 but if you have what it takes to return to where all the world knows your name,
then que sera, let's go sailing on
“Nah, I think we’re fine,” Mallos replied, with the first detectable trace of sarcasm. “The little bow should fix everything.”
He wasn’t concerned about being moved to the ground floor. That sounded like the type of plan which was liable to backfire on Arthur, since Mallos had a long history of making some very close ‘friends’ whenever he was shunted into servant quarters. In any case, he lived here by choice, not by force, and could simply move out whenever he wanted to… and Mallos was starting to glean the suspicion that this was where a number of people wanted him to be. Tsi obviously thought that Arthur was capable of handling him and/or assumed that Arthur would be a positive influence, or perhaps felt that Mallos was less likely to behave badly with his grandson around to regard him as a role model. Arthur presumably benefited from having the extra protection provided by resident divinity, which was particularly helpful when his powerful nemesis, Lorraine, was stuck on Shaman. And if anyone would make sure that Lorraine stayed away from the castle, it was Mallos. Keeping him here also ensured that he wasn’t around to annoy the other deities.
Oh yes. This was all looking a little too neat.
Fine. Fantastic, in fact. You can’t put a leash on a dog and expect to beat it; if this was where Tsi and Arthur wanted him to stay, then they were going to have to give him an incentive to stay. Mallos suspected Arthur knew that, too, so he regarded the threat of moving room as an empty threat. Provided he didn’t remain under house arrest, nobody could actually force him to conform to the tidy little boundaries he’d been placed in.
The king seemed to have learned his lesson about drawn-out silences, because he offered little pause afterward. Mallos adapted too, and didn’t attempt to interrupt; instead, he lounged in his chair, assumed a bored expression and tapped the edge of the armrest with his fingers. While seeming outwardly disinterested, as though these suggested punishments had been heard a million times before (and they had - really, manual labour? Pet-setting? Mallos had thought Arthur was more imaginative than that), internally his mind raced. Arthur wasn’t playing the game predictably. Mallos had had enough scoldings to know the basic accepted structure: firstly, the wrong-doer had to be informed what it was they had done wrong, and why; secondly, the wrong-doer received a telling-off; and thirdly, a firm and non-negotiable punishment was delivered. Arthur had skipped steps one and two and proceeded directly to the punishment, which seemed to be open to debate. What was he doing? Arthur was a king, and a father - he knew as well as anyone how to tell someone off for a misdemeanour. Maybe he really was pressed for time and was trying to get this over as quickly as possible.
The wine dashed that theory. (Mallos noticed that he wasn’t offered any, which was a bit unfair since Arthur had offered Sir Walter Smythe wine when he turned up to try and legally kidnap Thoth, and Mallos was much less annoying than just about any Auran leader.) Clearly, the king intended to be here a while… so why had he skipped straight ahead to discussing the punishment? And why discuss the punishment at all? Perhaps he expected to spend the rest of the conversation negotiating with Mallos about how best to sanction him, but that seemed unlikely. Mallos knew Arthur well enough to know that he would brook no argument once he had made his mind up.
Something was going on, and Mallos didn’t like being one step behind. He knew, too, that most of his techniques weren’t going to work. In a single day, he couldn’t push enough of Arthur’s buttons to make him rage or laugh - not without pressing the ones which would automatically end the friendship. He’d tested Arthur’s limitations before and had found them sterner than a single conversation, however long, would hold. Right now, the balance of power was on Arthur’s side of the desk - Mallos needed to swing it the other way.
And then, miraculously, Arthur swung it for him. He made the textbook mistake which would have had Aura and Tsi slapping their palms against their faces - he asked Mallos his opinion and handed the conversation over to him.
The expression of boredom broke into a characteristic grin, and he stood up and pushed back his chair, creating a metaphorical stage in the newly acquired space. The stage was Mallos’ home territory. It was where he operated best. And, like a true master of the stage, he could move about and own the entirety of it.
“If there’s a problem with the solution then you clearly haven’t considered the problem sufficiently,” he informed the king in a somewhat condescending tone in the hopes that it might drive Arthur’s blood pressure up a little. Talking to him as though he were a fool was one of the things the king found so insufferable about the deities. “So, we must rewind to review the problem. Exhibit A.”
He leapt backwards and made a show of holding his finger to his temple for a second, before thrusting his arm outwards to generate a memory-image in the gap between them. Mallos had done this before in front of Arthur, but this time he was sure to include crisper detail. He never bothered to show off his divinity when being told off by other deities, since they matched his magic equally with their own, but flamboyantly displaying it here and now would have the effect of shifting the power balance in his favour. A simple act of divinity was a stark reminder that Mallos was a god, not a commoner of Arthur’s kingdom, and that his own power - magically, at least - far exceeded the king’s. The image he chose was one designed to invoke sympathy. A scene from the battle, it showed a life-sized three-dimensional picture of Lorraine bearing an expression of harrowed rage. Clearly the battle had already been in progress for a while by this point, because she little resembled her perfectly coiffed self: her hair looked as if it had been blown about, there was blood on her pale green dress and smudges of dirt were visible from top to bottom. As she turned in slow-motion towards Arthur, glaring at something over his head, something hit her on the head from behind: a building. The stable block Mallos had mentioned to Tsi. It exploded, showering manure everywhere and burying her deep into the pile of muck. It looked like a scene from a comedy show.
“I seem to recall being ordered by the king of this land to ensure Lorraine suffered in hell for her crimes against Shaman. I realise manure isn’t quite hell, but I have to work with the resources I have at hand.” A third of the way through the second sentence, having taken care to build up a passionate tone and strengthen his accent beforehand, Mallos craftily switched languages to Spanish. Accidentally switching to their native tongue was a common trait amongst those who spoke second languages, and generally they wouldn’t notice that they’d done it unless it was pointed out to them. Mallos himself did occasionally lapse into Spanish in his letters to Morgana when he was distracted by something else, although he’d never done it verbally. The carefully-laid build-up was convincing of the innocent mistake, while in reality, the deliberate language switch played a role in altering the power balance. Conducted in English, the conversation played to Arthur’s advantage; in Spanish, it was much easier for Mallos to control. Arthur’s Spanish wasn’t as good as his English, and it was always harder to construct a sound argument in a second language. Even if Arthur insisted on switching back to English once Mallos had finished speaking, he would still have to overcome the abrupt change and keep up with listening and translating the Spanish. “So I acquiesced the wishes of the king,” he continued in his native tongue, sparing the king in question no opportunity to ask him to switch back to English, “and made some frankly ingenious uses of the available resources. Look - boom!”
He pulled forward a few more scenes, keeping on the move around them so that Arthur would have to keep his attention moving too, and narrated them in Spanish. All of the scenes, carefully chosen, depicted Lorraine in various ways that Mallos supposed Arthur would want to see her - dirty, desperate, pained or driven down. Thus far, Arthur had only seen the negative effects - now he was being treated to memories he could treasure for the rest of his life. If a picture of Lorraine being torched didn’t soften him, nothing would.
Mallos kept the verbal stream going, keeping command of the now one-sided conversation, and finished up by waving away the memory-images so that they disintegrated into the air. “Let me know if you want any of those immortalised on paper,” he added with a rather wicked smile. “And - the damage examined - shall we examine the aftermath? No fatalities, no serious casualties, and all the property damage was repaired more or less overnight by the originals. Meanwhile, there is now an acceptable excuse to keep Lorraine locked up in the pantheon forevermore. You’re welcome. I’ll take that medal - I mean, method of dealing with me - now.”
mallos
there's a wise man in every fool
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