Chapter Three – The Second Ball.Ask Ms. Arcy to the dance. 
Miss Arcy was not, she would freely admit, were she pushed to do so, overly fond of pigeons. She did not find attractive the way they pecked, the way they watched everything with their beady little eyes, the way – no, she could not blame them for her brother's demise, as much as she wanted to: it was, after all, but an accident; a common pistol-cleaning accident, as happened often when one cleaned one's pistols in a wood when in a terrible black mood. No, Miss Arcy was not, she thought to herself, fond of pigeons. Not overly. She was fond of sun, and handsomeness – as a concept, and as a concrete image before her, as a creation of flesh and bone, a hard, solid, lumbering-
Her mind wandered so, these last few days. Her brother's sudden disappearance was a difficult blow to take, to be sure. Luckily she was English, and could endure hardships that other, more foreign types, would find crushing. She thought of the way the French had crumbled under the weight of nuclear apocalypse – the Great Dying, of course, as she knew it – and chuckled. Such weakness!
Where was she? Pigeons... pigeons... the thought had come to her, of course, as just such a creature was in front of her, requesting her to dance. A sympathy dance, she thought, sadly. Well, overly fond of pigeons she might not be, but she did find Miss Alessa Thain, although a pigeon, to be of bearable company.
She accepted.
The odd – scandalous, were it not merely a pair of friends amusing themselves, and, indeed, not in the slightest bit scandalous, since it would in itself be scandalous even to imagine that such a thing could be construed as scandalous – couple stepped onto Lady Meyerschmidt-Cripeton's highly polished dance floor as the ensemble started up a lively waltz, a well-known melody by Profeckiov.
...The pair danced.
They danced lovelily, and Alessa asked herself, briefly, if this was even a word. Something somewhere in her mind suggested not, but she ignored it, and rebelled against such over-correctness, and continued dancing; the fragrant wafting of Miss Arcy’s perfume drifting over her from time to time, and the long rays of the setting sun piercing the windows of Lady Meyerschmidt-Cripeton's ballroom and setting the ladyhuman’s beautiful blonde hair alight in a manner rather reminiscent of the way in which the plains of Northern France had, not so many years ago, also blazed – gold and silver, red and orange.
Miss Arcy’s hair was, however, a blaze of greatly reduced radioactivity when set against that delightful conflagration, mused Miss Thain, and suddenly she wondered at herself, for not so long ago she would not have found anything delightful in the idea of such destruction. She gazed at Miss Arcy’s hideous face as discreetly as she might, which wasn’t terribly, and she seemed to feel Miss Arcy gaze back – no, she
saw Miss Arcy gaze back, but was hard put to decode what was transmitted in that blank and silent gaze, the ladyhumaneyes as grey as the flat cloud residing permanently above much of Derbyshire, or was it Lincolnshire.
Tears seemed as ready to fall from those eyes as rain from the English sky, thought Alessa. She felt a great sadness in the heart of Miss Arcy, she felt it through the fingers clutching lightly on her elbows, and though the woman had explained, without entirely saying so, it seemed to her, that the disappearance of her brother was the cause, she wondered nevertheless.
Surely her parents could lay another egg and sprout the poor ladyhuman another sibling in a matter of weeks?
Alessa wondered what Miss Esmerelda Arcy was thinking.
Miss Arcy likes you slightly more!She moves to dance with the Reverend, somewhat hoping that time would allow her a chance to step with several partners this ball.
”Oh Reverend I would of course dance with you. I do so love to dance!”She did, in fact, so love to dance, Miss Charlotte Fantail, yet although she was not an abominable dancer, was almost a tolerable dancer, it could not quite be called her forte. No: looking blindingly handsome was her forte, and Reverend Halfton was the current recipient of her blinding attentions. It was, it felt to him, like kneeling in prayer, deepest prayer, and then, before rising, and after giving thanks, looking up into the sky, half expecting to see the creator but, instead, staring directly at the sun, and wincing at its splendour.
He winced right now, and his small mouth puckered as he concentrated as hard as he could manage on not tripping over his feet, or collapsing to the ground in some kind of womanly fit, or not coming to some other catastrophic end that he could barely imagine but could vaguely sense approaching as if a chair in a dark billiards room at night.
By God, he found himself blaspheming,
what a handsome woman...Miss Charlotte danced, displaying a nearly average level of skill to the assembled whirling dancers, and paid scant attention to the blushes blushing their way now and again across the Reverend's cheeks and, entranced by the delightful music – Lady Meyerschmidt-Cripeton was a wonderful host, she thought, such delicacy of taste and such tremendous judgement of tone – entranced by the delightful music she barely noticed as the Reverend dabbed at the beads of sweat forming on his forehead.
...She noticed rather his long neck, and his intense blue eyes, and began to feel that perhaps the vicar appreciated her company and was, even, enjoying himself, and then she brushed her knee almost against his, and blushed at the faux-pas, and he blushed too, and coughed a little distractedly, and excused himself at the dance's end.
Well, sighed Miss Charlotte, at least I can dance with another companion now.
Reverend Halfton likes you slightly more!She mentally reviewed her steps as she stepped onto the dance floor.
There was, it became very quickly apparent, exceedingly little wrong with Captain Arbury. He was fond of dancing, and an expert at it, realised Lady Montagu, as he spun her round the room with a touch that warmed her heart like a forest fire. He was handsome, although not as handsome as he was rich – his riches gained not just through his tremendous daring and bravery in battle but, even better, through the sheer God-given right of being born to exceedingly wealthy parents with a vast estate. And his eye catching mole and pot-bellied shape were charmingly, maddeningly endearing.
She was, Lady Katherine was delighted to realise, rapidly becoming a little besotted. She felt the stirrings of possible romance rise within her feathered bosom. She admired his beauteous face and matched Captain Arbury’s expert movements with ease and elegance as she glid, and slid, stepped and turned, and even promenaded – danced, in short, and pranced, and flew about the room without a care in the world and-
...Lady Katherine Montagu, all of a sudden, realised that she was flying, and had long since, in her daydreaming reverie, let go the wondrous grip of the magnificent Captain Arbury – the love, probably, of her life, she told herself, now escaped! – and was, shamefully, hideously,
pigeonously propelling herself around Lady Meyerschmidt-Cripeton’s ball room with her
wings, very possibly – nay, very probably, given her complete lack of self-control in the face of overwhelming feelings of love, and lust, and loinwarmth, very probably doing-
There was a sudden crash, in Lady Meyerschmidt-Cripeton’s ballroom, as Lady Katherine Montagu interrupted a chandelier’s delicate hanging with her beak. Both ladypigeon and chandelier fell to the ground; one in a crumpled heap of shame, the other in a shattered explosion of minute shards of very expensive glass.
Lady Katherine wasn’t sure whether she should fly away in shame, berate the peasant of a chandelier for being there, or sob uncontrollably and wetly, hoping for the best. She decided, after several seconds of stillness, and of silence – as even the ensemble had stopped playing so as to better gawp at this silly pigeon playing the lady – to try to stand, and then to determine what the next part of her plan should be, but as she did so her leg gave way, and she collapsed once more to the ground.
She lay there, as the stirrings of gossip spread around the room, staring at her red cheeks in the polished reflection of Lady Meyerschmidt-Cripeton’s ballroom floor. She began to cry, very gently, to herself.
And then, as Lady Montagu's shame reached its burning yet damp apogee, Dame Diane De Oiseau, for some reason strangely absent from the ballroom thus far, burst in.
”It's... It's Lady Meyerschimdt-Crikeyton! She's... She's been murdered! In the library!”Captain Richard Arbury likes you slightly more!Reverend Halfton likes you slightly less!Mr Garret Pinkerton-Smyth likes you slightly less!Mr Arthur Arbury likes you slightly less!Miss Esmerelda Arcy likes you very slightly less!Miss Elizabeth Feckerby likes you slightly less!Reverend Halfton likes Captain Arbury slightly more!Mr Garret Pinkerton-Smyth likes pigeons slightly less!Mr Arthur Arbury likes pigeons slightly less!Miss Esmerelda Arcy likes pigeons slightly less! Reverend Halfton likes pigeons slightly less!Miss Isabella Villar likes pigeons very slightly less!Sorry... just exceedingly busy with work and home at the moment.
Enter: Dame Diane De Oiseau.
Dwarmin: you will get double approval/dislike scores for the remainder of this chapter to make up for your absence in the first one. You can also take an extra action during the week (you’ll see what I mean when it gets to it) and choose 3 NPCs you would like to have attempted attitude-improving with. List them in order of preference (i.e. the one you’d most like to like you first) and I will apply a complex algorithm to determine what happens to each.
Also, gosh that last one was difficult to work out.
edits: to add pictures
Author
Topic: Pigeons & Prejudice: Definitely deceased. (Read 23433 times)