XXXHolic/Discworld, take 4
Nov. 24th, 2006 02:40 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rallamajoopSequel to Just Another Tuesday, expanded from the previously posted version here (although unrelated to the Granny Weatherwax one, except by the series being crossed over). Huge thanks go to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
rhap_chan for kindly volunteering to beta this for me.
Title: Binky
Summary: Watanuki, Doumeki, and a horse borrowed from a shinigami from another dimension. Just another job when you work for Yuuko.
Spoilers: Reference to certain facts regarding Doumeki’s childhood revealed in chapter 102, plus a couple of blink-and-you'll-miss-them* references to certain outcomes of the spider arc.
*Look, I swear I didn't realise how appropriate an expression that was until after I'd written it!
There wasn’t a lot of space just behind Watanuki on the footpath that morning, so Doumeki found himself trailing behind. He was not far enough back for Watanuki not to notice him.
“She didn’t say you had to come!”
“But she sent you past the temple, right?” Doumeki pointed out reasonably.
“It was the shortest route! Don’t you have a path to sweep or something?”
“It’ll wait. You can help me finish when we get back,” he suggested.
Watanuki made a number of semi-coherent spluttering noises in some kind of protest.
It looked like it was going to be an interesting day.
***
The day was already far too interesting for Watanuki’s liking.
It had been one of those mornings when Watanuki absolutely dreaded going past the temple. True, this was common to most days that required him to go anywhere near the place with the expectation of meeting a certain Doumeki Shizuka, but today was still looking to be one that really stood out in the field of personal humiliation. Watanuki had long since come to the understanding that Yuuko’s purpose on this earth was to make his life miserable under the dubious guise of it being “all for his own good,” but wasn’t it enough that he had to cook her meals and clean her shop and fetch her disappearing rabbits and deliver messages from shinigami hailing from other worlds?
Oh, of course not. Yuuko was entirely capable of getting creative.
There wasn’t even going to be any delay to this meeting, because Doumeki was right out in front of the temple, engaged in the temple-dweller’s never-ending duty of sweeping the front path. Watanuki maintained just enough faith in the universe to hope that there was still a chance he could just get past here without Doumeki saying anything like…
“That’s a horse,” said Doumeki, and Watanuki snapped like a bowstring.
“THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR CLEARING THAT UP. I WAS JUST WONDERING WHETHER YOU WERE GOING TO BE ABLE TO SEE IT, YOU
UNSYMPATHETIC BASTARD!”
“Everyone else can see it,” Doumeki pointed out, in a possibly deliberate attempt to ignore perfectly good sarcasm. On the other side of the road, two young children, both pointing and squealing at the animal which was currently chewing on a tuft of grass outside the gate, were dragged past the shrine by their mother with some difficulty.
Watanuki gave a heartfelt sigh. “It’s all Yuuko’s doing.” He tugged on the halter a couple of times, trying to make Binky give up on the grass. Binky relented, but the moment Watanuki let the halter slacken, he bent down again. “She thinks because he likes me, it should be my job to give him some exercise. And I never even wanted a pony!” he added, aware this last bit might have made more sense given some context, but equally aware Doumeki would be the last person in the universe to notice.
Doumeki regarded the horse with the same cool expression he used on everything from Watanuki’s lunches to giant, invisible snake-spirits about to make lunch out of him.
“You’re supposed to ride them. Not lead them around like a dog.”
“Of course you are! But where would I have learned to do something like that?!”
Doumeki shrugged. “It’s your horse.”
“IT IS NOT MY HORSE! What kind of crazy person even keeps a horse in the middle of the city…?” Inspiration struck mid sentence. “Wait-- don’t you know how to handle horses?”
“Nope.”
“But your grandfather had a horse.”
“Never rode it.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t ride in a girl’s kimono.”
And that there – that expression and this whole situation and that sentence – was the only evidence Watanuki ever needed to prove that Doumeki’s divine purpose in this world was to drive him completely insane.
***
Yuuko’s hand-drawn map lead them to a vacant lot between two buildings, and there the directions stopped. Watanuki shook it and turned it over a few times as though it might magically produce some new instructions (which, knowing Yuuko, was a possibility), but nothing useful emerged. Doumeki looked around the lot suspiciously.
“Oi,” he called to Watanuki.
“What?”
“There isn’t anything here, is there?”
“What the hell kind of question is that? Of course not.”
“Hm.”
Doumeki started a lap around the perimeter of the lot, just in case, and waited for whatever was going to happen.
***
Binky found himself another nice tuft of grass. Watanuki gave up and left him to it.
The lot had been vacant long enough to have collected a good stock of long grass and weeds, which Binky was now working his way through with some gusto. There was nothing to sit on that wasn’t dirty or dusty, but after ten minutes, Watanuki gave in to his legs’ loudening protests and sat down anyway. It was starting to look like it would be a very boring afternoon. Watanuki didn’t trust boring afternoons; he’d been working for Yuuko too long.
It was just possible, Watanuki decided, that Yuuko really had sent him here to spend the afternoon in Doumeki’s company while the horse she’d borrowed took care of feeding itself. Of course, that wouldn’t explain the matchbox, but the matchbox wasn’t something Watanuki was in any great rush to have explained.
To be a little more specific about Watanuki’s position at this point, in order to get him through the day, Yuuko had supplied him with the following:
1 (one) borrowed horse (white, male, unsaddled, answers to the name of ‘Binky,’ or rather, doesn’t answer, since (thank god) it was yet to show an inclination to talking).
1 (one) map, hand-drawn on the back of an envelope, apparently in crayon. Yuuko had not strictly told him to follow it when she handed it to him, merely made the suggestion that he might want to take a couple of things with him while he was out exercising the horse, but Watanuki knew her well enough to know how these things worked.
1 (one) matchbox, containing 1 (one) dead beetle. This had been handed to him with no explanation whatsoever. Worse still was the suggestion she’d made that if he did find a use for it, it would be taken out of his pay. Watanuki didn’t want to know what the going rate for a dead beetle in a matchbox was when Yuuko gave it to you. It was bound to be far more than anyone else would ever dream of charging for it. Anyone else would probably agree it was worth a few yen to have such rubbish taken away.
A raven swooped on a rounded clump of dirt, rolled it over with its beak and pecked at it a few times in a disappointed manner. The lot continued being empty.
Over the other side, Doumeki was poking at a pile of broken timber, which they’d both generally assumed was the remnants of whatever had been here before the space returned to vacancy.
“Oi,” called Doumeki’s voice again. “Isn’t there something odd about this stuff? It’s been worn too smooth, like driftwood.”
Reactions warred in Watanuki’s head. On one hand, he knew it was possible Doumeki could be on to something. On the other, he knew Doumeki was the greatest idiot-jerk the universe had ever produced. These were difficult perspectives to reconcile.
“So someone’s been using this place as a dumping ground, so what?”
Doumeki didn’t appear to hear him. “Do you know what barnacles look like?”
“Those things that live on the bottom of ships? How would I know?”
Doumeki’s frown grew deeper. “Do you smell salt?”
Watanuki made a concentrated effort to breathe through his mouth. “We’re miles from the beach.”
“I know.”
There was a clatter as Doumeki let the plank he was holding fall back on to the pile. The silence that followed stretched out just long enough that something had to make the effort to fill it.
“Here, that’s Binky, innit?” said a voice. “What’s he doing here?”
***
From Doumeki’s perspective, the situation looked like this.
Watanuki was waving his arms at a raven and talking to someone who didn’t seem to be there, if by ‘talking to’ you meant ‘arguing with’, and if by ‘arguing’ you meant ‘yelling at the top of his lungs.’ When Watanuki was concerned, all of this was usually a given (up to and including the apparent non-existence of whatever was irritating him).
At one point, Watanuki made a horrified face, slammed his hand over his right eye so violently that Doumeki’s own vision winked out over that side for a second, and yelled “NO OF COURSE I DO NOT HAVE ANY TO SPARE!” This could have been a real concern, but Watanuki seemed to be going on with the argument with no less than his usual energy, so the situation couldn’t be all that bad.
***
From Watanuki’s perspective, the rest of the conversation went like this.
“I was only arsking.” The raven backpedaled as fast as it could manage. “You didn’t have to take it so personally, I didn’t necessarily mean one of yours. I could’ve meant someone else’s.” Something in Watanuki’s face made it quickly amend this to, “Someone else who you weren’t personally acquainted with? Look, it’s a raven thing, awright?” he finished helplessly. “It’s in our natures.”
Watanuki let out a sigh. “You’re not a spirit, are you?” he asked warily.
“Me? Naw. Just your typical raven. Tweet tweet tweet and all that.”
Watanuki was relatively certain that ‘tweet’ was not exactly the usual sound associated with ravens, but there seemed to be more pressing matters.
“But you’re talking. And you know… something about the horse.”
“Well, we’re in the same business, aren’t we?” said the raven. “Faithful steed and occasional translator of the anthropomorphic personification of the decease-a-ment of rodents, that’s me,” it finished proudly, trying to puff up its chest, which ravens aren’t actually designed do, so this failed rather miserably.
Watanuki looked a bit blank.
“You might have met him. Boney little chap. Goes SQUEAK?” the raven added helpfully.
Unfortunately, Watanuki had. “He’s not here, is he?”
“Nah, I’m on a break. We’re done here for the day. Rats always leave first, don’t ya know. Some of them even make it as far as the shore if they swim well enough.”
“Huh?” said Watanuki.
A breeze blew through the lot, bringing with it the faint smell of sea-salt. Binky finished his tuft of grass, pricked up his ears and whinnied softly.
“So, I guess a few entrails would also be out of the question?” said the raven hopefully.
“Oi,” said Doumeki.
Watanuki realised he couldn’t use both of them as an excuse to ignore the other at the same time. Doumeki won.
“What?”
“Your horse is getting away.”
“I told you, it is not my--!” was as far as Watanuki got before he realised Doumeki was right. Binky, who had been very well behaved up to this point, had walked off out of the far side of the lot and down the street. Watanuki yelped and ran after him, grabbing the halter and trying to drag the horse back, but Binky was having none of this. Instead, he sped up so that Watanuki was dragged into a stumbling run, the equivalent of what happens when a small man takes a large, enthusiastic dog out for some exercise. They quickly cleared half a block, Binky showing no sign of slowing down.
Watanuki was briefly aware of the sound of footsteps, which meant Doumeki was catching up. The next thing he knew, he was being half-pushed, half-thrown up onto the moving horse, and he would have protested more but he was too busy half-dragging Doumeki up behind him, because hell if he was going to be stuck on a runaway horse on his own. As if this was all he was been waiting for, Binky picked up his pace from a fast trot to a canter and then to a gallop within the space of a few seconds. Faster and faster they went, until the whole world turned into a blur and Watanuki could’ve sworn Binky’s hooves weren’t even touching the ground anymore, and were they really going upwards? Within the space of a minute, it seemed they’d left the whole world behind them.
In fact, they very probably had.
***
Some sort of cinematic effects are usually pretty traditional during these sort of scenes. Time slows down, the world drops away from you, the camera travels down a great tunnel made of swirly effects and the stars go streaming past. It’s quite pretty when done well, and serves to wipe any remaining doubt in the minds of those seeing it that they’re going through some seriously weird shit.
Binky was a bit too familiar with these trips to bother with much of that, though this was probably for the best, under the circumstances. Doumeki was difficult to impress, and Watanuki had his eyes closed for most of it, and it would have been a shame for all that effort to go to waste.
***
By the time the horse started to slow down enough that Doumeki could see where they were, the scenery had changed quite a bit.
So.
He and Watanuki were riding a horse. Neither of them knew how to ride a horse, but apparently this horse was pretty good at being ridden.
The horse they were riding was flying. Through the air, at high speed, without any apparent difficulty. It was moving with exactly the same gait of any normal galloping horse; however, its hooves weren’t actually impacting on any ground at any point in the process. This didn’t seem to bother it.
The air through which they were flying carried them over a steep-faced cliff which descended some tens or hundreds of metres to a roaring ocean. Doumeki didn’t take long to decide that it wasn’t likely that either the cliff or the ocean had anything to do with anywhere that had ever heard of Japan.
In the ocean was a ship, not the modern metal-and-smoke-stacks variety, but one of the old fashioned wooden kinds, with masts and sails and rope hanging from everything you could hang a rope from. It was certainly not as impressive as the ones you saw in the movies; whatever the exact requirements were for a ship to be classified as ‘stately’ were, it seemed unlikely this boat would even have made the short list. It wasn’t very large, obviously a long way from new, and had probably spent more of its life carrying cargo than kings. Had Doumeki still been interested in the question about barnacles, the bottom was bound to be caked with them. It was also in a lot of trouble.
The ship was being buffeted by gale-force winds from a storm, the like of which Doumeki had never even imagined. The vessel was under incredible duress, so much that it seemed as though the only reason it wasn’t yet an utter wreck was that it was holding out for a way to splinter in every possible direction at once. The horse didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the storm, but given that it wasn’t bothered by gravity or dimensional boundaries (or two of the world’s least experienced riders) either, this probably shouldn’t have been a surprise.
From what Doumeki had managed to gather from Watanuki’s mad ramblings on the subject, it seemed the horse they were riding had been borrowed from a shinigami from another world.
So.
Here they were, riding through a storm on a shinigami’s horse, which was taking them towards a boat full of people who were about to die.
It made sense, if you thought about it like that.
***
For once in his life, Watanuki was too awed and horrified to scream at anyone about what was going on. He didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there, but he didn’t need to have ever actually seen an old ship caught in a storm like this before to have a pretty good idea of what was about to happen next, and he really didn’t want to be here to see it.
Binky reached the ship and touched down with practiced ease. To all appearances, he was now standing on the deck, but the ship was definitely lurching around a whole lot more than Binky was.
People were still running, or in some cases, tumbling, or even – indeed – practically swimming around the deck, and doing incomprehensible things (to Watanuki’s eyes at least) with the rigging and sails and various other parts of the ship that two twenty-first-century schoolboys would have no hope of understanding. No one seemed to notice the horse, but it was probably fair to say that even had Binky been conventionally visible to them in this world, they were all a bit distracted at the moment. By this point in the wrecking process, they weren’t so much fighting a losing battle as flailing around in the mad hope that some kind of cosmic director would yell, ‘Cut! Okay, everyone take ten!’ if they just kept the scene going convincingly for a little longer.
It was a really first class storm – rain and thunder and lighting and wind and even a scattering of hailstones just to add that extra class; there very likely would have been water spouts had the ocean been just a little deeper. It would have been easy to believe it wasn’t what constituted conventional weather at all, but rather what happened when two storms of quite different character collided and got into an argument over whose fault it was.
Beyond even this thought, there was something… odd about the storm, in a way that would probably have been nearly impossible to appreciate from any vantage point other than the mysteriously protected Binky – and this was that the storm had a width and a depth, no more than about a hundred meters to each, beyond which the wind calmed from violent to peaceful quite sharply. Perhaps stranger still, the storm actually shrank the closer to shore you went. The wind went funneling out to sea in something akin to a cone shape. And by that logic, if you followed it back far enough, somewhere back there would have to be the place where it collapsed down to nothing at all.
Watanuki squinted up into the storm. Even though he could only barely feel the wind, it did horrible things to visibility. And yet, Watanuki still couldn’t help but feel – the same way he felt monsters sneaking up on him which no one else saw – that he could almost make out something up there, something that drew his eyes inexorably up towards it, and it was something important…
***
“What?” said Doumeki, as though he couldn’t believe what he had just heard.
“I said I have to get up there!” Watanuki shouted, pointing, then realised that as long as they were close to Binky he didn’t have to shout; he could hear himself just fine. “It’s coming from something on the cliffs!” he shouted anyway, because it was still hard to shake the feeling he should need to, and since he was talking to Doumeki it was practically traditional anyway.
“You want to go to the source of the storm?” said Doumeki. He didn’t say ‘you really are an idiot,’ but he was definitely thinking it.
“The wind doesn’t bother him,” shouted Watanuki, indicating Binky by yanking on the halter. “How do you get this thing to turn around?” Watanuki discovered that by pulling on only one side of the halter at a time he could make Binky turn, but making him start moving again was more difficult.
Doumeki was quiet for a few seconds.
“Oi,” he called. “If you get up there, you can stop the storm, right?”
“What?”
Doumeki slid backwards off the horse in one movement, ignoring Watanuki’s loud demands to know what the hell he thought he was doing, landed a bit awkwardly, but made sure to keep one hand in contact with the horse until he had the other wrapped firmly around the mast. Now secured as best he could manage, he slapped Binky once, hard on the rear.
It seemed to do the trick.
***
Binky charged upwards through the storm, Watanuki trying to keep him in the centre of the cone. He was starting to get the hang of steering. Left and right were fairly manageable. Up and down were a bit trickier, being directions the traditional bridle had never been designed to deal with. Fortunately, Binky seemed to be getting the idea of where he was expected to go. The wind howled at them, louder and more determined to force them back the closer they got, but Binky wasn’t listening.
By the time they’d gotten within a few yards of the cliffs, the tunnel of wind had shrunk to barely a man’s height, tapering off even more sharply over that last little distance, so that it really did come to a fine point somewhere on the cliff face. Binky slowed to a trot and then a walk so the final approach to the cliff face – visibility gradually returning as the wind diminished – became a slow-reveal affair.
From here you could really get an idea of the scale of the whole thing, just close enough to make out the scraggly trees at the top that gave the cliff some perspective. To let you know that it wasn’t closer than your eyes were trying to tell you: it just really was that enormous.
And from here you could see the steep walls weren’t actually smooth, they were littered with rocks, with seabirds’ nests wedged into any crack that looked relatively safe. There were even a few adventurous mosses and weedy plants eking out a living anywhere they could find a few grains of honest dirt.
And from here you could make that out that right where the wind calmed, there was a little indention in the rock. It was the sort that might have been called a pothole had the ground only been a bit closer to horizontal – just about the right size for a hapless traveler to get a boot good and stuck in. Stretched across that were the delicate strands of a spider’s web.
And caught in that…
“Oh,” said Watanuki, wondering in some corner of his mind just exactly at which point in his life this had started to constitute a perfectly satisfactory explanation for anything.
Caught in the web, right at the very apex of the storm and struggling madly to get free, was a single butterfly.
Even given that it was flapping its wings at that frantic speed that only small insects are capable of, Watanuki could almost imagine he could see great gusts of wind emerging from every panicked beat of the entangled creature. Despite all the chaos, the spider’s web itself had remained miraculously intact, but it was probably safe to say that if something the size of a butterfly was going to take it into its head to start causing storms with every careless flap, it was probably best to throw out all those ‘equal and opposite reaction’ ideas from the start. The spider cowered helplessly on the edge of the web. It wasn’t even going to try to get any closer.
Watanuki didn’t have to stop and think about what needed to be done. The angle wasn’t ideal; Binky had done his best given the circumstances, but reaching from the back of a horse you have only a general understanding of how to stay on while suspended in mid air was never going to be the easiest way to get to anything. As carefully as he could manage with one hand, Watanuki reached around behind the struggling insect, broke a few crucial entangling strands, coaxed it on to a finger, and gently plucked the butterfly from the web.
The butterfly cooperated beautifully. The moment its wings stopped fluttering, the wind dropped away as if it had never been there.
“Alright now?” he asked it softly. The butterfly did indeed seem to be quite happy where it was. It opened and closed its wings once or twice in a lazy sort of way, but showed no sign it wanted to take off. Now that it had stopped moving, he could see that it was yellow and black in colour. There were detailed patterns covering its wings, something about which gave him vertigo.
Mission accomplished, Watanuki surveyed the damage. There was a large hole in the centre of the spider’s web now, which had probably been pretty much unavoidable given the circumstances. Something about the sight of this made Watanuki’s stomach try to move residence to his feet – events of late had given him a healthy respect for spiders. The spider was examining the web in a forlorn manner.
Watanuki shuffled the butterfly carefully on to his shoulder and fished the matchbox out of his pocket.
“Sorry about the damage,” he told the spider, “but there probably wasn’t anything else to do, and – well, have this in consolation.”
He tipped the dead beetle onto the web. The spider prodded the offering cautiously with a foot, as if worried this meal was going to turn out like the last one, but finding nothing amiss, leapt on it with relish.
It was possible, of course, that all he was dealing with was the real common- or garden- (though not shrine) variety spider in this world, and efforts to appease it were laughably unnecessary; but in a place where even a butterfly could make storms, who in their right mind would take the chance?
***
Back on the ship, a crew of bleary-looking seamen was trying to figure out what had happened, whether this really meant the scene was a wrap and if they could all go for lunch now. Doumeki, still standing in their midst, was fully visible to them since he had separated from the horse, and a few crewmen were staring at him and trying to figure out where he’d come from, whether he was some sort of storm-induced hallucination, or what, if anything, he had to do with it at all. No matter how you turned it, he didn’t look anything like any of the locally recognised deities of good fortune or miraculous rescues, but the sad fact of the matter was that, should the Cult of the Deadpan Schoolboy Ocean Weather God catch on in the area any time in the near future, it was going to be all his fault.
“What you did back there,” said Watanuki, once safely back on deck, “was incredibly stupid.”
“Which one of us went charging off into the eye of the storm, you idiot?” Doumeki released his death grip on the mast before Watanuki got back, but there were a few splinters still clinging to his clothes.
“Well it worked, didn’t it?” Watanuki reminded him, a little petulantly. “The storm stopped.”
“Yeah. It did. What’s that?” Doumeki added, pointing to Watanuki’s shoulder.
“Oh!” Watanuki found himself instinctively cupping a protective hand over the creature. Despite all the trouble it had caused he couldn’t help feel a sort of fondness for the thing. “You may not believe it, but this little guy was what was causing that freak weather in the first place.”
Doumeki seemed to consider this. “They say a butterfly flapping its wings somewhere can be the difference between a sunny day and a storm.”
This logic didn’t appeal to Watanuki. “Maybe, but it’s not supposed to happen this fast!”
“Are you sure?”
Watanuki was sure. Watanuki was absolutely certain he was right about this one. It wasn’t his fault there was a perfect counterargument sitting on his shoulder.
“Well? Can you make him take us back?” Doumeki indicated the horse.
“I think we have to just hope he wants to take us,” Watanuki replied, fervently hoping Binky didn’t have anywhere else he wanted to take them that day.
Doumeki seemed satisfied enough by this. “Help me up again.”
Watanuki grudgingly leant him a hand. He screwed up his face as Doumeki settled back onto the horse. “You’re soaked to the skin!” he complained. “You’re getting me wet!”
“What did you expect? Get us home already. We’ve still got to sweep the shrine this afternoon.”
Doumeki shortly discovered he couldn’t hang on and hold his hands over his ears at the same time, but he probably deserved that. Binky took back off into the sky.
The wooden planks were gone when they got back to the lot, but no one really noticed.
***
Yuuko was waiting for them when they arrived, which was no great surprise. She was terribly pleased with the butterfly, which transferred itself to a proffered finger with almost no prompting at all. The image suited her so well Doumeki could have believed the butterfly had been created just for the purpose, although it couldn’t have hurt the impression that she’d found herself a lacy, yellow and black dress for the afternoon either.
Binky was led away around the back of the shop for a good rest, although he still looked as fresh as ever. Watanuki said he was never, ever, ever doing anything like this again, no matter how many domestic chores he had to do instead, which Doumeki figured meant he had about a week off, maybe two at the outside. Life around Watanuki was a lot louder, but at least it was never dull.
Actually, it was exactly one week later, while Doumeki was sweeping the path again, that something bumped into his ankle and he looked down to see a large, metal-and-wooden chest. It doesn’t take any particular skill to bump into something of that nature when it stands at about knee-height; however it does usually require one to be to be the one who was moving at the time, and Doumeki had definitely been standing perfectly still.
“Don’t you even ask!” Watanuki’s voice yelled from the gateway. “And don’t step on any of its toes. And for heaven’s sake, don’t feed it anything else! ”
And again, this was going to be the end of it. But I still sort of wanted to write something with Susan, since she's about the one remaining character in the Death 'family' left unmentioned, and besides, she and Watanuki *both* have this little thing where they see a lot of monsters most people don't (although they do go about dealing with them a little differently). So I tried writing a short, missing-scene/epilogue with her in it, and it grew into another fic. ^^;;; There's still a real epilogue to go as well, but damnit, that one *will* stay at a few hundred words. I swear!
ETA: For anyone reading the series in order, part 3, being the Susan one, can now be found up here.
So, in conclusion: still not quite done with this universe just yet.
For one final thing, I thought I'd share a couple of pics I scanned from 'The Art of Discworld' to go with this fic. I know there are a few people who've read (and going by the comments, even enjoyed) previous parts of this despite not being familiar with Discworld. Obviously it'd be a bit crazy for me to try to summarise everything referenced from Discworld here, but I can at least offer some nice visuals to fill a few gaps:
The Quantum Weather Butterfly
The Luggage, along with its usual hapless owner, Rincewind
And just for the hell of it, here's The Death of Rats, Quoth the eyeball-fixated Raven, and a festive Hogswatch stocking (I would love to get something like this on a Christmas card)
rhap_chan for kindly volunteering to beta this for me.Title: Binky
Summary: Watanuki, Doumeki, and a horse borrowed from a shinigami from another dimension. Just another job when you work for Yuuko.
Spoilers: Reference to certain facts regarding Doumeki’s childhood revealed in chapter 102, plus a couple of blink-and-you'll-miss-them* references to certain outcomes of the spider arc.
*Look, I swear I didn't realise how appropriate an expression that was until after I'd written it!
There wasn’t a lot of space just behind Watanuki on the footpath that morning, so Doumeki found himself trailing behind. He was not far enough back for Watanuki not to notice him.
“She didn’t say you had to come!”
“But she sent you past the temple, right?” Doumeki pointed out reasonably.
“It was the shortest route! Don’t you have a path to sweep or something?”
“It’ll wait. You can help me finish when we get back,” he suggested.
Watanuki made a number of semi-coherent spluttering noises in some kind of protest.
It looked like it was going to be an interesting day.
***
The day was already far too interesting for Watanuki’s liking.
It had been one of those mornings when Watanuki absolutely dreaded going past the temple. True, this was common to most days that required him to go anywhere near the place with the expectation of meeting a certain Doumeki Shizuka, but today was still looking to be one that really stood out in the field of personal humiliation. Watanuki had long since come to the understanding that Yuuko’s purpose on this earth was to make his life miserable under the dubious guise of it being “all for his own good,” but wasn’t it enough that he had to cook her meals and clean her shop and fetch her disappearing rabbits and deliver messages from shinigami hailing from other worlds?
Oh, of course not. Yuuko was entirely capable of getting creative.
There wasn’t even going to be any delay to this meeting, because Doumeki was right out in front of the temple, engaged in the temple-dweller’s never-ending duty of sweeping the front path. Watanuki maintained just enough faith in the universe to hope that there was still a chance he could just get past here without Doumeki saying anything like…
“That’s a horse,” said Doumeki, and Watanuki snapped like a bowstring.
“THANK YOU VERY MUCH FOR CLEARING THAT UP. I WAS JUST WONDERING WHETHER YOU WERE GOING TO BE ABLE TO SEE IT, YOU
UNSYMPATHETIC BASTARD!”
“Everyone else can see it,” Doumeki pointed out, in a possibly deliberate attempt to ignore perfectly good sarcasm. On the other side of the road, two young children, both pointing and squealing at the animal which was currently chewing on a tuft of grass outside the gate, were dragged past the shrine by their mother with some difficulty.
Watanuki gave a heartfelt sigh. “It’s all Yuuko’s doing.” He tugged on the halter a couple of times, trying to make Binky give up on the grass. Binky relented, but the moment Watanuki let the halter slacken, he bent down again. “She thinks because he likes me, it should be my job to give him some exercise. And I never even wanted a pony!” he added, aware this last bit might have made more sense given some context, but equally aware Doumeki would be the last person in the universe to notice.
Doumeki regarded the horse with the same cool expression he used on everything from Watanuki’s lunches to giant, invisible snake-spirits about to make lunch out of him.
“You’re supposed to ride them. Not lead them around like a dog.”
“Of course you are! But where would I have learned to do something like that?!”
Doumeki shrugged. “It’s your horse.”
“IT IS NOT MY HORSE! What kind of crazy person even keeps a horse in the middle of the city…?” Inspiration struck mid sentence. “Wait-- don’t you know how to handle horses?”
“Nope.”
“But your grandfather had a horse.”
“Never rode it.”
“Why not?”
“You can’t ride in a girl’s kimono.”
And that there – that expression and this whole situation and that sentence – was the only evidence Watanuki ever needed to prove that Doumeki’s divine purpose in this world was to drive him completely insane.
***
Yuuko’s hand-drawn map lead them to a vacant lot between two buildings, and there the directions stopped. Watanuki shook it and turned it over a few times as though it might magically produce some new instructions (which, knowing Yuuko, was a possibility), but nothing useful emerged. Doumeki looked around the lot suspiciously.
“Oi,” he called to Watanuki.
“What?”
“There isn’t anything here, is there?”
“What the hell kind of question is that? Of course not.”
“Hm.”
Doumeki started a lap around the perimeter of the lot, just in case, and waited for whatever was going to happen.
***
Binky found himself another nice tuft of grass. Watanuki gave up and left him to it.
The lot had been vacant long enough to have collected a good stock of long grass and weeds, which Binky was now working his way through with some gusto. There was nothing to sit on that wasn’t dirty or dusty, but after ten minutes, Watanuki gave in to his legs’ loudening protests and sat down anyway. It was starting to look like it would be a very boring afternoon. Watanuki didn’t trust boring afternoons; he’d been working for Yuuko too long.
It was just possible, Watanuki decided, that Yuuko really had sent him here to spend the afternoon in Doumeki’s company while the horse she’d borrowed took care of feeding itself. Of course, that wouldn’t explain the matchbox, but the matchbox wasn’t something Watanuki was in any great rush to have explained.
To be a little more specific about Watanuki’s position at this point, in order to get him through the day, Yuuko had supplied him with the following:
1 (one) borrowed horse (white, male, unsaddled, answers to the name of ‘Binky,’ or rather, doesn’t answer, since (thank god) it was yet to show an inclination to talking).
1 (one) map, hand-drawn on the back of an envelope, apparently in crayon. Yuuko had not strictly told him to follow it when she handed it to him, merely made the suggestion that he might want to take a couple of things with him while he was out exercising the horse, but Watanuki knew her well enough to know how these things worked.
1 (one) matchbox, containing 1 (one) dead beetle. This had been handed to him with no explanation whatsoever. Worse still was the suggestion she’d made that if he did find a use for it, it would be taken out of his pay. Watanuki didn’t want to know what the going rate for a dead beetle in a matchbox was when Yuuko gave it to you. It was bound to be far more than anyone else would ever dream of charging for it. Anyone else would probably agree it was worth a few yen to have such rubbish taken away.
A raven swooped on a rounded clump of dirt, rolled it over with its beak and pecked at it a few times in a disappointed manner. The lot continued being empty.
Over the other side, Doumeki was poking at a pile of broken timber, which they’d both generally assumed was the remnants of whatever had been here before the space returned to vacancy.
“Oi,” called Doumeki’s voice again. “Isn’t there something odd about this stuff? It’s been worn too smooth, like driftwood.”
Reactions warred in Watanuki’s head. On one hand, he knew it was possible Doumeki could be on to something. On the other, he knew Doumeki was the greatest idiot-jerk the universe had ever produced. These were difficult perspectives to reconcile.
“So someone’s been using this place as a dumping ground, so what?”
Doumeki didn’t appear to hear him. “Do you know what barnacles look like?”
“Those things that live on the bottom of ships? How would I know?”
Doumeki’s frown grew deeper. “Do you smell salt?”
Watanuki made a concentrated effort to breathe through his mouth. “We’re miles from the beach.”
“I know.”
There was a clatter as Doumeki let the plank he was holding fall back on to the pile. The silence that followed stretched out just long enough that something had to make the effort to fill it.
“Here, that’s Binky, innit?” said a voice. “What’s he doing here?”
***
From Doumeki’s perspective, the situation looked like this.
Watanuki was waving his arms at a raven and talking to someone who didn’t seem to be there, if by ‘talking to’ you meant ‘arguing with’, and if by ‘arguing’ you meant ‘yelling at the top of his lungs.’ When Watanuki was concerned, all of this was usually a given (up to and including the apparent non-existence of whatever was irritating him).
At one point, Watanuki made a horrified face, slammed his hand over his right eye so violently that Doumeki’s own vision winked out over that side for a second, and yelled “NO OF COURSE I DO NOT HAVE ANY TO SPARE!” This could have been a real concern, but Watanuki seemed to be going on with the argument with no less than his usual energy, so the situation couldn’t be all that bad.
***
From Watanuki’s perspective, the rest of the conversation went like this.
“I was only arsking.” The raven backpedaled as fast as it could manage. “You didn’t have to take it so personally, I didn’t necessarily mean one of yours. I could’ve meant someone else’s.” Something in Watanuki’s face made it quickly amend this to, “Someone else who you weren’t personally acquainted with? Look, it’s a raven thing, awright?” he finished helplessly. “It’s in our natures.”
Watanuki let out a sigh. “You’re not a spirit, are you?” he asked warily.
“Me? Naw. Just your typical raven. Tweet tweet tweet and all that.”
Watanuki was relatively certain that ‘tweet’ was not exactly the usual sound associated with ravens, but there seemed to be more pressing matters.
“But you’re talking. And you know… something about the horse.”
“Well, we’re in the same business, aren’t we?” said the raven. “Faithful steed and occasional translator of the anthropomorphic personification of the decease-a-ment of rodents, that’s me,” it finished proudly, trying to puff up its chest, which ravens aren’t actually designed do, so this failed rather miserably.
Watanuki looked a bit blank.
“You might have met him. Boney little chap. Goes SQUEAK?” the raven added helpfully.
Unfortunately, Watanuki had. “He’s not here, is he?”
“Nah, I’m on a break. We’re done here for the day. Rats always leave first, don’t ya know. Some of them even make it as far as the shore if they swim well enough.”
“Huh?” said Watanuki.
A breeze blew through the lot, bringing with it the faint smell of sea-salt. Binky finished his tuft of grass, pricked up his ears and whinnied softly.
“So, I guess a few entrails would also be out of the question?” said the raven hopefully.
“Oi,” said Doumeki.
Watanuki realised he couldn’t use both of them as an excuse to ignore the other at the same time. Doumeki won.
“What?”
“Your horse is getting away.”
“I told you, it is not my--!” was as far as Watanuki got before he realised Doumeki was right. Binky, who had been very well behaved up to this point, had walked off out of the far side of the lot and down the street. Watanuki yelped and ran after him, grabbing the halter and trying to drag the horse back, but Binky was having none of this. Instead, he sped up so that Watanuki was dragged into a stumbling run, the equivalent of what happens when a small man takes a large, enthusiastic dog out for some exercise. They quickly cleared half a block, Binky showing no sign of slowing down.
Watanuki was briefly aware of the sound of footsteps, which meant Doumeki was catching up. The next thing he knew, he was being half-pushed, half-thrown up onto the moving horse, and he would have protested more but he was too busy half-dragging Doumeki up behind him, because hell if he was going to be stuck on a runaway horse on his own. As if this was all he was been waiting for, Binky picked up his pace from a fast trot to a canter and then to a gallop within the space of a few seconds. Faster and faster they went, until the whole world turned into a blur and Watanuki could’ve sworn Binky’s hooves weren’t even touching the ground anymore, and were they really going upwards? Within the space of a minute, it seemed they’d left the whole world behind them.
In fact, they very probably had.
***
Some sort of cinematic effects are usually pretty traditional during these sort of scenes. Time slows down, the world drops away from you, the camera travels down a great tunnel made of swirly effects and the stars go streaming past. It’s quite pretty when done well, and serves to wipe any remaining doubt in the minds of those seeing it that they’re going through some seriously weird shit.
Binky was a bit too familiar with these trips to bother with much of that, though this was probably for the best, under the circumstances. Doumeki was difficult to impress, and Watanuki had his eyes closed for most of it, and it would have been a shame for all that effort to go to waste.
***
By the time the horse started to slow down enough that Doumeki could see where they were, the scenery had changed quite a bit.
So.
He and Watanuki were riding a horse. Neither of them knew how to ride a horse, but apparently this horse was pretty good at being ridden.
The horse they were riding was flying. Through the air, at high speed, without any apparent difficulty. It was moving with exactly the same gait of any normal galloping horse; however, its hooves weren’t actually impacting on any ground at any point in the process. This didn’t seem to bother it.
The air through which they were flying carried them over a steep-faced cliff which descended some tens or hundreds of metres to a roaring ocean. Doumeki didn’t take long to decide that it wasn’t likely that either the cliff or the ocean had anything to do with anywhere that had ever heard of Japan.
In the ocean was a ship, not the modern metal-and-smoke-stacks variety, but one of the old fashioned wooden kinds, with masts and sails and rope hanging from everything you could hang a rope from. It was certainly not as impressive as the ones you saw in the movies; whatever the exact requirements were for a ship to be classified as ‘stately’ were, it seemed unlikely this boat would even have made the short list. It wasn’t very large, obviously a long way from new, and had probably spent more of its life carrying cargo than kings. Had Doumeki still been interested in the question about barnacles, the bottom was bound to be caked with them. It was also in a lot of trouble.
The ship was being buffeted by gale-force winds from a storm, the like of which Doumeki had never even imagined. The vessel was under incredible duress, so much that it seemed as though the only reason it wasn’t yet an utter wreck was that it was holding out for a way to splinter in every possible direction at once. The horse didn’t seem the least bit bothered by the storm, but given that it wasn’t bothered by gravity or dimensional boundaries (or two of the world’s least experienced riders) either, this probably shouldn’t have been a surprise.
From what Doumeki had managed to gather from Watanuki’s mad ramblings on the subject, it seemed the horse they were riding had been borrowed from a shinigami from another world.
So.
Here they were, riding through a storm on a shinigami’s horse, which was taking them towards a boat full of people who were about to die.
It made sense, if you thought about it like that.
***
For once in his life, Watanuki was too awed and horrified to scream at anyone about what was going on. He didn’t know where he was or how he’d gotten there, but he didn’t need to have ever actually seen an old ship caught in a storm like this before to have a pretty good idea of what was about to happen next, and he really didn’t want to be here to see it.
Binky reached the ship and touched down with practiced ease. To all appearances, he was now standing on the deck, but the ship was definitely lurching around a whole lot more than Binky was.
People were still running, or in some cases, tumbling, or even – indeed – practically swimming around the deck, and doing incomprehensible things (to Watanuki’s eyes at least) with the rigging and sails and various other parts of the ship that two twenty-first-century schoolboys would have no hope of understanding. No one seemed to notice the horse, but it was probably fair to say that even had Binky been conventionally visible to them in this world, they were all a bit distracted at the moment. By this point in the wrecking process, they weren’t so much fighting a losing battle as flailing around in the mad hope that some kind of cosmic director would yell, ‘Cut! Okay, everyone take ten!’ if they just kept the scene going convincingly for a little longer.
It was a really first class storm – rain and thunder and lighting and wind and even a scattering of hailstones just to add that extra class; there very likely would have been water spouts had the ocean been just a little deeper. It would have been easy to believe it wasn’t what constituted conventional weather at all, but rather what happened when two storms of quite different character collided and got into an argument over whose fault it was.
Beyond even this thought, there was something… odd about the storm, in a way that would probably have been nearly impossible to appreciate from any vantage point other than the mysteriously protected Binky – and this was that the storm had a width and a depth, no more than about a hundred meters to each, beyond which the wind calmed from violent to peaceful quite sharply. Perhaps stranger still, the storm actually shrank the closer to shore you went. The wind went funneling out to sea in something akin to a cone shape. And by that logic, if you followed it back far enough, somewhere back there would have to be the place where it collapsed down to nothing at all.
Watanuki squinted up into the storm. Even though he could only barely feel the wind, it did horrible things to visibility. And yet, Watanuki still couldn’t help but feel – the same way he felt monsters sneaking up on him which no one else saw – that he could almost make out something up there, something that drew his eyes inexorably up towards it, and it was something important…
***
“What?” said Doumeki, as though he couldn’t believe what he had just heard.
“I said I have to get up there!” Watanuki shouted, pointing, then realised that as long as they were close to Binky he didn’t have to shout; he could hear himself just fine. “It’s coming from something on the cliffs!” he shouted anyway, because it was still hard to shake the feeling he should need to, and since he was talking to Doumeki it was practically traditional anyway.
“You want to go to the source of the storm?” said Doumeki. He didn’t say ‘you really are an idiot,’ but he was definitely thinking it.
“The wind doesn’t bother him,” shouted Watanuki, indicating Binky by yanking on the halter. “How do you get this thing to turn around?” Watanuki discovered that by pulling on only one side of the halter at a time he could make Binky turn, but making him start moving again was more difficult.
Doumeki was quiet for a few seconds.
“Oi,” he called. “If you get up there, you can stop the storm, right?”
“What?”
Doumeki slid backwards off the horse in one movement, ignoring Watanuki’s loud demands to know what the hell he thought he was doing, landed a bit awkwardly, but made sure to keep one hand in contact with the horse until he had the other wrapped firmly around the mast. Now secured as best he could manage, he slapped Binky once, hard on the rear.
It seemed to do the trick.
***
Binky charged upwards through the storm, Watanuki trying to keep him in the centre of the cone. He was starting to get the hang of steering. Left and right were fairly manageable. Up and down were a bit trickier, being directions the traditional bridle had never been designed to deal with. Fortunately, Binky seemed to be getting the idea of where he was expected to go. The wind howled at them, louder and more determined to force them back the closer they got, but Binky wasn’t listening.
By the time they’d gotten within a few yards of the cliffs, the tunnel of wind had shrunk to barely a man’s height, tapering off even more sharply over that last little distance, so that it really did come to a fine point somewhere on the cliff face. Binky slowed to a trot and then a walk so the final approach to the cliff face – visibility gradually returning as the wind diminished – became a slow-reveal affair.
From here you could really get an idea of the scale of the whole thing, just close enough to make out the scraggly trees at the top that gave the cliff some perspective. To let you know that it wasn’t closer than your eyes were trying to tell you: it just really was that enormous.
And from here you could see the steep walls weren’t actually smooth, they were littered with rocks, with seabirds’ nests wedged into any crack that looked relatively safe. There were even a few adventurous mosses and weedy plants eking out a living anywhere they could find a few grains of honest dirt.
And from here you could make that out that right where the wind calmed, there was a little indention in the rock. It was the sort that might have been called a pothole had the ground only been a bit closer to horizontal – just about the right size for a hapless traveler to get a boot good and stuck in. Stretched across that were the delicate strands of a spider’s web.
And caught in that…
“Oh,” said Watanuki, wondering in some corner of his mind just exactly at which point in his life this had started to constitute a perfectly satisfactory explanation for anything.
Caught in the web, right at the very apex of the storm and struggling madly to get free, was a single butterfly.
Even given that it was flapping its wings at that frantic speed that only small insects are capable of, Watanuki could almost imagine he could see great gusts of wind emerging from every panicked beat of the entangled creature. Despite all the chaos, the spider’s web itself had remained miraculously intact, but it was probably safe to say that if something the size of a butterfly was going to take it into its head to start causing storms with every careless flap, it was probably best to throw out all those ‘equal and opposite reaction’ ideas from the start. The spider cowered helplessly on the edge of the web. It wasn’t even going to try to get any closer.
Watanuki didn’t have to stop and think about what needed to be done. The angle wasn’t ideal; Binky had done his best given the circumstances, but reaching from the back of a horse you have only a general understanding of how to stay on while suspended in mid air was never going to be the easiest way to get to anything. As carefully as he could manage with one hand, Watanuki reached around behind the struggling insect, broke a few crucial entangling strands, coaxed it on to a finger, and gently plucked the butterfly from the web.
The butterfly cooperated beautifully. The moment its wings stopped fluttering, the wind dropped away as if it had never been there.
“Alright now?” he asked it softly. The butterfly did indeed seem to be quite happy where it was. It opened and closed its wings once or twice in a lazy sort of way, but showed no sign it wanted to take off. Now that it had stopped moving, he could see that it was yellow and black in colour. There were detailed patterns covering its wings, something about which gave him vertigo.
Mission accomplished, Watanuki surveyed the damage. There was a large hole in the centre of the spider’s web now, which had probably been pretty much unavoidable given the circumstances. Something about the sight of this made Watanuki’s stomach try to move residence to his feet – events of late had given him a healthy respect for spiders. The spider was examining the web in a forlorn manner.
Watanuki shuffled the butterfly carefully on to his shoulder and fished the matchbox out of his pocket.
“Sorry about the damage,” he told the spider, “but there probably wasn’t anything else to do, and – well, have this in consolation.”
He tipped the dead beetle onto the web. The spider prodded the offering cautiously with a foot, as if worried this meal was going to turn out like the last one, but finding nothing amiss, leapt on it with relish.
It was possible, of course, that all he was dealing with was the real common- or garden- (though not shrine) variety spider in this world, and efforts to appease it were laughably unnecessary; but in a place where even a butterfly could make storms, who in their right mind would take the chance?
***
Back on the ship, a crew of bleary-looking seamen was trying to figure out what had happened, whether this really meant the scene was a wrap and if they could all go for lunch now. Doumeki, still standing in their midst, was fully visible to them since he had separated from the horse, and a few crewmen were staring at him and trying to figure out where he’d come from, whether he was some sort of storm-induced hallucination, or what, if anything, he had to do with it at all. No matter how you turned it, he didn’t look anything like any of the locally recognised deities of good fortune or miraculous rescues, but the sad fact of the matter was that, should the Cult of the Deadpan Schoolboy Ocean Weather God catch on in the area any time in the near future, it was going to be all his fault.
“What you did back there,” said Watanuki, once safely back on deck, “was incredibly stupid.”
“Which one of us went charging off into the eye of the storm, you idiot?” Doumeki released his death grip on the mast before Watanuki got back, but there were a few splinters still clinging to his clothes.
“Well it worked, didn’t it?” Watanuki reminded him, a little petulantly. “The storm stopped.”
“Yeah. It did. What’s that?” Doumeki added, pointing to Watanuki’s shoulder.
“Oh!” Watanuki found himself instinctively cupping a protective hand over the creature. Despite all the trouble it had caused he couldn’t help feel a sort of fondness for the thing. “You may not believe it, but this little guy was what was causing that freak weather in the first place.”
Doumeki seemed to consider this. “They say a butterfly flapping its wings somewhere can be the difference between a sunny day and a storm.”
This logic didn’t appeal to Watanuki. “Maybe, but it’s not supposed to happen this fast!”
“Are you sure?”
Watanuki was sure. Watanuki was absolutely certain he was right about this one. It wasn’t his fault there was a perfect counterargument sitting on his shoulder.
“Well? Can you make him take us back?” Doumeki indicated the horse.
“I think we have to just hope he wants to take us,” Watanuki replied, fervently hoping Binky didn’t have anywhere else he wanted to take them that day.
Doumeki seemed satisfied enough by this. “Help me up again.”
Watanuki grudgingly leant him a hand. He screwed up his face as Doumeki settled back onto the horse. “You’re soaked to the skin!” he complained. “You’re getting me wet!”
“What did you expect? Get us home already. We’ve still got to sweep the shrine this afternoon.”
Doumeki shortly discovered he couldn’t hang on and hold his hands over his ears at the same time, but he probably deserved that. Binky took back off into the sky.
The wooden planks were gone when they got back to the lot, but no one really noticed.
***
Yuuko was waiting for them when they arrived, which was no great surprise. She was terribly pleased with the butterfly, which transferred itself to a proffered finger with almost no prompting at all. The image suited her so well Doumeki could have believed the butterfly had been created just for the purpose, although it couldn’t have hurt the impression that she’d found herself a lacy, yellow and black dress for the afternoon either.
Binky was led away around the back of the shop for a good rest, although he still looked as fresh as ever. Watanuki said he was never, ever, ever doing anything like this again, no matter how many domestic chores he had to do instead, which Doumeki figured meant he had about a week off, maybe two at the outside. Life around Watanuki was a lot louder, but at least it was never dull.
Actually, it was exactly one week later, while Doumeki was sweeping the path again, that something bumped into his ankle and he looked down to see a large, metal-and-wooden chest. It doesn’t take any particular skill to bump into something of that nature when it stands at about knee-height; however it does usually require one to be to be the one who was moving at the time, and Doumeki had definitely been standing perfectly still.
“Don’t you even ask!” Watanuki’s voice yelled from the gateway. “And don’t step on any of its toes. And for heaven’s sake, don’t feed it anything else! ”
And again, this was going to be the end of it. But I still sort of wanted to write something with Susan, since she's about the one remaining character in the Death 'family' left unmentioned, and besides, she and Watanuki *both* have this little thing where they see a lot of monsters most people don't (although they do go about dealing with them a little differently). So I tried writing a short, missing-scene/epilogue with her in it, and it grew into another fic. ^^;;; There's still a real epilogue to go as well, but damnit, that one *will* stay at a few hundred words. I swear!
ETA: For anyone reading the series in order, part 3, being the Susan one, can now be found up here.
So, in conclusion: still not quite done with this universe just yet.
For one final thing, I thought I'd share a couple of pics I scanned from 'The Art of Discworld' to go with this fic. I know there are a few people who've read (and going by the comments, even enjoyed) previous parts of this despite not being familiar with Discworld. Obviously it'd be a bit crazy for me to try to summarise everything referenced from Discworld here, but I can at least offer some nice visuals to fill a few gaps:
The Quantum Weather Butterfly
The Luggage, along with its usual hapless owner, Rincewind
And just for the hell of it, here's The Death of Rats, Quoth the eyeball-fixated Raven, and a festive Hogswatch stocking (I would love to get something like this on a Christmas card)
