Whispers of Fire ch2 ficbit – answers

~ crossovercreativechaos

Alibaba blinked up at the wooden overhead of a cabin. And not the one he’d been sharing with five other travelers and cargo underfoot, so each of them barely had enough room for a hammock. This was one of the Shadow’s few passenger cabins, porthole flung open to bring in an evening breeze of salt and blood; still just enough room to swing a mouse, but the bulkheads gave a rare solitude that made him want to relax even more than the crackling warmth by his side-

Firepot, Alibaba realized, spotting the heat-waver above the small blue-and-white porcelain tucked almost against his borrowed bunk. The captain let someone light that inside a cabin?

“Don’t worry,” Jahan said dryly. “If it tipped, you’d probably put it out by reflex.”

Alibaba sat up, wincing at a bruise or two where Chadli must have hit him. “Did Chadli make it?”

“He’s not going to be lifting anything with that arm for weeks, but so far it looks good.” Jahan raised a graying brow. “I thought you’d ask about the island whale.”

“If that wasn’t dead, we all would be,” Alibaba muttered. Ow.

Though all things considered, a few bruises and getting soaked to the skin was getting off easy. Even if he did feel like he’d dragged the whole Shadow behind him.

I might not be out of this yet. “What did you mean, I’d put it out?” Alibaba asked, honestly curious. “That sounds like-”

“Magic?” Jahan cut him off, amused. “Someone conquered Amon, indeed.”

Oh boy.

“Hmm. You’re a lot more cautious than Sinbad was.” The older merchant leaned against the bulkhead, amber eyes narrowed. “Of course, by the time I spotted that madman dancing on the roofs in a lightning storm, he’d been carrying Metal Vessels for years.”

Alibaba blinked. “In a lightning storm?” he managed.

“Mm-hmm. Baal is a lightning Djinn, and Valefor’s ice… well, you may never have seen hailstones, but it’s water-based enough for a storm to be tasty for him, as well.” Jahan shrugged. “I was rude enough to ask, and he was grinning enough to answer. In short, he wasn’t in any danger, because the Djinn would just soak up the magoi kin to their own before it could harm him.”

26 thoughts on “Whispers of Fire ch2 ficbit – answers”

  1. I’m suddenly getting a very Captain Jee vibe off Jahan. or maybe Shirong? Hmm, between those two. It’s cozy. And it’s the calm way he grits his teeth in memory of the crazy. And the rueful acknowledgment of how he got himself into the mess.

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  2. >“Of course, by the time I spotted that madman dancing on the roofs in a lightning storm, he’d been carrying Metal Vessels for years.”>
    This is Sinbad we’re talking about. He was probably dancing around in lightning storms within weeks of getting Baal.

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    3. In the scene snippets my bunnies keep leaving me for the Magi AU fic, has the aftermath of Yunan who is traveling with the lunatic, off-handedly mentioning that a good way to charge his Metal Vessel for Ba’al was thunderstorms . . . so instead of trying avoid the next storm, Sinbad heads straight into it.
      “This wasn’t what I had in mind!”
      “But it’s fun!”
      They survive, of course. Through Yunan does make dire threats against Sheba for talking him into this. He’s sure his life would be a lot less crazy if he had left Sinbad to his own devices. (“But boring.” “That is Ja’far’s complaint. I could use a little boring.”)

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  3. So… any discworldly antics? Shouting “All gods are bastards” while in metal plate in a thunderstorm? You know what I mean right?

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  4. I think Alibaba does need to heard about his hero from people who have actually met the man. Because I bet the stories need to emphasize the awesome rather than the crazy (probably because Sinbad wrote a lot of the originals and after all, his crazy ideas make perfect sense to him).

    Also, someone who knew his father more as a merchant than a king I think would be a nice change of pace. King, Alibaba cannot picture himself as. Merchant, however, . . .

    And no, the fact that Sinbad is his childhood hero and started off as merchant has nothing do with it! He likes trade!

    Which is true. If not the entire truth.

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      1. *Nods* Also as the bunnies have helpfully pointed out to me, magic is a useful tool for preventing Al-Thamen from smearing our heroes across the landscape, how they can defeat them lies in undermining their main source of power – despair – by restoring hope.

        Of course, they also note that restoring a sense of hope is both easier and harder than blasting bad guys to bedrock with magic.

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      3. Though blasting bad guys to the bedrock would be a good start…

        *nods* And might get some people to go “Okay, maybe they aren’t blowing smoke.”

        And for some people, seeing certain people knocked on their behinds would be just the thing to perk them up. Because there are some characters in this universe who really, really a dose of ‘you can lose.’

        Also that getting their butts handed to them, in both magic and non-magic, might be the only way of getting the “you are being an idiot and the fun kind of idiot like Sinbad” past their hair.

        Just saying that getting certain people’s heads out of their behinds is going to take drastic measures.

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    2. I am now imagining a Nanoha and Magi Crossover where Nanoha teaches how Aladdin to make friends. I wish I understood more how magic works MGLN besides super math and how that may interact with the Ruk.

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      1. Canon is that the TSAB knows of a bunch of different ways of doing magic. What we’ve seen so far is all based on old lost technology recovered after a series of very destructive wars. (Around the time `of WWII, the three founding Admirals settled the last war, and started the current era of peace and civilization. (I once started work on a fic where Heinrich Muller had escaped to Midchildia and trained their police bureaucrats. Ending in arrest and trial even if starting as a joke.)) Many Nanoha plots involve how insanely dangerous the old tech they have floating around is. You can pretty much jam any system into Nanoha, as long as it is not so much better that everyone would use it instead.

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      3. Nanoha is a multi system, multi planet polity constructed in the remains of very many destructive magitech wars. Earth is number ninety something of the worlds the Time Space Administration Bureau does not administer. Some of their ships can be equipped with a destructive weapon that they treat very much like a nuke. There is a subtle theme of girls as mecha.

        Negima does not, to my knowledge, take place outside of the solar system. There is a secret magical society, with a secret history, including secret politics and secret wars. There is a heavy focus on family. I think over powered magic may be invented as often as it is discovered, and it might be a notch over on the spectrum towards ‘forbidden techniques can be safely used by protagonists’.

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      5. You got Negima right. I think it might be pretty inaccessible if you aren’t checking against the class roster when you read it.

        Same problem maybe as Assassination Classroom.

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      6. Make friends is a term Nanoha fans use for ‘hitting with a large beam of non-lethal magical energy’.

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