what's the going rate on Extra Thoughts™ in the Linens-verse setting? if you have more floating around the top of your head I'll happily eat them all up, but I understand that you may have more current (and unrelated) thoughts/interests. either way, thank you for my Eskel/Geralt life
oh man, am I allowed to barter Extra Thoughts for things? Usually it’s more of an effort toward, like, not unleashing them constantly all over everyone. I have a migraine but also don’t want to go to bed yet so I’ve got my green safety glasses on and I can look at my computer, LET’S SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN I START WRITING DOWN A FEW LITTLE THOUGHTS
- The story I actually have on my list of things to write Next, someday, when my ability to write more than a thousand words a week returns from the war, is a fairly direct follow-up to The Trial of Lambert: it’s what happens when the rest of the wintering witchers find out that Geralt may still be up for getting fucked. (For a minute I was like, oh no, this will lead to a loss of status and they will all respect him less, and then I realized that no, that is not what they think, they will all just be like PLAY TIME WITH LITTLE WOLF REDUX??? YES PLEASE??? KAER MORHEN’S REIGNING CHAMPION MOST ENTHUSIASTIC BOTTOM IS BACK IN ACTION???) So, uh, yeah, that one is summarized on the list as “KM winter gangbang feat. Jens/Slava” which means that Jens and Slava are just sort of hanging out on the edge of the gangbang, enjoying the show--it’s a very pleasant party, everyone is having a good time even if Geralt is having the very best time--and once in a while Jens reaches over as-if-absently to pet Slava’s hair or shoulder or neck and Slava holds very, very still and pretends not to notice.
- Jens and Slava, incidentally, are not at Kaer Morhen during the massacre, although the other witchers also never heard from them again afterward. They just sort of... went away somewhere. Somewhere quiet. They have an orchard. You can do a lot with fruit trees when your natural lifespan is three hundred years and your other main project is spending several decades working on being able to snuggle. They are patient men.
- Their neighbors are fully aware of what they are and will vigorously deny it to anyone who asks. Those are THEIR nice neighbor fellas who grow peaches and incidentally Handle Other Problems that may arise in the vicinity, and they handle them very well (and grow very nice peaches) so the villagers aren’t having ANYBODY interfere with them.
- Where was I.
- Oh yeah, uh, fairly mild video game spoilers (which are also possibly Netflix spoilers?) incoming!! read at your own risk!
- RIGHT so hey guess who had the actual undisputed #1 saddest and sweetest Trial of the Linens ever in the history of the Wolf School. LEO. (haha what you’ve never heard of Leo?? He’s a very important character in the first Witcher game for about half an hour or however long it takes you to get to the part where he dies in front of you, it’s very sad.) But like--Geralt’s gone, either trying to keep Ciri safe or dead, and Vesemir, feeling the empty nest with Ciri gone, somehow acquires this teenager who wants to train to be a witcher despite the fact that they can’t really MAKE witchers anymore, so he brings him to Kaer Morhen and starts training him, and Lambert and Eskel come home as much as they can manage to help out, and, well. There’s one old-fashioned Trial they can give him, and maybe it’s more important than ever, to get to know and love their new little brother, and to teach him to be one of them. It’s the first time Lambert ever takes a trainee to bed. And then he dies! So that works out great. Lambert is in no way traumatized by that. More than he already was.
- Intergenerational witcher trauma: sometimes it flows both ways!!
- Of course before Leo there was ANOTHER little baby kinda-sorta trainee, and that was CIRI. And one day they’re talking to her about the Trials and kinda telling her how awful they all were and then all of a sudden Geralt and Lambert and Eskel all, simultaneously, remember The Other Trial and their brains short out thinking of it in the context of Ciri. She is very confused but accepts their explanation, once they boot back up, that they just have some really bad memories and don’t want to talk about it anymore today.
- The thing is, the actually logical person to give Ciri a Trial of the Linens, if she were to have one, would be Triss. Lambert works this out and it’s solidly 80% of why he’s an asshole to Triss for literally decades afterward, like holding a grudge against someone for something they did in a dream you had one time and never even told them about.
- One of the mercies of his amnesia is that Geralt forgets having had this set of realizations, except then his memory comes back and he HAS THEM ALL OVER AGAIN, which is probably worse.