Congratulations, I’m CACKLING at this. Omg, the only way this could be better is if a ghost pops up and Nightingale has to deal with it and tour-guide!Peter is VERY suspicious/intrigued.
I’ll go you one better: it turns out that Nightingale is in fact the embodiment of that post about immortals who weren’t really paying attention to major historical events and the fact he corrected Peter on is the one thing he knows that Peter doesn’t.
Peter spends the next few months trying to interrogate him on various things and being told that Nightingale a) was in Sri Lanka b) remembers things but not the thing Peter wants to know and/or c) just wasn’t paying attention. Peter is only slightly mollified by being introduced to some of the older Rivers, because half of them weren’t paying attention either, especially to things that didn’t affect local hydrology.
(I am 90% sure this is true in actual canon but it’s even funnier if knowing historical facts about London is Peter’s job and not just his hobby)
Congratulations, I’m CACKLING at this. Omg, the only way this could be better is if a ghost pops up and Nightingale has to deal with it and tour-guide!Peter is VERY suspicious/intrigued.
I’ll go you one better: it turns out that Nightingale is in fact the embodiment of that post about immortals who weren’t really paying attention to major historical events and the fact he corrected Peter on is the one thing he knows that Peter doesn’t.
Peter spends the next few months trying to interrogate him on various things and being told that Nightingale a) was in Sri Lanka b) remembers things but not the thing Peter wants to know and/or c) just wasn’t paying attention. Peter is only slightly mollified by being introduced to some of the older Rivers, because half of them weren’t paying attention either, especially to things that didn’t affect local hydrology.
(I am 90% sure this is true in actual canon but it’s even funnier if knowing historical facts about London is Peter’s job and not just his hobby)
Okay never have I rejected a fact from an author more, omg. THIS IS ENTIRELY HIS PERSONALITY, TO THE POINT I AM NOW CONVINCED THAT ON DATE NIGHTS, BEVERLEY WILL PUT ON BAD HISTORICAL DRAMAS SIMPLY TO WIND PETER UP AND WATCH HIM GO. (Peter doesn’t even care that much about the Tudor era and yet whenever Bev puts on an episode of the Tudors he spends the entire episode breaking down all the million of ways it’s wrong, both factually and spiritually. Beverley has no idea how you can “spiritually” get the history wrong but Peter swears up and down that it’s a thing.)
Edit: now that I’ve derailed this post, I love the idea of Peter sitting rapt as one of the Rivers gleefully trash-talks some random historical figure while Nightingale sits there, bemused at how Peter is so into what amounts to gossip that is CENTURIES out of date.
I mean I agree it IS his personality now it just cracks me up that it wasn’t planned as an ~organic part~ of Peter as a character or w/e, it was just convenient for fact-dropping AND NOW THAT’S HOW IT IS, Peter is a giant history nerd and we love him for it.
All my money for Peter and, IDK, Lea exchanging John Maynard Keynes gossip while Nightingale knows “I was THERE and I didn’t know any of this and also why do you CARE”
“If you think he cares about this, you should see how he gets about the Tudors,” says Beverley.
Congratulations, I’m CACKLING at this. Omg, the only way this could be better is if a ghost pops up and Nightingale has to deal with it and tour-guide!Peter is VERY suspicious/intrigued.
I’ll go you one better: it turns out that Nightingale is in fact the embodiment of that post about immortals who weren’t really paying attention to major historical events and the fact he corrected Peter on is the one thing he knows that Peter doesn’t.
Peter spends the next few months trying to interrogate him on various things and being told that Nightingale a) was in Sri Lanka b) remembers things but not the thing Peter wants to know and/or c) just wasn’t paying attention. Peter is only slightly mollified by being introduced to some of the older Rivers, because half of them weren’t paying attention either, especially to things that didn’t affect local hydrology.
(I am 90% sure this is true in actual canon but it’s even funnier if knowing historical facts about London is Peter’s job and not just his hobby)
Congratulations, I’m CACKLING at this. Omg, the only way this could be better is if a ghost pops up and Nightingale has to deal with it and tour-guide!Peter is VERY suspicious/intrigued.
I used to think dragons weren’t terribly plausible in the RoL universe because both 1) physics and 2) the large unknown animal problem (essentially: talking foxes are one thing, but the largest non-marine vertebrate unknown to science that wasn’t a subspecies of a known species, i.e. forest elephants don’t count, was the okapi in the early 20th C). But thinking on it, people breathing underwater (or surviving without breathing?) for hours + invisible unicorns pretty much address the how-much-can-magic-screw-with-physics issue (although one feels dragons would have to be fairly significantly magically powerful even so), and entrances to Fae deal with the large unknown animal problem.
All of which is to say that dragons in this series would not break my suspension of disbelief, but only as long as Peter spent a lot of time being outraged about the ability of magic to screw with physics and doing sketch diagrams in his notebooks about the amount of force required per square metre of wing area and so on to keep them airborne.
I think firebreathing as a biological phenomenon might still be out of the question, though. Maybe dragons can just naturally cast fireballs.
There is something so perfect about finally finding out who the Faceless Man is and having him revealed to be yet another politely xenophobic/racist shitfucker who believes that only “pure” white people are actually Britons.
Like, kudos to you, Ben Aaronovitch, for making the insidious racist who’s civil about their bigotry into your main villain. I appreciate that kind of commentary down to my bones.
also Lesley is a pretty good example of people who don’t think of themselves as being racist but who also don’t see a problem with working with, supporting or helping a white supremacist because it’s advantageous for them personally …
Thomas Nightingale: ‘100 year old nuclear weapon in a 3 piece suit’ (quoth @thebaconsandwichofregret)
Beverley Brook: Literal Goddess
Tyburn and all the other Rivers: also literal gods and goddesses, but older and scarier
Molly: exiled Queen of the Fairies
Martin Chorley: actual real live supervillain
Lesley May: supervillain-in-training, magic face-changing powers, possessed by the ghost of a god????
Varvara Tamonina: professional henchwoman and immortal Russian witch
Peter Grant: goes toe-to-toe with all of the above as friends/colleagues/mortal enemies mostly by virtue of his intelligence, detective skills, and inventive use of technology, has acquired/semi-adopted a teenage sidekick, absolutely hates guns, would rather talk people down than get into fights with them
QED, thank you for coming to my TED talk.
*But, like, approximately a million times less angsty. And rich. And we’re definitely talking 90s TV show Batman here not any of the Frank-Miller-esque versions.
tora42's nonsensne 