The exercise:
Write about: fanatics.
Brought home a couple of serious baseball fans from the Island. The boys got into watching the Blue Jays with my parents last visit, but that was for less than a week.
Tonight I spent half an hour chatting baseball with them before dinner, then after dinner took them out to the nearby school field for the second straight night to play ball.
Max can really hammer the ball, and Miles is surprisingly consistent with making good contact.
3 comments:
I feel like baseball is like cricket: there are plenty of people who claim that it's a deeply fascinating sport and can spend hours and hours with it, but objectively... it's dull. It takes a long time to play, the only people who really get involved in it are the players, and people who insist on trying to explain how interesting it really is miss the point that if it was really interesting they wouldn't have to explain that.... That said, I think the same is true of most hobbies and sports for most people, so it's not a complaint about baseball per se :) Plus, baseball isn't really played much in Europe (although cricket, tediously, is) which makes it harder to get into.
[And I've run over again, sorry.]
Fanatics
As Dread closed the doors behind them he did something extra this time, and Fabian raised an eyebrow at him. Despite the dim light, coming mostly from Rystin and the Staff of Five Elements, Dread saw it and shrugged, his shoulders rising and falling rhythmically. "It doesn't stop us leaving," he said. "It might stop anything chasing us though. It'll slow it down, at least."
Fabian considered asking what was prompting this caution but then decided that he would have done the same if he had any way to do so. Putting up a strictly worded sign threatening pursuers with the full might of HR would only work if they'd already met Cassandra.
The Maestro was looking around with the air of a home-owner who's been away and is now checking what the house-sitter got up to in their absence. Sebastian was also looking around, but he looked nervous and alert and, unless Fabian was very much mistaken, was trembling like a dandelion gone to seed and caught in a breeze. Rystin was already heading towards the main staircase with the steps of a man who has a job to do whether he liked it or not.
"Follow the light, gentlemen, please," said Dread in a calm voice, carefully taking Sebastian's elbow. The spider-mage flinched but started moving after Rystin.
"This is about right," said the Maestro, starting to walk slowly along. "Though... that exhibit." He pointed at the yellowish-white panels of the Cycle of Monnia. At the front of their little line Rystin stiffened. "That's the Cycle of Monnia, which was destroyed during the Tenrith War."
There was a long silence until the Maestro broke it with, "Well?"
Dread sighed. "It might not have been destroyed," he said. "But the only way to know for certain is for experts to examine it and see if it's the real thing or a replica. Rystin thinks it's the real thing."
The Maestro looked over at Rystin, who was stomping up the stairs as though they were swamped in mud and he needed to pull each foot free each step.
"We have replicas of many things," he said. "Though... the Cycle of Monnia was strangely powerful. We would need the elves to investigate it, I think."
In the back of Fabian's head a voice, sounding suspiciously like his ex-wife, whispered, "now, that's tact." Rystin's stomps eased off a little, but the stiffness to his gait remained.
Dread started moving again. "There were fanatics on both sides in that conflict," he said. "I'd like to believe it's a replica, but to be honest, I think a replica would be in the Museum, not the Halls of Sunset."
"Maybe," said the Maestro. "Bu-"
"It's fake," said Sebastian. His voice was feeble and quiet in the vastness of the Halls, but it was enough that everyone stopped again and stared at him.
"I'm half wisp-elf," he said. "You figured out the spider-elf part, fine, but I'm half spider-elf, half wisp-elf. And I can tell you right now, though it's been hard to sort it out: that Cycle is fake but there is an active wisp-elf altar in here, and it's changing everything. I can feel it. It's creating order of some kind, and I don't understand it. This is why you wanted me here, isn't it?"
Greg - I did get into watching cricket a little bit while in New Zealand, but it takes lengthy matches to a whole other level compared to baseball...
Hmm, Sebastian proving his worth already, it would seem. Onward!
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