If Thistledown...the snow-white rabbit and viceroy of the Teaset Coterie...could talk...what kind of voice would he have?...
Charlotte ate her coconut milk rice one small spoonful at a time—a relaxed, intentional pace—while in her lap the rabbit Thistledown had his own meal of lettuce. Crnch crnch crnch... Hum of the refrigerator aside, his nibbles were the only noise in her insulated apartment-for-one. The surrounding accoutrements—glass fairies in moss-encrusted jars, obsidian dragon murals etched into the walls, cherry-blossom curtains fencing in a canopy bed—would have surprised no one who had seen her matches. But when Charlotte was alone, she kept the lights so dim she could barely make out the fey panoply around her.
Like Shimmerlace herself, Thistledown proved a draw. The matches featuring the rabbit blew up even more than than her most lascivious hentai outings. LAW, it seemed, drew a segment of viewers who wanted their sexfights with a side helping of cute, of precious, of fluffy. And so Charlotte let Shimmer keep her pet at the head of her coterie.
But how to use him here, in this...promo? How to do...anything? Working intentionally to keep her breathing steady, each breath deep, Charlotte imagined the scene: piercing stagelights, heat drying her cheeks red and crisp, a rustle in the audience signaling impatience...impatience with her, with her numbskull slowness of speech, with her sheer in-ring incompetence, with the thud after thud of her lead-balloon jokes… Charlotte ate another ten-grain spoonful of rice.
Honestly? I kinda picture Thistle there as kinda a brat. Like, picture a HIGH SQUEAKY pixie fairy kinda voice, right, with a childlike kinda intonation sorta thing? And he’d say things like—
————
—”Got any sevens, stinky-butt?”
While Charlotte stayed curled up in the dark of her padded apartment, Shimmerlace sat onstage at one end of a long table set for a teaparty. Silver kettles and porcelain teacups—all white except for a single pink saucer at Shimmer’s side—glittered while steam rich with ginger tea curled overhead, thick like a mist. Behind her the titantron. Below, the audience.
—”Lucky guesses we’re havin’ today...” Shimmerlace placed two cards face down halfway down the table. Thistledown picked up two cards from his own pile and lay them on Shimmer’s, and Shimmer put them all into the discard pile. ”How about...the queen o’ clubs?”
—”Hahahaha! GO FISH old lady! Got any… EIGHTS?”
attire
—”HAHAHA!” The exchange of eights exhausted the last of Thistledown’s cards. ”I WIN YOU LOSE, NYAAAAH! The rabbit hopped into the pile of cards, rolling tiny rabbit barrel rolls until cards had flown all over the table, onto a few bare chairs, and all over the floor. “Gaaaaawd you suck.”
—”You’re doing an awful lot of gloating over a wee game of luck, sweet wain...”
—”Uuuuh. Yeah sure, but I mean like…In general.”
—”Oi!”
—”I mean, come on boss-lady, you’re like FIVE. BIG. FAT. Ls in the hole, your girlfriend kicks you around like a soccer ball, and the last time you beat me at cards, I was learning the rules.”
—”Now you listen here, you little cunt, just on account of my changin’ your diapers, don’t you go assuming you can talk however—”
—”Hey, do I have to hang out with you when you’re in the human-sized rabbit cage? No offense but that sounds cramped, and I’d rather stay with Auntie Nico please.”
At this, Shimmer gave a long pause. She sighed. She reached into the inside-pocket of her costume’s chest piece and pulled out her by-now signature butterfly-shaped glass smoking pipe and a lighter. The feychild lit her smoke and puffed pink plumes. Finally she stood, walked to her rabbit, and lifted him by the scruff of his neck. In a deadly-low voice, she began to growl at him between rabbit-face-covering puffs of smoke.
—”Have you ever considered, dear Thistledown, that life has dealt to us all a most terrible and final L?”
—”Uh, Shim-Shim...”
The glare from the Seelie Scion into the Snow Prince of the Cloudy Vale was iron and angry.
—”HAVE YOU EVER, sweetest of my wains, considered unflinching the bare reality of your mortality? Ever stood still before your mirror and imagined each merry cell in your body drooping like a tent unfurled, your tongue turning stone-cold and losing the color of its taste, your eyes going milky, then washing away like ice in the unflinching sun?
As Thistle hung by his scruff, he did not kick or squirm or try to escape. Well-trained and well-fed and in no pain, he hung still.
—”That seems a little...”
—Ever imagined the slow recession of your life-giving magic once your heart ACHES and then goes still, cold and cold and cold and then not even shivers, not even cold or black, but sheer unadulterated nothing? With that inevitable retreat before one and all, HOW DO WE POOR JOBBERS DEAL, THISTLE?”
—”Wh...what?”
—”To the right of the dealer, dumb fuck.”
Grinning, Shimmerlace dropped Thistledown onto the table.
—”Clockwise, in other words. I thought you said you knew the rules to this game?
At this point, Thistledown had been supposed to hop back to his end of the table, where he could enjoy his pile of lettuce and carrots—but instead he fell onto his side. Poor, overstimulated baby. As Shimmerlace neatly seated herself, she sympathized. The entire ventriloquism act had begun to make her own mind a bit fuzzy from exertion.
—Anyway, you needn’t worry, as I have no intention of spending to much as a second in that gibbet. Your Teatime Maitre is gonna step on Angie.”
In spite of Shimmer's growing fatigue, she remembered the key fact: the audience was there below, just beyond the stage—a packed (if small and secondary) ampitheatre, an entire crowd of people who had shown up just to hear her talk. She had to imagine they shared some piece of her vision, and that thought made the edges of Shimmerlace shine brighter and thicker. She owed them a finale.
—”...Are you mad at me, Shim?”
—”Course not Thistle.”
—”I was just playin...But I do really worry about you, you know. Haven’t your losses made you feel...even a little, I don’t know...degraded?”
—”They really don’t. Lotsa reasons there. For one, I really do intend to start dunking on these dumbfucks. But, even if I don’t...”
While she spoke, Shimmer had already picked up the pink saucer. Now she put it to her lips, filled her mouth with liquid until her cheeks were round pouches, and then with a quick flip of the lighter she spewed liquid on flame. A fan of curling, retina-searing pink flame burst into the fog. And now the audience would see something previously obscured by the steam and fog—tiny, transparent ribbons hang from the ceiling. These burst into glittering pink sparks, flames roiling up the sparkler threads that had been tied like webbing to carve out a leering lapine shape:
Spoiler
