Demesne Patron EX SS 43 – Little Lori Goes To The Theater

It had been a grueling week. Between going to the library to get copies of books that were too expensive or too hard to find to buy, clubbing people to get the books from them, avoiding getting clubbed in turn, actually reading the required portions of the book, doing the writing assignments to show she’d read the books… the only thing that would have made the week worse was having to submit a collaborative paper. Why were there so many collaborative papers?

However, the eight days of work—she had not been able to rest on Hope, there’d just been too much to do—were done, and Lori was free! Free and out of the apartment she shared with her parents. Thankfully they hadn’t tried to stop her with something inane like ‘cleaning her room’ or ‘reading ahead’. Although that could be because she’d slipped out.

Well, no matter! Lori had a good day ahead of her! The rain was falling, the bugs were singing, she had the day’s budget of beads in her belt pouch, and her socks were nice and warm inside her tall rain boots. She felt the familiar sensation of raindrops on her hat, and the subtle impacts on her arms as water dripped from the brim and onto her rain coat. She was one of many out on the streets—or sides of the street, as this was a major road and the majority of it was overtaken by vehicular traffic—just another figure in a leather coat and hat.

It wasn’t universally adopted; some had on deep hoods to keep the rain off their heads, and one could always tell the foreigners in the crowd by their cloaks, many of which were not doing so well against the wind blowing down from mountain that was nearby Taniar Dungeon. A few poor fools were trying to make do with rain shades—this was obviously their first visit to Taniar Demesne, and had greatly underestimated their reputation for rain—and were learning that holding on to what was basically a sail on a stick was a terrible idea.

Her satchel bounced reassuring against her hip as she walked, containing two bottles of golden bud juice. Well, golden bud juice in water mixed with a little honey, since the juice by itself had a very strong flavor. It was a specialty of a tavern near where they lived, which was where they got their food most of the time. While one could buy drink where she was going, the only things they served was tea and small booze, both of which were not to her tastes.

Through the mist caused by the rain, Lori could see her destination, the familiar shape of the Mirror Dream Theater. It was the theater closest to where she lived, where the pit had padded benches—even if the padding was getting a bit thin—the food was always freshly cooked—for a given degree of ‘fresh’—and there was gallery seating available for everyone, not just the very rich. While not a very large theater, its position on a major road gave it a lot of passing traffic, especially since there was a lot of housing nearby that was owned by the Banking Authority and other financial institutions for their employees. The theater had been in business for decades, and seemed set to do business for decades more, market forces willing.

In front of the theater, barely shielded by from the rain by an overhang, was a printed poster—complete with a rough illustration—announcing the play adaptation of the novel ‘Spice and Wax’ that was currently running. An adaptation of one of Lori’s favorite novels of the same name, the play had premiering at the beginning of the week on Despa. She had originally planned to go in the middle of the working week, but there had still been so much work to do when on Hope had come around… But all that was behind her and she was here now!

There was no line in front to the ticket box, either because of the rain or because it was still a bit early for the matinee. Lori checked the ticket price before pulling the exact beads from her belt pouch. Normally, she would buy a ticket in the pit, but given the stress of the week so far, she decided to indulge and bought a ticket for the gallery, where she didn’t have to worry about anyone taller that her standing in her way. Accepting the little paper stub of the ticket in exchange, Lori stepped into the theater’s lobby. There was a large bound tool timepiece inside, the thinnest arm relentlessly ticking away the moments, next to the schedule of performances. The morning performance had apparently been cancelled because of a rain—it was usually the least-attended one, even compared to the last full show—but the rest of the day’s shows were still scheduled to go on, and the next would be in forty-five minutes.

That was plenty of time, although it seemed the matinee crowd was here. Three people had just arrived at the ticket box, although they seemed to still be debating the merits of attending the show. She couldn’t hear what they were saying over the sound of the rain, but she wasn’t really interested.

The theater also had a snack bar just past the ticket box manned by three people, two of which were cooking while a third was laying out squares of waxed paper to put the food in. The lobby was filled with the sound of the pouring rain, and the smells of hot cooking oil—not rancid, thankfully—and frying bug meat. The delicious scent made Lori’s mouth water as she hurried up the bar and looked at the slate where what was available was written down. “I’ll have five orders of fried bug meat,” she said as Lori took off her hat so she couldn’t drip on the bar. There was no saving the floor. “No, six.”

“Do you want buns with those?” the third worker asked, the words rote as Lori took out beads from her pouch.

The young Whisperer considered, then nodded. “Buns for two of them,” she said, paying for her food.

She watched as batter-covered bug meat—already cooked and cooling on a rack—was dropped into oil-filled pots and stirred around a bit, getting them warm again before they were stuck through by thin wooden skewers, five pieces of thumb-sized bug meat on each skewer. Ten of the pieces were placed into two buns that had been cut so the bug meat would nestle between them. All six were them wrapped with a length of course brown paper. Lori accepted the package, long years of buying theater food letting her not think of how clean this was.

Taking a moment to juggle her food and her hat, she headed towards the stairs up to the gallery to find a good seat. Fortunately, she was had arrived early enough that the galleries facing the middle of the stage were still empty. Lori helped herself to a bench, placing her package of food on the narrow ledge for snacks in front of her seat. Reaching into her satchel, she pulled out one of the sweetened golden bud juice, and put one hand on the still-warm paper package to claim some firewisps from it, forming them into binding as she methodically breathed imbuement into them. The bottle was glass, so Lori pulled off the stopper to let her drop the binding she had formed and imbued into the drink, where it began to destroy the heat in the liquid to slowly cool the beverage.

Lori had been looking forward to this play ever since she’d seen the announcement that the script was being rewritten for a play. Set during pre-industrial age, the novel had been about how a small group of medieval wizards tried to bring down a relatively small demesne—for the time period depicted, anyway—by causing a bead shortage to collapse the economy as a means of luring out the demesne’s Dungeon Binder so they could be assassinated. The novel had been quite a pleasure to read, and supposedly been based on actual historical events, but Lori was extremely skeptical of that. If it were in any way factual, why would it be allowed to exist, essentially encouraging both economic sabotage and treason?

Still, she wasn’t one to be pedantic about such details. The plot had been exciting, the plan had been reasonably in line with what could be done to sabotage an economy if one didn’t have modern safeguards against probably this very thing happening, the execution had been creative, and the dialogue had been witty. Hopefully that last would be retained by the play. The very worst adaptations always wrote new dialogue when the source novel already had the perfect lines to recite.

Hopefully they’d also cut out the pointless romantic subplot between the spice merchant and the accountant, that had made the novel drag in a lot of places. Really, why did writers insist of sticking in such nauseating nonsense into perfectly serviceable novels? Did they get paid by the word or something?

Actually, they might be, but that was no excuse for such boring material when they could clearly do better?

The minutes passed, each moment seeming to drag on for far too long as Lori resisted the urge to start eating, keeping her food warm with a binding, although she’d allowed herself to eat one of the skewers in a bun to let her hold off her cravings. If she ran out of food before the play started, she’d have to go back to the bar for more and she’d lose her place on the gallery. People had been slowly coming in, filling up both the pit and the rest of the galleries, most still dripping from the rains outside. On the stage, lights blinked on and off as the stage hands tested the wisplights, the intensity and color sometimes changing.

And then it was time, and the theater wisplights were dimming, and the curtain was rising as the band the theater employed began to play to give the opening scene accompaniment…

…

Wait, she didn’t remember this scene… was it new and unique to the theatrical ver—why was this scene focused on the spice merchant and the accountant?-!