[YANS] (aka Yet Another New Story!) NaNoWriMo 2017 (COMPLETE)

Day 19 - Well That Was Easy

"This... is a mess." The Muse looked over the results of the overnight write-in with something akin to panic. There wasn't enough caffeine in the world to wake her up enough to deal with this. "How are we supposed to edit this into coherence?"

"Eh, don't worry." The Writer said with a yawn and dug around for a Diet Coke in the couch. It helpfully spawned a two-liter for her. Senient interdimensional couches of holding were awesome.

"So are we going to get any real story done today or is this all going to be fixing spelling errors and formatting?"

The Writer just looked at her.

The Muse sighed and rolled up her sleeves. "Fine, fine. Alright, how bad can this be?

~*~*~*~*~

"So. Bad." The Muse grumbled as they stumbled back in from the hourlong slog through the old word count. They'd added a few words, fixed more spelling errors than she wanted to think about, and had the fun of trying to decypher gibberish written just before the witching hours. "You aren't allowed to stay up until midnight writing ever again."

"But I had so many good ideas!"

"Ever."

"You're just jealous because the plot is actually coming together for once. I may end up short on my word count, but it finally looks like I might have an end to this. Now I just need the rest of the middle." The Writer collapsed into the comfy chair and ignored the pathetic puppy dog eyes coming from the writing table.

Which was impressive, because it didn't even have eyes.

"So if you've got this all figured out, tell me why Jashn is still bothering to hide the fact that he's a dragon." Said the Muse as she sank blissfully into the couch, which offered her up a drink without asking. "Holding up that level of glamour has to be draining, plus the elder dragon knows who he is, so it's only sort of a secret. Heck, why did he even make a secret to begin with?"

"Because he doesn't trust them," the Writer handwaved grandly. "Reasons."

"But his own dragon has been very nice to him, from what he's said. And the temple he was raised in doesn't seem too bad, other than the go-be-the-dragon's-executioner bits." The Muse insisted. "Why would he think that the dragons specifically weren't going to be trustworthy?"

"Maybe his dragon was getting paranoid? The demon shadow thing in the pools was messing with them quite a bit before they left. Maybe it was messing with him too." The comfy chair was being extra comfy and the Writer yawned. "Depending on how intelligent this thing is it could have been manipulating everything from the very start."

"But Jashn isn't dense enough not to notice that, right?" The Muse was still positive that this was going to turn into a massive plot hole.

"It depends-- look, if this thing has spent a lot of time learning how to manipulate people, then it's going to be pretty good at it. It could have induced a low level of paranoia where Jashn wouldn't even realize he was being unreasonable. Plus he's been hiding the fact he was a dragon from everyone, it's habit at this point."

"So you're saying this is a second draft problem?" The Muse sighed. "Fine, fine, but I still object. For the record."

And they continued on...