Love's Labour's Lost

Carrying a tune, Minoth notes, is much easier, more straightforward and intuitive, when done with your arms and your broad, honest back than when attempted with your bare hands and fingers. Your spirit might be able to carry some extraordinarily fiddly elements of melody staked to the rhythm, improvised and extended through many a live-long day, but exacting the appendicular coordination that can bring all that out, via an artisan-crafted instrument? Quite a different story altogether.

Addam's pitch is only great relatively, so he doesn't start his song in the same key every time. It's always close, but never exact - and the difference of a minor second can be the worst and most jarring one of all. Minoth, painstakingly training his fingers to lay correctly along the fingerboard, takes issue with this, you see.

"Hold up, now, Prince." His call is genial, but the tone gives a little bit of bite. "I just got my chord shape together! You're in the wrong key again."

Addam frowns. "Well, so move it down a step - can't you?"

"Not below an open string," Minoth points out, grateful for the cover over his lack of concentration. "You're starting on the third, right? So let me get myself set, and then I'll play it for you. Deal?"

Addam harrumphs, like the turkey he is, but a genuine smile lurks beneath the bluster that he's assumed in order to belt out the high line with pride. Minoth, confident and satisfied with his ability to simply pick out a tune, note by note, had dedicated himself then and there to the pursuit of becoming the four-chord man to bolster as many seaman's songs as could be imagined, and so he needs a proper crooner to bear them out.

Minoth readies his intervals in his left hand, his strumming position in his right.

"You've got to know when to hold them...know when to fold them...know when to walk away, and when to run..."

Pack it up, Prince. You're sharp.