Timestamp: Kalendryas, Winter, Era XV Post Fractum.
Songstamp: Kill Yr Idols - Sonic Youth
It was Nuit Blanche in Secyclion, the biggest winter-time celebration in Neos Megalis, an all-nite party up and down the Main to break the gloom of the island's winter rainy season. The Jaedaxian emigre who'd moved to Neos Megalis before the Siege had brought the party with them, used to extreme winters and not about to let the cold bring the spirits down.
At the
Mouse and the Masque the hipsters were wild, dressed up in Carnival masks and the tackiest, glitziest dresses and tunics in the world and high out of their heads. A Song mage was on stage surrounded by what looked like a metal junkyard, a drum set made of pots and pans, a rusty shield, and other scrap, banging on them all with his hands and drumsticks and raising a noise enchanted with aggressive euphoria while everyone pogo-sticked. Everything was being passed around liberally -- keif, kratom tea, some junkies were lounging glazed in the corners of the Mouse or out on the beach on qaifa, the arcane powder from Aelyria Prime called snow-white, and a local ingestible leaf called kero, the mainland ales and island ouzo, wines and strange spirits, desert cacti and barley rot.
There were bonfires out on the beach and some spill-out from the Mouse despite the cold air. And out there was a man who didn't quite fit in with these dilettantes and poseurs. Bowery was a Nexian who looked a bit like Glenn O'Brien from the '80s, close-cropped black hair, sunken cheeks, stubble. He wore a ratty black peacoat and a black bandana artfully tied around his neck.
He had attracted a small crowd. He was crouched in front of a heap of chairs he'd stolen from the Mouse and was intently lighting them on fire with a torch he'd pulled out of a bonfire. He spat out a wad of kero and said to one of the hipsters standing next to him, "You think you know how to party???"
When a hip bartender from the Mouse tried to stop him from lighting their chairs on fire he muttered out of the side of his mouth, still intently burning the furniture, "Don't you know who I am? I'm Bowery Manhatten. I'm here on a very important assignment! Don't stand in my way!" He spat out another wad of kero.
The chairs finally caught. Bowery leaped on top of the burning pyre and berated the crowd, "Haven't you people figured out the Archmage? You could be incinerated any waking minute! I'm gonna go trash the Main! I've got kero. Who wants in?" He jumped off, stuck some kero leaves in his mouth, lit a cigar off of a chair and picked up his torch.