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magic-and-moonlit-wings · 5 years

Text

Chapter 44: Scrapbooking

Bold italics are trollish.

This story is NOT back on its old weekly update schedule! Chapter 43 was a week late, and I happened to finish this chapter 'on time' and decided to update to match the alternate-Fridays that I wrote on my calendar. The next chapter will be two weeks from now unless it's late again instead.

Becoming The Mask

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Bagdwella had offered the two human girls a seat on the box spring mattress that she had not yet disassembled to get at its bed coils, but Mary and Darci had turned her down. Instead they were sitting back-to-back on the short wooden bench that Bagdwella stood on to reach high shelves. Apparently there were tiny insects that sometimes lived in old mattresses and the humans didn't want to risk the parasites crawling into their clothes.

Each girl was writing something. Sometimes Mary referred to her phone before making notes. Darci would pause and tap her chin with her pen before returning to her papers.

"How do you spell 'divorce'?" Mary asked. They had a dictionary with them, but Darci was using it.

Bagdwella spelled it out, carefully enunciating the runes for the girl to copy down. Mary chirped a quick "Thank you!" and ducked back down over her notebook.

The humans had come earlier that night, asking if they could work on whatever they were doing in Bagdwella's backroom. She suspected it was some kind of assignment from Blinky. Or perhaps a surprise for him, since they weren't working on it in the library.

The silly man had such a dry, academic way of teaching language. Bagdwella simply had to take it upon herself to step in and teach these whelps how to converse like proper trolls. Blinky was a better choice for writing lessons, though, being one of the few people she knew who read for enjoyment.

Oh, she could appreciate good record-keeping, and in a more abstract way she understood the value of collecting knowledge, but stories just felt stilted to her when they were written down instead of spoken.

Why Mary needed that particular word, Bagdwella couldn't fathom – had the human mistranslated something? Should she have asked her what she thought it meant in English?

"What is it you two are up to?" the shopkeeper finally asked.

"Translating stories about our families," said Mary. "This one is about how my parents got divorced and my mother got married again. She was smart, the second time. She insisted they get … premarital counselling. If Mom and Dad had bothered with that, they might have realized they shouldn't get married before they did."

"But then you might not exist," pointed out Darci.

"I'm not saying there wasn't a silver lining."

Bagdwella didn't know what lining something with silver had to do with anything. It didn't have a very appealing flavour, and the shades it developed when tarnished were pretty but not enough to make up for the metal's relative softness, so trolls didn't use it much in food, tools, or decor. It was probably a human saying. She was pretty sure they considered most metals valuable.

"What is premarital counselling?" she asked instead.

"Uh … counselling, before marriage?" Mary explained haltingly. "When people, who want to get married, talk, to … sometimes a leader, an Elder, like Vendel. Sometimes a … therapist … like a medic, but for thoughts and feelings. A person whose job it is, to make sure people who want to get married talk about … the things people should talk about before marriage. Things people who don't talk will fight about because they don't agree but did not know."

Bagdwella nodded thoughtfully. "Your parents did not do this, but your mother and her next spouse did?"

"Yes, exactly."

"That is …" Darci frowned in a way Bagdwella was learning to recognize, the furrow-browed looking-up expression of a human who knew what they wanted to say but didn't know the word for it. "That's kind of heavy, don't you think?" Darci said in English instead. "I write – written – am writing, about my older brother teaching me to drive."

"I need to explain why the divorce. My parents both are good people who learn from their mistakes. They did not divorce because one did something bad."

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Claire knocked once on the nursery door, a hard thump, before entering.

"I need you to check my trollish." She shoved a three-ring binder at the Changeling.

"Uh?" said Enrique, not dropping his human face.

"For the love of," Claire muttered, not specifying what she was invoking the love of. "Fine. You know what, fine. Please check my trollish."

Enrique shapeshifted obligingly and took the binder. "Was that so hard?" he teased. He made a show of examining the angular squiggles, turning the first few pages with a solemn expression, and then handed the book back to her. "Looks troll-y to me."

She rolled her eyes and pushed it towards him again. "I meant see if my grammar's okay and I spelled everything right."

"I'm not much for spelling. And yeh'd have to read it out for the grammar bit."

"… What, you can't read?"

"I'm picking up English and Spanish okay," he said defensively, gesturing to the shelf of storybooks.

"Jim can read trollish."

"Yeah, well, Jim is a madman who thought it was worth the risk, annoying Gunmar's advisor like that. Plus he's had Strickler and the other Mister Six Eyes to keep the lessons up since he left."

"Left? Left where? The Darklands," she answered her own question. "But, wait, I still don't get it. If you guys are supposed to be spies, why didn't anyone teach you to read and write?"

"If we're s'posed to be spying on fleshbags, what'd we need to read in troll for?"

"Ciphers?" she suggested immediately. "I mean, it's still a language so it's still got patterns, but it would take longer for a human to decrypt one if it's not based on a human language."

"… Some of the higher-ups know it. Could be why the rest of us don't." Make it a status thing. Control access to information.

Or maybe Claire was just smarter about spy stuff than Gunmar was.

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"So, we've been thinking about what you said," said Darci to Blinky. "And you're right. We went too fast, suggesting to Vendel that he should let us tell our families about trolls."

"And yet somehow I find myself suspecting that you are not telling me this as a precursor to setting that goal aside."

"We're asking him, all of you really, to trust complete strangers just because we vouch for them. And that wasn't fair. And there's not exactly a way for a troll to get to know a human without secrets coming out."

"Or is there?" said Mary dramatically.

Claire handed Blinky the binder he'd noticed she was holding behind her back. "We've collected some pictures of our families, for putting faces to names, and we're writing down stories about them – you know, anecdotes. Memories. Stuff they've done and that shows what kind of people they are. We're going to get Toby in on it, too. Maybe Jim, if he's got anything that can calm Vendel down about Dr Lake knowing already."

"And once Vendel knows everyone by proxy," continued Mary, "he should be more okay with actually meeting them."

Blinky took the binder cautiously. It wasn't heavy, and the stiff covers closed triangularly around the pages. Perhaps twenty pages, he estimated, which was quite respectable considering these three could only have been working on it for a few days.

It was divided, inside, with tabs to skip directly to any of the families described therein. The first section was Darci's family.

Several pages of photos grinned toothily out at him, captioned with names written in both the humans' Roman alphabet and phonetic trollish transliteration, and sub-captioned with each human's relationship to Darci. Mother, father, older brother; three living grandparents, plus one in a group picture who was noted to be deceased; and a maternal aunt and uncle and two cousins, with a note clarifying that Darci did not expect Vendel to agree to meet her entire family, only that knowing who these four humans were would help the stories make sense.

Blinky restricted himself to skimming only the title of each anecdote, though it was tempting to thoroughly read the one about the driving lesson right away, and move on to the section about Mary's family.

This section followed the same format. Blinky was impressed and proud that they'd managed to write almost the entire thing in trollish. He turned to the section on Claire's family and, three pages in, froze up.

The photo had to be of the Changeling that the humans had taken to calling Not Enrique – yes, that was how the caption identified him – lit by the blueish glow of the crystal staircase. The picture was lower quality than the others, as though the camera weren't as good, or as if it were a close-up of a larger picture.

Blinky already knew the Changeling had gotten into Trollmarket. They hadn't exchanged words yet, but he'd met the boy. And from his interactions with Jim, Blinky had really thought he was at peace with the idea that Changelings could be allies; friends; (perhaps family).

He should not be reacting to this image with the degree of shock and horror that he felt – this sense of no – this sense of wrong.

"I … do not think admitting to Vendel that one of your family members is known to be a Changeling will reassure him that it is safe to trust the rest of your relations."

"But he should take it better if we come clean than if he finds out later, right?" said Claire. "I don't think any of us can pull off acting like he got swapped after we tell our parents what's going on. And Jim said Vendel knows he's a Changeling."

"I honestly can't say what Vendel's reaction will be. But I can say," closing the book firmly, "that this was a highly dangerous picture to bring to Trollmarket." Hard evidence of Changelings amongst them …

Well, very strong circumstantial evidence. One slightly out-of-focus picture of a young troll with a handwritten caption claiming the youngling was a Changeling was hardly a compelling case.

It could still be enough to have Claire imprisoned on suspicion of conspiring with Changelings, since she had brought 'her little brother' to Trollmarket while knowing what he was. And from there, the Trollhunter's identity could be exposed, and even Vendel's protection – Vendel's collusion with the conspiracy to allow a Changeling Trollhunter to live and to operate freely – would likely not be enough to save Jim's life; and probably the best Blinky could hope for himself would be banishment.

"Okay," said Darci, jolting him out of his thoughts. "So what if we took the stuff about Not Enrique out for now, and told Vendel later? Do you think learning more about our families would help convince him?"

"… Possibly," Blinky conceded.

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Previous Chapter (Various characters try to comfort Toby in the aftermath of a nightmare)

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Next Chapter (Barbara finds out Draal has been living in her basement)

You would not believe how long an internal debate I had about whether Enrique would say 'spy stuff' or 'espionage strategy' in his own head.

On the one hand, inside his head he's got no one to perform for except himself, and so he doesn't need to dumb himself down to remain underestimated.

On the other hand, speech patterns can affect thought patterns and it sounds weird phrasing it like that when the scene is supposed to be in his voice.

#Bagdwella #Mary Wang #Darci Scott #Claire Nuñez #Not Enrique #Blinkous Galadrigal #Trollhunters #Tales of Arcadia #Becoming The Mask chapters #Changeling Jim #fanfiction #My Fanfiction #Monday is fanfic day!#family #anecdote #Vehicles #relationships #Changelings #espionage

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