WiPpet Wednesday: rewards and punishments

My reward for not doing as badly at Camp NaNo as I expected arrived today!

One of the nicest things about fountain pens is converters, which you can fill with any ink you choose... which usually results in owning quite a few bottles of ink (they're much cheaper than buying cartridges).  And I'll admit I'm pretty cheap with my inks: I prefer Diamine, which are usually £2-3 a 30ml bottle.

This... is not a cheap ink.  This is my third J. Herbin 1670 ink, and it's only just come out.  The 1670 inks have tiny flecks of gold in, and from all the promotional pictures I've seen that use it, it's got a beautiful sheen when used.

It's also... *ulp*  About £14 a bottle, and I've never used any of them, because I'm just a tiiiiny bit scared of them.  (I don't think I can be blamed at that price.)  They do look gorgeous though...

I will get around to trying it out though.  Probably with my dip pens, because I'm a little unsure how well a Lamy will deal with the gold flecks in the feed and I'm pretty sure my little Pilot with its EF nib will just choke on them.

But it IS pretty...

And on the subject of (subjectively) pretty, I found the Rose Queen bookmark I made while bored a few months ago.  Never did get around to making one representing Fayth...

WiPpet Wednesday

WiPpet Wednesday is a brilliant blog hop where participants show snippets of their Works in Progress, and all snippets relate in some way to the date, whether through simple substitution or WiPpet Maths.  It's organised by the lovely K. L. Schwengel and you can find out more, read other posts and jump in yourself over here.

It's the 5th August 2015 (05/08/2015) so my math is 2 + 0 + 1 + 5 = 8.  5 - 8 = 3.  3 + 8 = 11, for 11 paragraphs (sorry for the length).

To commemorate finding the bookmark again, I figured we should nip back to The Rose Queen to see what's going on.  I left Fayth with the discovery that his delivery of RQ is not everything he thought is was...

..and you're going to have to wait a little longer to see how that pans out, because chapter 4 deals with someone else.  Someone troublesome, who turned up without my permission...  (Profanity warning.)

The other thing he couldn’t help noticing, as he shifted from foot to foot and clenched his hands tightly together behind his back, was the sheer amount of greenery around the place.  Anywhere else, he’d take the stalks and stems to be a particularly expensive brand of synthetic and dismiss it as a pointless frippery; in here, he knew the truth.  Each plant was painstakingly—he might go so far as lovingly—raised to be the finest example it could be and then handed over to serve as nothing more than decoration.  It was easy to make a parallel between the plants and their gardener.

“Baenan.”

Outwardly he was sure nothing more happened than his knuckles whitening as he gripped that little bit harder; inwardly, he flinched.  If he was being addressed by his surname, he really was in for it.  “Yes, sir.”

The deep carpet muffled each heavy footfall and the man’s breath was barely audible, but Corliss knew where the man was standing simply from the pressure of his eyes over his skin.  The room might be designed to intimidate, but it had nothing on its occupant.  “Would you like to tell me anything about today, Baenan?”

Well, no, he wouldn’t.  What he would like to do was hide in his cabin until he could be sure people had stopped laughing every time he passed, but he was fairly sure that the Captain wasn’t going to accept that as an answer.  In fact, there was a lot the Captain wouldn’t accept as an answer, like how the Head of Security had found himself brained and naked in a storage closet.  Hay Medworth had a reputation as a fair Captain, but no matter how fair he was, Corliss didn’t think anyone would take the theft of their most valuable asset they’d ever had well while the man supposedly responsible for ship-wide security dozed through it all.

Fucking thief; it had taken a full ten minutes for Corliss’s nose to stop bleeding and hadn’t that amused everyone else.  He hadn’t intended to effectively broadcast that he was one of the few crewmembers without nanites.

“I’m waiting, Baenan.”

He swallowed, like that would force down the knot of fear in his chest, and kept his gaze fixed on the empty table in front of him.  Real wood, if he had to hazard a guess; he wondered if it had been grown in the habitat or shipped from a garden planet.  “I was doing a sweep of the docking bays.  I didn’t want anyone thinking that position meant pulling rank and offloading the shitty—” he winced; “—unpleasant, sorry sir, jobs onto junior staff.  The craft had all the correct credentials,” he added defensively, grip behind his back tightening again.  “The AI wouldn’t have let it dock otherwise.”

Captain Medway loomed into his peripheral vision.  From the way his lips pursed, that was the wrong answer.  “The system was fooled.  I would have thought you of all people would know how incorrect that was.”

It was like being slapped, only more effective.  He could get used to being slapped, but Medway’s sharp tongue opened the lacerations of his past every time.  “He hit me round the back of the head with a cleaning utensil, sir,” he found himself protesting weakly.

“That reminds me.”  The Captain settled behind his desk and watched the inwardly-squirming man over his steepled fingers.  “The cost of a new mop is coming out of your pay.  Perhaps you’d like to be demoted to caretaker duties and become better acquainted with it.”

(Oh, and just so they're not totally abandoned...  this is my most recent favourite bit from the half-arsed project:

Ais led him to a large flat stone that overlooked the sea and sat him on it.  Without the heat from his hands, the wind chilled Lirio's skin and rose goosebumps.  “You want to say we’re screwed, don’t you?”

Lirio snorted.  “I wanted to be, then your brother interrupted.”

So still no luck on that front for them!)