Chatterbox: Blab About Books

Because BaB needs more non-RP threads, and because everyone likes to talk about these. That I know of, anyway.

So here's a thread to discuss CMoA's, in books at least.

For those who don't frequent TV Tropes, a Crowning Moment of Awesome is a moment in a work of fiction (books, in this case) when something happens (usually a character does or says something) which will be remembered forever.

More loosely, it is when you have to stop reading to stare at the page and wrap your mind around what just happened, because it is just THAT epic.

An example, perhaps?

Lord Havelock Vetinari. Just... Vetinari. Just about every time he shows up, he's got a Crowning Moment, but this is my current favourite, from Jingo:

Basically, Sergeant Colon, Coporal Nobbs, and Vetinari are disguised and undercover in Klatch in order to locate the Klatchian ruler in order to stop a war (it's complicated). They pretend to be performers (made necessary by the disguises Colon and Nobby find) and are quickly detained by some guards (and please note that Vetinari HATES street performers, circuses, mimes (especially mimes) etc. and has outlawed them in Ankh-Morpork.):

"'You are jugglers, are you?' said one of them. 'Let's see you juggle, then.'

Lord Vetinari gave them a blank look and then glanced down at the tray around Al-jibla's neck. Among the more identifiable foodstuffs were a number of green melons.

'Very well,' he said, and picked up three of them.

Sergeant Colon shut his eyes.

After a few seconds he opened them again because a guard had said, 'All right, but anyone can do it with three.'

'In that case, perhaps Mr. Al-jibla will throw me a few more? said the Patrician, as the balls spun through his hands.

Sergeant Colon shut his eyes again.

After a short while a guard said, 'Seven is pretty good. But it's just melons.'

Colon opened his eyes.

The Klatchian guard twitched his robe aside. Half a dozen throwing knives glinted. And so did his teeth.

Lord Vetinari nodded. To Colon's growing surprise he did not seem to be watching the tumbling melons at all.

'Four melons and three knives,' he said. 'If you would care to give the knives to my charming assistant Beti...'

'/Who?/' said Nobby.

'Why not seven knives, then?'

'Kind sirs, that would be too simple,' said Lord Vetinari*. 'I am but a humble tumbler. Please let me practice my art.'

[*Jugglers will tell you that juggling with items that are identical is always easier than a mixture of all shapes and sizes. This is even the case with chainsaws, although of course when the juggler misses the first chainsaw it is only the start of his problems. Some more will be along very shortly.] 

'/Beti?/' said Nobby, glowering under his veils.

Three fruits arced gently out of the green whirl and thumped onto Al-jibla's tray.

The guards looked carefully, and to Colon's mind nervously, at the cross-dressed figure of the cross corporal.

'She's not going to do any kind of dance, is she?' one of them ventured.

'No!' snapped Beti.

'Promise?'

Nobby grabbed three of the knives and tugged them out of the man's belt.

'I'll give them to his lor-- to him, shall I, Beti?' said Colon, suddenly quite sure that keeping the Patrician alive was almost certainly the only way to avoid a brief cigarette in the sunshine. He was also aware that other people were drifting over to watch the show.

'To me, please... Al," said the Patrician, nodding.

Colon tossed him the knives, slowly and gingerly. He's going to try to stab the guards, he thought. It's a /ruse/. And then everyone's going to tear us apart.

Now the circling blur glinted in the sunlight. There was a murmur of approval from the crowd.

'Yet somehow dull,' said the Patrician.

And his hands moved in a complex pattern that suggested that his wrists must have moved through one another at least twice.

The tangled ball of hurtling fruit and cutlery leapt into the air.

Three melons dropped to the ground, cut cleanly in two.

Three knives thudded into the dust a few inches from their owner's sandals.

And Sergeant Colon looked up and into a growing, greenish, expanding--

The melon exploded, and so did the audience, but both their laughter and the humor was slightly lost on Colon as he scraped over-ripe pith out of his ears.

The survival instinct cut in again. Stagger around backward, it said. So he staggered around backward, waving his legs in the air. Fall down heavily, it said. So he sat down, and almost squashed a chicken. Lose your dignity, it said: of all the things you've got, it's the one you can most afford to lose.

Lord Vetinari helped him up. 'Our very lives depend on your appearing to be a stupid fat idiot,' he hissed, putting Colon's fez back on his head.

'I ain't very good at acting, sir--'

'Good!'

'Yessir.'

The Patrician scooped up three melon halves and positively /skipped/ over to a stall that a woman had just set up, snatching an egg from a basket as he went past. Sergeant Colon blinked again. This was not... /real/. The patrician didn't do this sort of thing...

'Ladies and gentlemen! You see--an egg! And here we have a--melon rind! Egg, melon! Melon, egg! We put the melon over the egg!' His hands darted across the three halves, switching them at bewildering speed. 'Round and round they go, just like that! Now... where's the egg? What about you, shah?'

Al-jibla smirked. ''s one on the left,' he said. 'It always is.'

Lord Vetinari lifted the melon. The board below was eggless.

'And you, noble guardsman?'

''s got to be the one in the middle,' said the guard.

'Yes, of course... oh dear, it isn't...'

The crowd looked at the last melon. They were street people. They knew the score. When the object can be under one of three things, and it's already turned out not to be under two of them, then the one place it was certainly not going to be was the under the third. Only some kind of gullible fool would believe something like that. Of /course/ there was going to be a trick. There always /was/ a trick. But you watched it, in order to see a trick done well.

Lord Vetinari raised the melon nevertheless, and the crowd nodded in satisfaction. Of /course/ it wasn't there. It'd be a pretty poor day for street entertainment if things were where they were supposed to be.

Sergeant Colon knew what was going to happen next, and he knew this because for the last minute or so something had been pecking at his head.

Aware that this was probably his moment, he raised his fez and revealed a very small fluffy chick."

Two pages later, this little conversation makes the above scene even MORE awesome: 

'Didn't know you could juggle, sir,' Colon whispered to Lord Vetinari.

'You mean you can't, sergeant?'

'Nossir!'

'How strange. It's hardly a skill, is it? One knows what the objects are and where they want to go. After that it's just a case of letting them occupy the correct positions in time and space.'

'You're dead good at it, sir. Practice often, do you?'

'Until today, I've never tried.'"

And yes, for those not familiar with the series, Lord Vetinari is this awesome ALL THE TIME. <3.