patience

[calescent]

Alser's granddaughter has the same suggestive "power" blessing from her first set of three that Kiri has. Her other blessings aren't torz either - flexibility is coru, loyalty is hunti - but she is torz, and Alser's current best guess for a successor. She's about the elder prince's age, just a little older than Kiri. Alser asks Kiri if he might visit her at home with this grandchild-of-interest in tow.

Kiri says sure, why not.

And so Alser and Patience Frothen - who is only named for the blessing of patience, and does not wear it in her hair - comes to the house not too long after the princes do.

Comments

[calescent]

Plenty of hugs, yes.

[salt_of_the]

Awwwww.

[pythbox]

On a whim, he bounces over to Patience and asks, "Do you want hugs too?"

[salt_of_the]

"Sure!"

[pythbox]

So he hugs her.

[salt_of_the]

Patience turns out to be highly huggable.

[pythbox]

That is excellent. He is so pleased. Hug hugs!

[calescent]

Kiri goes around them to head out of the library to greet the current torz prime.

[pythbox]

"This library is really great," says the prince, still hugging Patience. "Me and Kiri are learning Soechin from it and it's fun."

[salt_of_the]

"Learning Soechin is fun? How do you make it fun?"

[pythbox]

"By just liking it, I think," he says after some consideration. "And by not having teachers because teachers are boring."

[salt_of_the]

"Oh, I guess that would probably help, wouldn't it."

[pythbox]

"Yeah! I sit and read books and Kiri reads my mind and she takes notes and then we make sentences at each other. It's fun."

[salt_of_the]

"Well, that's one way to use the power of the primes," giggles Patience. "Grandfather would probably think it's frivolous but he also said it doesn't really turn off so why shouldn't she be frivolous with it."

[pythbox]

"And it's not like she's going to run out of primeness," he says. "So she can be frivolous even with stuff she does on purpose, if she wants."

[salt_of_the]

"Right! To tell you the truth I'm not as sure as Grandfather is that I'll be the next Frothen one," Patience confides. "But I might as well go around meeting the people I'll have to know if I am."

[pythbox]

"Why aren't you sure?"

[salt_of_the]

"Well, you can't be sure, sure. It could be some really distant cousin, or maybe somebody we don't even know is related because of a scandalous secret affair who is more torz-y than I am. My dad drew power for me when I was born, sure, but maybe that means I am going to be an ambassador or that I will have seventeen children and boss them all around or that I'm going to run the navy, I don't know."

[pythbox]

The prince giggles. "Seventeen children? Wow."

[salt_of_the]

"I dunno, I just made up the number. I'm not wearing fertility in my hair. It'd be sort of embarrassing if I was! I guess some people must get it as a random blessing but it must be awfully strange."

[pythbox]

"It wouldn't have to mean a lot of children even if you were, I guess," he says thoughtfully. "Like it could just mean that you're going to be, I dunno, a really good gardener. But probably people will think you're going to have a lot of children and I bet it wouldn't be nice growing up like that, especially if you didn't want to."

[salt_of_the]

"Yeah. Or it could be extra metaphorical, maybe it means a fertile imagination - although I suppose then you'd just get imagination, wouldn't you - but at any rate there are other things it could mean and everybody always thinks the 'seventeen children' meaning first. I'm not categorically opposed to having large numbers of children although seventeen might be kind of pushing it? It is not my life ambition though. I'm glad that wasn't what Dad pulled."

[pythbox]

"I don't know if I'm going to want to have kids," the prince says thoughtfully. "I guess it'll be important to do it if I'm king."

[salt_of_the]

"Probably, yeah. Got to keep having royalty or... something... happens. I'm not actually sure what happens, do you know?"

[pythbox]

"Well, probably they can find somebody somewhere who's related enough to royalty to be king or queen if there's nobody better around, and then they'd have to do it. I don't know what would happen if the country just ran out of anyone who was even a little tiny bit royal. Maybe the primes would pick a new king or queen to start over with."