enchanted book: secret satina!

[cozen]

FORM: Magic book (and word of mouth + transcription for anyone who can't read).
SENDER: Bastien
RECIPIENT: Everyone
NOTES: Responses public unless otherwise stated so feel free to comment/threadjack. Deadline to sign up is October 24, 2024. You'll be PMed the name of your gift recipient(s) on October 25, and the deadline to ICly shoot them a comment with their gift will be November 2.

SECRET SATINA
To participate in this year's secret gift exchange for Satinalia please provide the following.

1. Name
2. Likes (colors, foods and flavors, genres, activities, and so on)
3. Dislikes (see above)
4. Deepest secret ☺

If you choose to sign up your reluctant friends without telling them & they do not look in the book to notice & stop it, make sure you are also willing to get a gift for their assigned recipient on their behalves if they do not give in and participate.

<b>1. Name:</b> <b>2. Likes:</b> <b>3. Dislikes:</b> <b>4. Deepest secret:</b>

Comments

[brennvin]

1. Name: Astrid Runasdotten
2. Likes: Furs, statuettes, beads and ties for my hair, anything you've made with your own hands. Weapons and things to care for weapons. Drawing supplies but I know paper's like, hard to get these days. I actually love lookin' at maps. Elfroot for smoking. Good boots. Snacks! I love meat and fish and goat cheese and liquor and— ( She's eventually cut off there. )
3. Dislikes: Books?
4. Deepest secret: I don't like fermented shark. 

[aberratic]

You dislike books??

[ here's hoping ness doesn't get astrid as her giftee, oh no... ]

[laruetheday]

Not everybody likes to read!!!

[aberratic]

It's not just about reading! Books, generally, as a concept and class of object, are important!

[laruetheday]

To you maybe.

[aberratic]

To everyone. How can it not be important to record history, to describe the world in a way you can pass down for generations, centuries, millennia? That's vital!

[laruetheday]

You can say all those things out loud!

[aberratic]

Memory is too fallible! Sound is impermanent! When the last person who knows the story dies, it's gone, and before that what if they decide one day that the story is boring and they should change it to be more interesting? And some things are too complicated to ever be properly rendered in oral tradition—calculus, algebra, chemistry, how could you learn those things by just hearing them?

Books matter. I'm not strange for thinking so!

[laruetheday]

Writing can be changed too. There are sooo many written Greek myths that have like five different versions because someone decided they wanted to change some details later on.

Besides I never said books aren't important, just that some people don't like reading.

Never said you were strange either.

[aberratic]

Yes, books can be changed too, which is why in the library where I grew up anyone who defaced a book got their hand cut off.

[ which probably explains a lot about ness, like, generally.

after a moment, grudgingly, ]

What's Greek?

[laruetheday]

[ woah what the fuuuck ]

It's

[ hmm, how to explain this? ]

my religion/family.

[aberratic]

[ uhhhhh what ]

Like... a cult?

[laruetheday]

no??

[aberratic]

Oh. I just meant that cults usually refer to themselves as family, that's all.

[brennvin]

( The handwritten reply is slow and laborious, and in capitals for simplicity. )

DONT RLY READ TRADE

crystal;

[aberratic]

[ aw damn, that's a really good reason not to like books. ]

Would you like to learn? I'd be happy to teach you! Or I could read to you, if that's better. I love to read, it'd be no imposition!

[brennvin]

Don’t need to learn, I’ve got enough of it to get by,

( and that just sounds like soooo much work!! The second half of the offer, though, makes Astrid pause and perk up. )

We’d often tell each other stories round the fire, ‘specially in winter. You a good storyteller?

( Or reader, whatever; in this context, it’s the same thing. )

[aberratic]

[ "enough to get by" does not compute to a kid who was reading the fantasy encyclopedia for fun by the time she was seven years old, but the immediate, baffled noise ness makes is, at least, not picked up on the crystal. ]

I haven't had any complaints [ because she hasn't read aloud since she was a child, ] but that feels like a very subjective thing! What makes a good storyteller for you?

how to be a good audiobook narrator ft. ms runasdotten

[brennvin]

( For all that Astrid dismissed the idea of learning out of hand, she actually sounds bright and engaged and interested in this part. )

Good at pace and breathwork; you’ve got to make it through your sentences and have some natural pauses without running out of air or suddenly stopping at the wrong bits. Warm and emotive, not all stiff and unnatural-like. Good at the different voices. Not like, scratchy or squawky or shrieky, I’ve heard some people who are not fuckin’ made for public speaking, I’ll tell you what.

But most people who are shit at it just sound too flat. You’ve got to like… make it sound thrilling or dangerous or funny or scary, at all the right bits. Convey an emotion. Acting.

[aberratic]

[ wow that's way more detailed an opinion than ness thought she'd get. it tracks, though, makes sense—it was always more boring to listening to certain monks' renditions of the prophecies than others', and the boring ones were the ones who recited them all flat. ]

Those are much more concrete opinions than I'd expected, I must admit! I take it storytelling is fairly important where you're from? I don't think I've heard your accent before, I don't have a frame of reference for where that might be.

[brennvin]

( Why, ‘cos I sound stupid?

If there’s any lingering reflexive uncharitable defensiveness, Astrid swallows it like a hot coal. Pushes past it, decides to give the benefit of the doubt instead: )

Avvar, and yeh, it’s super important. Our skalds memorise the stories and poems and epics and can retell them; like, hours’ worth of tales, they don’t need to write ’em down, they just remember it all. We retell, we share, we remember.

Mostly our thanes and augurs are the only ones who learn how to read, for poli-ticking and studying magic; the rest of us don’t have to use it much.

[aberratic]

Oh, I've read about the Avvar! There's not a lot about your people in the written record, like the Dalish, so most of what I know is "they exist, somewhere", but,

[ as invested as astrid had been explaining her opinions on storytelling, ness is equally invested in learning about the avvar, and it shows in her voice. ]

That's fascinating! But how do you ensure the skalds tell the stories the same? Oral tradition is a good starting point, but it's so easy for someone to just... change things, because they felt like it, and then that's just how the story is. How do you ensure a poem is passed down accurately? And then, what if the last skald who knows a story dies? What if a skald decides a story should never be told again and they just take it to their grave?

[ for all the insensitivity of the questions, at least ness sounds genuinely interested in astrid's answers... ]

[brennvin]

( She rolls with it as if blunt insensitive questions are in fact the easier thing; because, well, they are. She doesn’t mind. )

Of course they don’t stay the same, ( Astrid says, surprised. ) They’re gonna change and evolve. Mostly they do try to keep it the same, like, and the big important beats stay, but maybe some plant has died out so someone changes a reference on the fly to be some other flower people’d actually recognise and know the meaning of. Maybe there’s some sentence that’s really clunky so they rephrase it so it sounds better. It gets improved, it stays fresh. You keep it alive, keep it so’s it makes sense to the people listening. The world is always changing, so stories do too. Nothing stays the same forever.

And people change books too, don’t they? There’s such a thing as an edit-or.

[aberratic]

[ it takes all of ness's decade-plus of practice being cool not to verbally express her dismay, which gets worse with every word out of astrid's mouth. ]

Yyyes, [ is an inoffensive place to start, ] editors exist for books. That's... a slightly different process depending on if one is editing pure fiction or history, though.

[ now to the hard part: how can she possibly explain something that seems so basic without being a condescending asshole? ]

In my previous life, there was a group of monks whose sole and only job was reciting the prophecies of a great seer of our home. They recite it day in, day out, constantly, with no changes—until a prophecy comes true, and it's removed from the chant. We name our years by these prophecies, we use them to predict calamity and ruin.

We know they're unchanged, because the prophecies were also written down. If we didn't have the written record, and had to rely only on the memory and whims of the Chanter, and the Voices of the Winds...

[ do you see? do you understand why the fallibility of memory and the editorializing of history is To Be Avoided?? ]

[brennvin]

( In her adventures in this wide outside world over the past year, there’s always the smaller differences: Rivain likes their foods spicy while the Avvar favour plainer, hardier fare. Orlais favours more ornamentation in their furniture. The Nevarrans inter their dead while hers dismember theirs. These are, ultimately, smaller differences; matters of cultural flavour, easily understood.

But for the first time, Astrid’s run facefirst into a core, foundational, contradictory belief about how the world works and what even matters about it, and she finds herself squinting at her crystal at an equal loss. The same question’s running through her own mind: How can she possibly explain something that seems so basic? ]

Stories told for fun and flavour are different from prophecies. Even then, though— if the prophecy’s accurate and it’s gonna happen anyway, then what does it matter to keep track of ’em? If it’s right it’s right and it’ll still come to pass.