GNOMES!

[kippurbird.livejournal.com]

Strange but true. My dad eats mustard raw. I mean without putting it on anything. He does that with BBQ sauce too.

My brother and I are not allowed to do it though.

Now that I have completely gone off on a tangent from who knows where, we're back with Triscuit and Earwig. Earwig is trying to get Triscuit to see the thing that isn't really invisible, but Triscuit can't see. Even thought it's not really invisible. How does that work again? It seems that the way to see is to relax your eyes or something like those Magic Eye thingies. I always liked them. I was good at them. Easy for me to do. I had one in my room of dinosaurs. Those were cool. They should bring them back. Those and Hypercolor T-shirts. Ahh... the late eighties and early nineties such nifty things.

Whoops. Sorry digressing.

Triscuit is still upset about the whole Lillith not being his true love thing. Not the fact that he had been raped mind you, but the fact that she wasn't real. I'm starting to think that Triscuit probably assumes that every women wants to jump him, so it doesn't matter who or what they are or how they do it, it's just how women are. Birds fly and women want to have sex with him. Egotistical bastard.

Earwig keeps on telling him, "heed your blood, not your eyes... don't fight to see the image, but let it simply come to you, instead. Look for it with your heart. And listen to your blood."

Totally Magic Eye shit going on here. Total.

Some boring shit and then Earwig makes him close his eyes and then for some reason when he opens them he can see the canyon. "And he could feel the presence of the endowed blood in his veins with new vigor, almost as if for the first time." Um... that's not a good thing, being able to feel your own blood. High blood pressure maybe?

We finally see a gnome! They're red necks.

He was only about as high as the prince's waist, perhaps even somewhat shorter, but other wise he seemed mostly human. He had red hair shot through with gray, and a scruffy, identically colored beard covered his face. The dark, beady eyes sat above a rather large, turned-up nose. He wore blue bibs over a bright red shirt, scruffy knee boots with upturned ends, and a strange lopsided black cap that dangled down to one side.

From seemingly nowhere the gnome produced a chair and an oversized jug of ale. He sat in the chair and took a long draught of the ale, and then proceeded to light the corncob pipe that Triscuit now noticed sticking out from between his teeth.

Garden gnome red necks.

Just dwell on that for a while.

Also the gnome is named "Shannon the Small"

Is this like the Mac Nac Feegles naming conventions? Is there a Shannon the Medium? Shannon the Large? Shannon the not as Large as Shannon the Large but Larger than Shannon the Medium? I mean really, who actually calls them self "Small" if you belong to a race of short people? This is like those guys who wrote the Tomes where they called themselves "The Ones Who Came Before".

Oh! And there's a Time Discrepancy. In the beginning of the chapter we're told it had been several weeks since the Natasha incident, but then we're told that it's only been a few days. Now, as I'm fairly certain they haven't been to Fairy Land, this time discrepancy is what we call "Bad Editing" and "Lazy Writing". Can you say that? I'm sure you can.

Triscuit doesn't see why they need permission from a "unendowed" gnome to cross a damn bridge (as opposed to what? An endowed gnome? Perhaps that's why he's Shannon the Small. He's not endowed.) so he starts to cross it with out permission. Shannon bites him in the leg.

This is how the gnomes protect the entrance to the valley that isn't invisible. They bite people in the leg like dogs. Surely if the gnomes are intelligent (they wear clothes and everything) they would have a better way of protecting the bridge than by biting people. I mean, if you want a guardian that bites people, get a magical dog or something. Not a gnome that Triscuit easily defeats by knocking out. To get the gnome's permission to cross the bridge (if they don't give it Faegan will know they're here and can go into hiding) Triscuit dangles him over the bridge and forces him to give them permission to cross.

When Shannon asks Triscuit if the Prince would really have killed him, Triscuit says it depends, but in his heart he knew he could have never killed one so small. Because size really matters when it comes to things being deadly or not. As they're getting ready to leave Shannon APOLOGIZES for biting Triscuit in the leg, saying that he didn't know what else to do. He's APOLOGIZING for doing his job. Yes. He's the guardian of the bridge and he's APOLOGIZING for guarding the bridge.

Think about that one for a while.

Have you picked up your brains from the floor? Mopped up everything? Shannon wants to come with Triscuit and Earwig to take them to Faegan. Who I would refer to as Fagot, but that's just in bad taste. Right. So they let him come with. As they ride they discover a massacre of gnomes. Lots of dead gnomes all over the place. Shannon wished to by pass it, but Triscuit ignored him. Then they don't get why Shannon doesn't want to talk about it.

I feel stupider now.