[Jaskier stares at him. He stares, and after a moment, he laughs. The number is equivalent to telling a modern man of a trillion dollars; a number so large it ceases to truly have any meaning.
It's a number that may encompass Nilfgaard's army -- if it were tripled. A seemingly ludicrous number.
And then his laugh stops, and Dean stands there looking so proud of himself.
Four hundred thousand. Perhaps if he sat for a week and counted every second, he would reach a similar number.
He lets it go with a shake of his head. He isn't sure whether his new company is making a jest or not, but he also seems to come from a sphere where men can easily record music, to advertise it, to get more ears to listen to it. Things that, simply, were impossibilities to a bard. The only way he could be forever memorialized was to have his music written and memorized.
Which he fully intends to. He is, after all, the Continent's greatest bard.]
Very well. [He thinks of those people with their hands waving, cheering. The energy that crackled in the room; a room he's never been in, that he will never be in, but he can see it behind his eyes, can feel himself moving with the music. He jerks over a stool with his foot, carefully picking up the instrument. It's much heavier than his lute, weighing his hands down. As he takes a seat, he has to find the spot where the curve of its body fits against his thigh, different from the bowl-like roundness of his lute.
His fingers follow the strings. A touch of surprise raises his brows.] They're cold. [And some sort of metal, he thinks.] Not catgut. Far fewer strings, too. [When he plucks it, to his ears, it's wholly unfamiliar, outside the fact it is, indeed, a musical note. Something deep, like the growl of an animal, combined with this coldness. Not a bad coldness, he thinks, but different from animal gut strings.
He beings plucking, as he does his lute, measuring the distance between the strings. Easier to strum now they're not grouped in doubles, and his calloused fingers can still move against them similarly.
It's always been fascinating to him, the more he learns, how things can be so bizarrely, unfathomably different, and yet he can always find something familiar to him. He begins moving over the strings, adjusting his fingers on its sleek neck, adjusting to the weight, the balance, the feel of it. The coldness. But the strings are warming up the more he plays. It's a bit of cacophony at first, figuring out the similarities, the differences... but he is the Continent's greatest bard.
He begins with something quieter, simpler, because the notes this things create reverberate almost too loudly in his head. A fantasia comes through, slow notes melting into quicker plucks, as he plays with moving from flicks of his nail to the longer strums, letting the vibrations roll as they will.
It's a fascinating thing. Beautiful in its exotic sound. The last note rolls longer than it would on gut, but lower, towards the bridge, he finds this fascinating emptiness. Something these synthetic strings cannot replicate from the gut.]
It's frightening similar, despite all its differences.
no subject
It's a number that may encompass Nilfgaard's army -- if it were tripled. A seemingly ludicrous number.
And then his laugh stops, and Dean stands there looking so proud of himself.
Four hundred thousand. Perhaps if he sat for a week and counted every second, he would reach a similar number.
He lets it go with a shake of his head. He isn't sure whether his new company is making a jest or not, but he also seems to come from a sphere where men can easily record music, to advertise it, to get more ears to listen to it. Things that, simply, were impossibilities to a bard. The only way he could be forever memorialized was to have his music written and memorized.
Which he fully intends to. He is, after all, the Continent's greatest bard.]
Very well. [He thinks of those people with their hands waving, cheering. The energy that crackled in the room; a room he's never been in, that he will never be in, but he can see it behind his eyes, can feel himself moving with the music. He jerks over a stool with his foot, carefully picking up the instrument. It's much heavier than his lute, weighing his hands down. As he takes a seat, he has to find the spot where the curve of its body fits against his thigh, different from the bowl-like roundness of his lute.
His fingers follow the strings. A touch of surprise raises his brows.] They're cold. [And some sort of metal, he thinks.] Not catgut. Far fewer strings, too. [When he plucks it, to his ears, it's wholly unfamiliar, outside the fact it is, indeed, a musical note. Something deep, like the growl of an animal, combined with this coldness. Not a bad coldness, he thinks, but different from animal gut strings.
He beings plucking, as he does his lute, measuring the distance between the strings. Easier to strum now they're not grouped in doubles, and his calloused fingers can still move against them similarly.
It's always been fascinating to him, the more he learns, how things can be so bizarrely, unfathomably different, and yet he can always find something familiar to him. He begins moving over the strings, adjusting his fingers on its sleek neck, adjusting to the weight, the balance, the feel of it. The coldness. But the strings are warming up the more he plays. It's a bit of cacophony at first, figuring out the similarities, the differences... but he is the Continent's greatest bard.
He begins with something quieter, simpler, because the notes this things create reverberate almost too loudly in his head. A fantasia comes through, slow notes melting into quicker plucks, as he plays with moving from flicks of his nail to the longer strums, letting the vibrations roll as they will.
It's a fascinating thing. Beautiful in its exotic sound. The last note rolls longer than it would on gut, but lower, towards the bridge, he finds this fascinating emptiness. Something these synthetic strings cannot replicate from the gut.]
It's frightening similar, despite all its differences.