Chapter 279: Off The Rack
Alexandra Erin on January 30, 2015 in Volume 2 Book 8: Elven Holiday, Volume 2: Sophomore EffortIn Which Glory Makes Mackenzie Nervous
Author’s note: Things have been a bit lean as we gear back up after the holidays. Please help support Tales of MU with a one-time contribution, or join me on Patreon. Also, since I’m here: the next world-building podcast will be ready to go up next Friday.
“Wait… you’re going to get your hair done in a human color?” I asked. “Isn’t that a little drastic?”
“Well, I don’t think those are exclusively human colors,” Glory said.
“But that would be why you want them,” I said.
“Well, maybe… okay, to a large extent, yes,” Glory said. “But it’s more that I am sick of elven sameness… we all have the exact same wispy platinum hair, with maybe just a touch more silver or gold that only other elves even notice. I want to be different. I’d pick something more human-ish because I think it would be more me, but the main thing is to stand out.”
“Why not just start with something different with what you have?” I asked. “I never really see an elf with elaborately styled hair… you have so much hair, you could probably do some awesome things pleating it or whatever.”
“Our hair doesn’t actually braid that well,” Glory said. “It’s the wispiness… we don’t have the texture or thickness. Our hair doesn’t tangle, and maybe it feels awesome to run your fingers through, but it doesn’t hold together, either. So it’s not just a cut and color job that I want, I want to have it thickened.”
“Do you really want to go the whole way all at once, though?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Glory said. “I kind of feel like if I don’t do it all-or-nothing, though, it’ll just end up being nothing. Why are you so concerned about this, Mackenzie? I couldn’t imagine you caring.”
That was a good question. Apart from the difficulty of picturing Glory with chestnut hair… that was a shade of brown, I was pretty sure… why would I care? It wasn’t like I had a thing for ethereal platinum blondes. I’d observed many times that while looks weren’t everything, Glory wasn’t exactly my natural type, if I had one.
“You’ve got me nervous about it because you’re so nervous about it,” I said. “I’ve spent the better part of a semester anticipating your needs and feeling out your moods, and the way you’re treating this is screaming that you think that this is going to be a problem. I can’t think of many things you’ve had to do that required you to visibly get up the nerve for.”
“Were any of those things bad?”
“Not at all,” I said. “But it’s been huge stuff, like moving onto campus… and you’re acting like this is just as huge. You’re already way outside your comfort zone here, and you’ve taken your court with you. Is there any reason you’d need to do this now of all times?”
“…only that I am outside my comfort zone,” Glory said. “Right now I don’t feel like I have a position to maintain, and if it turns out I don’t like it… or that my girls can’t respect me if I’m bucking homogeneity that much… I can always say it was just a holiday lark and get it all undone before we get back to Prax.”
“Okay, I can’t actually argue with that…”
“Good, because I am not employing you to argue with me,” Glory said.
“Your’e not employing me to do anything, I’m on vacation,” I said. “And even if we’re not quite relating to each other on equal terms, it’s a lot closer than normal. As your girlfriend and someone who cares about you, I’m going to be concerned wen I see that you’re concerned. If you have a problem with that… then keep on having a problem with it, because I’m not actually going to stop doing it.”
“When you put it that way, I don’t think that I’d want you to,” Glory said. “But I still… I’m going to do this, Mackenzie. Well, I mean, I haven’t actually made up my mind that I’m going to go through with it. But I’m going to go in and take a look at my options.”
“You know your sister is dating a glamourist who specializes in hair alteration, right?” I said. “I know Nicki doesn’t tend to go for natural colors, but I don’t see why she couldn’t fix you up with whatever you wanted… and you could do it in the privacy of your own room, or theirs, or wherever.”
“Where do you think I got the idea?” Glory said. “But this is the kind of very personal thing that I can only feel comfortable entrusting to a total stranger. Going to my sister’s lover and asking her to do this would mean that even if I look or feel foolish and decide to leave my hair alone and never speak of it again, they will always know that it happened. By going to someone else, I can avoid that… by doing it now, I can leave the whole thing thousands of feet up in the air, if I have to.”
“Okay… that makes a kind of sense,” I admitted.
“Of course it does.”
“Though, on the subject of Nicki and her style of… style,” I said, “you should bear in mind that there are options you could take that are distinctly different from the standard pale model elf but are less likely to get you tagged as someone trying to be human.”
“I wouldn’t be trying to be human,” Glory said. “I don’t think I’d trade places with any true mortal even if I could… there are things I envy humanity for, but you have to admit the cost of living is pretty damned high.”
“But it’s about appearances… I mean, that’s why you’re worried, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” she said. “You are right. That is exactly what I’m worried about. At the same time, though, I think if I’m seen to be copying my little sister’s girlfriend’s personal style, it will make me look even worse in the eyes of the power-obsessed gossipmongers than if it just looks like I’m aping humanity, emphasis on ape.”
“…why would the emphasis be on ape?” I asked.
“No particular reason,” Glory said. “But I’ll bear in mind that there are options. I don’t know… maybe instead of going all out, I could go with a more richly layered blonde in a fuller texture?”
“Well, as long as you’re not just jumping into something you’ll regret, let’s do like you said and go check out the options,” I said.
“Don’t forget that you can get a new look, too,” Glory said.
“I’m not sure I want to commit to anything right now,” I said.
“Who’s committing?” Glory said. “t’s just hair. Even if you could’t get anything we do to it undone, it will still grow back.”
“Good point.”
I really had to admire Glory’s innate sense of direction. Our wrist thingies would have led us anywhere we wanted to go on the ship, but she barely seemed to need to refer to it, having seen the location of the walk-in salon on the map.
Granted, it was on the promenade deck, which made the first part of finding it pretty simple, but if I hadn’t been following her, I would have needed to spend a lot more time looking at signs to even get there.
When we got there, we did get a reminder of the fact that just because a place offered walk-in seating didn’t mean you could just walk-in and be seated… the place was crowded enough that there was a pretty substantial wait for a stylist. But the lady at the counter was happy to give us overlapping appointments for that afternoon.
“Are you sure you don’t want to just do it now?” I asked Glory before we left. “I really don’t mind sitting and waiting.”
“No, I think that forty-five minutes or so sitting here doing nothing except for waiting is going to be way more interminable than a few hours of being out and about doing other things. I feel like now that I’ve got a time to come back, I can think about other things, you know?”
“Okay,” I said. “I’m really fine either… I’m kind of along for the ride here, you know?”
“You know, though, before we come back, you should change into one of your suits,” Glory said. “Since one of the reasons you’re thinking about a change is how your hair went with it, or how it didn’t go.”
“Okay, but I’m not going to be dressing like that all the time,” I said.
“Well, you could grab your jacket,” Glory said. “Anyway, if you like the minimalist suit style, it’s not like there’s a limit on how often you can wear them.”
“You’d think so, but Amaranth tends to get antsy about it if I wear the same clothes twice in a row, or three times in the same week.”
“I meant we could get you more of them… or even more things in that general style.”
“Oh, right.”
I decided to wait until after lunch to change, for strategic mess-avoidance purposes. That didn’t leave us with a whole lot of time to mess around on either side of the meal, which was a perfectly non-threatening pasta place that was conveniently on the promenade level, in what was set up to look like a sidewalk bistro. Afterwards, we dashed back up to the room to change and then wound up back on the promenade, browsing clothing stores until it was time to talk to the stylists.
I had spent more time looking at clothes since the previous semester began than I’d spent thinking about clothes in my entire life before that, but I didn’t mind. There really was something attractive about the minimalist style that Glory was introducing me to.
I had a vague awareness that it was stylish, or at least well made, but it was… I mean, that was really it. There weren’t a lot of useless distractions or lacy bits or weird folds that could get messed up. It was so neat, so easy… it was all so seamless, in the most literal sense of the word, and in good elven fabric that didn’t hang off my body like the t-shirts I’d brought to school or cling to them like the more fitted shirts I’d been steered towards. I didn’t know what it meant exactly for clothing to flatter a body, especially when it was my body, but I felt flattered when I tried these things on, even when they weren’t made expressly to my measurements.
Two, Steff, and… to a lesser extent… Amaranth really liked to dress me up in things with shiny sequins, embroidered flowers, and stuff like that, but that had never really been me. As long as there was some restraint and the overall outfit was stuff I’d tend to wear anyway, I didn’t mind my friends and lovers putting their personal stamp on me, especially since I was the one person who didn’t have to look at myself. I mean, that was the reason I’d never been that concerned about clothes in the first place, you know?
But while Two and Steff had done a good job of helping me find slightly more interesting things that I would like to wear, I felt like Glory was helping me find things that reflected something about myself.
“I love this stuff… it’s like clothing for people who don’t care about clothing,” I said.
“I wouldn’t go that far,” Glory said. “It’s not entirely function over form… I mean, there is some subtle artistry that goes into designing them.”
“They’re telepathic?”
“Funny,” she said.
“I just don’t know how many of these shirts I should get.”
“How many do you want?”
“Well… I don’t know if I’m actually going to be wearing them all the time, but if I am, then I should have one for every day of the week, with a little bit extra for overlap and additional choice,” I said.
“So… maybe ten?” Glory said. “But bear in mind that you don’t have to get all of them here at this store, today.”
“Well, that’s what I’m thinking, when I say I don’t know how many I should get,” I said.
“Maybe grab the three that you’re most interested in now,” she said. “We can hit more stores in the next few days, maybe visit some shops while we’re landed in port, and then at the end of the trip you can come back and just grab a few more to bulk your closet up if you haven’t found enough that leap out at you.”
“I meant more how many I should get on this trip,” I said.
“You’re worried that you’ll get back to school and decide that this isn’t your style after all? Wait… you’re not worried about the money, are you? I know I’ve talked about how much money I’ve laid out for the trip, and for the house, and everything, but don’t get the wrong idea… ready-to-wear is not in the same neighborhood as the suits I had made for you. This is all walking-around money territory.”
“…that doesn’t necessarily make me feel better about you financing a whole new wardrobe for me,” I said. “And also, don’t forget that anything we buy here, we still have to take home. My suitcase was pretty full to begin with, and I’m already bringing home more clothes than I brought.”
“Yes, but I have space in my luggage for the clothes I brought for you, obviously, so you don’t have to worry about that,” Glory said. “Anyway, haven’t you noticed that every store we’ve seen has a big sign about shipping? We can have it delivered. Or if you don’t want to do that, we can certainly buy another suitcase.”
“That doesn’t make me feel like less of a leech.”
“Well, you don’t have to take anything from me you don’t want,” Glory said. “But if we can agree on three shirts for now, I won’t say another word about it today, I swear.”
“Okay, fine,” I said. “But maybe it would be easier to come back for them after the hair thing?”
“You can send our purchases to our room, right?” Glory asked the clerk who had been standing attentively near us since we came in.
“Absolutely, ma’am,” she said.
“See?” Glory said. “No worries.”
“They really do make it easy to shop, don’t they?” I said.
“Yes, I’m going to be counting on that,” Glory said.
“But not another word today, right? You promised.”
“I always keep my promises,” Glory said. “But you should wrap it up, because we need to keep our appointments.”
So elven hair is that thin and wispy.
On one hand it sucks while being worn. On the other if they grow it forever it probably makes a kickass crafting material if you can get an actual fabric out of it. Something that lightweight and coming from something like an elf with so many unique properties would basically be an enchanters dream to work with.
Imagine Sailcloth with an elf-hair overlay, catching the wind and giving a bit of elven speed to nautical travel. Or a blade scabbard wrapped in elf-hair, sitting easily on a belt loop without being gangly and awkward to wear full time. I mean I’d even guess this is what elves string their bows with, like Tolkien elves: There’s no realistic way someone with that poor upper body strength can fire off multiple shots with meaningful speed and power without some kind of enchantment, and an elven enchanter would have a constant source of the stuff on hand at all times.
This strikes me as both a convenient source of elven wealth and one of the many materials the slave markets probably turn out as a secondary product in reasonable supplies, along with other industry usefull materials like kobold blood or the things infernal value(their own sources of blood and hair probably going to cleric or paladin equipment to give that extra kick of purity).
Except Glory suggests that elven hair doesn’t knot of stick together, weaving cloth from it would probably be like trying to knit oiled silk with a pair of drawing pins
There’s more than one way to make a fabric. Even presuming that there’s no possible way to make a thread or fabric by weaving that still leaves you with a few options. You don’t actually need to get them in order to make felt, for example. You just need to condense the fibers together with heat and pressure.
Presuming our would-be elven enchanter doesn’t just throw his hands up, grab a power stone, and then just enchant the “weavyness” of the loom up as far as it’ll go then force it through then.
Elf hair pillow?
Yeah… I don’t see it… those examples aren’t exactly great for thin and wispy.
That and they’re pretty bad examples for hair’s properties in general.
Oh… and how would you feel if you ran in to someone carrying a bunch of a equipment made with human hair? It’s downright creepy!
And last, she didn’t claim supernatural properties to it… it’s not like it’s not braidable in general… just really bad at it, this is a trait that can and in some cases does apply to human hair.
Not to mention, again, ewww… it’s bad enough that one of the popular D&D magic items is a severed elf hand. (Hand of the Mage)
The idea that Tolkien-elves are inherently lacking in muscular strenght doesn’t have much support in the books he wrote.
Bah. Tolkien-elves are basically just Humans+15. It’s in the different races of Man and Dwarf that I look at Tolkien as creative.
Seems like elves end up just being humans, but without any of the flaws or baggage humans have.
The incredible social issues that MUniverse elves have are rather refreshing.
I couldn’t help thinking as I read this chapter that Granny Blaise really has to return to campus sometime before Mackenzie graduates and get a gander at her new fashion style. Her reaction should be priceless. 🙂
I’d really like Mackenzie to learn a whole lot more about her grandmother before THAT conversation.
Because if they air their dirty laundry out in public again, someone really needs to ask if it’s proper and ladylike to send your own squire to die or force your daughter to give up her baby. Martha has a lot to answer for and Mackenzie isn’t really equipped to be the person to make that happen.
I’d like to learn a whole lot more about her grandmother before that conversation. Unless I’m forgetting something huge (specifically a POV OT), we’ve only ever seen Martha from other people’s eyes – generally Mackenzie or The Man, neither of whom are unbiased observers. She’s done some terrible stuff to people we care about, but I can’t imagine those things have helped her sleep better at night.
Quite frankly Martha is probably the biggest unsolved mystery in the entire MU world, probably moreso than the gods or dragons or Mercy or whoever else you could name.
She’s an epic hero in the modern era. By some reckonings, she’s the ONLY epic hero, besides maybe Callahan. She gave birth to Laurel, a Subtle Artist who’s as stronger than anyone we’ve ever seen, except MAYBE Dee, who was specifically bred to be a powerful telepathy, and telepathy is hereditary. But she’s also a progenator of Mackenzie, and under Dan’s theories she might somehow be connected to The Man’s breeding program beyond happening to spawn one of his mates. But she’s a devout paladin, who doesn’t play by the same rules as others but clearly wields devout power. She’s also got that whole incest thing going on so if she inherited any or all of those traits then so could her husband, so there’s a chance she knowingly reproduced trying to get someone like Laurel, or some other result. Then you factor in that she went stomping around the shift for some reason we don’t know, but that area is crawling with demons and chaos. She also keeps a whole lot of books on those subjects heavily guarded, so she’s not just some meatshield but someone knowledgeable on the subject beyond a local healer or even average paladin’s requirements.
We spend so long looking at the La Belle family, but the Blaise family obviously has a whole lot of skeletons in it’s closet. I have no idea what the hell Martha IS, but she’s obviously something and it’s easy money to bet she wasn’t the first or only one.
Callahan is less of an epic hero and more of a ruthless villain, by her own admission.
…and Martha claims and is claimed to be the reverse. I’d say they’re about as trustworthy as each other, ultimately. Good and evil, sadly, aren’t often the absolutes one expects.
Callahan and Martha have more of a Law/Chaos difference than Good/Evil.
Where the heck did you read about that stuff? I seriously feel like I missed entire chapters of story somewhere along the line with the references people keep throwing out there.
It’s half conjecture, half info spread across over 700 chapters of story.
He is right about one thing: We know way too little about grandma Blaze and her motives.
It’s mostly an issue of keeping track of the OT’s and a few chapters. Nobody really discusses the other members of Mackenzie’s family or the implications of this in her presence but it’s a recurring thing for everybody else.
It’s half conjecture, but it’s not MY conjecture. The bit about the breeding program is a guess put forward by Sam in the OT’s and Dee in the main story. Martha’s motives in the shift were guessed at by The Man but he either didn’t have answers or didn’t want to tell Laurel. Martha not playing by the rules was Mackenzie’s guess at her demenour and life choices, basically saying that she likes the idea of rules and order more than having to deal with it firsthand.
The only leap I made PERSONALLY is the bit where incest comes into play. The conjecture on The Man says he needs a certain amount of inbreeding to do whatever it is he wants to do, and it’s from two people who know a good amount about inherited traits, in particular the exact traits that show up in the Blaise line at least once(mental power, infernal nature).
The obvious way to prove this is to look at the rest of the Blaise line and see what traits they do and don’t have. Dee mentioned that thanks to breeding and inherent natures most of her line has at least minor psychic power. By that same token you’d naturally see Mackenzie’s relatives having at least one or two cases of recognized power. Trina is evidently incredibly low on that same scale but able to take the same classes as Dee so once that power crosses a specific threshold even once it’d be immediately recognized.
Of course we’re not likely to find that out in the main story either. Mackenzie has expressed extreme discomfort in the idea of reuniting with other branches of her family, and those same cousins were also her main source of food for most of a decade, so they probably aren’t too comfortable approaching her either. The only thing that’d actually get us that information is an OT centered around people that aren’t Mackenzie, Laurel, or Martha, but are close relatives, like her aunt or unnamed cousins.
Don’t forget Violet. Her grandmother and great great aunt had that power too. There is also Adele, though it isn’t mentioned directly, given the way she talked with her grandmother I would bet her family has a history as well.
You would certainly think that others in the Blaise line would have the subtle arts ability as well, it’s clearly an inherited trait, and Laurel Ann seems to be on the upper end of the scale. I wonder if Martha herself has any such ability, Laurel Ann specifically mentions that she never tried to influence her mother’s mind because “she always got the impression of solid iron from her mother” – I wonder if this was purely in her own mind, or if Martha was actively guarding herself.
I doubt that she is all that powerful if at all, since she didn’t catch on to what Laurel Ann was doing – but she could be similar to Mackenzie and poses more internal mental power than most people.
On the OTHER HAND, Teddi DID mention once that an expression of Subtle Arts is often made out to be divine power by outside observers. Likewise great and greater dragons are repeatedly shown to exert vast mental strain before they ever make physical contact with an enemy, and that even other dragons of the same caliber can’t completely throw that kind of thing off(the two greens in particular, it’s mentioned that every other green was weighing on them from hundreds of miles away with constant pressure, regardless of circumstance).
By that same token, Lysander states that mortal heroes are capable of overpowering greater powers in tense moments, calling upon some unknown reserves of power and bending the rules everyone plays by to kick more ass than any god could.
Martha undoubtedly has divine power. She can bless water and perform exorcisms and had the trappings of a paladin like a mount. But it’s possible that she’s been multiclassing the whole time and nobody could tell. After all, if MU paladins go by the same scale as RPG ones the most obvious signifier to an outside observer(mounts, divine power) come on the low end of the scale and there’s no higher end associated with them like high level magic spells.
Supporting this, we’ve only ever seen one other high level paladin, and he’s mentioned as being a monk before that point instead of having always been a paladin. Actual pure high level paladins seem to be somewhat rare, as opposed to a paladin/some other thing combo.
typo alert
Even if you could’t
should be
Even if you couldn’t
If Glory is tired
Of platinum Elven hair
She should go copper
“I love this stuff… it’s like clothing for people who don’t care about clothing,”
Is Mackenzie getting into Normcore? I think she might be.
I really want static to be a thing with elven hair!
I feel like static is somthing elves might be immune to on principal.
“Emphasis on ape.” Oh man, no one mention evolution to Mackenzie. She would lose her mind.
Evolution in the scientific sense clearly does not apply to the MUverse.
Creationism theory is obviously as firmly proven there as evolution theory is here. (Except for the Mechan Evolutionists of course, they just might reject the notion of divine creation out of principle because it is not in one of their science books).
Since evolution genuinely doesn’t exist in the MUniverse, it’s probably more of “this makes you look like a monkey eek eek ook ook” than an evolutionary jab.
It’s come up before that humans look like monkeys. Celia pointed it out when Mack made reference to “animal people”.
My guess would be that maybe evolution in the way we know it isn’t a thing, but perhaps humans are monkey people in the way that Celia would be a snake person, just nobody human has noticed it/ likes to talk about it.
I think the main problem is that humans and apes lack the same kinds of commonalities you see with other beast-folk. Humans have hair, but so do Orcs and Goblins and Ogres and a million other things. They have opposable thumbs, but so does every other race.
Meanwhile with beastkin the similarities are unambiguous and straightforward. Yokano are covered in fur and have spots patches and stripes appropriate to that exact type of animal. Nagakin aren’t pure Naga, but they shed scales and eat live mice and do all of the other stuff we think of as “snakeish”. Hissy’s body has never been described in detail but her motions in the water are a dead ringer for something crocodilian. So on and so forth down the line and the only ambiguities are “Artificial” ones like Faun who were cobbled together instead of born.
However they got made, since no beastfolk are ever seen worshipping any kind of god, there’s never any ambiguity that they’re a specific species of animal. By the same reasoning it’d stand that Primate types would have a similar level of fur or thumb like toes or prehensile tails or anything else that’s that kind of direct link.
The current prevailing theory isn’t that beastfolk are just modified animals, as “evolution” would require, but humans modified to be animal like, or animals with something human added. Which is why basically all of them are currently dealing with human missionaries.
Most mythical creatures make no sense from an evolutionary standpoint. Consider Gryphons, Pegasus, and Hippogryph – there all the combinations of physical characteristics, rather than genetic ones. None of them actually fit into proper classifications (especially considering they have six limbs each, and that includes Dragons too).
Furries are the same. Human, with a little cat/dog/fox thrown in. They aren’t the result of evolution on cats/dogs/foxes, nor are they what you would get by interbreeding those with humans (which is itself as impossible as a Hippogryph).
And since the MUniverse has no evolution, that’s okay. Some of those creatures are just the creations of gods that were less imaginative, adding animal-like features to humans, and some are even the result of mortal wizardry.
But that doesn’t explain why two different characters have made the link between apes and humans.
Magic / mythology has it that if you mix disparate animals you get offspring that combines traits of both parents, instead of a lot of blood and clumps of fur flying around.
This is an understandable misconception, since it does seem to work like that with humans (though early cultures generally prefered to think of this as only the father’s traits being relevant and passed on). It even seems to work for some types of animals that are quite disparate, like different breeds of dogs.
Of course in the muniverse this is in fact exactly what happens, leading to completely different species that are barely physically compatible being able to breed and their offspring sharing physical characteristics in equal measure of both parents. That’s how you get half-ogres like Victor and Belinda (and if they both ever get tired of trying to fit into their parents’ cultures they could walk off together and start a race of half-ogres).
And how you get half-nymphs (though I am guessing that to be fertile a nymph must kind of cease to be a nymph in the strictest sense of the word, and that even with lots of magic Mackenzie and Amaranth could not have children together; the divine and infernal would kind of cancel each other out).
It also leads to weirder mixes like draco-giganto-dwarfo-nymphs and whatever-went-into-making-Jill-Gottesmoerders …
I think the primary reason they couldn’t have children would be that there both female. . .
The ape-human thing is kind of obvious even without there being a literal link: Apes and people look and act REALLY similar. There aren’t any non-primates with hands and few bipeds that aren’t birds or the occasional reptile. They can speak sign language, making them one of the only animals humans are capable of understanding(but not the only animals with LANGUAGE. Dolphins and whales qualify, and so do a large amount of birds. It’s just that humans can’t really speak or decipher those languages except in a few noteworthy cases that took months or years of study). There are too many questions raised for humans to be literally modified apes in the sense of other creatures, unless there’s information we don’t have, but visually the distinctions are clear. Though dwarves share an equal number of commonalities and come from a totally separate order of creation. So do elves when you get down to it and they’re the ones swinging through the trees.
As for some kind of divine/infernal hybrid, we don’t really know that energies “cancel out” like that. A direct hit of divine power burns a half demon, but contrary abilities don’t seem to be a qualifier. Remember that Laurel and The Man had contrary abilities on a separate axis(a powerful psychic and an extraplanar creature that damages psychics) but they had no physical issues reproducing. Likewise it’s important to remember that part-demons don’t even manifest as infernal until many years past birth, so once conception occurs they’re basically good.