sorrowandsorrow | Open Post: Welters

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Open Post: Welters

It's probably been noted before, but Janet's not actually dumb. The people of this mansion are varied and mercurial. They're not like Fillorians, some of whom are little bitches but who were largely cow-eyed and willing to accept her authority just because she was a pretty girl from another world.

So. She has to win people over. Maybe everyone needs a little fun to take their minds off things. Conveniently, welters is absolutely Janet's idea of fun. There's a bunch of insane rules, violence is encouraged, and you win if you're good at magic and being bossy.

The mansion grounds are also a little tempestuous as to their character, but apparently the master magician toying with all their lives is feeling charitable today. She's found a big, flat stretch of undisturbed grass, and she's sketching out welters squares with a piece of chalk.

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Shen Qingqiu sees the other transmigrator, or whatever she is, messing around with the Mansion's lawn.

He hesitates. He—probably owes her an apology. She's clearly not behind whatever is turning people here gay, and she's no more the author of this place than Shen Qingqiu himself. Plus—Lan Wangji losing respect for him has made him feel kind of weird and isolated; there are people here he can talk to, who wouldn't mind seeing him—Sir Sagramore, for instance, or Tress, who he still wants to compare notes with, or even Asmodean. But to each of them to varying degrees he's been performing. It's weird—he'd never really felt this way on Qing Jing, maybe because there was no other possibility, but here there's a sort of awfulness to knowing that when they greet him with a smile, it's Shen Qingqiu they're greeting, not...

He shakes his head. Anyway. The point is, he'd been so riled up about Janet on their first meeting that he'd accidentally been himself with her, the way he used to be with Airplane. She might still find him unbearably annoying, but at least she was annoyed with him, and not the scraps of someone else he's increasingly desperately clothing himself in.

"Hey," he says, and then nods at the squares she's drawing. "What is this, some kind of game?"

Janet doesn't particularly like Insane Library Guy, but she doesn't particularly like most people. It usually doesn't stop her from getting along okay in medium-polite society.

"Hi," she says, cocking her head at him, a challenge to see if he's going to bust into another tirade or act like a regular person this time. "Yeah. I want to see if I can set up a game of welters here. It's like... magical chess. Crossed with magical capture the flag, crossed with magical four-square."

Shen Qingqiu raises his eyebrows, intrigued. "Sounds complicated," he says, the tone of his voice clearly approving. "Are there, like, teams? How many people do you need to be able to play?"

This is one of Janet's favorite topics, and he may even stand a chance at worming his way back into her good graces if he's actually interested, she thinks, only a bit reluctantly. "Yes. One team versus another team. You're supposed to have five people on a team -- but you can play short if you're good. My friends and I used to practice two-on-two. Me as the referee," she adds with a smile that borders on a smirk.

"Anyway. There are squares, so..." She gestures toward the board she's been sketching out. "If I can make this work, some of these will stay grass. But I'll transmute the others into water, stone, sand, metal, et cetera."

Five vs. five—Shen Qingqiu thinks he's met enough visitors in the Mansion for that, though he has a hard time imagining Binghe or Lan Wangji or the dragon playing complicated wizard capture-the-flag.

The mention of transmutation is interesting, too. Like, in an alchemy way? Or was Janet, like himself, given powers when she took on her fictional role? Not that alchemy wouldn't also be powers, you can't use physics to turn grass into metal, but he wonders if this is an external or internal thing.

If he makes nice, she might even be willing to tell him. He makes a face. "If I tell you I'm sorry for accosting you, the first day I got here, would you teach me to play?"

The half-apology catches Janet by genuine surprise. She comes close to dropping her chalk (but she doesn't).

Her mouth pulls into a sly little grin. "Oh, I might. You need to be good at magic, but I'm gonna have to bend the rules anyway since we don't have enough magicians here. So, are you? Sorry?"

Shen Qingqiu raises his eyebrows at the implication that of course there was no way he could be good at magic. He crosses his arms and unsheathes Xiu Ya with a thought, flipping it lightning-quick up and around his head so that its sword glare flashes out across the grounds at his side, carving a deep and precise slash into the ground right along the border of the playing field before sliding back home into the sheath at his side without a single motion of his hands.

"I'm sorry for the assumptions I made," he says, pointedly. "And the accusations." He's not sorry for not leaving the library when she'd dismissed him, nor for what he'd insisted about the nature of fiction—he's still definitely sure he's right about that stuff.

Janet is absolutely, perfectly, fifty-fifty torn between excitement and irritation. She's a multitalented woman, though; she can do both. "Well, shit," she says, grinning at him, "you're on my team. Whichever one that is. How the hell did you do that?"

A second later, she adds, "Apology accepted, if you agree to play welters with me."

Shen Qingqiu sticks out a hand for her to shake in the universal it's a deal gesture. "Cultivation," he says. "The setting I came from—not originally, obviously, because I'm from the real world, but like, just now, before I was here, it's xianxia. Like, ancient Chinese fantasy? Basically I—well, the guy whose body I'm in, technically—cultivated a golden core, which kind of stores up spiritual energy, which I can then use to do stuff like that. And also fly on my sword, and heal really fast, and exorcise ghosts, and a bunch of other stuff. Have you met Lan Wangji? He can use cultivation to talk to ghosts. I was kind of hoping he'd teach me, but I think he sort of hates me now, so." He stops talking, embarrassed by how excited he'd gotten about being able to talk about PIDW as a setting, rather than pretending it was reality or whatever. Nice infodump, you dork.

Wow, this man is a nerd nerd. Again, Janet thinks of how well he and Quentin would get along. Quentin's more of the sad-sack nice-guy type, but she's pretty sure they'd hit it off.

A smile, or something close to it, but maybe closer to a smirk, tugs at Janet's mouth. "I've seen him around, I think. Tall, resting bitch face, constant PDA with the guy in red and black, right? What'd you do to him?"

Shen Qingqiu hasn't seen Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian together yet, but the idea of them engaging in constant PDA brings him right back to the daydreams—um, logical conclusions he'd had upon learning they were married. He fans away his blush to focus on her question. "Mostly disappointed him, I think," he says, with a gloomy sigh.

Janet's eyebrows go up. Honestly, Lan Wangji pretty much always seems totally absorbed in his own world. But then again, he's so obviously gay that she hasn't really bothered trying to win him over. Or talk to him at all. "Sure, he seems kind of intimidating," she agrees, blatantly trying to get the rest of the story out of him.

"Yeah," says Shen Qingqiu. "Well—it's more—he thought because of," he gestures to himself, "I was like. A respected immortal master. And I think I kind of messed that up. Even though I am a respected immortal master, like, 90% of the time." He frowns. "But he should know better than to judge people based on a few murders they've done or whatever, if he's soooo into Wei Wuxian."

"We've all done a few murders," Janet says dryly, in a tone that makes it impossible to tell how serious she is. "So, sorry, what's the deal with you? You're a fictional character but you're actually just some dork from Earth?"

"Rude," says Shen Qingqiu. "But--yeah, basically. I died, and got pulled into this webnovel I'd been reading for like two weeks straight. Woke up as the villain, with like--" he struggles to explain the System. He's never had to, before; the only one he's talked to about this is Airplane, and he already knew. "This voice, keeping me in line. Making me act," he does finger-quotes, "'in-character', or I'd lose all my points and die again."

That gets Janet's eyebrows back up toward her hairline. The story is insane, but he's actually acting essentially like a regular person, so she's more inclined to believe him than she'd have been when they first met. "Wow. I watched a monster bite off the hands of some guy I knew¹ and I think I still had a better experience walking into a book."

¹Penny is not a friend. Let's be clear.

"Sounds like you had a better experience than that guy, too," says Shen Qingqiu. He waves his fan, interested. "What kind of monster?"

"An asshole of a monster," Janet says. She immediately gets a little pissed off just thinking about the Beast. "You know in the later Fillory books when Martin stops getting invited to Fillory?¹ He got back in anyway. Umber found him, and, like... I don't know. Trained him up. Corrupted him.

"He ate part of Quentin," she finishes, for a bit of drama.

¹Yeah, it doesn't occur to her that Shen Qingqiu may not be familiar. It would be like not having any familiarity with Narnia. Also, last time she mentioned them, he didn't specifically say he hadn't heard of them.

"Wait," says Shen Qingqiu, disappointed. "So just like. A human guy, doing cannibalism? I haven't read the books you're from, you gotta give me more than that."

Oh, fuck off! Janet doesn't really like talking about the Beast, but she also hates losing at anything.

"No, he bit part of him. Like, unhinged his jaw on the spot, and chomped." The memory does make her a little nauseated sometimes. Penny had bled so much, too. You're not really supposed to get both of your hands bitten off. It looked like a crime scene, like something you'd see on CSI but worse, because of the way it smelled.

"Yeah," says Shen Qingqiu, "that's what I said, cannibalism." He isn't entirely without sympathy, but he'd been hoping for like, a monster monster. "In Proud Immortal Demon Way there are spiders that imitate babies crying to lure you into the woods, and then when you come close enough they stick their razor-sharp legs into your brain and pop your head right off your body, and then they carry your head around using your mouth and tongue to cry more and attract other victims."

Edited 2023-10-13 20:44 (UTC)

Janet sighs. Why is this guy so annoying about everything? Sorry Martin Chatwin in a suit with razor-sharp teeth wasn't scary enough for you, fucker. If you'd been there and heard him casually threatening them all in his stupid English accent, you'd get it.

"That's fucked up," she informs him. "This book of yours sounds horrible."

Shen Qingqiu hesitates. He should enthusiastically agree—and he does agree. Proud Immortal Demon Way is trash of the highest order, so riddled with plotholes and gratuitous sex scenes and world-ending gore that the actual coherent story could probably only fill a single sheet of printer paper. But—he feels a weird surge of defensiveness at this rude woman calling it horrible anyway. Zhangmen-shixiong is in there, and Ning Yingying, and Liu Mingyan, and Qi Qingqi with her terrible, vicious bets, and an unexpectedly cute Liu Qingge, and most importantly—

Well. The most important thing there is also here, and he's still navigating that.

"Yeah," he says, finally. "It sucks. Anyway, are you gonna teach me to play?"

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Open Post: Welters

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