Post by Darth Eolais on Apr 25, 2015 2:06:17 GMT
Alternative titles: Monstrosities of Character Interaction; That Thread Where Amorata Posts All the NSB-Related Stuff Which She Has The Audacity To Call Fanfiction.
Original thread here. Also, I'm reposting the first two sections of "Date Night" to make things a little easier to follow when I get around to writing the other six sections, and to remind people that they exist.
Enjoy.
-----------------------------------
Date Night
or, "Amorata and Ares Go To the Opera"
~~~
Hour Zero
The lights of Sith Row shone brightly, almost washing out the stars and city lights overhead as two figures stepped out of The Raven, a high-end if rather mundane restaurant on the corner that joined the Row to the rest of New Bethrezen’s Recreational Quarter. One was tall and steady, every footstep sure; the other, whose hand rested lightly on his arm, was slender and graceful, despite the heeled shoes that raised the top of her head from eye level to almost the same as his. Their hair fluttered in the same light breeze that carried their soft laughter into the numerous side alleys as they turned their backs on the Row and turned the corner.
“--and then I said, ‘Yes, but in terms of actual effectiveness, that would be roughly equivalent to sticking an eggplant up your nose!’,” Amorata finished with a slightly unladylike grin.
Ares’ chuckle resounded in the cool night air. “I’m not sure which is harder to imagine: his face, or those words seriously coming out of your mouth.” He paused, taking stock of his surroundings. “Ah, where are we going?”
Caught, Amorata’s cheeks gained a hint of embarrassed red. “Do you remember the last time you took me shopping?”
“The time where we got the thing with the concertina wire, or the other time?” Ares asked, raising an eyebrow.
“The other time.” Amorata bit her lip. “Do you remember the man with the red jacket who bumped into us?”
“Vaguely.”
“And how he apologized so profusely once he recognized us? And insisted on giving us something to make up for the inconvenience?”
“Yes,” Ares said slowly. “Why?”
“Well…” Amorata’s head tilted upwards, in no way hiding her reflexive look of carefully crafted innocence. “He ended up giving us two tickets to Sidious, to be performed in two weeks. You thanked him very graciously and stuck the tickets in your wallet, where, as far as I know, they have remained for the past two weeks.”
With a sinking feeling in the region of his stomach, Ares tore his attention away from his fianceé’s face to examine his surroundings.
They had just reached the steps of the New Bethrezen Opera House.
Very carefully, he refrained from making any comment on a certain rise in his general level of trepidation. Amorata, for whatever inexplicable reason, didn’t like such comments.
“I’m hardly dressed for an opera,” he protested as they ascended towards the thick oak doors.
“A Sith is dressed appropriately no matter where he or she goes,” Amorata replied, her light grip on his arm propelling him inexorably onwards. “After all, who would dare say otherwise? That’s why certain of our Brotherhood can get away with such horrible fashion choices.”
The doors swung open as they reached the top step.
“Tickets, please.” The usher’s accent was both sophisticated and irredeemably bored. Then he looked up, and his eyes widened in recognition. “Darth -- my lord! My lady! We were not expecting you. Have you tickets -- that is to say -- I mean…!”
Amorata held out a hand. Ares withdrew his wallet from his coat pocket and gave it to her, barely holding back a sigh. Arm still linked through his, Amorata flipped through the jumble of various ID and datacards until she found the tickets, which she presented to the flustered usher with a smile. “We have. However, we came across them quite by chance, and were hoping a more suitable place might be unfilled. Perhaps on the balcony?”
“For you, my Lady, anything.” The usher regained his composure astonishingly quickly. Despite the subject matter supposedly being events of great importance in their history, few if any Sith had actually attended one of the famous operas. Even so, there was a certain protocol that nearly everyone on New Bethrezen had drilled into their bone marrow: namely, what a Sith wants, they get. “The balcony -- or perhaps a box? A recent cancellation has left our best empty, quite at the last minute.”
Amorata’s smile grew wider. “That would be lovely. Please, lead the way.”
They took their seats just as the lights were dimming and the synth-orchestra struck the first chords.
Relax, Amorata thought at Ares. Her own mind was practically humming with sardonic excitement. This will be fun.
Ares gave in to the sigh that had been building ever since he had seen the opera house’s doors. Resignation, already a strange bedfellow, had just climbed in and stolen all the pillows.
~~~
Hour One
“Nuyak motina zodisi kia nun tikazi nu meo nwit, nu meo kosh jont zeprie zo dalia zibeti!”
“I was born under a lucky star?” Ares muttered to Amorata, eyebrow raised. “Who writes this Bantha poodoo?”
Amorata shrugged. “The lyrics aren’t really the point, you know. The point is for people with vocal talent to show off.”
“Sis kash tave tik ipros, nuo nu meo kosh jont sis iprooooooooos!”
Ares stared at her blankly, as only a Miraluka could. “What talent?”
Amorata reached over and took his wrist. Ares, pleased but confused, suddenly realized that she was checking his watch. “The kind of talent that lets the contralto playing the young Palpatine hold a note for… over a minute now.”
“...Is that what that tone was? I thought it was someone’s hearing aid or something.”
“Hearing aids don’t work like that, dear. Now shhh, people are glaring at us.”
And instantly looking away when they realize what we are, Ares wanted to counter, but thinking about being recognizable made him uncomfortable, so he turned his gaze back to the multicolored lights sweeping across the stage.
Is that woman wearing a circus tent?
On stage, the reigning monarch of Naboo paraded by as Palpatine’s father Cosinga sang at length about his envy. Grudgingly, Ares found himself agreeing with Palpatine’s counterpoint, which was essentially a more eloquent version of “Shut up and take power already, idiot!”.
Minutes and multiple long notes later, the sung argument had drifted away from Cosinga’s failings in the megalomaniacal power grab department and towards Palpatine’s desire to go to university. Cosinga appeared to be fretting about the undesirable influences higher education might have on his son. Palpatine’s response involved a lot of high notes, flashing lights, and variations on “I do what I want!” Any further detail was lost on Ares. Opera, he was learning, focused on perfect notes -- for a given value of “perfect” -- to the detriment of actually being able to understand what the singers were saying.
“You know, originally operas were written in High Galactic,” Amorata murmured, as though she had been listening to his thoughts. Come to think of it, she might have been doing exactly that. Ares wouldn’t put it past her. “Which is to say, they were performed in a language everyone in the audience could understand. It was only after the general language changed that people got this impression that opera ought to be even more incomprehensible than it was originally.”
“How do you know this much about opera?” Ares muttered back.
Amorata leaned closer, almost resting her head on his shoulder, the reduction in distance proportionate to her reduction in volume. “Back when I was working as a slicer, every so often I would get a client who thought I was pretty enough to serve as an arm decoration and uneducated enough to need an introduction to, quote, real culture. I got paid extra for a night out and they didn’t have to shell out full price for an official escort service. It worked out decently, aside from how incurably boring most high-society people are. It’s all gossip and nothing of substance at the dinner table.”
The sensation of her breath on his ear sent a shiver down Ares’ spine and his thoughts on a highly entertaining, if rather embarrassing, tangent. Without moving his head, he glanced at Amorata and the small smile playing across her face.
She knew. She knew what she was doing to him, and she wasn’t a bit sorry. And Ares would be damned, figuratively and possibly literally, if he let her know she was succeeding. With the force of will that had served him so well on other battlefields, he forced his focus back to the events playing out on the stage. Palpatine had apparently managed to make his way to a university, despite his father’s long-winded and irritating objections.
The music’s theme changed as a dark shadow slowly overtook stage left. The actor playing Darth Plagueis entered, pausing briefly to allow the spotlight operator to begin tracking him and then belting out his first few notes in a rich baritone. Palpatine and his chorus of friends on the other side of the stage froze.
“My master is dead, is dead, is dead! I cut his throat and burned his head to dust!”
“And off they go on another odyssey of drawn-out vowels.” Ares sighed. The last thing he wanted to be doing was sitting listening to someone sing about killing their master and searching for another apprentice, but here he was, and it was all Amorata’s fault. “If I didn’t care so much about the value of sentient life, I think I might just strangle the actors and leave.”
“You darling,” Amorata purred in his ear. “You’re so precious when you hold yourself back for the sake of your morality.”
Trying to figure out whether Amorata calling him “precious” as though he were an animal or a small child made him feel pleasantly warm or just downright uneasy occupied Ares for the next several minutes. Meanwhile, Plagueis had finished summarizing the events of his rise to power complete with overdramatic hand gestures and was beginning to extol Palpatine’s virtues as a potential apprentice. The list went on. And on. And on.
“It’s like some sort of stalker’s love ballad,” Amorata breathed, apparently fascinated. “He’s even using the same verse structure as the famous duet from Caramia and Ledoe.”
“I wish you hadn’t mentioned that. Although, since you have mentioned it, mention it to Drakonis, will you? He’ll appreciate its value in the realm of psychological warfare better than I ever could.” Ares shuddered, and quickly steered his thoughts down another track. “How many of those clients did you have, anyway?”
Amorata shrugged. “Does it really matter?”
“...I suppose not.” A particularly loud note called Ares’ attention back to the stage once again. Palpatine’s friends had slowly drifted off stage, leaving the focus on Palpatine and Plagueis as they sang their way through their first conversation. Palpatine was animated, pacing the stage as he questioned Plagueis; Plagueis stood perfectly still in the center, giving cryptic replies. The orchestra slowly worked themselves into a frenzy until, with one final crash of cymbals, Plagueis revealed his knowledge of Palpatine’s secret activities against Cosinga.
Amorata checked her program. “Oh, good, they’re almost done with the first act. We’ll be able to stand up and stretch a bit soon.”
“That was only the first act?” Ares exclaimed, just loudly enough to draw another round of glares from the rows below. Lowering his voice, he asked, “Out of how many?”
“Six.” Seeing Ares’ shocked look, Amorata laughed softly. “Don’t worry, halfway through there’s an intermission. They sell food and beverages. You’ll be fine.”
Ares was about to insist that no, he would not be fine, and they should just go home now, when the lights went up, Amorata stood up and stretched, causing her dress to move in interesting ways, and he completely forgot what he was about to say in favor of, for lack of a better word, wondering.
~~~
To be continued
Original thread here. Also, I'm reposting the first two sections of "Date Night" to make things a little easier to follow when I get around to writing the other six sections, and to remind people that they exist.
Enjoy.
-----------------------------------
Date Night
or, "Amorata and Ares Go To the Opera"
~~~
Hour Zero
The lights of Sith Row shone brightly, almost washing out the stars and city lights overhead as two figures stepped out of The Raven, a high-end if rather mundane restaurant on the corner that joined the Row to the rest of New Bethrezen’s Recreational Quarter. One was tall and steady, every footstep sure; the other, whose hand rested lightly on his arm, was slender and graceful, despite the heeled shoes that raised the top of her head from eye level to almost the same as his. Their hair fluttered in the same light breeze that carried their soft laughter into the numerous side alleys as they turned their backs on the Row and turned the corner.
“--and then I said, ‘Yes, but in terms of actual effectiveness, that would be roughly equivalent to sticking an eggplant up your nose!’,” Amorata finished with a slightly unladylike grin.
Ares’ chuckle resounded in the cool night air. “I’m not sure which is harder to imagine: his face, or those words seriously coming out of your mouth.” He paused, taking stock of his surroundings. “Ah, where are we going?”
Caught, Amorata’s cheeks gained a hint of embarrassed red. “Do you remember the last time you took me shopping?”
“The time where we got the thing with the concertina wire, or the other time?” Ares asked, raising an eyebrow.
“The other time.” Amorata bit her lip. “Do you remember the man with the red jacket who bumped into us?”
“Vaguely.”
“And how he apologized so profusely once he recognized us? And insisted on giving us something to make up for the inconvenience?”
“Yes,” Ares said slowly. “Why?”
“Well…” Amorata’s head tilted upwards, in no way hiding her reflexive look of carefully crafted innocence. “He ended up giving us two tickets to Sidious, to be performed in two weeks. You thanked him very graciously and stuck the tickets in your wallet, where, as far as I know, they have remained for the past two weeks.”
With a sinking feeling in the region of his stomach, Ares tore his attention away from his fianceé’s face to examine his surroundings.
They had just reached the steps of the New Bethrezen Opera House.
Very carefully, he refrained from making any comment on a certain rise in his general level of trepidation. Amorata, for whatever inexplicable reason, didn’t like such comments.
“I’m hardly dressed for an opera,” he protested as they ascended towards the thick oak doors.
“A Sith is dressed appropriately no matter where he or she goes,” Amorata replied, her light grip on his arm propelling him inexorably onwards. “After all, who would dare say otherwise? That’s why certain of our Brotherhood can get away with such horrible fashion choices.”
The doors swung open as they reached the top step.
“Tickets, please.” The usher’s accent was both sophisticated and irredeemably bored. Then he looked up, and his eyes widened in recognition. “Darth -- my lord! My lady! We were not expecting you. Have you tickets -- that is to say -- I mean…!”
Amorata held out a hand. Ares withdrew his wallet from his coat pocket and gave it to her, barely holding back a sigh. Arm still linked through his, Amorata flipped through the jumble of various ID and datacards until she found the tickets, which she presented to the flustered usher with a smile. “We have. However, we came across them quite by chance, and were hoping a more suitable place might be unfilled. Perhaps on the balcony?”
“For you, my Lady, anything.” The usher regained his composure astonishingly quickly. Despite the subject matter supposedly being events of great importance in their history, few if any Sith had actually attended one of the famous operas. Even so, there was a certain protocol that nearly everyone on New Bethrezen had drilled into their bone marrow: namely, what a Sith wants, they get. “The balcony -- or perhaps a box? A recent cancellation has left our best empty, quite at the last minute.”
Amorata’s smile grew wider. “That would be lovely. Please, lead the way.”
They took their seats just as the lights were dimming and the synth-orchestra struck the first chords.
Relax, Amorata thought at Ares. Her own mind was practically humming with sardonic excitement. This will be fun.
Ares gave in to the sigh that had been building ever since he had seen the opera house’s doors. Resignation, already a strange bedfellow, had just climbed in and stolen all the pillows.
~~~
Hour One
“Nuyak motina zodisi kia nun tikazi nu meo nwit, nu meo kosh jont zeprie zo dalia zibeti!”
“I was born under a lucky star?” Ares muttered to Amorata, eyebrow raised. “Who writes this Bantha poodoo?”
Amorata shrugged. “The lyrics aren’t really the point, you know. The point is for people with vocal talent to show off.”
“Sis kash tave tik ipros, nuo nu meo kosh jont sis iprooooooooos!”
Ares stared at her blankly, as only a Miraluka could. “What talent?”
Amorata reached over and took his wrist. Ares, pleased but confused, suddenly realized that she was checking his watch. “The kind of talent that lets the contralto playing the young Palpatine hold a note for… over a minute now.”
“...Is that what that tone was? I thought it was someone’s hearing aid or something.”
“Hearing aids don’t work like that, dear. Now shhh, people are glaring at us.”
And instantly looking away when they realize what we are, Ares wanted to counter, but thinking about being recognizable made him uncomfortable, so he turned his gaze back to the multicolored lights sweeping across the stage.
Is that woman wearing a circus tent?
On stage, the reigning monarch of Naboo paraded by as Palpatine’s father Cosinga sang at length about his envy. Grudgingly, Ares found himself agreeing with Palpatine’s counterpoint, which was essentially a more eloquent version of “Shut up and take power already, idiot!”.
Minutes and multiple long notes later, the sung argument had drifted away from Cosinga’s failings in the megalomaniacal power grab department and towards Palpatine’s desire to go to university. Cosinga appeared to be fretting about the undesirable influences higher education might have on his son. Palpatine’s response involved a lot of high notes, flashing lights, and variations on “I do what I want!” Any further detail was lost on Ares. Opera, he was learning, focused on perfect notes -- for a given value of “perfect” -- to the detriment of actually being able to understand what the singers were saying.
“You know, originally operas were written in High Galactic,” Amorata murmured, as though she had been listening to his thoughts. Come to think of it, she might have been doing exactly that. Ares wouldn’t put it past her. “Which is to say, they were performed in a language everyone in the audience could understand. It was only after the general language changed that people got this impression that opera ought to be even more incomprehensible than it was originally.”
“How do you know this much about opera?” Ares muttered back.
Amorata leaned closer, almost resting her head on his shoulder, the reduction in distance proportionate to her reduction in volume. “Back when I was working as a slicer, every so often I would get a client who thought I was pretty enough to serve as an arm decoration and uneducated enough to need an introduction to, quote, real culture. I got paid extra for a night out and they didn’t have to shell out full price for an official escort service. It worked out decently, aside from how incurably boring most high-society people are. It’s all gossip and nothing of substance at the dinner table.”
The sensation of her breath on his ear sent a shiver down Ares’ spine and his thoughts on a highly entertaining, if rather embarrassing, tangent. Without moving his head, he glanced at Amorata and the small smile playing across her face.
She knew. She knew what she was doing to him, and she wasn’t a bit sorry. And Ares would be damned, figuratively and possibly literally, if he let her know she was succeeding. With the force of will that had served him so well on other battlefields, he forced his focus back to the events playing out on the stage. Palpatine had apparently managed to make his way to a university, despite his father’s long-winded and irritating objections.
The music’s theme changed as a dark shadow slowly overtook stage left. The actor playing Darth Plagueis entered, pausing briefly to allow the spotlight operator to begin tracking him and then belting out his first few notes in a rich baritone. Palpatine and his chorus of friends on the other side of the stage froze.
“My master is dead, is dead, is dead! I cut his throat and burned his head to dust!”
“And off they go on another odyssey of drawn-out vowels.” Ares sighed. The last thing he wanted to be doing was sitting listening to someone sing about killing their master and searching for another apprentice, but here he was, and it was all Amorata’s fault. “If I didn’t care so much about the value of sentient life, I think I might just strangle the actors and leave.”
“You darling,” Amorata purred in his ear. “You’re so precious when you hold yourself back for the sake of your morality.”
Trying to figure out whether Amorata calling him “precious” as though he were an animal or a small child made him feel pleasantly warm or just downright uneasy occupied Ares for the next several minutes. Meanwhile, Plagueis had finished summarizing the events of his rise to power complete with overdramatic hand gestures and was beginning to extol Palpatine’s virtues as a potential apprentice. The list went on. And on. And on.
“It’s like some sort of stalker’s love ballad,” Amorata breathed, apparently fascinated. “He’s even using the same verse structure as the famous duet from Caramia and Ledoe.”
“I wish you hadn’t mentioned that. Although, since you have mentioned it, mention it to Drakonis, will you? He’ll appreciate its value in the realm of psychological warfare better than I ever could.” Ares shuddered, and quickly steered his thoughts down another track. “How many of those clients did you have, anyway?”
Amorata shrugged. “Does it really matter?”
“...I suppose not.” A particularly loud note called Ares’ attention back to the stage once again. Palpatine’s friends had slowly drifted off stage, leaving the focus on Palpatine and Plagueis as they sang their way through their first conversation. Palpatine was animated, pacing the stage as he questioned Plagueis; Plagueis stood perfectly still in the center, giving cryptic replies. The orchestra slowly worked themselves into a frenzy until, with one final crash of cymbals, Plagueis revealed his knowledge of Palpatine’s secret activities against Cosinga.
Amorata checked her program. “Oh, good, they’re almost done with the first act. We’ll be able to stand up and stretch a bit soon.”
“That was only the first act?” Ares exclaimed, just loudly enough to draw another round of glares from the rows below. Lowering his voice, he asked, “Out of how many?”
“Six.” Seeing Ares’ shocked look, Amorata laughed softly. “Don’t worry, halfway through there’s an intermission. They sell food and beverages. You’ll be fine.”
Ares was about to insist that no, he would not be fine, and they should just go home now, when the lights went up, Amorata stood up and stretched, causing her dress to move in interesting ways, and he completely forgot what he was about to say in favor of, for lack of a better word, wondering.
~~~
To be continued