more goblin emperor junk
Mar. 26th, 2019 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7via https://ift.tt/2UWuHHP
I spent too long trying to figure out the question of, if you have two pairs of bodyguards who always operate in pairs and provide round-the-clock coverage and clearly alternate whose job it is to stay overnight, how the fuck any of them would have any kind of quality of life.
For some reason I had assumed eight hour shifts, but like. There are 3 8-hour shifts in a 24-hour period, which means you’d, say, be on from oh let’s say 6am to 2pm, then off 2pm to 10pm, then on again from 10pm to 6am, then off from 6am to 2pm, then on again from 2pm to 10pm, and so on until the end of time.
Actually this is a thing I’m familiar with from Patrick O’Brian books; namely, one book where they’d had a midshipman or two die and so the two surviving ones had to be at “watch and watch”, meaning that exact schedule of 8 hours on, 8 off, then 8 on again; I recall it being a plot point in that novel that the midshipmen, who were teenage boys, were being run to ragged exhaustion by it and it was generally considered inhumane by the 18th-century British Navy and was something the captain was at fairly urgent pains to remedy, but no replacements were available.
But nohecharei are elite guards so maybe that was part of the training?
(I had started from the premise that it must be 8-hour shifts, but as I was writing this up I was like but it could be 12 hours? and yet no, it’s very clear from the text that it alternates every other night which pair watches over him as he sleeps, and various other details make it clear that they are always alternating who is with him during the day, etc. and it must be fairly even. It’s really got to be 8 hour shifts, or some uneven number so they swing even more erratically– which makes sense for foiling assassination attempts, if you can’t plan very far in advance for who’s going to be where. the [SPOILER] attempt relying on that particular maza being on duty wouldn’t need a great deal of advance notice to make it work, and if you had suborned one they could certainly give you advance notice of the schedule, but if you were trying to look from the outside it seems like it makes sense to make it hard to predict which of them it’ll be. But erratic shifts seem even WORSE for quality of life.)
Anyway the last bit i was noodling during work today was mostly me projecting onto Telimezh about not being able to sleep on command. Because I have absolutely worked long-hours retail/restaurant jobs where I had to close and then open, or open one day and close the next night, and it is SHEER HELL, I can’t imagine doing that for a job with NO WEEKENDS even if I were a sober-faced young elf with a soldier’s topknot and Shoulders Of Justice. (edited to add and "vast probity", which i finally looked up, and he meant "moral honesty" kinda, which like, ah gotcha. even better. can your vast probity substitute for adequate sleep, beshelar?)
Fuuuuck that shit.
________________
Telimezh was well aware that he hadn’t been sleeping well, and was well aware that he needed to do something about it, and was extremely, extremely well aware that his duties would suffer if he did not get it under control, and he was also very well aware that he was devoting too much of his attention to worrying about the wrong things, and he was in addition running out of ways to politely thank the various people that kept telling him to get himself together without just snapping at all of them that telling him things he already knew were in no way helpful to him achieving any of those objectives and he ardently wished to consign all of them to the demons at this point.
So he was paying extra-keen attention as they returned to the Alcethmeret from the dinner they had attended at Lord Beshelar’s apartments, and was able to give the courier gossiping with Csevet an extra instant to get his filthy feet off the desk and stand up like a reasonably well-raised person and not a discredit to all of them.
Telimezh fixed him with what he knew was a particularly evil glare, then spared one for Csevet.
“Is Himself in good humor?” Csevet murmured urgently, standing up, apparently impervious to Telimezh’s attempts at intimidation.
It was a good reminder that Telimezh’s own mood mattered not at all. And a rebuke: he didn’t know. He had time only to grimace uncertainly at Csevet before Kiru and Edrehasivar came through the door.
___________
ALSO I am hampered by a physical copy of the book which I must return soon and cannot find the scene describing Red Ribbons, I want to use him but I’m going to have to just make something up. I’m sure there must be a discord or something where someone has worked out the exact schedules of the nohecharei and all the similar issues but I don’t understand Discord so that’s a closed book to me.
Oh and do we ever find out in canon why Telimezh is initially afraid of Beshelar?? Or is it just one of those background details? Is it just that Beshelar is such a noted stick in the mud (eta: "vast probity" *snigger*) even among his own people? Did I miss something? I missed a lot of things. I am so spoiled for searchable ebooks, it’s killing me.
I spent too long trying to figure out the question of, if you have two pairs of bodyguards who always operate in pairs and provide round-the-clock coverage and clearly alternate whose job it is to stay overnight, how the fuck any of them would have any kind of quality of life.
For some reason I had assumed eight hour shifts, but like. There are 3 8-hour shifts in a 24-hour period, which means you’d, say, be on from oh let’s say 6am to 2pm, then off 2pm to 10pm, then on again from 10pm to 6am, then off from 6am to 2pm, then on again from 2pm to 10pm, and so on until the end of time.
Actually this is a thing I’m familiar with from Patrick O’Brian books; namely, one book where they’d had a midshipman or two die and so the two surviving ones had to be at “watch and watch”, meaning that exact schedule of 8 hours on, 8 off, then 8 on again; I recall it being a plot point in that novel that the midshipmen, who were teenage boys, were being run to ragged exhaustion by it and it was generally considered inhumane by the 18th-century British Navy and was something the captain was at fairly urgent pains to remedy, but no replacements were available.
But nohecharei are elite guards so maybe that was part of the training?
(I had started from the premise that it must be 8-hour shifts, but as I was writing this up I was like but it could be 12 hours? and yet no, it’s very clear from the text that it alternates every other night which pair watches over him as he sleeps, and various other details make it clear that they are always alternating who is with him during the day, etc. and it must be fairly even. It’s really got to be 8 hour shifts, or some uneven number so they swing even more erratically– which makes sense for foiling assassination attempts, if you can’t plan very far in advance for who’s going to be where. the [SPOILER] attempt relying on that particular maza being on duty wouldn’t need a great deal of advance notice to make it work, and if you had suborned one they could certainly give you advance notice of the schedule, but if you were trying to look from the outside it seems like it makes sense to make it hard to predict which of them it’ll be. But erratic shifts seem even WORSE for quality of life.)
Anyway the last bit i was noodling during work today was mostly me projecting onto Telimezh about not being able to sleep on command. Because I have absolutely worked long-hours retail/restaurant jobs where I had to close and then open, or open one day and close the next night, and it is SHEER HELL, I can’t imagine doing that for a job with NO WEEKENDS even if I were a sober-faced young elf with a soldier’s topknot and Shoulders Of Justice. (edited to add and "vast probity", which i finally looked up, and he meant "moral honesty" kinda, which like, ah gotcha. even better. can your vast probity substitute for adequate sleep, beshelar?)
Fuuuuck that shit.
________________
Telimezh was well aware that he hadn’t been sleeping well, and was well aware that he needed to do something about it, and was extremely, extremely well aware that his duties would suffer if he did not get it under control, and he was also very well aware that he was devoting too much of his attention to worrying about the wrong things, and he was in addition running out of ways to politely thank the various people that kept telling him to get himself together without just snapping at all of them that telling him things he already knew were in no way helpful to him achieving any of those objectives and he ardently wished to consign all of them to the demons at this point.
So he was paying extra-keen attention as they returned to the Alcethmeret from the dinner they had attended at Lord Beshelar’s apartments, and was able to give the courier gossiping with Csevet an extra instant to get his filthy feet off the desk and stand up like a reasonably well-raised person and not a discredit to all of them.
Telimezh fixed him with what he knew was a particularly evil glare, then spared one for Csevet.
“Is Himself in good humor?” Csevet murmured urgently, standing up, apparently impervious to Telimezh’s attempts at intimidation.
It was a good reminder that Telimezh’s own mood mattered not at all. And a rebuke: he didn’t know. He had time only to grimace uncertainly at Csevet before Kiru and Edrehasivar came through the door.
___________
ALSO I am hampered by a physical copy of the book which I must return soon and cannot find the scene describing Red Ribbons, I want to use him but I’m going to have to just make something up. I’m sure there must be a discord or something where someone has worked out the exact schedules of the nohecharei and all the similar issues but I don’t understand Discord so that’s a closed book to me.
Oh and do we ever find out in canon why Telimezh is initially afraid of Beshelar?? Or is it just one of those background details? Is it just that Beshelar is such a noted stick in the mud (eta: "vast probity" *snigger*) even among his own people? Did I miss something? I missed a lot of things. I am so spoiled for searchable ebooks, it’s killing me.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-27 10:37 am (UTC)I love _The Goblin Emperor_ so much, and you are inspiring me to reread it.
no subject
Date: 2019-03-27 11:42 am (UTC)But "at watch and watch" in the Google Books results seems to mostly indicate a two-watch system, which was standard for I think whalers and the like, and seems to have been just twelve hours each.
I don't remember which book it was, now; it may well have been four hours in that story as well, and it's definitely been about 20 years since I read the book (my parents were big fans and I'd pick up their discarded library copies before they returned them, so I usually had to snarf the book down as quickly as possible, which did not aid in comprehension).
I'm glad my Goblin Emperor witterings are inspiring something. I have to return the library book today and I'm resigning myself that I'll probably have to buy the ebook at some point.