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Retrograde, Most Quietly (Jaskier | R | 3,355 words): Inconveniently, Jaskier murders a man in his sleep. This takes a silly premise--Jaskier was trained as an assassin--and makes a ridiculous scenario from it. The humor all comes from Jaskier's narration.
Excerpt:
Jaskier was an assassin - or a former assassin, really, ever since he'd decided to give up killing for coin and started singing for it, the profession of a bard was really so much more alluring than slitting throats for his former merry band of psychopaths... but either way, he'd been taught from a young age to kill, and he was very good at it. Jaskier was trained as an assassin, there we go, and as such, he'd been very well-versed in how to cover his tracks. How to make a stabbing look like a suicide, which poisons were best for which situations, if he meant to make it look like the victim had simply passed in their sleep, or if the person who hired them wanted the victim's suffering prolonged, how to frame a servant for a heat-of-the-moment crime of passion that was really a planned attack...
Not that any of that was particularly useful in this situation, because there was a man who'd had his throat slashed in the woods, and even Jaskier's rather extensive imagination was struggling to find a way to explain this that didn't shout bloody murder.
Excerpt:
Jaskier was an assassin - or a former assassin, really, ever since he'd decided to give up killing for coin and started singing for it, the profession of a bard was really so much more alluring than slitting throats for his former merry band of psychopaths... but either way, he'd been taught from a young age to kill, and he was very good at it. Jaskier was trained as an assassin, there we go, and as such, he'd been very well-versed in how to cover his tracks. How to make a stabbing look like a suicide, which poisons were best for which situations, if he meant to make it look like the victim had simply passed in their sleep, or if the person who hired them wanted the victim's suffering prolonged, how to frame a servant for a heat-of-the-moment crime of passion that was really a planned attack...
Not that any of that was particularly useful in this situation, because there was a man who'd had his throat slashed in the woods, and even Jaskier's rather extensive imagination was struggling to find a way to explain this that didn't shout bloody murder.