"Self-Reflection on My Self's Reflection or, Do Foxes Tire of Time-Worn Tropes?"
“Pink...everything is...pink. By. The. Twelve. Has all the world….gone pink!?”
Aly flipped her hair out of her face, laughing in her normal voice instead of the overly-theatrical faux-masculine one she had used a moment before. Glancing in the mirror and seeing her attempts at styling were already mussed beyond easy repair, she scrabbled at her hair with both hands, to tease it up into further heights of disordered fluffitude. Pink strands tinged with light blue now stood out in all directions from her head, the points of her long, furry ears barely visible above the mass.
“Okay, Fetch.” She crouched down to address the fox sitting primly on the floor of the small, slightly ramshackle airship, The Four Winds, beside her. “Remember to make a wish, before you blow the seeds off this unusual but strangely alluring pink dandelion, and scatter its seeds alllll across Eorzea.” She pointed at her recently-enfloofened hair, and gestured broadly with an open palm to indicate, no, really, ALL across Eorzea.
“Just imagine, little me’s sprouting up in every city-state. It’ll be the cutest AND most combat-ready invasive species!” She laughed again, imagining the potential mayhem. “Unless you somehow managed to like. Send out fox-spores or whatever. Then that one wins, hands-down. No one will suspect the lethality and sheer cunning of the adorable fox-weeds until it’s toooo late! All of Eorzea will be within the grasp of your many slender snoots!”
Fetch lifted aforementioned snoot slightly, perhaps to watch a moth fluttering past the hanging lantern, or perhaps to affect a more majestic air befitting a conqueror. Whatever the motivation, the effect was achieved nevertheless.
Alyona grinned wide and tossed Fetch a hearty thumbs-up, before bouncing up out of her crouch, stretching her arms and tail as far as they would go, arching and flexing her back, and then turning to look in the mirror.
“I know you don’t need my approval, Fetchie, but I need yours,” she said, raking her fingers this way and that in an attempt to tame the fluffy pink mane. “Do you like my hair parted on the left side? Or the right?”
The fox tilted her head in apparent consideration, and then began scratching her left ear with her hind paw.
“Left side, got it! Your advice is invaluable as always.” Aly wasn’t sure where Kail Gerrad, the tough old pirate who was Fetch’s person, had wandered off to, or why the fox was roaming around the airship on her own, but she was glad of what company the oddly attentive animal could provide.
The miqo’te leaned forward to examine her reflection more closely, tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth as she struggled to open a barrette with a resin paissa affixed to it. Her eyebrows raised in realization, and her mouth opened in a wide grin, showing her fangs.
“Oh! This is that part of the story where the heroine examines herself in the mirror, so the readers can know what she looks like and what is on her mind. It’s a well-worn literary device, Fetch. Some might say TOO well-worn, but you know what? I say it’s a classic for a reason!”
Aly clipped her hair into place and gave an “eh, good enough” shrug at her reflection. “Here’s the important question, Fetch: what IS on my mind?”
The fox paused her scratching to give a huff that sounded almost scornful. “If you don’t know, woman, how on earth am I, a fox, supposed to?” is what it seemed to Aly to convey.
“Ha, fair enough, Fetchie, fair enough,” Aly said, as though replying to an actual statement the fox had made.
“Well, let’s start with the appearance then! Okay so. I have these big ol’ gray eyes, which are great at noticing things. They’re not shrewd gray eyes, or flinty gray eyes, so that tells you something about the nature of my character. They’re,” she paused to make a series of increasingly bizarre faces in the mirror, furrowing her brow, arching one eyebrow, opening her eyes so wide it looked like they might disengage from the rest of her head.
“Soft,” she wrinkled her nose, dissatisfied with what character traits that might denote, “And curious,” she nodded. “These eyes say to the onlooker, this person does not NECESSARILY know what is going on. But, she is canny enough to *know* she doesn’t know, and savvy enough to try and find out.”
Aly gave another thumbs-up and a grin. “Yeah! We’re doin’ it, Fetch! Introspection Experts Beg Protagonists To Identify Their Defining Traits With This One Weird Trick.”
“Umm, what else. Rounded cheeks, perhaps denoting my youthful enthusiasm?” She smooshed a finger into the soft curve. “Or at least my enthusiasm for like, cheesecake?” She shrugged.
“And a cute little chin signifying,” she paused a moment, frowning. The chin, what did it signify? Was a chin sometimes just a chin? “Oh! That I am agreeable but can be very decisive when necessary!”
Aly beamed and pumped her fist in the air. “Man, I am a natural at this! I should open a consulting business, telling people what character traits they have, based on my assessment of their appearance!” Aly sat with that idea for a moment, arms folding across her chest. She shifted from foot to foot.
The woman grimaced, and scratched the back of her neck. She looked chagrined. “I….should NOT open such a business, for reasons that should have been immediately clear to me, but, now revealed, are better left unsaid.”
She waved away her embarrassment. “That’s not how these scenes work anyway! They have to emerge organically. You can’t force someone to undergo character growth,” she laughed.
She narrowed her eyes and growled into the mirror dramatically, “Though by the Twelve I try.” She slapped her fist into her palm for emphasis.
Aly beamed again at the fun she was having, and her tail waved merrily behind her. “What next. Ears? I have pretty ears. They’re real soft. Though not as pretty and soft as yours, Fetch, no no no, I would never suggest! What inner complexities do you find that they reveal to the perceptive, Fetchie? Or has anyone even taken notice? Don’t worry, the right ones will come along,” she reassured the animal, nodding. The fox’s tongue lolled from the corner of its mouth. Fetch’s face was not that of a forest creature who was overly concerned.
Aly turned her head at various angles, watching the shifts in light and shadow on her face. Her hand wandered up to stroke the edge of one of her own ears. A goofy grin spread across her face, in both recognition and enjoyment of the absurd gesture.
“Mmm,” she said, closing her eyes and smiling. “It actually is pretty nice, even this way. Though still not the same.” She opened her eyes and tapped her cheek thoughtfully. “Oh! The takeaway here is perhaps that I am the kind of person who is aware that her ears are soft and pretty, and cares which way the light falls on her face to create the desired dramatic effect. I am surprisingly filled with artifice!” she observed cheerily.
She held up a finger, adding, “AND self-awareness! And and, winning! I am full of winning, Fetch.”
Fetch gave the woman a flat look that indicated she was certainly full of something.
“I can’t see what look you’re giving me right now so I’ll have to assume it’s more of that approval,” said Aly, who, with the mirror, absolutely could see that was not the case.
“Of course,” she said, lifting up her shirt, “This callback serves not only to point out my delightful cheeky sarcasm,” (the shirt covered Aly’s face at this moment, so she could not see Fetch’s reaction to this declaration) “But to recognize that I am not entirely kidding about craving recognition and even acceptance from a fox, which really calls into question a number of my other judgment calls.”
“Oh well!” She chirped, casting her blouse to the floor. “Now we get to see how many paragraphs we spend discussing the appearance of my br-” Aly broke off, tilting her head curiously, and running her fingers over a spot on her side.
“Huh,” she said. “I have a scar there. A small, cute scar. But totally a scar.” She used her thumb and forefinger to measure its size, then brought the measurement up in front of her face. Her eyes crossed a little as she looked at it.
Aly pursed her lips, then reached down to her thigh-high boot. She pulled out a knife, which she held up first to her fingers, then to the old wound.
“Oh, yeah. I definitely got stabbed,” Aly asserted, nodding confidently. Sheathing her knife, she pressed her fingers into her side with her left hand to feel her ribs, and put the palm of her right hand flat against her chest, over her heart. “I almost got stabbed to death!” The miqo’te’s level of enthusiasm for this macabre revelation might have seemed to Fetch to be entirely out of proportion, had the fox not been absorbed with the pressing task of worrying at her svelte right haunch with her tiny teeth.
Aly was ready to move on with her whimsical self-assessment, but her fingers kept wandering back to the scar. Probing it, examining it. Imagining what it must have felt like. She frowned slightly. Well of course she’d been stabbed before, there was nothing significant about that. She’d been injured in combat multiple times in the past month alone. Scrapes, bruises, cuts. That desperate Ala Mhigan’s spear had taken a while to heal from. But the fact was that she had healed. She was fast to recover, and not prone to developing lasting, visible scar tissue. Not prone to taking a hit someplace so vulnerable, someplace she would have rolled and twisted and fought to protect in combat.
She moistened her dry lips. “I think,” she said slowly, “I wasn’t stabbed in combat.” She took a moment to mull over what that might mean.
“They said I was a spy, Fetch,” she said, crouching down to retrieve her discarded blouse. “In those folders and files we found at the secret base. Dossiers! That’s the word. It, it was the Garleans! It could have been a trick, or just plain wrong. But…” Aly twisted the fabric in her hands. Fetch yawn-whined, and padded to Alyona’s side, resting her tawny chin on the girl’s thigh.
Aly had already averted her gaze from the mirror, but it was too late to stop the tide of unbidden reflection, as ever more stories about herself came flooding into her mind. You’re the kind of person who can’t tell friend from foe. You’re the kind of person who lets her guard down even when it doesn’t make sense to do it. Someone tricked you into believing you were safe with them. You probably tricked other people into thinking they were safe with you, too. You’re the kind of person who tells lies and gets lied to, do you even know which of your stories are true? You’re the kind of person who can’t leave well enough alone. You refuse to look at what’s in front of you, and when you finally do, you won’t look at anything else. How many people are going to get hurt before-
Fetch whined again, and Aly absently stroked the fox’s head. The feel of the fur against her fingers grounded her, interrupted her racing thoughts. Impulsively, she hugged the creature, an act which the elegant fox bore stoically. Fetch gave the miqo’te an appraising look, as if to say, “Well? What have we concluded?”
Aly rose to her feet, and pulled the now-wrinkled blouse back over her head. “We’ve concluded,” she answered the imagined question, “That I’m the kind of person who almost got killed, maybe in combat, maybe by someone close to me, but, that’s not going to stop me from fighting. That’s not going to stop me from getting close to people! I love people, I will never stop that!” She stamped her foot for emphasis, and her booted heel thudded against the wood of the floorboards. She liked the dramatic sound it made, so she did it again.
“The girl smiled,” Aly narrated aloud, breaking into a grin on her own command. She didn’t turn to look at it in the mirror, however. “She didn’t know a lot about who she had been, but, little by little, she was finding out, who she is.”
Aly nodded in satisfaction. “Well? Whatcha think, Fetch? Would you read a book about this character? Or is she consigned to the discount bin?”
The fox was nowhere in sight. Perhaps the stomping had scared her away, or perhaps she had found the scene too self-indulgent by half.
Aly heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Everyone’s a critic,” she lamented, but she said no more about it. This time, she was not even talking to a fox.
@teahousetales @erstwhile25
Smop. Smop. Smop. Smop.
Thick, juicy slices of tomato fell one on top of the next as the blade of the knife arced cleanly through the crimson fruit, and the inventor’s eyes of pale gold began to widen.
“I think... I think you’ve got it!” he declared excitedly to the odd-looking mammet perched over the countertop, which was holding the tomato in place with one arm while the other cut it into slices. Its knife technique was flawless, at last: after at least two dozen iterations of this machine, not a single one of the slices was too thick, too thin, wedge-shaped, mashed into a pulp, or filleted into something more resembling a paper doll.
It had been the inventor’s fervent conviction for many moons that he could free up more time in his day by inventing the perfect cooking mammet: a machine that could mimic everything a skilled culinarian could do, from chopping to grating to sautéing to knowing how much coriander to use. A machine that could unshackle him from the need to feed himself.
Yet for some reason, these arts had so far proven too subtle for a mammet’s logical brain and unpredictable caprices to master. Even the simple touch required to slice a tomato without bruising or pummeling it had eluded all of his attempts thus far.
Thus it was that he watched with mounting glee as the tomato was sliced with perfect precision, the mammet holding it in its left hand with great care for its fragility while the knife held in the other hand executed perfect cuts.
Smop. Smop. Smop. KRUNK. KRONK. KRUNK.
“NO!”
The inventor lunged forward as the mammet reached the heel of the tomato and continued right along on its merry way, slicing the articulated metallic fingers of its left hand into neat sections, perfectly sized for use as a sandwich topping.
“STOP! STOP SLICING! TERMINATE PROGRAM!”
The mammet turned its domed head back to peer curiously at him as it continued carving its own arm midway toward the elbow joint, before giving him an indifferent shrug and withdrawing the knife to a ready position.
Crestfallen, the inventor wiped his face with his hand, surveying the carnage.
Back to the drawing board for another day... and back to the kitchen.
@teahousetales
The Crooked House of Windsor - The Oldest Teahouse in England.
Unlock the secrets of The Crooked House of Windsor, a legendary teahouse that has witnessed centuries of English culture. Explore its crooked charm and savor the nostalgia of an authentic teatime, right in the heart of England.
The House Kouronne grew up in was small, nearly every Miqo’te in Bahz Bahn lived in a small house, mansions were reserved for the Garlean governors and those who had embraced the empire when it had arrived, a full ten years before Kouronne’s birth.
He didn’t mind the small size of the worn out home perched like a heron above the swampy marsh on sturdy wooden stilts, didn’t notice the luxuries it lacked; he was a child and a child’s home—and the people in it—are the whole world.
The sun had set and Kouronne was carefully peeling the skin off camas roots so he could add them to the pot of fish stew that boiled day and night. Every family had their own secret blend of herbs and spices that went into the stew, foraged vegetables and illegally hunted meat added nutrition and texture that changed the stew constantly. Kouronne’s mother, Brass, had disappeared like she often did after dark and he had been left behind to care for his sister, who sat a few feet away playing with painted rocks in the middle of the floor.
The knife Kouronne was peeling with glinted in the flickering lamplight and then it disappeared, slipping from his chubby fingers. He moved to catch it instinctively and he did, grabbing the glittering blade tightly.
He yelped and dropped it again, narrowly missing his dirty bare toes. The whole world seemed to stop on its axis as he examined the gash, three inches long where palm met fingers, then dark red blood welled up and the pain hit him.
With a loud cry he doubled over, cradling his injured hand to his chest. Hot tears filled his eyes and blocked his throat, choking his voice off. Snow white ears flattened against his curly hair and his tail, normally energetic and animated, was lowered and stiff as a board.
There was the clattering of rocks as Konoe leapt up and ran to him, her blood red ears alert and swiveling for any signs of danger, though what a six year old could do in such a situation was a mystery. When she saw Kouronne curled up in a ball she crouched down and crawled toward him.
“There ain’t no point in crying over a little scratch like that.” She pulled his hand toward her and forced his fingers apart with surprising strength. The act caused his cut to widen and blood oozed sluggishly onto his palm. Despite her harsh words, there were tears in Konoe’s eyes. She held Kouronne’s hand tightly between both of hers and squeezed gently; as she did so, white light glowed from between her fingers and the pain subsided.
She pulled her hands away to reveal a fresh pink scar where the wound had been.
“Well I’ll be the son of a Garlean.” Kouronne breathed out a shaky sigh of relief, a grin spreading across his face.
“Watch your profanity!” Konoe scolded, but she couldn’t restrain her own joyous giggle.
