As a chronic people-pleaser, this is my advice for success.
Offer as little as possible. Be terse. Get rid of all those exclamation marks and tidbits about why you want to take a sick day. State your needs clearly and concisely without reason. Start saying “No, I’m unable.” more often. Say Thank You only when the other party deserves it.
fae courts like, you know, the fae small claims court
Me, the DM: I actively regret all of the worldbuilding I’ve done on the faewild now because “the fae court of appeals” is a P H E N O M E N A L setting for a campaign.
it WORKS is the thing
the intricate and inscrutable rules. the importance of exact words. once an agreement has been formally made and witnessed it Has To Be Honored even if it’s not fair. beware entering unknown territory without a guide native to the world. things you say will be taken literally even when they were clearly not intended that way. there’s a lot of aesthetic formalities. you win by tricking people into telling the truth.
Essential to this concept is that the aesthetic remains entirely unchanged. The flowers and thorns and fairy circles and forests and thresholds and iron and salt as a ward and the bloody shadow war between courts and the charm spells and the dreams and the changeling stuff and the riddle games and the guardian creatures etc.
like you can still end up eternally bound in service to a fae court by eating food inside a mushroom ring
just also you can get there because you were subpoenaed
In the year 1869, Mr. James E. Singh, Esq. convinced the ruling Queens of both Summer and Winter that the mortal world, too, were ultimately ruled by courts—not quite like theirs, but just as requiring of respect and adherence to the rules of the land. He offered to negotiate a treaty of reciprocal respect and intersecting jurisdiction.
Every since, well, you do still need to be careful about circles of mushrooms, standing stones, horn calls and pounding hooves on moonlit or moonless nights, etc. The boundaries are precisely defined and you cross at your own peril! But you may also be summoned, with a letter delivered by a too-intelligent crow, written on birchbark in script that shines like sunlight or glistens like frost, to testify or even serve jury duty in the Land Under Hill, for mortal crimes may on demand be judged by a jury of peers. Or if the lawyers of our world won’t even hear you out, if the judges turn away and the bailiffs throw you out, you may hop through a fairy circle and request a trial by combat or by quest—but take care! Faerie Laws are often those of stories, and a heroic seeker of righteous justice might be favored, but great and powerful monsters don’t gain their power without breaking a few good heroes first.
And if one of the Good Neighbors is causing you trouble in this world, try tricking them into jaywalking. Thanks to the efforts of Mr. Singh, they will HAVE to pay the fine if formally accused, and they’ll hate it.
no Male Author Moment has ever made me cringe quite as viscerally as the ending of Grapes of Wrath and that was a full decade before I found out about this
Sanora Babb’s own novel, Whose Names Are Unknown, was buried by the publisher after Grapes was published. It was eventually released in 2004, a year before her death.
WGA’s asking people interested in all the tree law fun to also sign this petition about a god damned bitch of an unsatisfactory situation on another street on the Same FUCKING lot. NBC Universal (whose CEO is Mike Cavanagh just btw in case Ron Pearlman is listening) has started a construction project that completely removed the sidewalks from five different gates, in two cases forcing pedestrians to literally walk into oncoming traffic. In addition to being an ADA violation, it’s just flat out despicably evil of them and WGA’s asking for public support on this issue.
Anyhow, if you’re in the restaurant industry in LA and this dipshit walks in you have my blessing to spit in his soup
A lot of people–a gratifying number of people, really; it was like reaching the actual apocalypse cleared a lot of puritan bullshit out of everybody’s heads, so that their response to “we’re married” became “congrats,” and not a frantic game of “which one is your husband, which one is just a friend,” or worse, “oh, you’re gay, how nice, is she going to be your surrogate”–a lot of people assumed, when they walked into a hanger, that they were like those Chinese triplets. Three pilots. Triple the strain but triple the connectivity, the control.
(”How amazing,” those people murmured, in their own dialects, in their own ways. “They’re not related, you know. They can run a drift that close on love.”)
Except that they couldn’t.
When No Encores woke, she woke with Eliot on her left and Parker on her right, and Hardison back in the control room, monitoring their vitals, dying a little bit inside from the fear, coming back to life from the pride. He never stepped into the cockpit, never saw what they saw, never had to hold up the weight of the world as they knew it. That was for the best. He kept them safe in so damn many ways, in all the ways that counted, and their Jaeger danced like a thief and hit like a trained professional, and they came home. They came home every time.
Sometimes those same people, the ones who had assumed, would see Hardison on base when No Encores was running the waters. They would treat him so gingerly then, assuming he was hurt, neglected, left behind. And he would only smile, and maybe touch the inside of his left arm (”one show only” tattooed there, black on brown, small and meant for him and his and no one else), and say, “Nah. You think I want to punch a kaiju? Those things are full of germs.”
The drift wasn’t love. It was similarity in the broken places. Hardison didn’t envy them that.
ALT
