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ii-thiscat-ii · 7 years

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Oooh, how about The Wizard of Lanata?

Sure. The Wizard of Lanata.

(DVD-style commentary is the single most self-indulgent thing the author has ever done and should be taken with a grain of salt and probably whiskey.)

Again, this is a story of Dipper pretending to be human. Unlike most of the others, the setting is an unimaginable amound of time in the future, probably on a different planet, in a society that has regressed to a medival type technology level.

I have repeatedly stated that I could probably write an entire novel about this story, but I won’t. What I have written was written over the course of two days during December last year, and is rushed, summarized, and probably full of typoes, but I still love it and so do many others.

It just happens to be the perfect blend of TAU and the more Pratchettian medival bizarre village stories, where strange things happen and people learn to live with them. I thoroughly enjoyed writing it and would gladly revisit it if I got a new idea.

Chapter 1

I wanted “Tyrone” to come across as somewhat fey. He was supposed to appear as something that attempted to be human, but didn’t really know what that meant, just like how his sheep seem like they kind of know what a sheep is, but not entirely.

The way it takes him a while to figure out how people are supposed to dress, the way his house materializes overnight, and the way he entirely forgets to age are all important things to have in the introduction, to establish the mood I wanted the fic to have. If there is anything I would change if I rewrote this, though, it’s his name. The whole “old man Tyrone” thing sounds nice, but doesn’t really make sense if he doesn’t look old.

Then there’s the Flock.

It was not unusual for shepherds to bring an animal or two into their houses during harsh, cold winter nights. It was stuffy and it smelled, but it was by far preferable to freezing to death.

Tyrone brought his flock into his home on a very different basis. Unrelated to the seasons, every single sheep in his corral walked into the house once a day, regularly as clockwork. No one could understand how they all fit in there, and no one could understand why, either.

When anyone dared ask, Tyrone only smiled and said, “Well, it can’t do for them to miss their reality shows, now can it?” which made no sense at all.

I always have the Flock watch reality shows if I can. It’s one of those details that are just funny in themselves. Of course, the fact that they can get reality shows in a place where TVs generally don’t exist adds another layer of unreality to the whole place.

Either they’re watching through weird time-shenanigans, or they’re actually getting shows from another planet, which honestly makes more sense.

The conclusion they ended up falling back on was the Tyrone simply did not know the proper method by which to shear a sheep. And that he should probably not be invited to any more shearing events.

Lanata’s reaction to Tyrone is probably my favourite part of the whole story. Whether he’s doing things that are blatantly impossible, having actual fair folk buy his wares at the farmers market, or having his sheep spy on people and predict the future, he’s not hurting anyone, so Lanata accepts it and moves on.

Of course, there’s also the detail that the sheep never predict the future while he’s around to see, implying that they’re taking the whole “pretending to be mortal” thing slightly less seriously than he does, and that they’re not afraid to have a little fun on his behalf.

The incident with the sheep thieves has been written out and is hilarious. Here.

It’s one of many scenes I had ideas for for this fic, not all of which I could include. I liked the idea of one sheep herder borriwing one of the Flock for studding purposes just because it was ridiculous and we all know it wouldn’t work, but unfortunately I forgot to write in the one where someone somehow burns a truckload of yggdrasil, fogging down the entire valley and accidentally swarming the village with demon sheep high off their asses. Ah, next time.

As any other special thing that happens to such a community and stays around, and that they can do nothing about, they developed a kind of pride around him. Sure, he was creepy and unsociable, and his sheep randomly announced people’s small but dirty secrets to the world, maybe he infuriated people at times, maybe he scared the living daylights out of most of the youngsters who were dared by friends to approach his house at night, maybe eerie music could be heard from his home, and maybe he was a wizard, and wizards were rumoured to be fickle and dangerous, but he was their wizard, dammit, and they were proud if him.

Incredible what you can decide to be proud of if you can’t remove it.

Tyrone isn’t a wizard, of course, but that’s what people think. At this point in time he’s been around for long enough that going a decade without a proper deal isn’t the biggest problem, which of course leaves him with more time to fuck around, but he does still make deals if they’re offered, and that does probably help the way the village sees him.

He’s not someone whose help you want to need, but if you do, you can get it, and that’s important. It helps cement in people’s minds that he’s not just weird and magical, he’s also powerful, and on average he does good.

The tax collector was funny though. I had a lot of people saying they felt sorry for him, which tells me I wasn’t clear enough about the fact that his demand for one of Tyrone’s sheep was not, in fact, his job, but an abuse of power. It’s a bit of a staple for stories of this genre that the tax collector is someone no one likes and who does no good, and considering how remote Lanata is, you have to wonder if it ever actually gets anything back for its taxes.

Either way, it was a fun joke.

Chapter 2

I wasn’t actually planning for this fic to become as long as it did, but my things have gotten this tendency lately to grow entirely out of proportion. I wasn’t happy about having to chop it up, but in the end, it was probably for the best.

The first chapter was mostly Tyrone and Lanata, and how they feel about each other. In this one, we get more outside views.

Liam is just a random travelling wizard, mostly there to show what Tyrone looks like to one of this planet’s actual wizards. He gets scared quickly and leaves without having any large effect on anything.

The next outsider to try to meddle is a king, because if I didn’t include a king, what kind of genre conventionalist would I be?

The part I like about this passage is that Tyrone himself doesn’t do much to dissuade anyone. All he does is tell two separate people no and then warn the tavern owner that someone is trying to set her house on fire, and letting Lanata sort out its own business.

Only when the king bothers to come himself does Tyrone decide to give him his time of day. This of course ends with the king gaining a lifelong fear of demons and eventually to the Circle of the Dreamers’ Star becoming a national religion, but that’s more or less irrelevant. The point is that Tyrone doesn’t need anything that he doesn’t already have here. He is, in fact, entirely content. I like writing fic like that.

The wizard and his sheep had lived in the house on the hill for so long the oldest woman in the village remembered her grandmother speaking of him as if he had always lived there. For all this time, there had been very little change in how he acted out his days.

Then, Iirah happened.

Iirah is one of my own favourite Mizars. She’s “the old wizard’s beautiful daughter”. She is so much fun, and she changes the game.

At this point, Dipper has been Tyrone the sheepherder, and then the Wizard for several centuries, and it was about time for something to change. Iirah gives him a reason to interact with the townfolk on a more personal level. She humanizes him, in a way, because she is undoubtedly human where he is undoubtedly not, and it creates an entirely new dynamic.

Not to mention all the random theories that arise about where she comes from. We know that he probably just kidnapped her from neglecting parents off another planet, but they still have to wonder if he made her out of straw.

Iirah is also what makes him give the second king a chance, because he is soft as hell for his children’s puppy eyes no matter how old he gets, and Iirah wants to see a castle and wear a princess dress, and honestly she has a great time.

She’s such a spoiled child.

He was numbered among their curiosities, a seemingly normal man with antlers like a stag growing from his head, antlers made of wood and bone with cranberry leaves growing from them. They called him Bet, and he visited the tavern one night that Iirah worked the till. He caught her eye immediately.

Kaleb’s story is one I really wish I could have taken more care with. I don’t think anyone will be surprised to hear he’s a Henry reincarnation, what with the antlers and all.

They’re physical because of an incident in his youth, and they’re also the reason he’s more or less a slave at the point invtime where he enters the story.

I wish I could have had his and Iirah’s meeting flow better, and I wish I could have had a bunch of village boys corner him and tell him that she had never learned to protect herself so if he hurt him they would stab him dead for his own good. I wanted him to be taken in by the village absolutely and completely, only because Iirah liked him and Iirah is the wizard’s daughter. I wanted him to hear rumours about the wizard but never really meet him before he walked out of Iirah’s room that one morning after, to find Tyrone sitting in a chair and looking at him.

I wish I’d found a more elegant way to deal with his name, and what that meant.

“For as long as you are within the boundaries of this village, you will have no name. No designation attached to you will stick, no memories of your previous names will remain, written records will smudge, and spoken words will be caught by the wind.”

I still like this part, though. Any beast can kill someone. Any monster can torture someone, but if something steals your name, you can be pretty damn sure you shouldn’t mess with it. It’s one of those scenes that formed the basis I built the rest of the story around.

And then it ends. Iirah dies, and Dipper can’t stand to live in the village anymore, though he gifts it with enough magic to keep the village special for centuries after, in the form of neon coloured sheep herds.

Maybe some day I’ll sit down and actually write that novel, but for now, this is it for Lanata.

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