WMG for The Colour of Magic. Spoilers may be unmarked.
- Vetinari goes off on the Grand Sneer. This is expected of him.
- Whenever he arrives in a location that is likely to eventually trickle back news to The Big City he acts like the standard Young City Toff, drinking and partying.
- Whilst away he ensures he overeats to gain weight. Or wears a fatsuit. He also adopts a few affectations like the black glove that make him look like a Fop.
- When he gets back to the city he holds several parties, in which the vain and selfish of The City see one of their own and the politicly savvy see a candidate for Snapcase's replacement.
- He also "has his trousers mended" a lot in order to establish good relations with The Seamstresses and quite possibly The Beggars and The Thieves too.
- Once he gets the job he keeps up the act whilst he gets his position stable. The offering of strange foods and the doing of odd things are a carefully weighted tests of character. If an absolute ruler in a job with a history of violence offers you something that you are certain you are going to hate, what would you do?
- Once he no longer needs it, he ditches it. By then they could not get rid of him if they tried.
Alternately, he'd picked up a taste for candied marine life while passing through Krull on his Grand Sneer, putting on weight solely because of this craving. Later, after getting turned into a bug-eating newt (he got better) in Sourcery, he was so repelled by the thought of consuming still more invertebrates that he broke the habit, and rapidly lost the flab.
- this fan fic neatly explores these ideas.
- Considering gravity is not based on the mass of objects and will always be in the downward direction (see the Water Troll), whoever happens o be on the bottom of such a union would need to hang on very tight.
- But that's the point: mating belly-to-belly would mean that neither Disc would be on the "bottom".
But what if Death arranged for Scrofula to perform his work as an experiment, to test out whether he could entrust the Duty to someone else, on a temporary basis? He must've hit upon the idea of recruiting an apprentice (and potential boyfriend for Ysabell) at some point before Mort. Having never tried anything of the sort before, Death must've realized there could be complications to sharing his power with a mortal, so he first tested the procedure by delegating some work to Scrofula: a petty underling who's not much more powerful than a human, but is already familiar with the responsibilities of anthropomorphic personifications. As it happens, Scrofula blew it when Rincewind escaped him, meaning Death had to go back and review his method for transferring the Duty to someone else. Hence, Mort doesn't start until some time after Rincewind fell off the Edge. Best if Death gets all the bugs worked out before he risked sharing power with a mere human, right?
Except he didn't get all the bugs out. Because, in sharing his power with Scrofula, Death also took on some of the personality-traits of Scrofula ... who's a far more small-minded, vindictive, envious little creep than his boss. Death's out-of-character behavior in the early part of The Colour Of Magic wasn't the behavior of the Grim Reaper, but that of a petty, cruel disease-bringer acting out of spite. Later, when he spoke to Fate, he'd managed to get a grip on his mental state, regaining his proper attitude of dignified, businesslike dispassion. It was just Rincewind's typical bad luck to have run into Death when he was still swept up in Scrofula's nasty streak.
This, incidentally, explains why Death got so uncharacteristically angry when Mort spared Princess Keli, and why he'd said he might've fired the boy if Mort had shown pleasure in the Duty. Why? Because Scrofula hadn't just messed up by failing to collect Rincewind: he'd temporarily infected Death himself with his cruel streak, causing his boss to behave shamefully, and even to take lives slightly sooner than was destined (the flies), for his own vindictive satisfaction. Death had already seen the Duty sullied by one incompetent assistant, and now the lad he'd hoped would do things right had disgraced the office even further.
- This is canon for me now. It explains everything in a watsonian manner and provides wonderful insight to boot. Well done!
- He seems to keep not dying the the most ridiculously lethal circumstances. Really, he just regenerates into an identical body.
- He runs a lot. A lot a lot.
- He speaks many languages, mainly to plead for mercy. He did not learn them, he has a TARDIS somewhere translating.
- You mean, somewhere near Rincewind there's likely to be a mysterious, innocuous-looking box that's bigger on the inside than the outside?
His name? The Wizzard, of course!
- Or maybe he's half Time Lord. It would actually reconcile how his mother could have run away before he was born.
-It's not primarily gold, but the vast seams of octiron that act as the counterbalancing and namesake force of the Counterweight Continent
- Or the man was due to succumb to a heart attack at that time in any case, which explains why Death was on that street in the first place. He only appeared to trigger the man's death because Rincewind distracted him enough that he was a second or two late at collecting the fellow.
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