really, truly, super shuffled! It has nothing to do with payback for her making him wait in the mess deck, nope.
"This is a Lumièran game with Lumièran cards," he points out, "and I thought you enjoyed learning about other cultures."
With a pointedly innocent smile: "Best two out of three. And if I win, you'll agree to call for me before you get up again." A far more pragmatic wager than hers.
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Affectionately, of course. Unfortunately, these sorts of instincts and emotions are rarely straightforward.
"Agreed," she says, the word ground out with resolve. Then, without releasing him: "But I deal."
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As usual, there's nothing here that she wants that wouldn't have been freely given if she'd just expressed a desire for it. But this is a card game, not a therapy session, so he lets it pass, handing her the deck.
As she deals: "I have to admit, I expected you to bet for something more academic." A shrug. "A treatise on gestral culture, or a live demonstration of my..." He waffles a bit before landing on, "Regenerative qualities."
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Her visible card is a four; the hidden one, a six. She notes both, then deliberately waits for his verdict first, following the order he laid out back on the ship.
In the interim, she counters: "I am absolutely not about to obligate you into such a demonstration via a card game."
Apparently that is a bridge too far. Or perhaps she's simply developed a conditioned aversion to pressing the subject. She keeps discovering new and inventive ways to unsettle him when she does, and even Jasnah can recognize a flawed experimental variable when it repeats itself.
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"It's not..." That big of a deal, honestly. Except the reason that she even thinks that is because he'd made it into a big deal; he hems and haws for a moment, contemplating what to say. "I don't mind that you have questions."
And he doesn't! If he can entertain and delight with his immortality, then good. It's just— "I reacted poorly before, because..." He taps his cards a few times, then says, "I had an unpleasant experience, once. My companions saw my immortality firsthand, and I was abducted and interrogated."
He conveniently leaves out the part where he escaped with a little murder.
"But it isn't fair to judge you on someone else's merits." A beat, then he looks down at his cards again. "I'll hit."
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(But something bone-deep and quietly lovely settles in her chest at the simple fact of being told I don't mind that you have questions.)
She chews her bottom lip, thinking. Then, reaching to the small pile of cards on the divan, she deals him a third card. A third for herself as well.
Jasnah is self-aware enough to recognize how easily she can sound like an interrogator. Self-aware enough to note how thin the semantic line is between between abduction and being stranded in a strange world, dependent on a single, familiar person. Silently, she resolves to do better. Be better. It's the kind of quiet promise Ivory would have approved of. Meet your potential, he would say.
"—Is there," she begins, carefully, "any manner of demonstrating your regenerative qualities that you find...acceptable?"
No. Even that is the wrong word. Acceptable? Surely it still hurts. She frowns, recalibrates.
"Is there a way you prefer to demonstrate it?"
There. Better.
no subject
It does still hurt, yeah, but he likes to think he's gained a sort of tolerance to it. Or maybe he's just gotten good enough at mentally leaving his body that nearly anything has become endurable. He takes a look at his cards—the King of Spades, a 3, a 4—and sets them back down.
"I'll stand."
no subject
"Same," Jasnah says as she flips her three cards against her knee for him to see: a six, a four, a ten. Twenty, total. She's quite chuffed with this one.
Carefully, approaching her curiosity from a more careful angle: "Would you regrow a lost limb whole-cloth or would you require the original limb in order to heal it...back together? So to speak."
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As he reshuffles the cards, he answers, "That... depends. I have some measure of control over it." Not enough to stop it from happening completely. Staying alive isn't a choice, but the body in which he does that is, hence the unhealed scar. "If a limb were to, say, disintegrate entirely, I would regrow it."
This time, he holds the deck back out to her. Go ahead, deal. "But if it's still around, I prefer to bring the parts together. Feels less weird that way."
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But his measure of control is interesting. She nods along to his description, watching as he generously shuffles for her. Card shuffling would be a masculine art, to be sure. When he finishes, she takes the deck with a murmured word of gratitude. Loud enough to b heard; not so loud as to detour their conversation.
"—Can you be tattooed? Is that what you mean by having some measure of control over it?"
A serious, legitimate, academic inquiry. She knows of a man whose nascent Knight Radiant abilities foiled every attempt to set ink in skin. It would just wipe away, apparently. Jasnah had not been able to secure a primary source on this anecdote, of course, on account of her thinking Kaladin Stormblessed is a self-righteous annoyance and she can't be bothered to ask him herself.
no subject
He wouldn't actually mind a tattoo or two, honestly, but it's never really been an option. The last thing he wants is a sentient paintbrush coming at him with a needle. Sure, he could heal any artwork mistakes—which they'd probably make—but the trauma would last forever.
Tapping the floor: "Deal me in."
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Anyway. As she registers that mild not-surprise, she hands him first one card, then another. Appropriately interspersed with the cards she deals herself, of course. She turns over her top card, again using her knee as a makeshift play surface. A three.
"Hn," Jasnah makes a small, thoughtful sound. "Talking, animated wood?"
Well. Talking for a certain definition thereof. She hasn't forgotten his boast about only Monaco learning to communicate with humans.
"Sounds like Awakening."
Not a Rosharan magic, but one she's passingly familiar with.
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"Awakening is... animating an object?" 'Awakening' it, so to speak? "They're not objects." This, at least, he's adamant about. Yes, they might be made of wood, and yes, they might be unable to die, and yes, they might be unable to reproduce in any way one might expect of a living creature—
But those are his babies, okay.
"They're... their own breed of creature." And if they don't make sense, then it's because a little boy made them. "Most people in Lumière think they're mythical."
no subject
"There is often a kernel of truth in most mythic things," she allows — still, somewhat, wrestling with the implication that undying wooden beings are, in fact, beings at all. It sounds uncomfortably adjacent to Awakening, at least as Wit once described it. Demonstrated it.
Once he takes his card, she deals one to herself as well.
"I once witnessed a man breathe life — briefly — into a cloth doll," she says, thoughtful. "I assumed this might be something similar."
no subject
He wishes—not for the first time—that he could explain everything, but he doesn't know how to without digging himself into a deeper hole. If he explains that the gestrals were purposefully designed, then he'll have to explain how he knows that. And if he explains that he knows that because his mother is the Paintress who designed all of the humans in Lumière including himself, then he'll have to explain that he's just as close to a doll as the gestrals are. And if he explains that, then—
It gives him a migraine just thinking about it.
"I'll stand." And when Jasnah finally decides to stand herself, she'll find that he has a seven and two sixes. He's pretty pleased with this hand.
no subject
Her voice tapers as she glances down at her cards, considering them with the same faintly critical focus she brings to so many things. Two threes and a ten. Unsatisfactory. She draws again. A two — bringing her neatly to eighteen. That will do. She turns her hand face-up, satisfied.
"I suppose," she concludes lightly, "I wondered whether there might be some overlap after all."
Her satisfaction evaporates when she realizes he's beaten her by one. That earns him a quiet-but-earnest Storms, said beneath her very normal, very not BioChromatic breath.
no subject
Handing them back, he asks, "How did you learn so much about other worlds?"
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When he asks how she's learned so much about other worlds, she pauses only briefly. There are two answers, both true, both incomplete. She chooses the simpler one.
"By sitting with worldhoppers and asking them many questions."
The third and final round begins. She deals with practiced economy, then turns her top card face-up.
Seven.
no subject
"And here I thought I was special." With a mild little smile, he sets down his cards. Nine on top, eight underneath. Not the best hand, but not the worst, either; it's too high for him to risk busting on their final game, playing pragmatically. "I'll stand."
no subject
She deals herself a third card. Only then does she stand, turning her hand to reveal a five and an eight alongside her seven. An expression flickers across her face. Smile-adjacent, carefully restrained. The look of a woman suppressing a boast. She's pleased with the outcome, but she is trying, very earnestly, to be a gracious victor.
Tap. Tap. Tap. Her three cards mark time against the curve of her knee.
"I have a request," she says, cutting her own satisfaction short with a small, deliberate clearing of her throat. "Unconventional. Presumptuous, really. But would you let me amend my wager after the fact?"
The thought has been needling at her ever since his critique of what she'd asked for before. A chapter, read aloud. It no longer satisfies her. She wants something else now.
If he'll permit it.
no subject
"But," he continues, "you've piqued my curiosity."
Which cuts through all accusations of poor sportsmanship, obviously. He's a little worried that now she's going to request he chop a limb off in front of her—he's not opposed, necessarily, but he doesn't really feel like bleeding all over Jochi's floor and then having to clean it up—but he shoves that down in favor of finding out what she wants.
"I'll hear you out."
no subject
(He's fine. He'll be back. Just wait.)
"You and I can understand one another," she begins, framing her change of heart by pointing out the obvious. "I assume it's due to some quirk of Connection."
She does not linker here. Explaining Connection is a headache and a half. Tl;dr — outsiders can, intentionally or not, hijack Connection to a place they're visiting and effectively speedrun language acquisition. Jasnah assumes that's what happened to him.
"But your native tongue still surfaces from time to time," she continues. "Whether you notice or not." It's obvious to her; she's less certain it is to him. She lifts the seven of diamonds between two fingers. "For example, the characters in the corners are unintelligible to me. I infer the value only because I can count the shapes."
That is likely a sufficient preamble. Ultimately, her request is no more or less intrusive than the original. It's simply...different. Different, and longer-term. Although it's the kind of broader knowledge Wit would always deny her when she asked.
"I would amend my boon to learning your language." She lifts a hand before he can object. "I'm a confident autodidact. I would need only the alphabet and a few sample passages to begin."
A pause. A faint, intent look.
"Continued consultation, of course."
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congrats on receiving my 1,000th comment in this post
throwing a party!!
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first work tag of the new year...
ditto. 🥂
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