: Re: How do I write a scene with Lord Vetinari? I'm writing a fanfiction set on Discworld and I've encountered a scene with Lord Vetinari. Lord Vetinari has been told the main characters are a

@XinRu607

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I feel that there are better people to answer your question. There are Discworld books I've not read, so I cannot speak authoritatively about everything that's ever happened in canon Discworld. But a Vetinari who would choose to meet with extremely powerful beings before he had their full measure seems very different to me than any Havelock Vetinari that I've read of.

But in the absence of an answer from someone who has read all of the Discworld books... The most famous lord of Ankh Morpork would not judge someone a danger to his city merely because of their power, as wetcircuit pointed out. When we see him at the beginning of a book, we may not know very much about the character that he's meeting - but he certainly does. When we've seen him uncertain of what to do about a new element in his city, he doesn't go confront it. He gets reports from people who have encountered it and survived, and from people who merely observed the encounters - especially his Dark Clerks.

As stated on Wikipedia,

Vetinari's rule over the city seems to be cemented by the general acknowledgement that very little goes on in the city that Vetinari does not know about. Thus, when a visitor stands in audience with the Patrician, they can be assured that Vetinari knows exactly why they're there, even if the visitor does not.

If you are wanting to show that your Star Trek inspired characters are strong enough to take the city regardless of whatever the locals can do, I imagine it would be very tempting to have an early confrontation with one of the most obviously dangerous individuals in the city. But the Prime Directive would cause the Federation to not even let themselves be seen, nor to interfere. Many Star Trek factions would probably want nothing to do with such a peculiar world, although I'm sure the Vulcans would be fascinated by it. I am not as familiar with Star Trek as many, of course. But I have difficulty imagining a race that can function in the logical world of Star Trek doing well in the illogical world of Discworld.

On this particular point, have you considered what would happen to the computers in your protagonists' space ship when they enter the realm of Discworld where words have sentience and power and thus books are dangerous artifacts? Think about Going Postal. The post office was effectively haunted because of the sheer mass of innocent letters that had gotten stuck there. The ship computers on Star Trek vessels generally seem to carry vast libraries of literature, in addition to training manuals and maintenance documentation. For the most part, the race doesn't really matter, even the spartan Cardassians have thriving collections of literature on their ships, the only differences really seem to be what kind of literature will be predominant. What happens to the computers holding all of that information?

On the other hand, if they did survive long enough to reach the disc, and they did want to force the issue, they should have the technology to be able to find him and teleport to where he is. Typically surrounded by Dark Clerks. As visitors to the city, they would initially only know that Vetinari was the ruler of the city; they would not be aware that he was one of the greatest assassins produced by the Assassins' Guild, sufficiently skilled that he was never seen attending his classes on stealth, nor was he witnessed traversing the heavily trapped corridor he needed to traverse as part of his final Assassins' Guild examination. Nor would they be aware that many if not all of his Dark Clerks are also highly talented in the same arts. The last thing they wouldn't ever find out would be at what point he went from being intrigued by their ability to find him and travel to his location to feeling they were too much of a threat - if he ever did.

While Vetinari clearly has a preference for staying in power over having one of the other candidates who attempted to attain the position in various Discworld books, he also is clearly interested in the well-being of the city. If these visitors offered a net benefit to his city, it's likely he wouldn't have a problem with them, so long as they didn't force him to. There have been a number of Discworld books where there were some very major events that happened in Ankh Morpork without Vetinari getting involved in any way. It takes more than just a change to the city to get his involvement, it needs to be something that matters.

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