[open-ish post!]

[ravkanwitch]

Nina's been wearing more modern clothing recently - especially after she figured out the solution to her bone knife dilemma, a holstered rigging that she can wear either on her upper arms or her legs. And after her encounter with The Darkling, she's been wearing them more blatantly and currently has them strapped to her upper arms, on top of her shirt.

She's found a couple of revolvers similar to what she was used to shooting with Jesper* and set up some empty bottles in a makeshift shooting range as far away from the mansion as she can. Yesterday, she sent both Janet and Laertes a note with the location and time, hoping they can easily find her.

Nina is frowning. She just fired a test bullet and it zipped right between two bottles.

*Instead of a Zemeni revolve with inlaid pearl, it's probably closest to a Colt Single Action revolver with six bullets, where you reload it with a cartridge rather than single bullets in the cylinder.

Comments

[timebethine]

Laertes follows her, picking up a gun (careful to keep the barrel pointed away from either of them or the Mansion; this principle, at least, he's learned from handling pistolets) and studying it. There doesn't seem to be anywhere to seat a fuse. "Has this an internal mechanism for producing flame?" he asks, unthinking, then hastily adds, "--but I defer to Queen Janet's question."

[ravkanwitch]

"Both of you know I have control over these," Nina says, nodding at the knives on her arms. "Jesper has the same control over metal. He was the best gunslinger I've known - probably even without that control. I think every time he took me to the firing range, though, he was giving me a little assist. I hate him," she says, but there's only absolute fondness in her tone.

She turns to Laertes. "There's, um... a pin inside. It creates a spark that ignites the gunpowder and the bullet is pushed out that way. I think. The safety mechanism is on right now." She points it out for him.

[sorrowandsorrow]

"That sounds very convenient," Janet says. She picks up the other revolver, still with care. She's never been an incredible gunslinger or anything, but her dad wanted her to learn to shoot, so she did. "I could probably do something like that. With a lot of research. But not as tidily."

[timebethine]

Laertes makes note of the safety mechanism, flicking it off and then back on again (gun still trained on the ground) so that he has a sense of how easy it is to turn it off by accident. "May I watch you shoot first?" he asks. "You both have the advantage of me."

[ravkanwitch]

"I can show you," Nina volunteers. She stands with her feet a shoulders width apart and holds the revolver in her right hand, raises it, then stabilizes it with her left hand. "Jesper always said to straighten your elbows, look down the sights, place your finger gently on the trigger, and breathe."

She does so, and instinctively locks her wrists and elbows in place before she lightly squeezes the trigger. The bullet goes whizzing past a bottle, just barely to the side of it. "Better," she mutters.

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet's listening, too -- may as well take the advice. Target practice with bottles isn't exactly the same as shooting fantasy monsters at point-blank range.

She'll let Laertes take the bulk of the instruction, but she hoists her own revolver (always careful to keep it pointed away from anyone), releases the safety, then aims and fires after a second or two of reaccustoming herself to the feeling of holding a gun. Her bullet arrows itself just over the lip of the bottle she was going for, so close she can taste it. "Shit."

[timebethine]

It's reassuring to see both of them miss--failure is always acutely humiliating for Laertes, and he had spent much of the morning bracing himself to bear his embarrassment with good cheer. But both Nina and Janet seem to take their failures in stride, expecting them without sinking under them, and that gives Laertes the confidence that perhaps he can do the same. He clicks off the safety again, stands with his feet shoulder-width apart, and sights down the gun to fire.

The recoil makes him flinch a little. His shot is nowhere in the vicinity of the bottles; he casts about to see where it's gone, and finally spots a white blaze on the bark of a distant tree. "Well, surely it can go no worse," he says, laughing.

[ravkanwitch]

Nina laughs a little, though not unkindly. "That happened to me at first, too. Then I got better -- or Jesper happened." She makes another face.

"Just out of curiosity," she asks, before she fires her next shot. "Have either of you met a man who calls himself Yuri?" She squeezes the trigger and the bullet hits actually hits the top of one of the bottles, which shatters, but the main portion of the bottle remains. She tilts her head, mildly satisfied by that.

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Don't think so," Janet says, "but maybe I didn't catch his name. I think I've met most of the men here -- though they keep popping up like weeds, and they're all alcoholics.

"Nice shot," she adds. She squares her shoulders and tries again, taking her time with the aiming. This one does a better job, the bullet streaking toward the bottle and hitting somewhere right between its base and the fencepost it's sitting on. There's a bit of a bottle explosion, and a solid nick taken out of the fence, but hey. She rubs her elbow a little in the aftermath of the recoil.

[timebethine]

"I haven't met a Yuri, unless he has masses of curling dark hair and a red mark on his brow," says Laertes. This time, he successfully blasts a bullet hole in the top rail of the fence about a yard away from the bottles. Progress!

[ravkanwitch]

"Oh, who you're describing is one of my closest friends here, Luo Binghe," Nina says, easily, and it's clear she's happy to talk about him. "He's wonderful."

"Also, if you ever meet Yuri," she continues, face darkening a little, "don't trust him." She fires and hits a bottle dead on, glass shattering.

[sorrowandsorrow]

Those two statements in quick succession are one of the more confusing things Janet has ever experienced. One: Nina thinks Luo Binghe is wonderful. Two: Nina is telling her not to trust some dick named Yuri. By the transitive property, does that mean she should trust some dick named Yuri?

Janet shakes her head a little. "Sorry," she says, the only concession she'll make to the fact that she's kind of interrupting, "Luo Binghe, like... tried badly to seduce me and then immediately destroyed me in a fight, Luo Binghe?"

[timebethine]

"I know only that he has no patience or grace at all if you meet him before sunrise," says Laertes, glancing over at Janet with a commiserating look. "Which is hardly a better report."

[ravkanwitch]

Nina sighs. This is on par with when people ask her how she can be acquaintances with Kaz Brekker - and the answer is, it's better to be his acquaintance than to be his enemy - but perhaps worse, since she is actually friends with Luo Binghe, not simply acquaintances.

"Look," Nina says levelly, "I know he has a lot of wives and I think that's really distorted how he views women and his relationship with them. He's... trying to be better. He's been nothing but kind to me. He took care of me when I was turned into a child and he volunteered to take away my nightmares - but he gave me agency in that decision, as well. He knows there's things I dream about, even have nightmares about, that I might want to keep in my mind..." She pauses, briefly. It's also probably best not to talk about the blood magic situation. "Anyway, if actively he's trying to be better, I'm not going to just abandon our friendship. Besides... I have the sneaking suspicion that it's better to be friends with him than it is to be enemies with him."

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet latches onto that last assertion of Nina's with some relief. "I'd hate to be on his bad side," she agrees. "He wiped the floor with me." She scowls, still a little pissed off about it. "He's..." She laughs. "Definitely dangerous, if you ask me, but we had some drinks together and I didn't mind him as much. Maybe you just need to take the edge off of him."

[timebethine]

"Meet him at a more human hour," says Laertes wryly. Now that he has a name to put with the face, he can see the broad shape of a powerful man gruffly behaving himself in newly humble circumstances. "His friend Shen Qingqiu vouchsafed to me that his life was full of uncommon travails and triumphs, which made his temper changeable and violent as a winter storm. I thought it best to avoid him thereafter."

[ravkanwitch]

“Shen Qingqiu is also… an interesting man. But quite nice,” Nina says, though she’s clearly holding back on something. Dead? In love with Luo Binghe? Incredibly, frustratingly dense??

Nina is now also wondering if she should, perhaps, find out more about ‘Yuri’ and what he’s doing. At least before slandering his name. If people are coming from different worlds and timelines, what if he arrived from… earlier?

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet barks out another laugh. She aims and fires again, but her bullet goes a bit farther afield this time. Chalk it up to distraction.

"Shen Qingqiu," she says cheerfully, "is the prettiest loser I've ever met. Seriously, I'm pretty sure if this place had an internet connection, nobody would ever see him again. Especially if the internet was in the basement."

[timebethine]

Laertes laughs, more from confusion than anything else. "He seemed sweet enough to me," he says. "But tell me more about this Yuri. Why ought we to beware of him?"

He takes aim again, and nearly whoops with delight as his shot strikes the fencepost on which a bottle rests. The bottle wobbles, but doesn't fall.

[ravkanwitch]

“Close!” Nina says, in an encouraging tone, then pauses to think for a moment.

“Now that I’ve said all of that about Luo Binghe, I suppose there is something about not… assuming too much. He… did what he thought was right but ended up terrorizing a kingdom and getting a lot of people killed.”

Killing a lot of people should be the proper phrasing - but now Nina’s a little worried that she’s not a proper judge of character.

[sorrowandsorrow]

"Hey, not bad," Janet says to Laertes. There's something about him that makes you want to encourage him.

To Nina, she says, with a calm little shrug, "Most people are doing what they think is right. Sometimes what they think is right is completely fucking wrong and evil."

[timebethine]

"To what end did he do it?" Laertes asks. "What aim moved him?"

[ravkanwitch]

Nina switches the safety of the gun on because this will take more than a few moments.

"I don't know him personally," she starts. "I've only seen him once, ever. He was more of a... nightmare, a story from when I was younger. When he was young, he was an idealist about the Grisha, the ...people in my world who have abilities. He had lofty ideas about how they-- we were treated in our world and how we should be treated. The slavery, the slaughter, the way everyone looked down on us. They call us impure, witches, animals. He wanted to lead us into a new age. This is... it makes sense. I don't fault him for that. But his dark magic twisted him and it twisted the means that he used."

She shakes her head. "Manipulation, murder, and torture... even the murder of innocent Grisha. I was sent back to the orphanage I grew up in since I was too young to participate in the Civil War. He led the students to safety - myself included - and then razed the orphanage to the ground and hung our Grisha instructors in the trees for the whole world to see. He's... corrupted."

[sorrowandsorrow]

Janet keeps her own revolver levelled toward a target for a moment longer, but then she lowers it and clicks her own safety back on. If she gets too pissed off, the last thing she wants to do is accidentally shoot her own foot off.

"Nina," she says, as plainly as she knows how, "that's so fucked up. Seriously. That's not something where you need to stop making assumptions, that's something where you need to pepper-spray the motherfucker and run."

[timebethine]

Laertes thinks of Annie, of the bodies buried in her long silences and the violence he would gladly do to see her safe forever--but the image of Nina's teachers hanging from the trees makes him feel dizzy and sick. There are some means that no end can justify. "To replace one tyranny with another is not justice," he says. "If that man is here ... either he'll seek any means to return to his cause and his war, or he'll seek any means to claw back his power. Whatever his purpose, I'm grateful for the warning."