Fanfic: The Gambler (Fullmetal Alchemist)

[nebroadwe]

Title: Drabble: The Gambler
Fandom: FMA (anime version)
Character(s): Roy Mustang
Pairing(s): None.
Rating: G
Word Count: 100
Warnings: None.
A/N: Kenny Rogers ain't got nothing on Roy Mustang. Crossposted from nebroadwe to Höllenbeck (i.e. fm_alchemist, fullservicefma, fma_gen, fma_writers, and fma_fiction).
Dedication: For cornerofmadness, as a slightly belated birthday present. The inspiration was obvious. :-)

---

      Roy Mustang doesn't gamble. Maes Hughes used to say it was all that kept him from being a rake straight out of the Age of Wits, a dapper buck breaking faro banks and maidens' hearts while sipping claret. Roy always retorted that he couldn't stomach claret, either, but his friend made the comparison anyway whenever Roy declined a round of blackjack or craps. He wishes Maes could see him now, pushing everything he's earned to the center of the table, calling the bet of a man whose poker face no cardsharp can match.

      Because Roy Mustang doesn't gamble ... with money.

---

[Acknowledgments: Fullmetal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkinjutsushi) was created by Arakawa Hiromu and is serialized monthly in Shonen Gangan (Square Enix); the anime of the same title was directed by Mizushima Seiji and story-edited by Aikawa Sho. Copyright for these properties is held by Arakawa Hiromu, Square Enix, Mainichi Broadcasting System, Aniplex, Bones, and dentsu. All rights reserved.]

Comments

[terracottabones.livejournal.com]

Very sharp. I wouldn't have known what faro was except for a book a I finished a few days ago, too! It was "Arabella" by Georgetter Heyer. All the vocab here sounded like it was straight out of that book!

Also, sorry I didn't respond on your last...two posts. -__- I read them, too, which is worse. Haha. Anyway, let me say that I really liked to one about Sheska and Falman. Characterization was great, but I especially liked Falman's progressing sympathy. I always found it hard to determine what exactly Falman's characterization would be, since he never seems to...say much. I liked what you did to him, and Sheska was darling.

Right. And, on a last note, can I friend you? :P

[kashicat.livejournal.com]

This gave me goosebumps, believe it or not.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I wouldn't have known what faro was except for a book a I finished a few days ago, too! It was "Arabella" by Georgetter Heyer. All the vocab here sounded like it was straight out of that book!

Caught! I'm a Heyer fan -- I recommend The Grand Sophy and Frederica and The Unknown Ajax and The Masqueraders and ... um, well, several others, too. And Wrede and Stevermer's Sorcery and Cecelia. Dunno if Amestris had an eighteenth-century equivalent, but it's fun to imagine and "the Age of Wits" seemed a reasonable title. :-)

Anyway, let me say that I really liked to one about Sheska and Falman. Characterization was great, but I especially liked Falman's progressing sympathy. I always found it hard to determine what exactly Falman's characterization would be, since he never seems to...say much. I liked what you did to him, and Sheska was darling.

Thanks heaps! I wish I weren't having such a hard time making the transition into part 2 -- I have it all laid out and most of the dialogue plotted --

"Sorry, sir," said Furey. "We thought you'd be safe in the closet."

"Ah, come on, Furey, lighten up," Havoc said, slapping Falman on the back. "The warrant officer's a big boy. He can handle one little file clerk, right?"

-- and the entire conclusion drafted, but ... it's ... just ... not ... moving. Argh! I've decided to stop pounding at it for a bit and see if a rest helps. And if not, then it's time to pound the pavement. I've found that the best cure for my writer's block is a walk down to the local train station and back.

Right. And, on a last note, can I friend you?

But of course! Can I friend you back?

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Marvelous! That's just what I wanted. Whee! [heads off to prepare thank offering for Muses]

[kashicat.livejournal.com]

Hurray! Clearly it was superbly written, then. Well done!

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

Faro! (So wants to learn how to buck that tigah...er, sorry, Faro immediately takes me into the movie Tombstone and Doc Holliday as envisioned by Val Kilmer and makes me drool. *wipes mouth*)

*cough*

Where was I?

Yesh! Drabble. Love. Love love because it seems so very, very true of Roy Mustang...and knowing that it isn't just his own life on the line makes it that much more deliciously charged as a story.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Well, [blush, shuffle], "superbly" is a bit much. I'll take "effectively," though, if you're handing that out. :-)

[kashicat.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure I should let myself be bargained down...

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Yep. The way the anime sets up the climax, the entire Mustang-tachi is part of the gamble, but Roy's the one playing the hand: if he fails, they're all wiped. At the outset, it just amused me to think that, given that we see him drunk and sweet-talking other men's women (okay, Havoc's, but it's a synechdoche, right?), he might confound expectations by disdaining the third vice of the triumvirate, but that pretty quickly led to the idea that when he did play, it would be for mortal stakes. (Thank you, Robert Frost.)

Haven't seen Tombstone though I liked Val Kilmer in Willow and didn't realize it mentioned faro. It didn't occur to me the game held on into that part of the nineteenth century -- I had it too firmly associated with Regency England. [contemplates broadened historical horizons]

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Trust me -- I'm an English major. :-)

[kashicat.livejournal.com]

Bwahaha! She plays the Authority card!

I suppose an English degree would trump a Philosophy of Religion degree in such cases...

Oh, all right. Effective it is. ::grumble::

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Bwahaha! She plays the Authority card!

Hey, after all the time I spent getting the degree, I want more out of it than just a funny hat.

I suppose an English degree would trump a Philosophy of Religion degree in such cases...

But I shall defer to you the next time we're discussing William James.

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

that pretty quickly led to the idea that when he did play, it would be for mortal stakes.

Yesh. Yesh and yesh. *nods* I agree very much on that.

Faro was the trick of the trade in the gambling houses out West - sure, poker was king; you might've gotten a fair shake in poker (depending on shaved decks and notched edges) but faro? The odds are on the house. Or so Doc says in Tombstone. Val is one of my favoritest actors and that movie is one of my top three, "Cannot live without it in my collection" movies. (Gorgeous men, gorgeous clothes, semi-historically accurate storytelling, gorgeous horses...and the language and the lines and the violence...all it needed was an explosion or two and I'd be in heaven.)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Faro was the trick of the trade in the gambling houses out West - sure, poker was king; you might've gotten a fair shake in poker (depending on shaved decks and notched edges) but faro? The odds are on the house. Or so Doc says in Tombstone.

Wikipedia agrees with him. I keep having to remember that the gambling house in Heyer's Faro's Daughter is going under not because the bank keeps getting broken, but because the lady of the house has absolutely no financial common sense ("I can't and won't live in Squalor!" -- Squalor defined as hiring horses instead of keeping them :-).

Val is one of my favoritest actors and that movie is one of my top three, "Cannot live without it in my collection" movies. (Gorgeous men, gorgeous clothes, semi-historically accurate storytelling, gorgeous horses...and the language and the lines and the violence...all it needed was an explosion or two and I'd be in heaven.)

What, they couldn't get around to blowing up a train, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid? ("Think ya used enough dynamite there, Butch?" [chortle])

[c-b-syndrome.livejournal.com]

Oh! Absolutely beautiful! Probably one of your best (and that's difficult to say, since your drabbles always leave me breathless).

[terracottabones.livejournal.com]

Naturally, you can friend me!

I'm so glad you love Wrede and Stevermer, too! I went through an obsessive period with them. Determined to read all the Heyer I can get my hands on as well. *delighted*

Good luck on your conclusion!

[lyricnonsense.livejournal.com]

Mmm, fantastic. So well written, and so very Roy.

Any more words on my part would be superficial.

[evil-little-dog.livejournal.com]

("I can't and won't live in Squalor!" -- Squalor defined as hiring horses instead of keeping them :-).

Interesting...I thought hired horses were actually less expensive in the long run but. *shrugs/grins*

What, they couldn't get around to blowing up a train

Had it been "historically accurate," maybe - however, no trains ran into Tombstone itself, so we had to make do with horses galloping around the world. *giggles*

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Thank you, thank you. Now take a breath again and tell me: any more of Sit Vis Tecum on the horizon? :-)

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Thanks! Roy was the subject of one of my very first character-sketch bunnies, but the notes are still sitting in my drawer because I lost my nerve about actually writing it. Someday, someday ...

[fractured-chaos.livejournal.com]

Um...

Soon? :D

I'm actually dividing my time up between that, a 'Disaster 'verse' series of shorts (coughBright Light Dim sequelcough), Balance of Power, and an AMV that's STILL devouring my brain (7 months and counting, after subtracting time off for other stuff).

That's not including job hunting, and 'other' stuff.

btw? You'll be happy to know that this AMV is ALL. YOUR. FAULT! XD

...indirectly.

('Silence...', "Back is bare...", 'Brothers in Arms'... Hughes... *BUNNYATTACK!*)

[fractured-chaos.livejournal.com]

oops! Forgot I was logged in under another uname. *blushes* (but I'm sure you figured out who it was) ^^

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

My dear, you are unmistakable. :-) I'd noticed you were in the middle of a creative fit -- can't help doing the puppy-eyes for more of what I like to read. (Just ask evil_little_dog how many times I've inquired about the tea-party story.) Sorry for siccing the AMV bunny on you ...

... okay, no, I'm not. You do good work; there should be more of it. Attack, my lapine minions, attack!

[fractured-chaos.livejournal.com]

^_^

Well, the good news is, I -finally- got the bridge just before the "So many different worlds..." verse to a satisfactory level. I tend to story-board AMVs like I outline stories; which is to say, barely. I know where I want to start and I know where I want to end up... getting there is more often than not a rambling, back-roads, take-the-scenic-route affair that only goes in the -general- direction I need to.

You should see the file I have just for this AMV. It's... disturbing. I had a -ton- of frame-by-frame edits (somewhere on the order of over 500 frames I'd edited in PhotoImpact) that didn't get used. That's just for that one 11 second sequence.

My mouse screams in terror whenever I try to click on that particular icon now. XD

[ishte.livejournal.com]

Yay! As you know I adore your work. The last line says it all here.

btw, a while back I friended you without permission hahaha. Please feel free to friend me back. Especially if you like to watch random flamboyant ranting in amongst the more civilized stuff.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Thanks! I love it when I actually get a last line and don't have to whack my head against the keyboard and the thesaurus trying to achieve one by craft. Got one for the Fire-and-Ice Challenge almost immediately, thank goodness. Now I can concentrate on the hard stuff (i.e. the mush).

I don't mind the friending -- this journal is so painfully free of personal detail that you'd think I was, I dunno, raised in an era when the public-private distinction was more stringently maintained. :-) I shall friend you back, however; I'm looking forward to hearing how the MS ride goes!

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Eep. I have the greatest respect for people who do AMVs and other such things -- aside the technical know-how, I am in awe of the mind sufficiently attuned to pictures to be able to sort them into a properly related set. Even if it does create enormous honking amounts of film for the cutting room floor. (Does one's personal computer have a floor? Mine just seems to recede into an endless distance ... )

[fractured-chaos.livejournal.com]

I would assume mine has a 'floor' of approx 300Gb ;) (that's the size of my slave drive).

The folder for Brothers in Arms if currently sitting at 4.96Gb, and the folder for the raw frames extracted in the video editor for later use (which is 98% BiA, 2% other stuff) is at 3.5Gb. Neither folder would be that large, though, had I been more organized in the first place. What happened is I finally learned how to use the photo editing program, and with anything I learn, I tend to abuse the hell out of it for awhile (experimenting, etc). I'll have to wait until the AMV is finished before I clean it up, though. All those 'project' files have to be saved (the file that allows you to pick up where you left off in the video editing program), because so many of the special effects and edits I have had to be done as separate projects from the actual AMV (Things like, doing a sequence of 175 frames has to be put together and rendered into an actual video file before I can add it to the project because otherwise it'll severely bog-down the AMV project due to not enough RAM, and the enormous file size of the AMV project all on its own -- plus certain visual effects require the use of several filters and all 6 overlay tracks, and there just isn't enough 'room' in the main project to do so)...

Um... I geeked out on you there, didn't I?

Beyond that... Well, imagining pictures set to music is like any other creative skill, when you think about it. You suck at first, but if you keep at it, and learn from your mistakes, you get better. I've gotten better with timing now, so I don't need the Cool Edit Pro nearly as much as I did before (which is an audio editing program that I don't utilize nearly as much as I could... I mostly use it because it'll show me a song's wave-form at 30 frames per second, so I can get my timing right on in the AMV).

And, like with anything creative... once you start, your mind becomes a fertile breeding ground for various breeds of idea-bunnies. ;) (I've got one eating at my brain now for Styx 'Renegade', starring Scar.... AAAAGGGGHHHH!!! Too many ideas!) XD

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

oooo i like it very very much. THANK YOU! Poor Roy and what a wonderful analogy

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Glad you like it! Many happy returns!

[cornerofmadness.livejournal.com]

thanks again

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

Um... I geeked out on you there, didn't I?

Just a bit, yes. But I'm used to that -- I am, at the moment, one of only two humanities types in the local group of friends (the rest being biomedical sciences, helping professions and computer techies). I'm told I've developed a very good "my, how interesting!" expression. ;-)

And, like with anything creative... once you start, your mind becomes a fertile breeding ground for various breeds of idea-bunnies. ;) (I've got one eating at my brain now for Styx 'Renegade', starring Scar.... AAAAGGGGHHHH!!! Too many ideas!) XD

Hear, hear! If only they would mature as fast as they breed ...

[fractured-chaos.livejournal.com]

I'm told I've developed a very good "my, how interesting!" expression. ;-)

*giggles* And I've been told that I've developed the uncanny ability to hear eyes glazing over (even on the 'net) ^^;;

Hear, hear! If only they would mature as fast as they breed ...

NNnnnnnnoooooo! I wanna keep the new ones babies until the others have finished maturing! XD Otherwise, I'm -literally- hopping all over the place.

[orion117.livejournal.com]

As soon as I saw "faro," "rake," and "claret," I was reminded of my beloved Georgette Heyer romances. I was happy to see upthread that you, too, are a fan. That would have been enough reason for me to enjoy this, but the last line stopped me cold. Great idea, well executed.

[nebroadwe.livejournal.com]

I'm always tickled to run into other Heyer fans in contexts like this -- I was first introduced to her work via SF fandom (romance never having been my thing, really). Like Patrick O'Brian, she seems to appeal to people with an eye for the fine art of world-building. (The sense of humor, snappy dialogue and enjoyable characterizations don't hurt, either.)