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| the swiss have earned an unprecedented third W between Maurer, the watches, and the Miss |
lying and the half-real
27. Mice and rats admire liars.
1. For each significant lie (a lie that would break trust and hurt the person lied to if they found out) you have told that is still believed by anyone, one mouse per person who believes the lie will be willing to follow and obey you.
— mice crawl over you while you're sleeping, nest in your hair, and run over your feet while you sit, marking you as a liar. but you aren't! and you can't command these mice! someone is trying to sabotage your good name; likely an uncle, who has not forgiven you for revealing his lie and telling the funeral parade that your father was, in truth, dying, and must be eaten by an alligator.
2. If the lie was malicious, a mouse OR rat will be willing.
— you run errands for a Holy Coward; a greedy old woman who sits trimming her cigars, eyebrows, and fingernails with a pair of little scissors. she gives you a glass bottle of water and tells you to bring it to her sister. instead, you offer a sip to a starveling in a ditch and glue his mouth shut! an impressed rat swears service to you, growing more irritated by the day as he learns you aren't in the habit of lying.
28. An unliving thing, if it is shaped like a living one, will come to life if it is treated as living for a full day.
1. A thing that you can fit in your mouth requires only one person to treat it as living; things twice, thrice etc. as large must be treated as living by two, three, etc. people.
— you and your friends are provided for, cradled and fondled by a beautiful woman the four of you molded from clay. you grow insecure and jealous, knock her opal-eyed head clean off and flee with it to where you can feed and kiss and provide for her yourself.
2. this false life lasts until the thing is forced to confront its unliving nature; if it sees its reflection, hears someone speak of its creation, is broken, etc.
— there are many stories of parents who made and lied to their children rather than birthing them, but few artists capable of creating something lifelike enough to survive first contact with a mirror. though you do not know it, your parents and makers were among those few. to help conceal your nature from you, you were taught from an early age that you were fragile, and should fear the Hounds of Id taking you at once if you were ever wounded or alone.
29. If a lie is told, and there is not a single living person who knows that it is a lie, (including the teller) it will become true, as will anything necessary to make that lie true.
1. If the lie is about a living thing, that thing will come to life as a living lie.
— music comes from the perfumers manor that sounds as though a single singer passes the song between many different mouths.The rumor multiplies. Soon, your services are required. A singer with many heads haunts the halls of the manor and eats the perfumers food freely; one voice compels them to die, another to live, and they are in life-debt. The people in the village below begin to fall to the Ash-Tongue Curse, as the living lie was born from their thoughts. Your own mind carries the knotted Song of Tying; you feed her the thought, she sings it, and her own necks twist tight.
2. telling stories without declaring that what you are saying is fiction is taboo
— you travel through the jungle on the side of the mountain where the eye of Dead Ouroboros lingers. In that jungle live the Lying Apes, creatures that everyone despises and even the hungriest will not eat. You have seen how the forest crawls with their living lies: Horned Foxes and Catawheres and Jellybone Birds. You carry ape's tongue around your neck; if you replaced your own with it, you could speak a single lie into life before falling dumb forever. You know that the apes claim that they are men who crawled from the future-pool of the Eye can only be another fiction.
30. If the only person in the whole world who knows you exist doubts that existence, you flicker, and stay half gone. You, and anything you possessed that was known to that person and whose existence was doubted alongside yours, are now half-real.1. If your old, real, identity is ever definitively proved to anyone besides yourself, you are no longer half-real. If you ever doubt your own existence, you vanish.
— An early memory in a lonely country; your only companion, sibling, friend, lost for long enough that your young mind can barely recall them. Then a reunion; joyful at first, until you notice their backwards hands. Desperate, infantile interrogation: their confused pleading is met with the brutal skepticism of the young, and their crying face is gone.
2. A half-real item can be anything until it's seen and declared to be something, at which point it becomes that thing, and always was.
— Your idiot lover trades all of your blood-grown sugar for a package you are told never to open until you know what you want it to be. This makes a great deal of sense to him, and none whatsoever to you. It remains unopened.
3.The half real can do many tricks; some or all of the following. If anyone witnesses them do any of these things, everyone who can see them will stop doing everything and try to kill them on pure instinct.
— At a gallery of tattooed bodies, a woman slips free from a scene on a perfume-slave's back. the hands of the models and viewers (your own?) find her, break her neck, beat her head against the ground. you will not eat or sleep in a place that has visual art anywhere.
4. Their hands are backwards on their wrists, and by performing the motion in reverse, they may undo the most recent thing they did with their hands.
— You are accused of poisoning animals so that Angbora, when he eats them, will take the poison into himself. You are blindfolded in a room that has never seen the light, and tortured by a half-real man who has never been seen at all. He kills you with his hands and undoes the killing many, many times before a sufficient feast is offered for your release. Even blind, even asleep, your body knows what it feels like to be in a room with someone who is going to kill you, and will warn you.
5. The half-real may half vanish in crowds, and whenever anything affects them in a crowd (explosion, gas, rhetoric, whatever) they flip a coin; heads, they are unaffected by it.
— Trial by a Jury of the Half-Real is the rarest and fairest method for dispensing justice. Your bones have all been replaced with porcelain, and you certainly deserve it after beating the dream-vault that housed your joy to a pulp. The cow was innocent of the thought-theft, and to hold another thoughts is both the vaults burden and right.
6. They bleed blue paint, and, if they touch a surface with an open wound, can transform themselves into an artwork on that surface. If the surface is an artwork, they can incorporate themselves into it
— A client returns, irritable. the woman you have tattooed on their back is now in conversation with another, her form more skillfully rendered than you could have ever accomplished, but her placement ruining the composition entirely. you compose a new one, centered around the new woman. she changes her position again. again you oblige her. you give her trees to climb and things to eat. you learn to work with great speed. when your client complains you pay for a perfume to charm the thoughts from their head. your body is used to tattooing large scenes with just a day's work.
7. They have wire bones and in the dark and unseen, can fit through any hole they can get their skull through. When in the dark, unseen and no one imagines they could be there, they can fit through any hole they can fit a hair from their head through.
— You enclose yourself in a ball of clay and fat so that the Ash-Tongued Curse will not find you, and roll about like a blind gerbil. Very little age finds you as you dutifully lick the inside of your ball until suddenly, you flicker into half-reality, and worm your way to freedom. If you were ever recognized, not only would you cease to be half-real, but you would be swiftly cursed once more.
8. They have a tin heart, and can, by holding it in their mouth, make themselves seem as big as a galleon or small as a rat. They will be unconsciously treated as if they were this big, though people will not understand exactly why they are treating them this way.
— You find someone's tin heart beating, beating, inside a cotton doll. It will not work its full charm for you, but, placing it in your mouth, you may make yourself seem the grandest or most pitiful in a group, though which occurs is down to a coin toss.
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