#jabor

“Jabor and I are playing the long game” moment is just so hilarious i can't

Silly Nathaniel Underwood and Bartimaeus in Ptolemy form sketches (+one cat-like Faquarl) are below⬇️

London, fire, fight/violence, Jabor

Vaguely set during Amulet of Samarkand

How he loved fire. Fire was inside him, always, but when he conjured it and wrapped himself with it, was even better.

The most beautiful thing was setting things on fire. Especially human things: fragile, little humans, who made things as insignificant as them.

It was a joy setting fire and then watching them running around, trying to save what they could. Trying to save themselves.

Setting things on fire was a little like fighting, the only thing that mattered when he was on Earth, that drowned the pain out, because he was the one inflicting it. Defeating his adversary was pleasant, of course, but never as the fight itself.

It was because of that that he did not like fighting Bartimaeus: he flied and ran, he bent and never broke. The fire inside Jabor was yearning to crumble that ridiculous djinni, but he could never catch him. He was always faster.

But he’d have caught him, one day. He could run on the roofs, the trees, wherever he wanted, but in the end Jabor would have seized him. And Jabor would have burnt him.

11 down, 67 to go.

1: Jabor enjoying killing humans is problematic and quite rude, but ykw if I think about it, it's kind of hard to blame him, because he's uhh... not so philosophically gifted as Bartimaeus and may not have really understood how commoners had no power whatsoever. It may well have taken a good thousand years or so before he found out that there were non-magician humans, that summoning spirits wasn't just a thing all humans could do and commoners were just too weak to summon anything strong. And then only because someone told him. 2: Faquarl and Bartimaeus started out as genuine friends. They weren't foolish enough to refuse their masters' commands when they were pitted against each other, but they were close enough that no amount of knowing it wasn't personal made it not feel like a betrayal when they were pitted against each other, repeatedly. And also because they are both incredibly good at being completely insufferable to their enemies, and there were probably incidents where both of them tried to accomplish their mission without killing each other, leading to some very clever and creative means of incapacitation that were extremely painful/annoying. And the seed of hurt and spite grew, and grew, and grew. On the other hand, Bartimaeus and Jabor clashed a few times in the very early days, but didn't give each other much thought. No, what made them hate each other was being forced to work together. Bartimaeus does not suffer fools gladly, and he gladly makes fools suffer.

From Bartimaeus's perspective, he was living through an Ancient Egyptian version of Pinky and the Brain, if Pinky was also short-tempered, prone to violence, and capable of crashing through walls and blowing up buildings. Working with an oaf who had to have his subtle yet elegant plans explained to him repeatedly and still fucked them up roused Bartimaeus to fury.

From Jabor's perspective, Bartimaeus was an insufferable control-freak who tried to order him around despite having no authority to do so / being a lower-level djinni, and who went out of his way to avoid the simplest / most effective / most fun solutions to problems (i.e. If Violence Isn't Effective, You're Not Using Enough Of It) because he was too lazy/cowardly to go into fights he should have been able to win and also had a compulsive need to show off how smart he was: as a result he came up with incomprehensible plans that he somehow expected anyone to be able to follow and then blamed everyone when they went wrong (say, if he just assumed it would be obvious who the enemy with vital information they needed to take alive was based on their outfit). Also, got overly upset about being occasionally hit by stray detonations.

And it's worth repeating: Bartimaeus does not suffer fools gladly, and he gladly makes fools suffer. Both parties did their best to take their frustration out at working together on each other, but the thing is Bartimaeus and Faquarl in an "overly aggressive prank war" are more or less evenly matched, whereas Jabor had no hope of keeping up with the games Barti was playing. And Bartimaeus didn't just fight dirty, he sabotaged Jabor or baited him into lashing out and destroying something important and got him into trouble with various masters or "advised" their shared master to give Jabor horrible tasks, then gloated.

From Bartimaeus's perspective it was fair play, no reason not to use the same tricks you'd use to get one over on a magician in a position of power over you to get one over on a fellow spirit who was more powerful, if you can't play the game sucks to suck lol.

From Jabor's perspective, if the power differential was the other way around he would have had no problem taking on a low-level afrit with a "no cannibalism or detonations" rule and getting his ass kicked, but being made to feel helpless by a weaker djinni who kept screwing him over in ways where he couldn't even fight back drove Jabor utterly insane with rage.

Basically Bartimaeus vs. Faquarl is Bugs Bunny vs. Daffy Duck, but Bartimaeus vs. Jabor is Bugs Bunny vs. Yosemite Sam.

3: It would've been hilarious if Bartimaeus had actually given Jabor the "friendly advice" about turning into a gnat to escape the rift, because there's like a 60% chance Jabor would have thought it was a trick because "smaller forms are weaker and slower and would get sucked in more easily." It would've been extra hilarious if he had done this fully expecting this to happen because he thought it would be amusing to go "Well, I tried to help. Alas, poor Jabor, if only you hadn't been a complete idiot," and then Jabor listened and Barti had to spend the remainder of the Ramuthra Incident cursing himself for trying to be clever, resulting in Jessica Whitwell's servant running interference (and also cursing out Bartimaeus) until Barti manages to taunt Jabor into shooting a detonation at him while he's standing directly in front of the now amulet-free Lovelace.

Then Jabor gets summoned again during Golem's Eye and is surprisingly civil because Bartimaeus saved his life and helped him kill his master who was going to sacrifice him. Bartimaeus insists a little too loudly to everyone present that he didn't do that on purpose, he was just trying to be disrespectful.