Dragon Puns Art

Per popular request, this is part 2 to this story

It's been a while since the prince of Elbaf felt the fluttering, sickening feeling that was being in love. Did he love it or hate it? He was still not sure, but he did know this; he had to be free.

Masterlist Here

Word Count: 1,113 Drabble

(Image Source a:)(Image Source b:)(my attempt at art)

Synopsis: The first mate of the Red-Hair pirates is attempting to relax and enjoy his evening with you, but is rudely interrupted by Shanks' tinkering and clanging within the Captain's quarters.

Themes: First-mate x crew, established relationship, lounging, drinking, smoking, gentle touches, sweet domesticity.

Notes: The Beckman brain rot got me. This beloved first-mate lives rent free in my head, and I adore him.

Tag List: @sordidmusings @writingmysanity @gingernut1314 @feral-artistry

If you didn't have faith, then you weren't anything. There was just the dark.

He shuddered in the gloom. Was the god silent, or was there no one to speak?

He tried praying again, more desperately this time, fragments of childish prayer, losing control of the words and even of their direction, so that they tumbled out and soared away into the universe addressed simply to The Occupier.

The rain dripped off his hat.

He knelt and waited in the wet darkness, and listened to his own mind, and remembered, and took out the Book of Om once more.

And made a great light.

"She was keen on crushing infidels?"

"Well, mainly I think she was in favor of crushing Mrs. Ahrim next door, but you've got the right idea, yes. She thought the world would be a better place with a bit more crushing and smiting."

"Prob'ly true."

"Not as much smiting and crushing as she'd like, though, I think," said Oats. "A bit judgmental, my grandmother."

"Nothing wrong with that. Judging is human."

"We prefer to leave it ultimately to Om," said Oats and, out here in the dark, that statement sounded lost and all alone.

"Bein' human means judgin' all the time," said the voice behind him. "This and that, good and bad, making choices every day...that's human."

"And are you so sure you make the right decisions?"

"No. But I do the best I can."

"And hope for mercy, eh?"

The bony finger prodded him in the back.

"Mercy's a fine thing, but judgin' comes first. Otherwise you don't know what you're bein' merciful about."

this is a vegetarian potato curry recipe that's about 75% spices; once you get the potatoes in there you can really do whatever you want with it

this is literally just pasta, broccoli, and cheese babey and you can live off that shit for DAYS it makes such a big portion

bro this spinach/pesto/3 cheese flatbread is so fucking tasty bro

also you can make the flatbread yourself it's super quick!!

oh hey I'm eating this white chickpea chili right now, much like the curry it's mostly spices and you can do p much do whatever you want with it

don't let the name fool you these potatoes are delicious any time. not just breakfast.

Garlic butter rice

recently i read Guards!Guards! by Pratchett and it brings me great joy to draw out the characters, i will now proceed to throw these at you

Colon!

Sybil,,, i love her, how can i not love a crazy dragon lady ((thats also a big lady))... I like the idea that her brows are tiny because they get burnt by dragons so often

Carrot i also love him

+Big woman Sybil with no wig

And not one of these people, when it comes down to it, bothers trying to help or save him.

Coin.

A child.

Rincewind though?

Rincewind shows up with half a brick in a sock to take on the first sourcerer in centuries, and upon seeing Coin is a child, he helps him.

He takes Coin's side against his father/staff.

He throws himself after Coin while the wizards flee.

He acts as a distraction so Coin can leg it to safety.

Rincewind! Rincewind does this. Just Some Guy Rincewind.

And I kind of think that's the point Terry Pratchett is trying to make.

Coin's father/staff is a figure of power and so are the wizards, but Rincewind?

He's always been seperate from the power of wizardry. He's just a guy, just a regular person, seperate from power. He's just like us.

Of course he protects a child.

And yet Rincewind doesn't abandon a child in need. Or an idiot tourist in over his head. Or an underage demonologist meddling with forces he beyond his ken. Or a desperate revolution and a band of elderly barbarians facing overwhelming odds.

When the chips are down, Rincewind will always try to do the right thing.

Sometimes even on purpose.

because of so many reasons, so many points, so many subtleties of it

like, on the one hand, you have the sort-of subversion of urn’s words to simony, about why vorbis is evil – because he makes other people think like him. but he could never corrupt brutha. “yes, but i’m me” being brutha’s last line in the book is just such a genius, such a beautiful line, because it shows how his self-assurance and kindness were what made him the sort of person who will aid a monster – a man who tried to kill him, who tortured people to death because he found them to be heretics, an awful man who inspired multiple countries to join together to destroy not just him but the country he was unofficially in charge of – into passing through purgatory and into eternity.

and the fact that death, the anthropomorphic personification of the concept of dying, who is by his very nature unconditionally objective – makes a point to remind brutha of who vorbis is, but still, brutha’s response –

“yes, but i’m me.”

and i do not leave people behind in the desert.

even if it backfires, even if that person strikes him with a rock and takes the credit for carrying him – even if it turns out all wrong, jesus brutha does not leave people behind. it’s fundamental, it’s in the core of who he is, and nobody and nothing can change that about him. he does not abandon people to suffer. he does not leave them behind. he does not walk away when there is something he can do to help.

like, i’m an atheist and i find that moving to the point of tears. 

i don’t know if small gods is my favorite discworld book (night watch breaks my soul every time, and hogfather is just stunning, and thief of time is so wonderful, and..) but it’s the one i recommend to people who have never heard of terry pratchett, and if you had to ask me what i thought the best book in the english language is, i might just say small gods. because it made an atheist cry over religion. it has so many layers, so many details, so many profound moments that make me set the book aside and stare at the wall in awe.

i can say, without any hyperbole, with 100% sincerity, that reading small gods made me a better person. it made me a kinder person. it’s why i can speak with religious people without getting angry over how religion has hurt me. that one book. this one story. all culminating in this one scene.

i mean, it’s got:

commentary on slavery (given how we use them, maybe we’re scared because we know we deserve it)

commentary on labor rights, when dorfl is given ownership of himself and goes on his (for lack of a better term) rampage

and yet a deep understanding of how the human psyche works (you say to people, throw off your chains, and they just make new chains for themselves?) 

explores the definition of personhood, how if a golem is a thing then it can’t commit murder and if it can commit murder then how they’ve been treating golems is indefensible

the poetic beauty and horror of being poisoned by the candlelight

the core of vimes’s personal philosophy is exposed, but subtly, when he visits cockbill street and he thinks about how he grew up dirt-poor but his granny always said that no one was too poor to buy soap – on cockbill street, mostly what you ate was your pride. because cockbill street people, in spite of their absolute poverty, still believed that there were rules. and who, on the disc, is more the avatar of law and order, true law rather than the kind that lets rich people do whatever they like, than samuel vimes?

the one-off joke (oft-repeated, long before terry pratchett) of there never being any female dwarves being brought back up again to comment on trans rights; you can be any sex you like provided you act male. cheri coming into her own and, bit by bit, claiming her own femininity, even though it’s deeply against her culture to do so, and many people treat her with open disgust and refuse to stop calling her “him”.

vimes going from thinking of golems as objects with nothing behind their eyes to demanding that dorfl be given a voice so he can speak for himself, and swearing him in as a watchman

also, in a smaller way, getting to see the genuinely kind side of vimes, when he’s speaking with mildred easy, who took the candle-ends and extra food home with her and was terrified that she’d be arrested at her grandmother’s and little brother’s funeral for it (it is [stealing], vimes thought treacherously. but i don’t give a damn.) because there is a difference between taking the odds and ends from the palace to feed a fussy baby and your old granny, and stealing out of greed

the absolute tragedy at the beginning, of dorfl trying to save father tubelcek by putting a copy of his chem in his mouth, a tragedy that doesn’t become clear until much later in the book. he tried to save the priest the only way he knew how, with his own holy words.

god, the horror of the golems solemnly and silently killing themselves, leaving behind nothing but shattered pottery and slates written in all-caps anguish SHAME and CLAY OF MY CLAY

that they made themselves a king to save them, my god, they built themselves a savior out of their own bodies, but all their needs and all their suffering and all their hopes drove it mad, it makes you hurt

what makes the lesser pawns of the villain evil, the ones who weren’t involved in the big plot, but just went along with it for the money: you caused the death of an old lady and a baby down in cockbill street. –were they important?

were they important – somehow, that’s the coldest and most evil line spoken by any character in the whole book, maybe even the series as a whole, it’s at least up there

and then

you gave one of them a VOICE? … that’s blasphemy!

that’s what people say when the voiceless speak.

hi, thank you! it’s a good question, because i think most discworld people had the idea individually and then went online to find that everyone else was on the patrician moist train. i spent all day thinking about this, actually, and i have an answer that’s definitely more complicated than you were looking for. 

i think there are three and a half people that vetinari might realistically consider as his successor, because in order to succeed vetinari you need to see the man behind the myth, and very few people do. sam vimes, rufus drumknott, and moist von lipwig are the three, and william de worde is the half. (every night i cry with the lack of anymore newspaper books.) 

so lets look at those options! sam first. vimes & vetinari have perhaps the most public relationship, and vimes is definitely the person vetinari feels most comfortable showing weakness/vulnerability around. for example, in feet of clay with the Poisoning That Sparked A Thousand Fanfics, and in men at arms with the gonne shooting, vetinari is both physically and mentally vulnerable - to a really incredible extent - for vimes. in both instances, vetinari’s life is in his hands. in the fifth elephant, snuff, jingo, and thud!, although vetinari’s life is not physically in vimes’ hands, he is very explicit in trusting his reputation and the future of ankh-morpork to vimes, much to vimes’ consternation. 

however, vimes would not be an ideal successor. there’s age, of course - night watch shows us vetinari is at most five years older than vimes, as he is a senior assassin student where sam is entering his first job, and so vimes would be retiring at the same time as vetinari. but more important than that there is vimes’ attitude to leadership and power. sybil, when telling sam that he has risen to the top, gets the reply “so does the scum”, and vimes is always deeply and intensely uncomfortable with the privilege he wields over others. he delegates to carrot as often as he can, and always always takes the most dangerous position; look at thud!, or jingo, or. fuck it. look at every single book. vimes is a commander, but he really, really doesn’t want to be one, and he’s very uncomfortable with the inequality in treatment that comes with holding power. 

okay, now drumknott! imo, the title of vetinari’s terrier is wasted on sam; drumknott is the true “loyal dog” figure. in the truth, despite being the subject of the assault and witnessing it with his own eyes, he is the only character to openly deny that vetinari stole/tried to kill him. he is “very shaken” by the idea that this could happen. unseen academicals shows us vetinari is comfortable showing weakness in front of him, with his admission that he is drunk, and we know that drumknott is his sounding-board in many little scenes throughout the series. so far, so good. drumknott is probably a dark clerk, and almost definitely attended the assassins guild, so there’s no lack of intelligence or knowledge of the city. 

but drumknott lacks one thing, which is creativity. unseen academicals shows us this crack, the whole scene with vetinari asking him what he would do if presented with a ball on the street, and his single-minded interest in stationery. he also hero-worships vetinari too much; he can’t succeed as patrician because of his own perceived lack of what makes vetinari special. 

(i want to quickly look at william before i go to moist. if we had a second newspaper book i firmly believe william would be as beloved as moist is, but as it is we don’t. ;-; the key thing between william & vetinari is that william lacks a loving father figure, and in the truth vetinari shows a paternal indulgence towards the newspaper and movable type that he doesn’t show to other innovations like moving pictures/music with rocks in/previous attempts at a printing press. when william uncovers the truth, vetinari is pleased, but not surprised. william has potential, but that’s sadly all he has - vetinari is definitely a father figure for him, though.) 

so moist! moist is a criminal, a rogue, and completely untrustworthy. he is more talented at manipulation than any other character on the disc apart from vetinari and possibly granny, and he can balance plans on a knife-edge better than anyone except vetinari. if he isn’t presented with a constant life-threatening challenge, he grows so bored he starts breaking into his own house. he has contingencies upon just-in-cases upon getaways hidden all over the city, and like vetinari, is very skilled at pretending to be someone else; or at blending into the background. at the time of raising steam moist has at least three full-time jobs, and is looking for more. vetinari several times makes comments about the state of taxes in ankh-morpork and other public services that he thinks moist would manage well over. 

crucially, vetinari does show weakness in front of moist, albeit of a different kind. with vimes and drumknott its physical weakness, but with moist, it’s civic weakness; vetinari hands him the banks, the post office, the trains, the clacks, because he (vetinari) can’t handle them. so while vetinari trusts vimes and drumknott with his person, he trusts moist with something he values a lot more than his body; he trusts him with the inner workings of his city. looking at age, too, moist is described as early-middle-aged in raising steam, definitely a great deal younger than a vetinari who is entering old age. (it’s been brought up to me that he is 26 [provided he doesn’t lie] in going postal, so assuming 10-15 years have passed between postal and raising steam that puts him at a perfect age for the job) in other words, moist is a perfect age to take over as leader of a city-state. 

vetinari trusts moist with his city in a way he doesn’t trust vimes; he trusts moist explicitly, instead of the implicit trust he gives sam. he knows sam will always be there, because sam has built the system of checks and balances that makes up an almost-perfect watch; he knows moist will always be trying to improve, and that moist has that creativity and imagination that a leader needs to be successful. 

In my head Moist ends up being the establishment. I know not everyone likes the idea of him being the next Patrician, but to me it makes a weird sort of sense (which if you’ve read my fic One Man One Vote I sort of play around with it) as well as comedic brilliance in terms of the quote:

Steal thousands and you’re either the government or a hero.

Poor Moist ends up being both, in my head.

Anyway, I feel like Moist’s days of being a man like Gilt are behind him, oh he’s still more slippery than a bar of soap in the midst of a tsunami, but he’s never really been about the money, not in the way Gilt was. And even then Gilt wasn’t about money.

Moist took the thrill from feeling smarter and the danger in knowing he might get caught out, but he also has a genuine moment of crisis and self realization when Pump19 accuses him of murder, however indirectly. I imagine that figure still keeps him awake some nights. 2.338.

Gilt however has no such qualms, and gets a perverse joy from the power of it. Money is just money, he can always get more of it, men like Gilt always do. No, it’s the power over people that he wants, and we know he’s not above intentional murder to get it, and that is a fundamental difference in their character dynamic.

I think if Moist did find himself on the opposing side to a new technology that threatened the post office, he’d be first in line to install a telephone in the post office. And given how such technology works at its first implementation, it’d be him, the palace and the telephone office all in direct communication. 

He’d also make it the first free public telephone with a purchase of a stamp, making it cheaper to have in your own home…which the companies might be livid about, but then the innovators of technology are generally the ones who want the public to use their tools, after all they make things in a response to need. It’s the people that buy them for distribution that fuck it all up.

He’d find a way to integrate it and make it a part of the way the city functions, in the same way he took the conflict of the new money, and said “well, it’s like the stamp thing you see” and people went “well that Mr Lipwig he’s a clever bugger, there’s probably a trick here, but it’ll probably be a good one so I’ll just keep watching and see”…and the real trick is he makes things work. He uses being quick witted and a likable rascal to make people like him, to get them to change they way they think, he sparkles and shines and puts a gleam on the world and people go along with it because sometimes it’s shards of glass in the rubble, but there’s always the chance of a diamond eventually.

If the trolls had a name for him they’d call him Pyrite, but even fool’s gold has a little of the real thing in it, when you get down to it.

And that’s Moist, he’s carved glass set in fool’s gold and worried every day the shine will rub off. But there’s also iron in those things, and if you’ve got enough iron you can make a man, travel anywhere and keep evil at bay. 

In my head Moist ends up being the establishment. I know not everyone likes the idea of him being the next Patrician, but to me it makes a weird sort of sense (which if you’ve read my fic One Man One Vote I sort of play around with it) as well as comedic brilliance in terms of the quote:

Steal thousands and you’re either the government or a hero.

Poor Moist ends up being both, in my head.

Anyway, I feel like Moist’s days of being a man like Gilt are behind him, oh he’s still more slippery than a bar of soap in the midst of a tsunami, but he’s never really been about the money, not in the way Gilt was. And even then Gilt wasn’t about money.

Moist took the thrill from feeling smarter and the danger in knowing he might get caught out, but he also has a genuine moment of crisis and self realization when Pump19 accuses him of murder, however indirectly. I imagine that figure still keeps him awake some nights. 2.338.

Gilt however has no such qualms, and gets a perverse joy from the power of it. Money is just money, he can always get more of it, men like Gilt always do. No, it’s the power over people that he wants, and we know he’s not above intentional murder to get it, and that is a fundamental difference in their character dynamic.

I think if Moist did find himself on the opposing side to a new technology that threatened the post office, he’d be first in line to install a telephone in the post office. And given how such technology works at its first implementation, it’d be him, the palace and the telephone office all in direct communication. 

He’d also make it the first free public telephone with a purchase of a stamp, making it cheaper to have in your own home…which the companies might be livid about, but then the innovators of technology are generally the ones who want the public to use their tools, after all they make things in a response to need. It’s the people that buy them for distribution that fuck it all up.

He’d find a way to integrate it and make it a part of the way the city functions, in the same way he took the conflict of the new money, and said “well, it’s like the stamp thing you see” and people went “well that Mr Lipwig he’s a clever bugger, there’s probably a trick here, but it’ll probably be a good one so I’ll just keep watching and see”…and the real trick is he makes things work. He uses being quick witted and a likable rascal to make people like him, to get them to change they way they think, he sparkles and shines and puts a gleam on the world and people go along with it because sometimes it’s shards of glass in the rubble, but there’s always the chance of a diamond eventually.

If the trolls had a name for him they’d call him Pyrite, but even fool’s gold has a little of the real thing in it, when you get down to it.

And that’s Moist, he’s carved glass set in fool’s gold and worried every day the shine will rub off. But there’s also iron in those things, and if you’ve got enough iron you can make a man, travel anywhere and keep evil at bay.