Poisoned Smiles and a Silver Tongue
Gen, really mostly just Artemis/Sheik, but Impa shows up a bit. Artemis is tired of trying to negotiate with a stupid noble and decides to get some mischief onboard to convince him to stop delaying the negotiations.
Artemis groaned as she dropped into her favorite chair in her sitting room. The negotiations with Labrynna were still going on, and it had been four days. Usually these sorts of negotiations took two days at most. Four days, and all because the blasted noble they sent to accompany the poor diplomat was refusing anything except the ridiculous terms he’d gotten into his head that Labrynna deserved. Everyone else in the room, including the poor diplomat he was accompanying knew those were absolutely stupid terms, but he was adamant, and it was delaying the negotiations.
Artemis’ gaze fell across the bodysuit laying innocuously across the backs of one of her chairs, returned after Kiara had washed it earlier. Maybe it was time to try a more…hands on approach to diplomacy.
Nothing illegal obviously, but Sheik was technically employed by Artemis herself, so it wasn’t exactly odd to see Sheik loitering around the castle, and well, Sheik could always just…happen to be in the same place as that noble several times in a row and working with his weapons.
“Hey Kiara,” Artemis called, figuring her maid wasn’t going to be that far away.
“Yes, Queen?” Kiara asked politely, stepping out of the shadows. She was getting very good at that.
“Turn anyone who comes here looking for me away. Say I’m doing paperwork and can’t be interrupted or something. I’m going out.”
Kiara smiled, understanding the implications. “Of course Queen. You’ll be busy for several hours catching up on the paperwork delayed by the negotiations.”
“Thank you. I’ll alert you when I’m back.”
“May the shadows keep you hidden,” Kiara replied, a traditional Sheikah wish of good luck.
Artemis simply inclined her head in response, standing up and already beginning the process of unlacing her gown. Kiara would handle it all. She was Artemis’ handmaid for several reasons. Only one of the reasons was that she was being trained by Impa, which meant Artemis could trust her.
Sheik was ready within ten minutes, and at least two minutes of that was just hiding all of his knives. Sheik had gone by feminine pronouns for a while, mostly during the war, but after a couple incidents of someone calling him by masculine pronouns, he decided he liked that better and fully switched. Artemis was female, yes, but Sheik was not.
He snuck out of the Queen’s quarters, only actually appearing to most people’s eyes pretty far away. It wouldn’t do for there to be some awkward rumors about how he had been seen coming from the Queen’s rooms. If the Queen was rumored to be having a fling with her personal assassin Sheik was going to die of embarrassment. He could not have a fling with himself, that would be literally impossible.
If someone accused him of having a fling with himself he was going to reveal his secret identity as Artemis out of embarrassment and then Impa would kill him.
So, first order of business, identify where the noble was right now. Pretty easy to find out, he just had to ask a few of the servants if they knew where he was.
Turned out the noble in question was busy berating one of the servants he’d ordered to bring him food because she hadn’t known exactly what he wanted. Notably, he had neglected to tell her what he had wanted. It was like he thought she was a mind reader or something.
Well, jokes on him. Sheik strolled out of the shadows conspicuously within the noble’s line of sight, and set about doing a knife trick. They knew several fun tricks with knives, and all of them were good for intimidating nobles without saying a single thing.
The noble clearly saw him, as he quickly shut up and stopped berating the poor servant girl, who quickly scurried away when his attention was distracted.
Sheik made deliberate eye contact with the noble, flipping the knife up. It almost hung in the air for a second, then fell. He caught it, then slipped it into his sleeve with a sleight of hand trick. Sheik wouldn’t need to say anything at all, just show up a few times, play with knives a bit, and leave.
A few servants with laundry bustled out of nowhere, coming between Sheik and the noble, which was his indication to disappear. Which he did, straight up into the rafters. The castle was always built with rafters specifically for Sheikah to use. So few people bothered to look up, and even when they did, the rafters were generally wide enough a Sheikah could stand on one and be fully invisible to everyone below unless they were at a very specific angle.
Sheik could see the noble looking around frantically before slowly leaving, looking around like he was expecting Sheik to jump out of the shadows to attack him.
Sheik wouldn’t do that. Not to him, that’d probably just make Labrynna mad. Intimidating him by calmly walking by while doing a knife trick or two though, that was on the table because it wasn’t technically illegal. There was nothing illegal about performing knife tricks, and there was nothing illegal about walking around the castle.
Technically direct intimidation was illegal, or at least heavily frowned upon in diplomatic circles, but Sheik wasn’t doing that, he was just walking and playing with his knives. It wasn’t his fault if the guy took it as a threat. He didn’t mean it like that.
Well.
No one could prove that he did, in fact, mean it like that.
This was totally diplomacy. It wasn’t any more underhand than stuff that sometimes went down at the actual negotiation table. Totally diplomacy.
So Sheik continued his little game, any time the man stopped to berate a servant for doing nothing to him, or a guard for fooling around with her weapon, Sheik would drop down, stroll out of the shadows playing with a knife, make dramatic eye contact, then disappear.
As the game went on the man became visibly haunted, jumping at shadows and shuddering any time any gleam of metal caught his eye. Sheik drew great amusement from it, occasionally dropping down and just appearing among the servants. Not even playing with his knives, just walking with the servants for a bit before disappearing again.
The man eventually went back to the rooms for the Labrynnian guests, which meant the game was over sadly.
Sheik didn’t actually go back to his rooms for a while though, just hanging around the castle and randomly helping servants. He helped one lady carry laundry, then helped her fold it for a while. He helped one of the cooks by running back and forth between the storage a few dozen times to contribute to the canning process currently going on, moving completed jars to the storage areas underground and bringing empty jars back up.
It was refreshing to just run around the castle and do random chores, using his body in ways he didn’t usually, either when sitting around doing paperwork or dealing with her advisors, or when doing battle training.
Plus it was nice to just connect with his people, made sure he remembered that they were people with lives and thoughts and feelings. Plus he could get random dirt on people. That was always funny. No one thought twice about giving the latest gossip to Sheik, who showed up randomly to help with chores, even if he was technically the Queen’s personal assassin. He never used it, but it was funny to know anyway.
Conspicuously, the next day the noble caved quickly to the terms Artemis and the diplomat had laid out and stopped protesting. Impa was giving Artemis suspicious looks, which frankly were warranted, but still, rude.
That wrapped up before lunch, thank the golden goddesses, so Artemis headed down to the kitchens to collect lunch for herself, Impa falling into step next to her.
“He caved awfully fast,” Impa remarked, and Artemis couldn’t stop a smug smile from spreading across her face. “And you look awfully smug. What did Sheik do?”
“Nothing illegal,” Artemis replied innocently. It was true, Sheik had done nothing illegal.
Impa sighed. “And nothing that will be traced back to you?”
“I’m not some amateur, you taught me well.”
“Perhaps too well,” Impa sighed, but she probably didn’t mean that. There was no such thing as teaching someone too well.
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oooooo please tell me (who knows nothing on the subject) about orv swap au
hehehe. hehehehehehe. hehehehehehehhehehehhheheheh <- guy who is so normal
the premise of orv swap au (name has yet to be finalized) is this: what if kdj and yjh swapped narrative positions (reader <-> character) but very little else? what if a video game player enters a time loop to save his favorite character from dying over and over again and also to end the apocalypse?
admittedly it's not super fleshed out yet (a lot of the changes this premise would introduce are still not hammered out yet) but here are some points under the cut (novel spoilers ahead!)
orv swap au starts with pro gamer yjh who feels :/ abt his job, but hey, it pays the bills. despite (or maybe because of) his relative popularity as a pro gamer and networking with the agency/sponsors/people to impress, he's kind of isolated in a way that's detrimental, a facade of someone he's not whenever he's on camera
something to play around with is the idea of agency? maybe this yjh doesn't feel like he has any and has his hands tied between the lifestyle and being under public scrutiny and not having enough of a support system to leave everything behind. maybe he doesn't know what else he would even do. maybe he's aimless and drifting with nothing to hold on to.
his favorite video game is what i've been thinking of as World's Hardest To Play Indie Game (not based on difficulty but just on the experience of consuming it) a boring, exposition heavy, player-hostile, poorly designed, slightly buggy mess of a barely-playable game: twsa, a game that was not finished upon release and experiences with sporadic updates every now and then.
the ending tree to this game is so convoluted its insane. also theres no save states so if you die (very likely) u restart babeyyy.
twsa (video game) does have multiple endings, all of which happen when kdj, your main character, dies. some are farther into the apocolypse than others, some paths require meta knowledge of future events or character actions or items or whatever. the "true ending" is either analogous to the original 1863: kdj makes it to the end at the cost of everyone he loves, or hsy's modified 1863: kdj makes himself enemy of the scenario to secure a way out for the kimcom remnants.
there's branches on the choices tree where everyone dies and everything sucks and is bad forever and theres choices to make where kdj gets to make a family and they don't really get to settle down but they can get pretty close to it among the ruins of the apocalypse. through all his testing, yjh finds that these endings are nice but peter out - to get to the end of the apocalypse yjh has to claw his way there inch by painful inch, through betrayal and sacrifice, and he still cant fully get past it
i originally wanted to finagle a yoohankim 3 way swap but i couldn't figure it out. swap aus are a lot easier to work with when they're even numbers, at least to me, so this au features a ysa who is a video game company employee by day and by night she really has become god this time (and also a terrible indie dev). and this is how jungdoksang can still win !!!!
also yjh's coworker from Real Life hsy :) i haven't decided if she's like an employee for the same agency, or if she's someone else in the gaming circles that yjh interacts with sometimes (in my heart theyre in like some sort of discord server together), or something like that but she's around. whatever she does she is twitter cancelled for something. to me.
the only other character swaps are lsk and yma. yma is yjh's estranged sister (in broad strokes there's a vague bad parent situation going on here) (they used to be close until they drifted apart and slowly started hating each other [there is an abyss between them that neither of them can bridge]) (he feels that she betrayed him and threw him under the bus so he left [maybe he gets kicked out]) (she feels that he abandoned her to whatever situation they have going on [he didn't even try to take her with him]) and he has to find her when the apocalypse starts. yjh older sibling to yma gives us a whole different little dynamic to explore from kdj ysk (there's different levels of responsibility and guilt and blame when you're talking siblings that are soooooo interesting to me. sorry that i see any set of siblings and immediately try to figure out how to make them worse)
lsk is kdj's mom who appeared into existence at some point with kdj and they were both just adults. that's weird isn't it. oh well. i guess she can become a transcendent later too for funsies
everyone else stays in the same configuration of Real Person vs Character to me this is a very important aspect
this point has no precedent with the swap, nothing particular that would change to cause this, but it would be so funny if lgy was a little gamer boy who is an avid yjh hater. hates that guy. shows up to competitions to boo him. tunes into yjh's silent no-mic speedrunning streams to mald in chat but yjh +mods don't ban him bc its kinda funny.
anyways the apocalypse starts when yjh and his coworker/fellow gamer hsy are on a train to twitchcon and lgy is also there (also headed to twitchcon) and he brings bugs because he likes them but also to sabotage yjh specifically. its just funny if this happened. you understand
instead of having reader-related skills and abilities, yjh's skills are video game player based! he gets flavor text insight on people, location, and items, things like that. notably, he has the ability to reset, to bring himself back to the beginning of the apocalypse
orv swap proper follows yjh as the Player of the Game (Consumer of the Narrative) who lives hundred of lifetimes in this ruined-world-become-reality "replaying" [read: time looping through] the game to reshape it to save his fave character from self implosion (kdj with no dissociation is very prone to dying. all the time.). to revisit the idea of playing with yjh and the idea of agency, of creation, the only way to get past the apocalypse is to go off the beaten path, to choose options that weren't even there in the game. when in space, at his darkest point, yjh becomes a writer. in this story, at his darkest point, he has to become a creator too
please do not ask me how the epilogues go i dont know how the epilogues go (i don't want to throw yjh back into a train for milennia after he Just went through a thousand resets so i'm sending kdj for that but i havent fully planned how or why)
anyways, hope that helps!!! :)
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