foxinthestars

Viscountess Eeville and the Spotted Shumils (1005 words) by foxinthestars
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: 本好きの下剋上 - 香月美夜 | Honzuki no Gekokujou | Ascendance of a Bookworm Series - Kazuki Miya
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Ferdinand & Rozemyne (Ascendance of a Bookworm)
Characters: Myne (Ascendance of a Bookworm), Ferdinand (Ascendance of a Bookworm)
Additional Tags: One Shot, Humor, Culture Shock, Worldbuilding, References to 101 Dalmatians, Blanket Permission, and in the best and truest tradition of AoaB people sit in a room and discuss things
Summary: An animated movie song lands Rozemyne in Ferdinand's lecture room for more literary culture shock. As usual, everything she knows about storytelling is wrong — including the idea that everything she knows is wrong.

Viscountess Eeville and the Spotted Shumils

When I got called into the lecture room this time, I knew what it was about. I was pretty annoyed, too, because this was Ferdinand's fault, not mine.

Sure enough, he held up the sheet music he'd insisted I prepare. "What is this?" he asked.

"I told you it was no good, and you made me write it anyway!" I complained.

"You told me that it was a humorous song. You said nothing about it being entirely devoted to impugning a noblewoman's character." He raised an eyebrow. "Is this about Lady Georgine?"

"Not really. But maybe kind of? It's not talking about her, but her visit was what reminded me of it. I think my mind was trying to heal itself with humor." I'd barely met her, but since she'd left, I'd had that song stuck in my head for days, and Ferdinand had caught me humming it. That was how we'd ended up here.

"I see," he said. "Then who is this 'Viscountess Eeville'?"

"She's just a made-up character."

"Then why make her a viscountess?"

"Because it has the right number of syllables."

I was sure that would earn me a glare from him, but actually Ferdinand nodded a little like that was a perfectly acceptable reason. After that, though, he kept looking over the sheet music and frowning.

"She's a character from a story, and it's just a funny song about how mean and nasty she is," I said, cracking under the silent pressure. "Although it's pretty overblown, really. As story villains go, she wasn't that big of a deal. I mean, she wasn't plotting against the queen or anything."

"What was she doing?" Ferdinand asked.

"She was… Well, in the original version she wasn't a noble. All the characters were commoners, but she was wealthier than the others, and she wanted to buy their pets. And when they refused to sell them, she stole them. Like a lot of them. Like —" This world didn't seem to have dogs, so I reached for some kind of stand-in. There was that animal Ferdinand wanted me to use for my highbeast; what was it called…? "Like, one hundred and one spotted shumils."

"I cannot recall ever seeing a shumil with spots."

"Exactly!" I answered, only partly bluffing. "The kind of animal that it was, it was a special type of that animal that had unusual spots, and she wanted lots of them so she could make a fancy cloak out of their skins."

Silly, right?

But Ferdinand leaned forward. "Interesting."

"Huh?"

"If you wish to write a story presenting a fictional noble as a villain deserving of ridicule, I would say that this is a workable model," he explained. "While the duties of subordinates are more absolute, those of superior status are also expected to conform to certain standards of behavior, at least in the ideal. We may add to this that the animals in question are shumils, meaning that the properties they would add to the cloak as a magic tool could not be more than trivial. To extort or steal pets from one's subordinates in order to indulge in such useless vanity is indeed so flagrantly improper and foolish as to be ridiculous."

He flipped through the sheet music again. "'She ought to be locked up…' Assassination is more likely, but an Ivory Tower is also a plausible outcome. That would certainly be easier for you to write given your sensitivities."

This couldn't be happening. The Three Little Pigs had been nonsense, Cinderella had ended in tragedy, and now this? I'd concluded that all my story-writing instincts from my previous life were wrong here, but suddenly things were way more confusing even than that.

But then I realized that I forgotten something important. With this previously hidden move, I could convince Ferdinand that this story was nonsense, too!

"Oh, but the main characters are the shumils, and they can talk," I announced. "Well, sort of. They can talk to each other, and they can understand humans, but they can't talk to humans."

Ferdinand still didn't crack. "I see. A bit frivolous, but many would find the notion appealing."

"Well, what was wrong with The Three Little Pigs, then!?" I burst out.

He looked at me as if it were the stupidest question he'd ever heard. "Pigs are slaughter livestock, neither fey creatures nor pets, and their behavior in that story was bizarre." His eyes narrowed. "Do these shumils engage in building projects?"

I was half-tempted to tell him that they did just so my life would make sense again, but I couldn't. That movie was based on a book, after all, so it felt wrong to mess up the story. "No," I admitted. "Except for the talking and being unrealistically smart, they mostly did normal pet things."

He mulled it over. "Yes. I believe you should write this."

Getting a story pitch approved by Ferdinand should have felt like a victory, but right now it was just exhausting. "I don't think I have time to do that. Even if I did, I'd probably mess up all kinds of smaller things and have to go through a ton of revisions." To start with, I'd have to find out what shumils even were.

"The process would surely be instructive," he argued.

"But I'm doing so much already, and all of it is more important than this," I insisted, refusing to give an inch. Okay, maybe an inch but not more than that. "Maybe I could just write a short outline and put it away for later."

"Yes, that will do for now," Ferdinand agreed.

That was how a plot summary and sheet music for Viscountess Eeville and the Spotted Shumils found a home in a desk drawer next to my list of potential books to make and got its own entry on said list.

As an extra exhausting bonus, the process of writing and filing it got the song stuck in my head all over again.

'𝅘𝅥𝅮 The world was such a wholesome place un-til . . . 𝅘𝅥𝅮'

End

Afterword

End Notes

Only later in canon will Rozemyne try her hand at writing romance with unexpectedly X-rated results, learn what shumils are, and discover the wide-reaching appeal of talking shumils.
Confession: I was the one who had that earworm inspired by Georgine. Now the song tends to pop into my head whenever I see her. The resulting scene seemed fun enough to share — hope you enjoyed it!