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This Is Halloween--Everybody Make a Scene!
When; October 31st to the early morning of November 1st
Rating; G to PG-13 (please post warnings if your thread rating goes higher than this)
Characters; Yours!
Summary; To lighten the mood after the trials and tribulations of the past month and to celebrate the expulsion of the "witches" from the City, the Anonymous Movement are hosting a great Halloween party
Come, join the festivities in the Square or in Xanadu! The City has been dressed to the nines with all the trappings of Halloween--from jack-o-lanterns to twisted trees, to eerie lanterns, to burial shrouds, to mounds of burning candles, to any horror your mind can imagine--the Anonymous Movement has done their best with the decoration. And they hope you'll dress up for the occasion too. Come and feast on pumpkin stew and roasted beasts, come and dance under burning orange stars and lights, come and laugh with real witches and goblins of all sorts. (Spooky Goat costumes seem to be quite popular this year for some reason...)
Enjoy the festivities--and the things described here are just a starting point. Feel free to invent other things going on this evening~
Mingle! Mingle and talk and dance and have fun! To keep things basically organized, please feel free to note where your character is ("Misery Square, dancefloor"--for example) and whether the log thread is open to all or only certain characters in the subject line of your comment. Feel free to log things out in action tags or full prose tags, as you'd please. Happy Halloween, Polychromatic~!
Log; The Anonymous Movement has done their best to decorate the City--and they have done a passing fair job of it. Perhaps it's even grand enough to rival the celebrations the Deities hosted long ago (of course, the old remnants of those same decorations from years past were easy enough to find, so give the Anonymous Movement credit for finding this finery at least). Perhaps it's better than that--seeing as so many members of the movement and people in the City have come together for this celebration. Overground, underground, City-born, and City-captured--it's a holiday for all.
Misery Square bespeaks the holiday occasion today: Halloween, All Hallow's Eve. Already, the square is draped in holiday colors: orange, black, purple. Long rags of black hang down the sides of buildings or across alleyways and streets, touched only by strange banners sewn in diamond patterns, in harlequin patterns, of orange and black, and purple. Even the lamp-posts are wrapped in bundles of black sticks, hung with tattered harlequin banners of orange and purple, ribboned with tattered crows' feathers and black rags. And, look, the lamps themselves are Jack-O-Lanterns, grinning out at the City with their mocking skull smiles. The last of the decorations are going up, the twisted ladders are being taken away from the sides of buildings, and the spidery climbers who had been on them are coming down again.
It is daylight yet, perhaps, and the scene seems more like something from a children's book: the Kingdom of Halloween. The walls are draped with the king's colors, of course, or the queen's. The streets are lined with pumpkins, the candles are waiting in windowsills and on rooftops to be lighted. Dead leaves blow in the distance, the trees are bare, or nearly bare, as the wind strips them further. It is daylight, and the scene is eerie, though perhaps not yet so interesting as it will be.
At night, though, the celebration will truly begin: with long tables laid out for a feast not yet there, but promising to be there, if the masked and costumed figures laying out black dishes and ragged silver (probably stolen from a thousand different pirate caches) are any indication. The tables are dressed in black lace, torn from the wedding dresses of jilted, ghostly brides, dyed black with hints of red (their blood perhaps?), and dressing now these tables. And the tables? Made from old coffin wood, of course. What else could bear such a rich shine? Their feet are old gravestones, their chairs are made of ebony and bone. The whole is dressed for mourning. Look, even the flowers are black or dead or only bare twigs. Watch how sadly the ribbons flutter in the wind. But there is an elegance to it. And perhaps these tables will bear wonderful things. Perhaps there will be sweets made from grapes stolen from Paradise and the last drop of blood from an enemy's heart, perhaps leaves and mushrooms from a thousand hidden forests where the oldest creatures in the world make their way through time to the end of the world will lie soaked in old wine and new vinegar, perhaps there will be a monumental and towering and toppling cake that fairly bleeds sugar when it is cut, perhaps candy of every sort and every kind will lie in glittering obsidian bowls to be grabbed by the handful with utter disregard (and those bowls will never empty), perhaps wine will be mixed with blood (and even those who aren't vampires can partake), perhaps the ordinary will become extraordinary, perhaps the extraordinary will become horrific. Perhaps anything: the tables are bare for the moment--but only the moment.
But eating is only eating. What else is there? Perhaps this: a shining floor of ebony laid out in the midst of the square. For dancing, of course, and large enough to hold any number of waltzers or twisters or turners or swirling mass of dancers. Let the music take hold, as ever. It's guarded, of course, against those monsters and spirits and evil forces who (that explains the chalk lines streaking across the surface, doesn't it?). But how soon will those be smudged? There is no keeping things at bay on this night. And there will be no keeping still.
Look, a place even for musicians, hung with those same harlequin banners, draped in bunting of black burial shrouds, and lit by candles in their jewel-like glasses (but who knows what bony, knobby claws and talons will play those instruments, for they seem made of the flesh and bones of the monsters from the week before, now fused and melted into some new shape, gray and ragged, with fingerbones for tuning pins and knucklebones for the mouthpieces--perhaps the music will be sweeter than their appearance).
And over it all, strung up on some nightmare's wire, some massive spider's blackened thread, not a chandelier but its inverse: something hidden, something wrapped in black crepe and gauze and burial fabric. Dusty, too, as though it were a forgotten relic now revived. The whole of it hangs like some malevolent cloud above the festivities, strung high between two buildings, and hanging delicately by those wire threads. The chandelier (if there really is one) is hidden--or nearly hidden, for there may be some hint of twisted metal or barbed wire peeking out from within, and the fabric that drapes it is hardly new and untattered, and those holes to move when the wind blows--under layer upon layer of widow's weeds, all black and darkly glittering, the lack plain and torn, the embroidery ragged. Jet beads hang down in long waterfalls, trailing towards the floor, caught up sometimes in some vain attempt to keep them out of the way by some hand somewhere in their time. A locket here or there contains some twist of black hair, and a name that can't be read. And those same harlequin tapestries mark the points of the compass, hanging down from this widow-turned-chandelier (a woman can be made into stranger things, can't she?).
And, to light it all? A thousand candles or more, black and white and orange as a pumpkin and purple as a sunset before a nightmare, all mounted up in thirteen times thirteen candelabra, each bearing thirteen candles, and all made of the twisted and filigree iron stolen and re-wrought from the gates of churchyards and cemeteries and prisons and insane asylums. They are beautiful, in their twisted way, like twisted trees or the candelabras of a church or the great chandeliers that light so many manors and ballrooms and theaters of so many worlds. And all are draped in the colors of the day: black and purple and orange, in long swags of black gauze and those same harlequin banners. But, wait, what about those candles lying idly on those tables? Well, of course one needs a little more light for the occasion (though not too much): these are the candles that will be tossed into the air, and what hidden hands will hold them in the air are unknown. But know that these candles will yet be used, left to float in midair, all surrounding the rosette of crepe that hangs over the dancefloor.
And the Jack-O-Lanterns, too, of course, one cannot forget them, and the way they light the whole of the event: mounded up on tables, peering out from behind tables and chairs, sitting at the feet of the musicians' chairs, perched on window ledges, peering from rooftops, perched in trees--wherever there is a place for a grinning Jack-O-Lantern, there is one--save for when one looks for one.
But this is not the only place where the celebration will take place.
Xanadu, too, has been dressed for the occasion. Of course it must be, if it is, indeed, the famous pleasure garden. Though what pleasure can be found here must be strange, or so one must think upon passing through the twisted gates and under the twisted arch--though that arch is largely hidden by that same black crepe, those same black rags that seem to decorate the whole of the City this day and this night. Candles stand guard at either side of the entrance, melting quietly onto the real guardians: two massive statues (do they or do they not move as the night progresses?) of beasts perhaps only seen in some worlds (and those few are enough) that seems like creatures seen before or seen only in nightmares, with such fangs and such claws and such horns as that. And, grinning over it all, a Jack-O-Lantern, with his cohorts beside him, and their veritable army of burning candles.
The paths here are lined with those candles, like ghosts lights, and pumpkin and paper lanterns are hanging from the black, bare, gnarled tree branches. This is the antechamber of Xanadu, if one should like to think of it so. This is only the beginning. Look, this scarecrow (if one can call him that--he'd probably scare anything that came near him) is pointing the way: this way or that way? The paths diverge...
There are different paths here: those paths with little light or none, and those that glitter like Algol--the Demon Star. Choose whichever you would like.
If you choose the paths with little light or none, lit by those tiny ghost lights, burning blue and faint along the path, then be wary of the darkness. Be wary of those long rags that hang like mist or ghosts in the trees, blowing across the faces of those who pass. There are spiders in these trees, and the grinning faces of Jack-O-Lanterns--but never giving enough light to truly see. Watch for the shadows--there!--that rush by before one can see them, these creatures of fog and imagination. There are people in the trees all around, or creatures, or worse. Crows call as they do after they have found fresh carrion. Owls call, bats flutter across the sky. There are old houses, their broken windows menacing anyone who passes by like the empty eyesockets of a skull, there in the woods all around. The moon's light does little good here, and perhaps only casts a malevolent glow, twisting the shadows of the trees. But press on, find the way through the labyrinth of this path, and the horrors of one's own mind. The reward is yet to come.
If you chose the glittering path, then follow the lights that burn in the trees like stars themselves: purple and green and orange and white, wrapping around branches light fairy lights. The candles give way to glitter and starlight. There is no great light here, though--no, of course not. The whole is still in darkness, though in the darkness of starlight. The saddest spirits might haunt these paths, or the most beautiful, the ones who will lure the unwary into unsafe ways or into rivers. The harlequin banners are here, too, hanging from the trees, along with their black bunting. If there is a king's progress, then perhaps this is the way he would go, leading his court down a street of wicked trees lit with wicked stars. And he knows the reward that lies at the end of this road.
Regardless of the path one takes, one will find oneself, at the end of the maze, one will come upon the real celebration and come before a great twisting, spiraling tower of Jack-O-Lanterns.
Where Misery Square had its wretched chandelier, like a widow inverted and hung with candles, Xanadu has a blazing tower of Jack-O-Lanterns. All grinning, all orange, all burning with candles, the spiraling tower sits in the midst of another ebony floor (stained with chalk, yes, of course). It is like some stolen column from a monstrous temple, like some strange altar to a monster deity, like some horrific growth from a nightmarish pumpkin patch swelling up towards the sky. Be careful in getting too close. There are rumors flying tonight that some of the Jack-O-Lanterns have been seen laughing.
There are tables just beyond for conversation and a little rest, as one might expect (and still made from the stolen wood of old coffins, as one also might expect), and stone benches (stolen from cemeteries). Like Misery Square, the whole is hung with black rags and lace, tattered crows' feathers, and that same royal harlequin tapestry. Another ballroom, then. Though perhaps more secret, given the darkness just beyond the tables. Less grandiose, perhaps, given the simplicity of table and floor. Or better, if one so prefers to sit with one's companion over the soft light of a Jack-O-Lantern, and have sweet wine mixed with blood brought to one's table by a tall, dour, skeletal man who seems to say too little and know too much. Or so those burning eyes would suggest.
But, look: another stand for the musicians, with those same melted, stitched, ragged, wretched instruments. Who would touch these to play them? Who could play them well? The musicians will, of course, as they read their music by the light of the Jack-O-Lanterns staked on candelabra all around them. That is the light for this place: Jack-O-Lanterns and moonlight. Perhaps the better question, though, is to ask who would dance to it. And here is the answer, tumbling across the floor, skittering on stilts, twisting itself into knots and tangles: dancers themselves, or something like them, or perhaps something more like clowns, or jesters (if we imagine that Halloween King still). A flock of them, a troupe of them, each with his or her own skill. This one balancing high on stilts, that one bending herself into tangled knots, another breathing and eating and throwing fire, still another twisting herself like a serpent as she dances, still more tumbling in--clowns or jesters or the kin of Harlequin himself, yes, but masked as the day would require and dressed in its livery of black and purple and orange. They are amusing, yes, but perhaps they draw up the feeling one has when dreaming a dream that is mere moments, mere seconds away from turning into a nightmare. Watch, but don't stare too long: they seem human, if talented, but to stare too long will make certain inconsistencies appear, certain details grow clear, and certain unsettling problems very, very noticeable. Don't ask where they come from. Don't ask why they use a Hand of Glory to light their way. Speak to them, if you like, but don't expect answers.
Perhaps if Misery Square is meant to be supper with dancing, then this is the proper ballroom? Or does it work the other way? Or perhaps this is the entertainment after the ball? Or should one perhaps visit both? Yes, visit both.
Come, join the festivities. Wear your best costume, bring your best mask. The City has adorned herself for you. Show her the same courtesy, and let us all celebrate together...
Rating; G to PG-13 (please post warnings if your thread rating goes higher than this)
Characters; Yours!
Summary; To lighten the mood after the trials and tribulations of the past month and to celebrate the expulsion of the "witches" from the City, the Anonymous Movement are hosting a great Halloween party
Come, join the festivities in the Square or in Xanadu! The City has been dressed to the nines with all the trappings of Halloween--from jack-o-lanterns to twisted trees, to eerie lanterns, to burial shrouds, to mounds of burning candles, to any horror your mind can imagine--the Anonymous Movement has done their best with the decoration. And they hope you'll dress up for the occasion too. Come and feast on pumpkin stew and roasted beasts, come and dance under burning orange stars and lights, come and laugh with real witches and goblins of all sorts. (Spooky Goat costumes seem to be quite popular this year for some reason...)
Enjoy the festivities--and the things described here are just a starting point. Feel free to invent other things going on this evening~
Mingle! Mingle and talk and dance and have fun! To keep things basically organized, please feel free to note where your character is ("Misery Square, dancefloor"--for example) and whether the log thread is open to all or only certain characters in the subject line of your comment. Feel free to log things out in action tags or full prose tags, as you'd please. Happy Halloween, Polychromatic~!
Log; The Anonymous Movement has done their best to decorate the City--and they have done a passing fair job of it. Perhaps it's even grand enough to rival the celebrations the Deities hosted long ago (of course, the old remnants of those same decorations from years past were easy enough to find, so give the Anonymous Movement credit for finding this finery at least). Perhaps it's better than that--seeing as so many members of the movement and people in the City have come together for this celebration. Overground, underground, City-born, and City-captured--it's a holiday for all.
Misery Square bespeaks the holiday occasion today: Halloween, All Hallow's Eve. Already, the square is draped in holiday colors: orange, black, purple. Long rags of black hang down the sides of buildings or across alleyways and streets, touched only by strange banners sewn in diamond patterns, in harlequin patterns, of orange and black, and purple. Even the lamp-posts are wrapped in bundles of black sticks, hung with tattered harlequin banners of orange and purple, ribboned with tattered crows' feathers and black rags. And, look, the lamps themselves are Jack-O-Lanterns, grinning out at the City with their mocking skull smiles. The last of the decorations are going up, the twisted ladders are being taken away from the sides of buildings, and the spidery climbers who had been on them are coming down again.
It is daylight yet, perhaps, and the scene seems more like something from a children's book: the Kingdom of Halloween. The walls are draped with the king's colors, of course, or the queen's. The streets are lined with pumpkins, the candles are waiting in windowsills and on rooftops to be lighted. Dead leaves blow in the distance, the trees are bare, or nearly bare, as the wind strips them further. It is daylight, and the scene is eerie, though perhaps not yet so interesting as it will be.
At night, though, the celebration will truly begin: with long tables laid out for a feast not yet there, but promising to be there, if the masked and costumed figures laying out black dishes and ragged silver (probably stolen from a thousand different pirate caches) are any indication. The tables are dressed in black lace, torn from the wedding dresses of jilted, ghostly brides, dyed black with hints of red (their blood perhaps?), and dressing now these tables. And the tables? Made from old coffin wood, of course. What else could bear such a rich shine? Their feet are old gravestones, their chairs are made of ebony and bone. The whole is dressed for mourning. Look, even the flowers are black or dead or only bare twigs. Watch how sadly the ribbons flutter in the wind. But there is an elegance to it. And perhaps these tables will bear wonderful things. Perhaps there will be sweets made from grapes stolen from Paradise and the last drop of blood from an enemy's heart, perhaps leaves and mushrooms from a thousand hidden forests where the oldest creatures in the world make their way through time to the end of the world will lie soaked in old wine and new vinegar, perhaps there will be a monumental and towering and toppling cake that fairly bleeds sugar when it is cut, perhaps candy of every sort and every kind will lie in glittering obsidian bowls to be grabbed by the handful with utter disregard (and those bowls will never empty), perhaps wine will be mixed with blood (and even those who aren't vampires can partake), perhaps the ordinary will become extraordinary, perhaps the extraordinary will become horrific. Perhaps anything: the tables are bare for the moment--but only the moment.
But eating is only eating. What else is there? Perhaps this: a shining floor of ebony laid out in the midst of the square. For dancing, of course, and large enough to hold any number of waltzers or twisters or turners or swirling mass of dancers. Let the music take hold, as ever. It's guarded, of course, against those monsters and spirits and evil forces who (that explains the chalk lines streaking across the surface, doesn't it?). But how soon will those be smudged? There is no keeping things at bay on this night. And there will be no keeping still.
Look, a place even for musicians, hung with those same harlequin banners, draped in bunting of black burial shrouds, and lit by candles in their jewel-like glasses (but who knows what bony, knobby claws and talons will play those instruments, for they seem made of the flesh and bones of the monsters from the week before, now fused and melted into some new shape, gray and ragged, with fingerbones for tuning pins and knucklebones for the mouthpieces--perhaps the music will be sweeter than their appearance).
And over it all, strung up on some nightmare's wire, some massive spider's blackened thread, not a chandelier but its inverse: something hidden, something wrapped in black crepe and gauze and burial fabric. Dusty, too, as though it were a forgotten relic now revived. The whole of it hangs like some malevolent cloud above the festivities, strung high between two buildings, and hanging delicately by those wire threads. The chandelier (if there really is one) is hidden--or nearly hidden, for there may be some hint of twisted metal or barbed wire peeking out from within, and the fabric that drapes it is hardly new and untattered, and those holes to move when the wind blows--under layer upon layer of widow's weeds, all black and darkly glittering, the lack plain and torn, the embroidery ragged. Jet beads hang down in long waterfalls, trailing towards the floor, caught up sometimes in some vain attempt to keep them out of the way by some hand somewhere in their time. A locket here or there contains some twist of black hair, and a name that can't be read. And those same harlequin tapestries mark the points of the compass, hanging down from this widow-turned-chandelier (a woman can be made into stranger things, can't she?).
And, to light it all? A thousand candles or more, black and white and orange as a pumpkin and purple as a sunset before a nightmare, all mounted up in thirteen times thirteen candelabra, each bearing thirteen candles, and all made of the twisted and filigree iron stolen and re-wrought from the gates of churchyards and cemeteries and prisons and insane asylums. They are beautiful, in their twisted way, like twisted trees or the candelabras of a church or the great chandeliers that light so many manors and ballrooms and theaters of so many worlds. And all are draped in the colors of the day: black and purple and orange, in long swags of black gauze and those same harlequin banners. But, wait, what about those candles lying idly on those tables? Well, of course one needs a little more light for the occasion (though not too much): these are the candles that will be tossed into the air, and what hidden hands will hold them in the air are unknown. But know that these candles will yet be used, left to float in midair, all surrounding the rosette of crepe that hangs over the dancefloor.
And the Jack-O-Lanterns, too, of course, one cannot forget them, and the way they light the whole of the event: mounded up on tables, peering out from behind tables and chairs, sitting at the feet of the musicians' chairs, perched on window ledges, peering from rooftops, perched in trees--wherever there is a place for a grinning Jack-O-Lantern, there is one--save for when one looks for one.
But this is not the only place where the celebration will take place.
Xanadu, too, has been dressed for the occasion. Of course it must be, if it is, indeed, the famous pleasure garden. Though what pleasure can be found here must be strange, or so one must think upon passing through the twisted gates and under the twisted arch--though that arch is largely hidden by that same black crepe, those same black rags that seem to decorate the whole of the City this day and this night. Candles stand guard at either side of the entrance, melting quietly onto the real guardians: two massive statues (do they or do they not move as the night progresses?) of beasts perhaps only seen in some worlds (and those few are enough) that seems like creatures seen before or seen only in nightmares, with such fangs and such claws and such horns as that. And, grinning over it all, a Jack-O-Lantern, with his cohorts beside him, and their veritable army of burning candles.
The paths here are lined with those candles, like ghosts lights, and pumpkin and paper lanterns are hanging from the black, bare, gnarled tree branches. This is the antechamber of Xanadu, if one should like to think of it so. This is only the beginning. Look, this scarecrow (if one can call him that--he'd probably scare anything that came near him) is pointing the way: this way or that way? The paths diverge...
There are different paths here: those paths with little light or none, and those that glitter like Algol--the Demon Star. Choose whichever you would like.
If you choose the paths with little light or none, lit by those tiny ghost lights, burning blue and faint along the path, then be wary of the darkness. Be wary of those long rags that hang like mist or ghosts in the trees, blowing across the faces of those who pass. There are spiders in these trees, and the grinning faces of Jack-O-Lanterns--but never giving enough light to truly see. Watch for the shadows--there!--that rush by before one can see them, these creatures of fog and imagination. There are people in the trees all around, or creatures, or worse. Crows call as they do after they have found fresh carrion. Owls call, bats flutter across the sky. There are old houses, their broken windows menacing anyone who passes by like the empty eyesockets of a skull, there in the woods all around. The moon's light does little good here, and perhaps only casts a malevolent glow, twisting the shadows of the trees. But press on, find the way through the labyrinth of this path, and the horrors of one's own mind. The reward is yet to come.
If you chose the glittering path, then follow the lights that burn in the trees like stars themselves: purple and green and orange and white, wrapping around branches light fairy lights. The candles give way to glitter and starlight. There is no great light here, though--no, of course not. The whole is still in darkness, though in the darkness of starlight. The saddest spirits might haunt these paths, or the most beautiful, the ones who will lure the unwary into unsafe ways or into rivers. The harlequin banners are here, too, hanging from the trees, along with their black bunting. If there is a king's progress, then perhaps this is the way he would go, leading his court down a street of wicked trees lit with wicked stars. And he knows the reward that lies at the end of this road.
Regardless of the path one takes, one will find oneself, at the end of the maze, one will come upon the real celebration and come before a great twisting, spiraling tower of Jack-O-Lanterns.
Where Misery Square had its wretched chandelier, like a widow inverted and hung with candles, Xanadu has a blazing tower of Jack-O-Lanterns. All grinning, all orange, all burning with candles, the spiraling tower sits in the midst of another ebony floor (stained with chalk, yes, of course). It is like some stolen column from a monstrous temple, like some strange altar to a monster deity, like some horrific growth from a nightmarish pumpkin patch swelling up towards the sky. Be careful in getting too close. There are rumors flying tonight that some of the Jack-O-Lanterns have been seen laughing.
There are tables just beyond for conversation and a little rest, as one might expect (and still made from the stolen wood of old coffins, as one also might expect), and stone benches (stolen from cemeteries). Like Misery Square, the whole is hung with black rags and lace, tattered crows' feathers, and that same royal harlequin tapestry. Another ballroom, then. Though perhaps more secret, given the darkness just beyond the tables. Less grandiose, perhaps, given the simplicity of table and floor. Or better, if one so prefers to sit with one's companion over the soft light of a Jack-O-Lantern, and have sweet wine mixed with blood brought to one's table by a tall, dour, skeletal man who seems to say too little and know too much. Or so those burning eyes would suggest.
But, look: another stand for the musicians, with those same melted, stitched, ragged, wretched instruments. Who would touch these to play them? Who could play them well? The musicians will, of course, as they read their music by the light of the Jack-O-Lanterns staked on candelabra all around them. That is the light for this place: Jack-O-Lanterns and moonlight. Perhaps the better question, though, is to ask who would dance to it. And here is the answer, tumbling across the floor, skittering on stilts, twisting itself into knots and tangles: dancers themselves, or something like them, or perhaps something more like clowns, or jesters (if we imagine that Halloween King still). A flock of them, a troupe of them, each with his or her own skill. This one balancing high on stilts, that one bending herself into tangled knots, another breathing and eating and throwing fire, still another twisting herself like a serpent as she dances, still more tumbling in--clowns or jesters or the kin of Harlequin himself, yes, but masked as the day would require and dressed in its livery of black and purple and orange. They are amusing, yes, but perhaps they draw up the feeling one has when dreaming a dream that is mere moments, mere seconds away from turning into a nightmare. Watch, but don't stare too long: they seem human, if talented, but to stare too long will make certain inconsistencies appear, certain details grow clear, and certain unsettling problems very, very noticeable. Don't ask where they come from. Don't ask why they use a Hand of Glory to light their way. Speak to them, if you like, but don't expect answers.
Perhaps if Misery Square is meant to be supper with dancing, then this is the proper ballroom? Or does it work the other way? Or perhaps this is the entertainment after the ball? Or should one perhaps visit both? Yes, visit both.
Come, join the festivities. Wear your best costume, bring your best mask. The City has adorned herself for you. Show her the same courtesy, and let us all celebrate together...