"Two big issues," I said.
"More than two," Helen observed.
"Two big ones," I reaffirmed.
I've spoken, or at least been in the same chatroom when he's spoken, or whatever. I've read 'Bow's comments on what Twig was, and I have to say the element that gets repeated is the banter. Characters talk a lot in Twig. A lot. Compared to Worm and Pact, both of which were already pretty wordy and full of their protagonist interacting with the people around them, Twig is wordier. I'm reading Ward, and he's pushed in a similar direction to Twig, but the big thing is this emphasis on people. In Twig, everything is discussed and planned. Ok, they're being followed. Let's visit a cafe and talk through this. Ok, I've just met up with Fray, let's talk through this. But the important thing is that its fun to read. The characters talk, and the way they're talking is enough to invest in what's going on, and where we are.
I'm just bad at trying to comb over bits like this, cos they juggle so many character beats. Oh well. Sy is crafty, Helen is calm, Jamie is wary, and they all have cake. After all that talking and character development malarkey, they duck out the back and get attacked by the reason people keep saying Twig looks like Bloodborne.
He held his head at a strange angle, like his neck was broken, and a earlobes on already large ear dangled, a weight pinned to the bottom. He had unkempt black hair, an unkempt beard, and strangely spaced out features on his face, as if someone had grabbed the back of his head and pulled, everything back out of the way, eyes to either side, mouth down, nose flattened and broadened. He wore a soldier's uniform, and he was weighed down with canisters. A length of chain was wound his right wrist and hand, and something that looked like a lantern dangled from the end of that chain, nearly touching the ground by his right foot, with spikes radiating from it.
I mean, this guy is miniboss material. You can tell by the length of the description and all.
CLOSING NOTES! A few short and meaningless jokes divorced from context!
Jamie never forgets until he dies. That's what the backup brains are for. Poor kid.
Mary may be Mary, but Helen is Marie Antoinette.
Sy has accurately surmised the flaw in business jargon.
KEY QUOTES!
"Mmm," Helen smiled. "Perfect is complicated. Hard to explain."
"Give it a shot," I prodded her.
"It's… beautiful is the best word to describe it," she said.
Jamie and I nodded.
"Everything that isn't necessary to getting what we want is gone," she said, eyes closing, as if she was vividly imagining. "There's an abundance of it all, thanks to science. Food is everywhere and it overflows and there's nothing to worry about because we have and we want and we take. We're, and by we I mean people, we're everywhere and we spill over into one another and we're all knit together, physically and mentally. It's an exquisite landscape of things that don't ever run out to see and touches and tastes and smells and mating and eating and mindless fighting and eating-mating and fighting-eating and fighting-"
"Okay," I said, interrupting. I paused, then when I couldn't think of what to say. "Okay."
Helen reached down to her plate, used a fingertip to wipe up a bit of frosting, and popped it into her mouth, sucking it off.
This is beautiful and horrifying in equal measure. I bloody love this. I can't tell if she's joking, kidding, misleading, being sincere, or anything in between. But I want to come back to this quote, and I want to study it sometime. I want to see her vision, or some interpretation, or see Sy come back to this moment. Probably Jamie though. Poor kid has to remember this image word for word.
Jamie leaned forward, arms folded on the table, and scooted his chair up. "On that subject, you've reminded me, I think they've got a trump card."
"In what sense?"
"My focus up until now has been on the strategy, the war overall, troops, who they're sending, and where. Ames was a good source of information, but they started giving different people different details," Jamie said. "Trying to catch us out by narrowing down the field. I caught on to it when details didn't add up. They're not scared enough, Sy. Westmore is a half day away, fully occupied by the Academy, and the people in charge here aren't spooked about it. If you want to count stuff we should figure out and figure out soon, I'd put that on the list."
This will be important later.
JUST FOR FUN QUOTES!
I would have liked to grab the canisters, in hopes of getting something incendiary or something that might irritate the sniffing woman's nose, but I wasn't sure what the labels were supposed to mean, and I wasn't sure how to unhook them. Uncertainty was the spice of life, so to say, but people didn't tend to use phrasings like that when referring to that which prolonged life expectancy.
Yeah. The language and narration is just fun sometimes. Banter.
