We didn’t investigate why serious monsters were so uncharacteristically attacking a village. We have no legal and minimal moral authority in Srineia, after all.
The people with the actual legal and moral authority did investigate. And Rehit made a special trip to Strayway to tell us — by “us” I mean mainly Yerenthax and Jyondre — since they had been so helpful.
So: Beetheart was the wife of the baron of Pwishika (the old man killed by the skagganerax last night). They are quite old people. Their mari had died over the last few months, and Beetheart knew she didn’t have many more days left. So she decided to do something memorable and valuable for her village with the last of her life. She negotiated with some conlee to get seeds and live plants of the herb tapepy, so the village could cultivate it.
Tapepy is a culinary herb — we had it at Gutrumy House on one of the poisonous mushrooms. It’s sort of a mustard, and sort of a pepper, and very aromatic. It grows underneath the world-branch: not even on the Verticals, but all the way underneath, in the least safe places available. Adventurers sometimes bring back a sackful of it, and sell it for a lot, to expensive restaurants who then use it in miniscule amounts and sell it for even more.
So, Beetheart thought that it would make a wonderful legacy for her village.
The conlee flew down to the Underneaths, which was a very hard voyage, even for some monsters. They brought back a nice bushy tapepy plant … which was obviously dead when they put it in Beetheart’s hands. It didn’t like the change of venue very much. Beetheart healed it, but it did not survive very long.
“Well, that won’t do,” she said, and sent them back.
The conlee made the hard voyage under the branch again, and brought back a little cage of crawling tapepy seeds. They’re very odd things: they’ve got four little spiky tentacles, sort of like a miniature and very limber starfish, with which they crawl around hunting for a good place to grow.
Beetheart died the night that the conlee set out, though.
When the birds came back to deliver the seeds, the Pwishika villagers explained that Beetheart was sick; they took the seeds, and sent the birds off. The details of who exactly did what are very confused, for there is blame to be had there, and nobody who wants to either claim it for themself, or to give it to anyone dead. Also, only a couple of people in the village actually knew about the conlee or about the precise deal that Beetheart made.
Anyhow, the conlee came back the next day, and the next, and were turned away, and turned away.
So they talked a skagganerax into being their collection agency. Skagganerax are usually glad to think poorly of primes, and, in this case, certain primes arguably deserved it. I daresay they had an easy time persuading the monster to help them.
Skirret unarguably did not deserve it, but she was killed nonetheless.
This, in case you are wondering, is why we don’t much like or trust monsters.
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It’s a shame that one of the conlee who did all this in good faith got killed out of hand. I can entirely understand getting a collection agency into the act — it’s too bad the Skagganerax was more interested in burning things and less interested in saying, “You owe dese boids somethin’, I unnerstand. It’d be a shame if youse folks might could get hoit over a little misunnerstandin’ about what youse folks owe dese boids…”
Though I can see why monsters don’t much like or trust primes, either.
Not making me feel really good about Pwishika, no. :/ Not that the conlee’s problem resolution method was a good idea either! But I suppose that’s what happens when there’s no unifying rule of law or other form of redress.
Erm… it may be true that the monsters got carried away. But none of this would have happened if the primes had kept their side of the bargain – and getting carried away is NOT wholly a monster trait(or have you forgotten the reaction to Vae’s arrival at that doomed luncheon, and Rehit’s part therein?).
Instead, they were at best deceived, at worst outright lied to, depending on how you quibble with definitions(some people would define “dead” as “about as sick as can be”, but it’s plain the conlee weren’t given to understand properly either way). They worked in good faith; when they presented their goods, not only were they deceived, but the things they had worked to gather were taken from them, and no payment was given.
That’s not even refusal to pay for a service. The service can’t be taken back. The seeds… could.
When the skagganerax came, it too was deceived – “no Beetheart here”? Come on. Technically true, but is their memory REALLY that short?
As someone observed to me… If some Khtsoyis, say, had gone and retrieved the seeds, would they have been treated thus and still received the blame?
What if some other adventurers who had the means to fly had done it? And a Zi Ri, say? Even if they were foreigners, I’d have thought this sort of behaviour would be considered reprehensible.
The proper lesson from this particular episode is not “don’t deal with monsters” but “if you do, do so fairly”.
I’m with Veritas on this one. A simple case of Tell the Truth, especially when enough of the right important people knew of Conlee, instead of sincerly lying, would have saved the village from the disaster.
Do I need to explain what I mean by Sincerity?
By “sincerely lying”, do you mean, “Saying true but misleading things”?
In Feudal Japan (and I imagine, many other places in the Far East of this world), in court, there are cases where you are expected to lie to keep someone else honor intact. This is a forgivable sin, but you must do so in the right manner. You must be deeply respectful and ’sincere’ about whatever it is you lie about, treating the lie as truth.
The Baron very much treated this as a case of honor, and not only he, but the village paid for it. I don’t think we’ll ever know why he did, however.
I think he didn’t want anyone else to pay the price that Beetheart had contracted for: a (permanent) loss of vitality.
Would anyone have to pay it if she was dead, and they didn’t take the seeds, though?
Probably. The Conlee didn’t have any use for the seeds themselves, and had already paid their price by putting themselves in danger.
What an odd question you ask! There is no law between primes and monsters, or there might as well not be. They cannot come to court after all!
A reasonable person might argue that the conlee had done the work — twice — and deserved to be paid, seeds or no seeds.
Another reasonable person might argue that the conlee had an arrangement with Beetheart, and that the responsibility for fulfilling it was Beetheart’s. As Beetheart had been so irresponsible as to go and die, the arrangement would be over. (I am not quite sure how the villagers justify taking the seeds, if they were thinking this way. Perhaps they were simply looting monsters, as is traditional.)
In any case, I cannot imagine an arrangement that (a) had the least bit of moral force, and (b) permitted the killing of poor little Skirret.
And their actions (you don’t pay us so we MURDER YOUR CHILDREN) imply that they wouldn’t have shied away from taking their payment by force. Since, you know, they didn’t shy away from taking their payment by force.
I don’t think ‘fairly’ was really possible, once Beetheart died. There’s no way the Conlee would have been satisfied with just taking the seeds back. What good are seeds to them when they die of old age in a year?
Maybe, ‘if you do, pay in advance’?
You see, I don’t see it that way. It seemed to me, from the Conlee point of view, more like, “You have done something to our employer, and she is in trouble”, kind of thing. You’ve seen Yap Dogs, right? They aren’t necessarily very bright, but very loyal. Well, more hungry the loyal, but you understand.
I don’t think this incident would have come up if they had just simply told the truth. Sure, we might have had a different incident, but at that point, we’re moving into speculation of motives that we still don’t have a horribly clear picture of.
Conlee are neither stupid nor loyal, as a rule.
Yes THAT would have been an appropriate response! … It sounds like a khytsoyis job, personally. So Khytsoyis are the prime, um, go to folk for collections, what monster race tend to be the MONSTROUS go to folk for collections issues? IE, the monsters with enough discretion and power to intimidate thoroughly, but leave peaceably if they collect, and only become violent if the goods aren’t handed over?
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable” — John F. Kennedy
While attacking the children was clearly evil, a lesser use of violence (say destroying the building containing the seeds the village stole) would have been justified. When you deliberately exclude non-primes from any sort of non-violent mechanism for resolving disputes, you can hardly expect them to just sit there and take it.
What, could they not have found another buyer for such rare and precious seeds?
Although life force is the obvious answer to what the conlee wanted, the truth may have died with Beetheart and that conlee colover(and scattered with the other two).
More like “we risk our lives for you, you take the goods without paying, so we rain spells on the whole lot of you, and the children happen to be worst off”.
The children were at the center of the ring; the conlee were throwing basic-to-moderate attack spells at anyone in that ring. The adults were tough enough to weather it, the children were not, but the narrative didn’t give me the impression that the children were targeted to exclusion.
As someone else has pointed out, it’s not like they HAD a nonviolent appeal to turn to.
Sound principle. However, it’s doubtful the conlee could’ve been certain where exactly the seeds were kept. I doubt the villagers were THAT arrogant, not only refusing payment but further mocking the conlee by showing exactly where the fruits of their labour were stored.
(If nothing else, that would involve bringing the conlee deeper into the village than I think any of the villagers would have wanted.)
What I gathered from the narrative was that the conlee peppered the entire cluster of Herethroy with spells. The children, unfortunately, were far more vulnerable.
The children were particularly the targets of the individual attack spells. It is easier to kill a child than an adult, after all, and the conlee were trying to take their pay by killing primes as convenient, I think.
The moment the villagers up and took the seeds, all pretense of respectability was lost. The conlee were, considering the stakes, more than patient in asking a few more times before bringing help. I find it hard to believe that patience would have been exercised were the stakes reversed.
As for the death of the child… for one, were the conlee specifically attacking the children, or just lobbing spells at whoever they could hit in the bunch of Herethroy?
Even if the former – again, consider the stakes. If the deal was indeed for a measure of vitality, taking the seeds(which they could have tried to find some other buyer for) and not paying it was a direct attack on their future. And most mortal families consider their children to be *their* future.
It’s ugly business, no doubt there. But the people of Pwishika brought it upon themselves, even when they were given ample opportunity to correct it. And even when the reckoning came, they made the problem worse by telling ANOTHER lie.
Given their treatment this time around, being loyal WOULD be stupid.
Apologies, then. I recognised the spells named as being single-target, and… I’m not sure what the correct terminology would be, but designated rather than aimed; I’d got the impression that everyone was being pelted with them more or less at random, and hadn’t realised the adults were unscathed(by the conlee if not their cohort).
But see comment above. If the conlee were originally to receive vitality as payment, refusing the payment WOULD be killing them – if on a delay. I could see them lashing out in that manner even if it wouldn’t give them their payment, in another way, to do so.
…morbid question: Where they’re concerned, does the death count if it’s healed? If so, then stopping at three makes perfect sense. If not… I suppose it gets murkier, depending on which of them – the one captured and slain, or one of the others – was directly responsible for the death of Skirret.
I believe that the conlee were attacking such Herethroy as they thought they could kill. They were mainly using individual-target spells. (The scagganerax’s flames were the area attack.)
Most of the people of Pwishika (Skirret and her parents in particular) had no idea of the arrangements before the monsters attacked them. I cannot see how they could possibly be considered guilty in any individualistic system of guilt.
Which leaves the blame firmly on the monsters (for murder) and the few adults involved in the scheme (for theft).
On the whole, murder is considered a more serious crime and moral trouble than theft on the civilized World Tree. How is it with your people?
I think there is some distinction between “not preventing someone from dying of old age when one could do so” and “killing someone outright”.
(I very much hope there is! As I am quite guilty of the former myself, but not the latter as a rule.)
I do believe that the Herethroy were trying to delay the matter until the conlee died.
I do not believe that the death counts if it is healed. And I am not sure which monster killed which prime.
It wasn’t just the original schemers involved here.
Every time the conlee were sent away with the story that Beetheart was “sick”, the prime saying that tipped things farther in this direction.
When someone had the temerity to say that there was nobody named Beetheart in that village at all(a technical truth, but EXTREMELY misleading), it was aggravated further.
And the conlee were already playing for their lives. If they were aging, they might have had nothing to lose.
I’m not saying they were blameless – whatever happened, they were the ones that actually lobbed those spells at the children. That is certain and true.
But the whole mess could have been averted at a number of points prior. The manner in which it wasn’t… certainly weakens the position of the villagers.
If they had said “Beetheart is dead and nobody else wishes to pay; find someone else to trade the seeds with”, and then the monsters had reacted in the same manner, then the primes could claim innocence.
As it happened, however, it was primes failing to negotiate in good faith that aggravated the monsters and possibly drove them to desperation. Again, I don’t mean that some other luckless person should have been bound to the deceased Beetheart’s part in the deal – only that, if truly nobody was willing to pay it, the primes should have been honest with that, and not taken the seeds anyway.
Just because it’s “traditional” for primes to loot monsters doesn’t make it fair to then bemoan the consequences. The conlee didn’t have the force to fight at the time, as, say, a chromodon might – but that seizure was essentially the first strike in a very drawn-out battle. The ultimate reply was unpleasant… but not as despicable as it’s being treated; and some blame deserves to fall on those who tried to shoo the conlee away in such a petty manner.
Too, there’s a difference between “not trying to save everyone in the world” and “deliberately stalling so someone who’s done honest work for you will die”.
A closer analogy would be, not failure to offer immortality of your own magnanimity, not even “not working quite fast enough”(if a week of enchantment goes poorly and the would-be recipient keels over dead because of it, you can still honestly state that you were trying), but, when someone had contracted you to provide it *and paid in advance*, dallying and putting off the work or its presentation until it was too late.
Perhaps you’re not delivering the deathblow yourself, but there is still A) intent that someone die and B) intent that that death absolve you of your side of the bargain. As there is a distinction between that and outright murder, so too there should be one between deliberate delaying after being paid, and mere inaction.
In private, I generally accept this moral analysis. You know the company I keep.
It is not a point of view I wish to make too much of a fuss about in Eigrach or Srineia, though.
Nor do I wish to be too loud about it on Strayway. Jyondre and Yerenthax did quite a good thing under the circumstances; I won’t be trying to detract from their glories.
It may be noted that the very land of Eigrach belonged to monsters within living memory (mine, at least), and the forefathers of these villagers won it from them. So the discussion of such matters is troublesome in Eigrach.
Or, actually, in any prime lands on the World Tree.
I certainly don’t plan on putting Phaniet off! Though I haven’t gotten around to it yet … but at least she should have decades for a project that should take no more than months.
In the case of Pwishika, though, the payment option was gone. Those seeds might have been valuable (or not), but few primes would have paid for them with what the conlee needed!
After the children were separated from the ring, the Conlee *trapped them in a wall of thorns* and continued to fire single-target attack spells at them. The children were unambiguously deliberately targetted.
Ack, someone else already made that point.
You’re confusing the specific situation with the general issue. In this particular case, the response was unjustified and disproportionate to the offense, so the Conlee were clearly in the wrong.
But as a more general issue, when you bar non-primes for all forms of peaceful problem resolution, it’s inevitable they’ll engage in violent problem resolution. So the “this is why we don’t much like or trust monsters” line doesn’t hold; you’re blaming them for the situations the primes chose to create.
Monsters are more than likely to respond in disproportionate ways — my oldest friend as much as any of them.
And, of course, it’s not even possible in general to have a peaceful form of problem resolution with them: I can’t imagine such a thing working with a scagganerax or a bonstable, say. Or Vae.
There’s a distinct difference between non-primes with a innate compulsion to do evil and those that are rightfully angry about being victimized by prime criminals.
Unfortunately, the former category is small, and, if interpreted in the more useful sense as “monsters with innate motives to do evil”, is exceedingly small indeed.
I imagine that mherobump can go to court; they’re considered safe.
Conlee have an innate motive to do evil, though it stops short of being a compulsion.
I fully admit that the ethics of this situation, and, indeed, of the world, are horrible.
And if the primes had been honest about that, I’d not have any objections.
It’s a regrettable thing about law on the World Tree, that motive or even capability are sometimes taken as grounds for prosecution. (Conlee and blee on the motive front; but primes are not immune – not from what I’ve read about cley vampires.)
I’m not sure there’s a better way to do it, all things considered. Death can happen too fast; I might not like how World Tree law works in all regards, but I don’t have a better solution to offer.
(I would reply to your comment BENEATH mine, but I can’t. There is no reply link.)
I appreciate the distinction. And I’m not trying to lessen what Jyondre and Yerenthax got up to. By that point, the monsters HAD forfeited whatever respectability they might have had before then.
It’s just tragic. The entire mess shouldn’t have happened – and I still think that if the conlee hadn’t been given quite that much of a run-around, it might not. We may never know how they’d have reacted had they KNOWN Beetheart had died. Maybe they’d have tried to take their piece anyway. Maybe they(who, after all, are probably quite familiar with the limitations of a mortal lifespan) might have been bitter, and TRIED to argue that they deserved something, but moved on in the end…
Tragedy of the purest sort.
This, in case you are wondering, is why we don’t much like or trust monsters.
Because they can’t be legal participants in a contract, and when they try to do the right thing, it ends up with lots of deaths on both sides? Yeah, that’s why I wouldn’t trust one of your primes with a sharp stick.
The problem is that World Tree justice seems to decide issues primarily based on the identities of the involved parties. Whatever the complications of reality are, they will not be improved by a system which believes someone is guilty because they are non-prime or innocent because they are noble, regardless of the circumstances.
Those are realities: those are social realities.
No, they are conventions. There are noble non-primes and diabolic dukes. What makes someone good or evil is not what they are, but what they do.
As a generic comment, I do not want to lessen the job our Brave Wrongfolk did, also. I have no comment on their behavior, and they acted justly for what they were. I just wanted to comment on the Village and the Monsters, of which I have some sympathy for.
Oh, and as an aside, Silly Doodle.
[I like the doodle! Much fun.]
I think we agree: much unnecessary evil was done, by monsters and primes both.
So, is Tapepy like Chinese Hot mustard?
Somewhat…