User:JohnB/Fanfiction/The Masu: More Tales of Morrowind

We are the music makers,

And we are the dreamers of dreams!

(Arthur O'Shaughnessy, [1874])

Happy New Year from Japan!

(I came to realize that the number of stories in "A Morrowind Miscellany" was starting actually to outnumber miscellaneous items, so welcome to the Masu. A masu is a box made of Japanese cedar, about two inches high and four inches on each side. It's used to measure the amount of rice to cook for one person in one meal. It has a another--better--use. When you go into a watering hole in Tokyo and order sake from the bottle, the waiter places a masu in front of you and puts a glass into the masu. Then very carefully, he pours the sake until it overruns the glass and fills the masu underneath it to the brim. It's kind of awkward to try and drink from this arrangement without sipping from the glass till you can finally pick it up. When the glass is sufficiently empty, you pour the sake in the masu into the glass, or else drink the remainder from a corner of the masu.

Anyway, think of "The Kaleidoscope" as the glass, and this is its masu. I intend to make this masu elastic enough to contain more than just 15 stories. So as we say here, "Kanpai! Bottoms up!")

Index of Characters:

Aldam

(The Multicolored Dream Coat): Dunmer. Number One in Daynil's rogue's gallery. Wants Daynil out of the way for a dream he told their father that happened to have come true.

Armagnac, Andre

(The Enchanted Kettle): Breton. It was a toss-up what to name this character and also what race to make him. On the evening I finally settled on Breton, a friend was sharing with me a squat-shaped bottle of Armagnac de Montal Napoleon. Pretty good stuff, but he was drinking it on the rocks. Anyway, that gave me the name. He's a rag-picker who stumbles onto good fortune in the most unlikely way.

Arowhena

(The Book and the Stone, A Visit to Pelagiad): A young Cymri woman who is rescued from Erewhon (the Land of Machines) and becomes the captain's love interest.

Belvis

(The Late Comer): Dunmer. A young monk who should have found a different occupation.

Benar

(The Multicolored Dream Coat): Dunmer. Number Two in Daynil's rogue's gallery. Gladly goes along with Aldam's plan to do away with Daynil.

Casain

(The Multicolored Dream Coat): Dunmer. Number Three in Daynil's rogue's gallery. More skittish about doing anything bad to Daynil but goes along with it anyway.

Cyreril Aka Master Cyreril

(The Case of the Odd Pair, The Invaders, The Book and the Stone, Cyreril in Wonderland, The Homecoming): Altmer. Might have been a former mage who finally rejected magic for the study of science, especially mathematics and astronomy. Loaths the mages but still hangs out in the Ald-ruhn guild, where he hobnobs with his lacky, Explorer.

Daynil

(The Multicolored Dream Coat): Dunmer. Has the uncanny ability to foresee the future using an enchanted multicolored coat given him by his father.

Explorer

(The Book and the Stone): Race, uncertain. The house genius at the Ald-ruh Guild of Mages and Master Cyreril's lacky, you find out in this story why he couldn't define "Antipodean" for Asantus in The Book and the Stone.

Farseer, Karl

(The Ice Woman): Nord. Hatches a get-rich-quick plan with his father, but his father doesn't live to benefit from it.

Hoichi

(Hoichi the Earless): Dunmer. Has a shaky grip on reality when he finds that objects that should have stayed in a dream didn't. So, which is real: the dream, or this world? The monks of Holamayan monastery decide they'd better save the poor guy from himself.

Laila

(The Adventures of Laila, Scotti Marries Laila, The Three Girls Meet): An Altmer-Bosmer. Apprenticed to the Dark Brotherhood but botches a job to rub out Decumus Scotti. In The Adventures of Laila he goes on to Vvaredenfell and hooks up with a Bosmer ex-con named Ulwaen, who is being released with instructions to go against Dagoth Ur. In The Three Girls Meet she carries on a sort of Kafeeklatsch with Yumiya and Lunette.)

Legrand, Jacques

(Buried Treasure): Breton. Scion of a long line of wealthy landowners, now living as a indigent hermit in the Ascadian Isles. (Appears as William Legrand in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Gold Bug".)

Lunette

(Mordecai and Little Loonie, Starting from Scratch) A youngish Breton (later former-) prostitute who crosses paths with an Argonian grifter and is helped by him to recover a bounty on the murderer of the Seyda Neen tax collector. In Starting from Scratch, she meets Decumus Scotti, who has just completed a prison term for ebony smuggling, on the prisoner transport ship after she too was incarcerated for refusing to turn in Mordecai Jones, a freed slave trying to evade his former master, who is to take him back by force. Realizing two heads are better than one, Scotti and Lunette start life over again as a working partnership.

Ra'Karim

(Buried Treasure): Khajiit. A freed slave once owned by Jacques Legrand.

Sedas, Mallas

(Joining the Sixth House): Young Dunmer. Name borrowed from the TES Online. Must make his own way in the world and ends up in the wrong place.

Siegfried

(Siegfried does Vienna): Middle-aged Nord. A very capable iron smith who dreams he's in 1897 Vienna. Unlike Kafka's cockroach, he finds this a splendid change.

Ulwaen

(The Adventures of Laila): Young Bosmer thief released to Vvardenfell to undergo what could be a suicide mission. Laila takes him under her wing to prepare him for the worst.

Yumiya

(Scotti's Revenge, The Lost Airship, The Gotterdammerung): Young Nakan woman. Somehow became the chosen one to go against Dagoth Ur. The problem is this suits her well as long as she can take her sweet time, but when people start calling her to account, she makes her first clumsy move and nearly gets killed. Her "brother" has no choice but to take her place and kill Dagoth Ur, for which she takes all the credit and causes a serious rift between them. This has left her pretty much friendless.

Item #	Title	Release Year	Summary
One	Joining the Sixth House	2017	Launching into a living dream in the House Unmourned.
Two	Buried Treasure	2017	The narrator is roped by a madman into a get-rich-quick scheme.
Three	The Homecoming	2018	Originally a scene from the Kirk Douglas movie The Oddysey, which along with the following story, based on a US Civil War event, came out pretty lame, so I ditched both of them and recycled the titles. Now this is a sequel to Cyreril in Wonderland listed below. Cyreril arrives in Ald-ruhn to fulfill a special request from the Redguard astronaut, who left some hardware in Vvardenfell and wants to get it back.
Four	The Rebellion	2018/ 2019 The Last	A mysterious hermit comes to the Dren plantation, ostensibly to convert the slaves to a new salvation religion but in fact to set off a chain of events that will change how Vvardenfell deals with its many Khajiiti and Argonian inhabitants. The final story in 2018, replacing a story of the same title written at the end of 2017, was left half-finished, so I got it out of the way in 2019. This is the last story.
Five	The Adventures of Laila	2008?	Scotti's former wife (because technically he's dead), with a not-so-dark personality as in the later "Scotti's Revenge" story, making her way in the world.
Six	Scotti Marries Laila	2008?	Laila failed to rub out Scotti, so they fall in together on a faux-honeymoon. Laila learns too late that Scotti also has an axe to grind.
Seven	The Multicolored Dream Coat	2018	Daynil has the ability to see into the future using an enchanted coat.
Eight	The Three Girls Meet	2018	Laila, Yumiya, and Lunette have gotten together at the Eight Plates to celebrate Girls' Day and catch up on each other's recent events. The question boils down to whether they managed to put their broken lives back together. Yumiya tries to shrug off having come up short.
Nine	A Visit to Pelagiad	2018	JohnB goes to meet Arowhena in Pelagiad. They discuss "The Book and the Stone" and her place in it. And JohnB tells her some recent unpleasant news, for which she has a positive answer. The most autobiographical story in these collections.
Ten	Siegfried does Vienna	2018	Siegfried wakes from a Kafka-esque dream in which he finds himself in fin-de-siecle Vienna. He must answer to the police for the pouch of gold and steel dagger in his possession.
Eleven	Hoichi the Earless	2018	A wandering troubadour meets the subject of his epic poem.
Twelve	The Enchanted Kettle	2018	One good turn deserves another.
Thirteen	The Ice Woman	2018	A young woman returns to Karl Farseer's life to take care of some unfinished business.
Fourteen	The Late Comer	2018	A young monk finds he's overslept by a long shot.
Fifteen	Cyreril in Wonderland	2018	Master Cyreril pays a visit to a new buddy in Tucson, Arizona.
Sixteen	Farewell	2019	This is the real goodbye.