MOD EVENT ↠ SATINALIA

[faderifting]

WHO: Everyone
WHAT: It's Satinalia and no one dies.*
WHEN: Forward-dated to Firstfall 1
WHERE: The Gallows and Kirkwall
NOTES: *If you kill your character or an NPC please let us know so we can adjust the log description. Fire cw, use other cws for your tags as needed please! And participate in the gift meme if you want to be cool.

Named for Satina, the smaller of Thedas' two moons, Satinalia is a celebration of freedom, marked by wild celebration, pranks, the donning of costumes and masks—not the fine, delicate masks of Orlais, but animals and caricatures and playful horrors—and the exchange of gifts both sincere and satirical.

I. THE GALLOWS

In Riftwatch's fortress home, the dining hall—not the one recently wrecked by an abomination, the other one—and an adjoining garden courtyard have been decorated (by Benedict, thanks Benedict) in green, gold, and black, with enough torchlight to keep the room glowing once the sun goes down and a fire pit in the garden.

Dinner starts early, to leave ample time for festivities afterwards. Also to make sure everyone has time to eat, because there's a lot of food. Under Colin's direction, the banquet table hosts a spread representing many of the home countries of Riftwatch's members: coq au vin and tiny Orlesian cakes; Fereldan fish-and-egg pie with saffron and some potent cheeses on toasted bread; seafood with white wine sauce on noodles and fresh oranges from Antiva; spicy (very spicy) Rivaini curry and spiced rum cakes; a sampling of Nevarran soft cheeses, fruit, and dry-cured, thinly-sliced ham; and slightly spicy shrimp soup and chocolate-filled pastries from Tevinter. The centerpiece is an enormous and completely edible depiction of the Celebrant (aka the constellation Satinalis). It’s made of various breads—the man himself made of a lightly sweet bread rolled with cinnamon and chopped dates, his lyre golden with an egg wash, his clothes of rye, the stone he sits on of buckwheat. The constellation over him is drawn into the dough, the stars represented by clear rock sugar.

Every table is decorated with a ‘bouquet’ of delicate, edible marzipan roses, and in addition to the table wine and mead from Riftwatch's stores, there's a whole case of semi-decent Nevarran wine provided by Derrica and Athessa.

There's also a table set up to the side with plain, basic masks and a collection of paints and feathers to decorate them with, courtesy of Isaac, for anyone who doesn't have a costume or just enjoys arts and crafts. Some of the masks' interiors are subtly coated with invisible ink, slow-acting glue, fine glitter, or itching powder. Hahahahahaha.

Not long after most people have filtered in and found seats, the mostly-annual tradition of choosing the organization's own Satinalia Fool—usually arranged in advance, sorry, but there is a war on—is upheld, with little warning, by an apologetic Bastien. Volunteers (or those volunteered by their tablemates who don't do a good enough job demurring) are subjected to a few rounds of voting by applause. Some people applaud for their favorites, some for their least favorites, some for their crushes and some for comedy, and in the end Byerly Rutyer and Wysteria Poppell emerge as co-victors. That makes them co-rulers for the remainder of the evening. Or possibly the remainder of the week, by Antiva Rules.

Once the wining and dining are in their dying stages, the music starts. It's informal, at first, with Riftwatch's amenable musicians filtering over to their instruments as they finish their food (or bring it along with them), but once there's a critical mass, they coalesce into a tune that can be danced to. The next hour or so passes with a mixture of peasant reels and formal court dances—the latter mostly by request.

Eventually, after a break for a white druffalo gift exchange, the party disassembles into unstructured mingling. For anyone who wants to stick around, there's more alcohol, smoking in the garden, card and conversation games at the cleared tables, and a game of musical chairs with the rules altered so anyone left seatless has to take a drink and keep playing.

II. KIRKWALL

But across the harbor, the city is rowdy and reveling and will be all night, so making a break for the ferry instead won't be considered rude. The excitement in Lowtown spills out of the taverns and into the streets, with masked celebrants on their worst (but mostly harmless) behavior while street performers of all stripes provide entertainment for tips. The alienage has its own party—not because the gates are locked, but because the elves who aren't working generally don't consider throngs of drunk humans to be a good time—with a bonfire and shadowplays, and friendly outsiders might be allowed, especially if accompanied by an elf.

Hightown is quieter, but mainly because there's enough room in the mansions there for various parties—ranging from dignified, religion-tinged feasts that absolutely require an invitation to a word-of-mouth orgy at a particular mansion that only requires looking sexy and disease-free at the door—to be tucked away inside.

III. AFTER PARTY

Late in the evening, there's an outcry at the docks after an over-excited amateur fire-juggler lights fire to a partially-wooden warehouse full of wooden crates. By the time there's an organized effort to put out the blaze, it's roaring, threatening to leap to neighboring structures—including the warehouse and stables Riftwatch maintains on the docks—and visible from the Gallows. Any assistance from Riftwatch members in containing the fire will be noticed and appreciated by the locals, and just in case, it might also be wise for people to move the various horses, harts, nuggalopes, dogs, and any particularly stupid cats further away from the fire until it's under control. Which it will be, eventually, leaving a blackened ruin of the warehouse where it started but only singing one of the walls of Riftwatch's property.

However, for better or worse, someone took pity on the ferryman and sent him home at midnight rather than making him wait around all night, so everyone who'd intended to go back to the Gallows can either draw straws for who has to play ferryman to get people back to the island and then get the boat back to the docks, or else just pile into the stables and warehouse for an impromptu slumber party.

Comments

[acreage]

There's a moment where he takes that in, straightens and looks at her. He likes this hypothesis even less than the last, as it turns out, and now it's clear why she'd emphasized official opinion before speculating.

"Okay. You're saying that we're — that this is — " he sweeps an arm out towards the room at large " — a shared dream? Our lives are still happening, but we only think we're here."

A part of him knows that this is still a shade off from her theory, but he likes what she's actually saying even less.

[heirring]

"No, not at all. Thedas is quite real, as are we while we are in it."

It would be ridiculous to suggest that she shared anything with Mr. Stark, for example, save perhaps certain inclinations and turns of character. Earth is nothing at all like Kalvad for one, and for two they are so clearly physically present—thinking and feeling and doing in this place.

"I'm suggesting that our true selves dreamed, and that our dreams touched the Fade. The concept of an immaterial realm is evidently quite common across a great many 'systems,' you see, and so perhaps it is like the Crossroads. A place between many places. And perhaps while our minds walked there, we simply strayed too close to a weakness in the Veil here and fell through it. And so you and I are not a shared dream, but rather like dreamed copies of ourselves made real only by passing through the Rift. We are still here. But we didn't arrive as if by walking through a doorway. Rather, we are informed by the passage through to it. Take Mister Loxley, for example. His appearance allegedly changed when he came here. If we were truly ourselves, how could that be?"

Isn't existential dread interesting?

[acreage]

No!!! No it's not.

Wysteria expounds on her theory, and what happens is this: he filters it through the terms of his own world, his own reality, and the things he understands.

She says: A place between many places. He thinks: of the Sol gate, the slow zone, 1,300 portals.

She says: dreamed copies of ourselves made real. He thinks: of the ghost, the recreation of a dead man, living in his head for around a year. You got more synapses than stars in the universe. I push a few trillion of them buttons in exactly the right way and, ta-da. You're talking to Miller.

He says: "Changed how?"

He hasn't met Loxley.

[heirring]

"I cannot recall all the details, I'm afraid." She has been drinking just a little, you see, and it has been some months since she and Mr. Fitz conducted their survey. However—

"But changed as in changed. As in his appearance is different here than it was there."

[acreage]

"How often does that happen?"

Though, honestly, he looks different seems a dissatisfying answer.

[heirring]

"Here we tread toward the limit of my expertise I'm afraid, Mister Holden."

She shrugs gently, a small thing, and tips her attention back to the mock battle before them.

"But what seems apparent is that we must in some respect adhere to the rules of this place as we pass into it. And that when we withdraw from it, we leave only what we have done behind."

[acreage]

He breathes out as she looks away, equilibrates over the course of a long moment.

"That's all," he points out, "we leave anywhere."

Maybe a little philosophical, for him. But he can see what she's saying: when Rifters are gone, they're just...gone. No gate, no monsters, no body, no obvious cause.

He can't help asking, "That doesn't worry you? The possibility of disappearing one day?"

[heirring]

"Not at all," she lies quite smoothly, for she has had some practice at it by now and is pretending in this moment to be worldly and confident both. "It seems to me a waste of time to be so concerned over an inevitability when there are so many more interesting things to look after."

She tips her attention back to Holden, and there is something in the look of her which suggests she about to crack an awful joke and knows it—

"You must look on the bright side, Mister Holden. Disappearing is hardly the worst thing that might happen to us while fighting a war."

Ha ha ha. We have fun here.

[acreage]

It's a fair answer, to an unfair question. He may as well have asked her if she's afraid of death, oblivion that lies at the end of the road for everyone; tomorrow, or in a year, or ten, or thirty.

And he's no stranger to morbid humor. So he laughs, and it's sincere.

"On the bright side," he says, looking back towards the dance floor, "I think we know who the winner of this battle is."

[heirring]

She follows the line of his attention. The faux battle does indeed appear to be winding toward a close.

"Ah. Why, the crown of course," she agrees, all good spirits and begins then to sort the arrangement of her skirts so she might rise to her feet.

"Would you be so kind as to help me up, Mister Holden? I would like to stand for a moment on this chair, and then you will have to excuse me. I'm afraid I'm about to be deposed."

[acreage]

He stands and moves closer to Wysteria, holds out his hands to give her any help she needs safely making it up onto that chair. Any cover he might provide, standing between her high-slitted skirts and the rest of the ballroom, is not entirely coincidental.

"Enjoy your revolution," is said with a smile, before he goes along on his way.