Chapter Notes: Milk Can

[lokiofsassgaard]

This is a chapter in two acts.  The first act is what every transplant and tourist goes through during their first freeze in the valley.  Shock that it freezes, and then frustration and indignation that nothing and nobody is prepared for anything to freeze.  Loki made the same bad assumption so many people make, assuming he would only be driving in hot, dry weather.  And this isn't just limited to transplants and tourists.  Locals just lose their damn minds every time winter happens.  The concept of scraping your windshields is so foreign to people that they'll just drive around blind and assume that's okay.

At this point, Loki's been in the US for about six months.  He's more or less got used to the weirdness that is Las Vegas, but he is still very much an outsider in a lot of ways.  And one of those ways is that he's never going to stop thinking certain American hallmarks are just obscene and garish.  But slot machines in every corner of the city?  Yeah, apparently that's just something you get used to.

And it is, and it's weird.

A lot of the first fic was just a love letter to Las Vegas, and the time I spent there being a weirdo table magician.  That's not going to change.  I made a joke on Tumblr about how the real relationship in this series is the unstable, borderline abusive one Loki has with the city, and as I get farther into this, it gets more and more true.  Loki's intense culture shock plays a very big role in his mental state throughout this entire fic, and it's not something I want to shy away from.  That city does something to you.  It's insidious and toxic, but in a way that can be utterly addicting.

I went through so many iterations of how I wanted the fish tank to go, and ultimately decided to just wholesale rip off Penn & Teller.  It's actually a combination of about three tricks in the end, with the way I've got it set up.  At its heart, this routine is their phone booth trick, which is the one I mentioned going wrong in the last chapter, and their shadow puppet routine, where Penn would fail a straight jacket escape and get hanged in the rigging.  Both have the same concept of not being good tricks, and wind up being great tricks because of it.  In the phone booth, Teller drowns on stage while Penn wastes too much time and doesn't notice what's going on.  In Unicorn, Penn gets hanged in a bad straitjacket escape while Teller hijacks the stage to do a comedy shadow puppet routine.  I love both of these, because they fly in the face of how these sorts of routines are supposed to go.  In both instances, the payoff is so shocking and unexpected, because the trick isn't what you thought it was.  In the phone booth, the trick isn't that Penn finds the correct card in the nick of time.  The trick is that the correct card somehow winds up inside Teller's mask after he drowns.  In Unicorn, the trick isn't Penn miraculously escaping.  It's that Penn was never in the rigging in the first place.  Both are wonderful switches, pulled off by incongrous misdirection.  So I wanted to play with that.  Let this ancient, tired trick be something else.  Let it be a switch that comes from nowhere.  Loki doesn't escape, because he's not the dead guy in the box.

And then there's a sneaky allusion to the box jumper they opened their show with for a while.  Loki and Darcy keep talking about a "black board."  This isn't like a chalkboard you'd find in an old classroom.  It's a technique for making something appear or disappear from a box by obscuring it with a piece of plywood painted black.  With the right lighting, the board is completely invisible to the audience, which can allow a performer to walk across the stage without being seen.  Or, in this case, allow them to switch out performers in a fish tank.

I said in my opening notes that this fic is going to ruin a lot of magic tricks.  And part of that is because there's no way to adequately convey what is effectively a scam via prose.  I can describe what appears to happen for a spectator, but in prose, the magic vanishes.  In prose, anything can happen because I say it happens, whether it's possible or not.  Instead, the magic is how they make their routines work.  With a few exceptions, I'm not actually using anyone's full routines in this series.  I'm taking the tricks and methods I know from various routines and cobbling together something new.  Loki's version of the Milk Can resembles Penn & Tellers by drawing inspiration from it, but their methods and entire routine were completely different.  Putting the performer in a glass box, and then drowning him for a shock payoff is where the similarities end.  The routines I do take from actual people are properly old, and published to be performed as is.  So even if you do go see a stage show, and someone does a similar routine to what I've got in this series, you won't see it performed as I describe it.

Unless someone does Al Baker's breakfast routine.  There's pretty much only one way to do that one.