(text-style: "italic") ["You are the light of the world.
[[A city set on a hill cannot be hid."]] ](text-style: "italic") ["Nor do men light a lamp
and put it under a bushel.
But on a stand,"
[["and it gives light to all in the house."]] ](text-style: "italic") ["Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works
and give glory to your Father
who is in Heaven."]
(css: "font-size: 70%;") [ - The Sermon on the Mount]
(align: "=><==") [ [[Play]] ] How do you travel there?
[[By Oxline]]
[[By Airship]](set: $transCounter to 0)
|sample1)[(transition: "dissolve")+(align: "===><===")[Dystopia Rising: Texas Presents]]
|sample2)[(transition: "dissolve")+(align: "===><===")+(css: "font-size: 150%;")[Lonestar Skies:]]
|sample3)[(transition: "dissolve")+(align: "===><===")+(css: "font-size: 250%;")[**The Shining City**]]
|sample4)[(transition: "dissolve")+(align: "===><===")[[Travel to Waking ]]]
|sample5)[(transition: "dissolve")+(align: "===><===")[ ]]
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}The hazy sky above your traincar is the color of an oracle box tuned to a dead channel. The shocks beneath you buck back and forth over the newly-laid track that streaches between sleepy Bravado and Waking,The Shining City and, your destination.
[[Look out the Window]]Gray.
Gray.
More gray.
The impassive, depthless field of smog outside the window of the airship has characterized the latter two hours of your trip. Greasy, gray streaks extend across the broad bay windows of the primary bridge and make it so that you cannot tell if the dark clouds just beyond them are thunderheads proper or the noxious methane fog whose lightning burns a brilliant and dangerous blue and whose too-light air suffocates the lungs before the brain realizes it.
Both make you nervous.
You have been traveling to Waking since you began - as long ago as that was - and according to the arcane instruments strung along the captain's bench; barometers, sundry maps and charts of the San Saba Territories, and a single psion crystal hung on a silver chain from the ceiling like a diode - you're (text-style: "italic") [nearly] there.
[[Check out a map of the San Saba.]]
[[Ascend.]] When you boarded less than three hours ago - the sky was blue. But now the clouds, sulpherous ash-heads heavy with some tarry black stuff you think smells a bit like biodiesal, have eclipsed the ruddy light of midmorning and rendered the blastlands a dim and glaucous landscape.
Your gaze locks on something in the smoggy distance; a thin oval of shining metal rocketing at a ludicrious speed along the horizon line - before pulling up sharply in a bloom of white light and dissapearing into the lowslung clouds.
Weird.
[[The train's airbreaks scream and you feel the Ox begin to slow.]]
Which is strange - because you don't see a train station. As a matter of fact when you press your face to the glass of the Ox's window you can barely glean the sharp curvature of an track interchange - designed only to turn the train around.
Other passengers in your car begin to trade looks - some look perturbed while others panicked. For an instant it occurs to you that this Minor Shareholder business might be bullshit and you're about to be treated to a shallow grave in the Lonestar Blastlands when [[a voice crackles to life over the intercom.]]
(text-style: "italic")["Oxline final stop; Waking. All y'all passengers gotta disembark now." ]Declares the tinny and twangy voice of the conductor in an accent so heavy your ears have a hard time picking it up, (text-style: "italic")[ "Repeatin', Oxline final stop; Waking. All passengers gotta disembark. Ferries to Waking Prime are comin' down now." ]
Ferries, huh?
[[Disembark.]]
You and some fifty other people shuffle off the Ox in relatively single-file. Everyone, you notice, is dressed in their best clothes despite the filmy weather.
Rovers in finely trimmed scarves that nearly drag the ground but only by pinning or the grace of God do not, bundle themselves into small groups with their faces turned inwards towards their kin.
Digitarians, returning home, in their mottled greens and grays - all sharp lines and retrofitted business suits designed to mimic the stately angles of CEOs and Househeads past, wait patiently with their faces upturned towards the smoggy sky.
You eyes drift over to a small group of dangerous looking figures in orange jumpsuits when [[the sky opens up above you.]]At first it is a rumble, then a roar and when you have only just realized that the claxon originates from above you and not the Oxline behind you your gaze swings upward again to be treated with the view of a grease-stained hull so large as to at first be the whole of your vision before your brain adjusts and your eyes refocus.
The airship, a zeppelin painted generously with bright oranges and reds with two great bladders strung out on either side of its primary manifold, descends from the opening it has wrought in the cloud layer to land - in a prodigious puff of dust - at the edge of the Oxline and some thirty feet from you.
(text-style: "italic")[The Soaring Dawn] the hull declares in huge, looping letters that evoke the wide brush strokes an artist might make across too much canvas.
The door on the exterior of the gondola, the small boat attached to the lower half of the air bladders, opens, and from it drops a gleaming silver ladder.
[[Climb it.]]You and some fifty other survivors take the few steps between the train tracks and The Shining Dawn (what you assume is the Waking ferry.) The air buffets you sharply as you draw closer to the ship - its massive propellers still spinning with residual inertia.
You haul yourself up the ladder and into the gondola - and it reminds you immediately of the Oxline traincar you've just exited. Seats ring the oblong "room" facing inward - clearly intended for passenger posterior. A single huge map of the San Saba - the territories recently outlined by the [[San Saba Board]] is laminated to the top of a heavy wooden table otherwise laden with flight instruments far beyond your capability to identify.
[[Cloudskippers]], a clan of skybound Rovers and the obvious propriators of this airship, move to take your bags and direct you to your seat. A particularly severe looking woman stands on the deck above yours - and barks orders as if she were born to it.
[[Take a Seat.]]
[[Take a look at the map.]] This body was formed by The Chair and is composed of two voting members from the Railroad Conglomerate, one from the Grave Council, one from the Tribes Disperate, and one from the Justices of Prudence Penitentiary. It is they who set the laws in motion and contract The Law Dogs to enforce them. This faction of the Tribes Disparate are the only merchants who can service Waking, a flying city, with any kind of fidelity. They manage most of the coming and going of travelers, and most imports and exports from the city.
Cloudskipper airships are normally piloted by a captain and a psion that serves as the navigator. They also have a tradition of asking for a story as part of payment for passage as a superstition, but refuse to hear the ending until the voyage is completed.
The engines roar to life again and, much more quickly than you'd thought it possible, The Soaring Dawn launches itself into the air and, in your heart, earns its namesake with aplomb.
Your stomach drops out and the roar of open flame somewhere in the ship's primary envelope accompanys a dizzying ascent up to the smog layer.
You only have a few seconds to crane your neck to look out the window behind you before The Soaring Dawn explodes through the clouds and you are treated with your first sight of [[The Shining City.]]The sprawling Lonestar Wastes as seen from above, the San Saba Territories extend from lovely and verdant [[Essex]] to the dusty Blastlands below [[Waking Prime]].
Between these two major settlements, rests New Bravado - home of the Railroad Commission - now Railroad Conglomerate - and digsite for one of the largest archeological endevors in the history of the Wastes and - funnily enough - hometown to most of the people you know who hail from the Lonestar
Before you can scrutinize the map further - the voice of the captain orders all passengers to take their seats.
[[Take a Seat.]]
Once a city of light and sound and rare beauty, ruled by purebloods, ruthless merchants and Crystal Candy dealers - the small citystate of Essex has recently undergone an intense terraforming process that has transformed what was previously a small metroplex into the largest contiguous forest in the Lonestar.
Thanks to the Survivors who enacted the change - in lieu of a much worse one - Essex has become a haven for the wandering Tribes Disparate as well as the recovering few who survived the Candy Mines below the city. In a turn of events that follow the natural math of the world and surprise no one - the Grave Council has done what it can to maintain a cultural hold on the city and its five morgues.
But in the wake of the Fountainhead Incident, only time will tell who this city will play host to - and who will come to define its culture against the tapestry of the San Saba.
For the sake of clarity, Waking Prime is the airship that hangs over Old Waking. The clouds peel away from the airship's siding and you are left with the distinct impression that you have just risen from a dark and filthy ocean to see the landmasses beyond its lip - much like some primordial crab clawing forth from the muck of its forebears.
Purely and simply, Waking Prime is a marvel - though from your vantage you can tell the gestalt metroplex is anything but pure or simple.
Still beneath the island-like superstructure, you are treated first to the sight of its underbelly. Framed in a complex latticework of steel and chrome, what at first you think are distant pockmarks on the hull of Waking Prime's re-enforced manifold (the giant envelope of canvas that keeps the city afloat) you realize on closer scrutiny are actually thousands of pivoting jets hot with exhaust - that seem to keep the city stable some two thousand feet in the air.
[[But suddenly it is very hard to see anything at all.]] It feels like only a few seconds after you take your seat that the axis of the plane shifts skyward and you are suddenly, intensely aware of both gravity - and the weight of it on your arms and legs as you experience several G's of force as the airship wrenches itself skyward and, gloriously, out above the smog.
You feel your jaw slacken at your first view of [[The Shining City.]]You find a map that's so new the ink still shines and depicted is sprawling Lonestar Wastes as seen from above. The San Saba Territories extend from lovely and verdant [[Essex]] to the dusty Blastlands below [[Waking Prime]].
Between these two major settlements, rests New Bravado - home of the Railroad Commission - now Railroad Conglomerate - and digsite for one of the largest archeological endevors in the history of the Wastes and - funnily enough - hometown to most of the people you know who hail from the Lonestar
Before you can scrutinize the map further - the voice of the captain orders all passengers to take their seats.
[[Ascend.]]You blink. And you blink again.
Moments later you can see the shape of the city once more outside your window and it is both comforting and alarming to you that, when you cast your gaze around the cabin, its other occupants share the same befuddled and blinded expression as you.
"The mirrors..." a passenger mutters somewhere to your left and you pivot your gaze to where they point with a claw-tipped finger.
Surely enough the complicated latticework of steel and chrome you'd glanced over earlier in favor of jetfire are the source of the light that, you now realize, blinded you.
"I hear the [[Helios]] blokes installed that just last month." A voice declares conspiratorially from your right, "Some kind of shielding technology that keeps the city hidden. Dunno why though."
"Wastes Fair, certainly," Another voice suggests archly, further away, "The Helios can't afford to lose the race - what with their position in the Tribes Disperate being so new and tenuous."
But the voices truncate abruptly when your airship rises to the same altitude as Waking Prime. Every pair of eyes turns outward and your shoulders tense to see the perfect golden pillars of the Shining City in earnest.
[[Look Upon.]] The sun-colored spires of the Magnolia District look everything and nothing like the pictures you have seen. They are as thin and ramroad straight as the descriptions fed to you by couriers and caravaneers who claimed to have seen them - and they are so much taller than you could have imagined.
The buildings across the city are capped with thousands and thousands of thick black rods - the largest and longest a glorious triple-pronged trident that extends from the crown of Eureka Tower; the tallest building in Waking. It reminds you of a crown, or if you are passingly familiar, the iconic headware of the Helios fashion.
The streets of the Magnolia district, often called "The Mag" by locals and the sort of person who pretends to be a local, are as white as the collars of the criminals you expect make their business there. While the landing strip - where your airship is currently heading - and all the Bilge below it remain a muddier, grittier cast than the gleaming facades of the hightown.
[[Touchdown.]]The landing gear extends with a hydraulic hiss as your airship swings in to touch down on the strip that extends down the middle of Waking Prime before terminating at the base of The Mag.
Outside you see the several hundred bodies of the other fairgoers, dressed to the nines in Pureblood blue, Digitarian greens and, to your slight surprise, even the telltale flash of Vegasian yellow. Each of them moving to line up at an enormous turnstile that, you realize now, is the only effective airfield exit.
As each patron steps up to the gate you see them pass off a ticket to the kiosk manager - much like the ticket you received recently yourself and that prompted your attendance here today.
[[Check your Pockets.]]You reach down into your belongings, or your pockets, or your shoe - and pull out the folded ticket emblazoned with gold filigree and the phrase "ADMIT ONE: MINOR SHAREHOLDER" across the front.
You flip it over and in much smaller text the back reads: "On the day of the Wastes Fair, to be held on the twenty-sixth day of the ninth month of the fourth year Post Hiway War, this collateral represents an invitation from the San Saba Board and Waking Prime to attend the whole of the Wastes Fair and experience the sundry promises of greatness therein."
You reflect on who gave this to you, invested as they are in your attendance, and your own feelings on the whole thing. You understand each of the faction heads associated with the San Saba Board, the RRC, Grave Council, Tribes Disperate, and Prudence Penitentiary respectively - each divided these vouchers between their core constituary. Some of these vouchers ended up on the Black Market - others were traded for favors - other still stolen wholesale from their rightful bearers or sold legally to parties with more money than clout.
For one reason or another, by scheme or schism, this ticket found its way into your posession. As far as the turnstile is concerned - it belongs to you.
[[So use it.]] Ticket clutched in hand, you disembark the airship and step for the first time onto the landing strip of Waking Prime and breath in the sharp and dizzying smell of hypoxic air and biodiesal fumes. The sound of the great and immortal engines that keep Waking afloat shudder beneath your feet dully like the disant breathing of some great beast.
The tarmac is warm with sun on the soles of your boots as you file into line with the other faregoers. Ahead of you is a small-framed Ironborn man with a pin on the lapel of his tatty blazer that reads [["LOCAL 727"]] in wrought brass. His hands shake and clutches a ticket much like yours. His eyes are wide with wonder.
He notices you looking at him and says "Never seen anything quite like it, huh?"
[["Nothing quite like it, no."]]
[[Don't reply.]] "I've heard of the fifteen hundred stabilizing jets that keep this place from drifting all over the central Lonestar - but I never imagined I'd see them turn all in tandem like-" The Ironborn stops and his cheeks and forehead begin to glow. You realize he's blushing.
"Sorry - I'm overstepping. My name's Pike and I'm very excited to be here." The Ironborn named Pike extends on hand - callused and capable, "Nice to make your acquaintance."
[[Introduce yourself.]]
[[Don't reply.]] The Ironborn looks abashed - he's probably from a smaller community where that kind of behavior is friendly rather than threatening. Embarrassed, he turns around and does his best not to bother you until you reach the turnstile.
[[Use your Ticket.]]
"Bloody pleasure!" Pike assures you, pumping your hand up in down in the most enthusiastic greeting you think you've recieved in recent memory. "I'm here about the fair - brought my own invention and everything. Wanna see?"
[[Yeah.]]
[[Don't reply.]] You arrive at the front of the line and the turnstile clerk, a stately looking digitarian woman in perhaps her early 40's, extends a long-nailed hand to take your ticket.
When you hand it over she holds it first up to the light - and then dunks the entire thing in a bucket of clear fluid. When she removes the small rectangle of paper it has turned from golden filigree on white paper to green paper with silver.
"Oh wow." the Ironborn next to you says as the clerk takes his ticket and treats it to the same. You are each returned your pallet-swapped tickets, probably as souvenirs, and ushered into the city proper.
[[Go into Waking.]]
"I don't really have a a name for it yet," he confesses toothily, "But what y'do is you put any 'ol heterogeneous mixture of fluid in the chassis here-" Pike gestures to what looks like the pitcher-portion of his electric blender.
"And you apply a current to the engine - with whatever power source you got handy. Hey-" he rounds on you again. "You know this place is held up by the lightning that strikes it?"
[[Uh no - I didn't.]]
[[I think we were talking about your invention?]]'Is that what it's called?" Pike asks - excitedly. "I rotate heterogeneous substances at high speeds and the relative uh - mass or weight or I dunno of the individual particles in the solution mean they end up with the heaviest on the bottom and the lightest on the top."
"But we use it back home to separate out substrates. Me ma's a agricultural engineerin' type and she can tell just from lookin' at the dirt what kinda crops we oughtta grow the next year."
He beams, truly an inventor in his element.
[[Honestly? Pretty cool.]]
Too pushy, honestly. [[Don't reply.]] "They're tremendous!" Pike assures you. "There's two-thousand lightning rods bolted to basically every building in the city that collect energy from the storms and transfer it to the Capacity Engine. The Eurekan Coils are notoriously capricious and prone to failure, though-" Pike winks, "but are a project that is constantly maintained and updated as the city experiments with new forms of power."
"I'm one of the coil technicians myself!" He goes so far as to say.
[[I think we were talking about your invention?]]"We were but I'm done now." He laughs, putting his invention back in the knapsack and reshouldering it before standing to meet your gaze. You're nearly at the front of the line now.
"About that time." Pike says.
[[Use your Ticket.]]"Thank you!" He stuffs the small invention back into his back and reshoulders it. Hey have you heard about how the city gets its power? From the storms?
[[How?]]The Local 727 are a Union of crafts folk, laborers and small time merchants who believe in fair work and fair pay fundamentally. Made up of many Evolved, Mutant and some Devoted strains, this faction inside the Tribes Disparate plays a large part in providing infrastructure for their fellow Tribes. Team players, collective enthusiasts, and generally hardworking - the Local 727 built themselves from the ugly aftermath of war, determined to build a better, more enduring world.
The Local 727 are the craftspeople of the city that keep it floating. Possessing great influence as a result of their labor union, the Local 727 are kept pretty fuckin’ happy by the Railroad Conglomerate who recognizes better than most - that you gotta keep the union happy.
The Hermits of Helios are a monastic tradition of survivors that are transfixed with the adaptation of the self to understand and survive the evolution of earthly and natural adversity. They look toward the Sun in its Deadly and Lifegiving Radiance acknowledging this dichotomy it represents. Likewise, it represents, to them, the reminder that humanity has endured through calamity, analogous to Night, and evolved to not simply survive, but thrive in it's new Day. The Hermits are straightforward and hopeful, and have made strong alliances with the Tribes Disparate in the wake of the Fountainhead Incident.
"Capital!" Pike says, unshouldering his backpack and fiddling with the ties for a bit before he pulls out a device that looks, for all intents and purposes, very much like an average electric kitchen blender.
[["What is it?"]] He grins, "There's two-thousand lightning rods bolted to basically every building in the city that collect energy from the storms and transfer it to the Capacity Engine. The Eurekan Coils, which is what they're called, are notoriously capricious and prone to failure, though-" Pike winks, "but are a project that is constantly maintained and updated as the city experiments with new forms of power."
"As a matter of fact I'm a coil technician myself."
You're nearly at the front of the line now. Pike sighs heavily, as is nervous.
[[Use your Ticket.]]The lot of you; now a crowd of probably two hundred, press onward into Waking Prime with the excitment generally reserved for young children attending a Fall festival.
You trek up the airstrip towards a huge pair of gold-and-green doors that, when you pass through them along with the throngs of Minor Shareholders who arrived here today with you, surprise you by leading to an enormous room with no other exits. The masonry is beautiful - stucco and brightly painted to resemble those ionic pillars so loved by the Digitarian elite of the Lonestar. And the floor is a polished marble veined through with gold.
[[But the doors shut behind you.]]You curse to yourself and, for just an instant, feel a pang of fear that you've been had. The ground beneath you begins to rumble - and then, incredibly, with more than 200 people on what you now realize is an enormous elevating platform;
[[Your entire congregation begins to ascend.]] The scraping, grinding sound of gears churning behind those stucco walls humble you. But moments, and several adrinaline spikes, later - the gigantic doors open again to reveal The Mag - and the sight nearly blinds you all over again.
[[Step onto the Promenade]]
You are ushered, by energetic Digitarian stewards who tell you they are members of the Buzzbee [[Dynasty]] and assure you of their legitimacy with only just enough fervor to worry you.
They escort your massive group in sections - but all of you stride down the central strip of Waking Prime to the base of Eureka Tower; which rises before you now like the sun.
One of the stewards, a curvacious person in chartruse robes, hands over a pamphlet that's been folded three times over. "WELCOME TO WAKING." The text, printed on a press, declares in bold black font and beneath that; "A CITIZENS GUIDE TO THE SHINING CITY".
You flip it open as you walk.
[[Read it.]] The City of Waking is made up almost entirely of Digitarians; exclusively from one of the five longstanding dynasties that collaborated to draft the first plans for the flying city.
Those dynasties are;
Dellison
Hackard
Kwolk
Tinstrument
Buzzbee
When you unfold the pamphlet to reveal its contents; you see a masterfully rendered drawing of Waking Prime as seen from its side and cut in half.
Each major section of the cityship is labeled and corresponds with a small description on the back. You could read this as you walk The Mag.
[[Eureka Tower]]
[[The Magnolia District.]]
[[The Edison Solarium]]
[[Updraft Cantina]]
[[The Bilge]]
[[The Sump]]
[[Plastique Boutique]]
[[Apothicarium.]]
[[Faiths Galleria]]
[[The Hall of Inventions]]
[[That's enough of that.]]
The jewel in the crown of Waking, Eureka Tower was commissioned by The Chairman, shadowy leader of the San Saba Board. Not the desiccated skeleton of a skyscraper, but the hopeful and savage rendition that only a Survivor could imagine in their most silicone dreams. Eureka Tower is mostly housing and labspace - but its penthouse level is where the Chairman lives and works.
Double-click this passage to edit it.The wealthiest, newest and (in relation to sea level), highest section of Waking; The “Mag” as it is often referred to, is immaculately kept; with streets and building facades scrubbed till they resembled the color of the collars of its criminals. This strip of city belongs to the wealthy few; but is scrutinized by the entire city as its beating heart.
The view from above; the Solarium is a public works project designed to show off the mechanical marvel that is the city’s sweeping vista. Possessing a swimming pool, a lawn and a painstakingly recreated pre fall beach - the Solarium is the daytrip of the wealthy and the pilgrimage of the scrummer who lives in the Bilge below.
Located on the outskirts of the Magnolia District, the Updraft plays host to the wealthier travelers who visit Waking in search of truth, knowledge or - more generally - the opportunity to strike it rich with the Cloudskippers as a one of the many exporting bodies who ferry goods from Waking to the rest of the Lonestar Wastes.
Owned by a retired Cloudskipper named Aric Stormborn, the Updraft is known for its reasonably strong drinks, its skyrunner crowd, and the massive pressure release valve located at the center of the airship-turned-building - which serves as both an emergency release dock and the threat of the same.
Beneath the shining city of Waking is the churning machinery and greasy fingers of the force that keeps the city afloat. The ne'er do wells, the unfortunate, the uncreative and unsponsored end up beneath in the great hull of the city’s engines. The deeper you go in this maze of steamworks, the more bizarre and non euclidean its geometries become. No one knows exactly where the morgue beneath Waking is - but the dead crawl their way from the oily depths of the Sump all the same.
Located below The Mag in the twisted halls of the Bilge, The Sump sits just beneath the Capacity Engine in the Primary Manifold of the City Herself - in the literal drip pan for the city’s beating heart. A huge bath, if you could call it that, sits in the middle of a great and echoing chamber. Rather than water, the depression in the floor is filled with the black and ichorus muck of biodiesel runoff. Locals swear by its medicinal properties, citing their skin improving as a function of a long soak in the stuff. Stewarded by one Doctor Promethea Buzzbee, this small company and enthusiastic subsidiary of the RRC offers temporary solutions to permanent problems. Located in the Bilge, this reputable group of physicians, largely hailing from the Bay’lor School of Dread Surgery, can make any physical liability into an opportunity - at least for a while.
The most opulent place in the city to take a drugnap, the Apothecarium is a den for users and abusers who would rather forget. Owned by one Madame Timorous Tinstrument this small shop for the elite and painfully alert brokers in dreams as much as drugs. Rumors pair Madame Timorous with the Curators; a band of psions who barter in memory.
A public works project, the Faiths Galleria is a stretch of open-air green upon which monoliths, huge rectangles of granite, are set at regular intervals. The grass is neatly trimmed and each stonework is reflective of a recognized faith in Waking. Though all are well-tended the most well-attended monolith is cut from a gray green granite that is evocative of the Darwinian faith it represents. Information exchange is a powerful tradition among the Digitarian families and thus this park is often the site upon which Allfaiths Meetings are held. Recently constructed and at the base of Eureka Tower, the Hall of Inventions is where many of the Waste’s Fair’s smaller inventions are housed for the duration of the event. Made up of many wings, the main Hall and its many smaller halls, are warehouse space. Museum Custodians roam the halls accompanied by members of the Spindrift Navy tasked with the safety of the Hall and its contents.
You close the pamphlet and reflect that its author doesn't seem particularlly invested in you loving this city - only in your tourism.
Your group has finally reached the base of Eureka Tower. It looms above you in a weird and golden echo of the Fountainhead, if the memory belong to you, in Essex just a few months ago. You think, as the crowd shuffles into place and as the redheaded figure of the CEO of the Railroad Conglomerate takes the podium, that something like this has happened before.
[[And so it makes sense that it would happen again.]] Ms. Felicity Redfield is a woman who looks as if she is constructed to the rubric of fire. Her hair, worn short and straight, is the color of the most billious clouds Solvent Yellow 14 can produce. Her spine, a ramrod, recalls to mind poured iron in a mold. Her clothes are black and beige and seem to say; "I have had money longer than your family has had a name."
She is flanked by the other members of the newly assemable San Saba Board save, you see, for the vaunted Chairman who is supposedly its head.
Behind them still is the great doors of the Hall of Inventions; complete with massive green ribbon prohibiting anyone's entrance.
“This Exposition” Ms. Felicity begins after a moment. Her voices echoes out over the gathered people and those muttering few fall quiet.
"is not the conception of a single mind; it is not the result of any single effort, but it is the grandest conception of all the minds and the best obtainable results of all the efforts put forth by all the people who have in any manner contributed to its consideration."
[["This triumph, like all human triumph, has been achieved in tandem.”]]
She glances back down at her notes and continues. “I am here, on this auspicious eve, to join my fellow Shareholders in the congratulations which benefit this occasion. Surrounded by the stupendous results of Texican enterprise and activity and in view of magnificent evidence of skill and intelligence, we need not fear that these congratulations will be exaggerated."
"We stand today in the presence of the oldest settlement in our great Lonestar-” Felicity gestures towards the tarmac beneath you, [[but clearly intends to indicate Old Waking some two thousand feet below.]]
“And we may point to the great achievements of our Oldcestors asking no allowance on the score of youth.
The enthusiasm with which we contemplate our work intensifies the warmth of the greeting we extend to those who have come from foreign lands to illustrate with us the growth and [[progress of human endeavor in the direction of a higher civilization.” ]]
“We who believe that popular education and the stimulation of the best impulses of our citizens lead the way to a realization of the proud destiny which our faith promises, gladly welcome the opportunity here afforded us to see the results accomplished by efforts which have been exerted longer than ours in the field of man’s improvements, while in appreciative return we exhibit the [[unparalleled advancement and wonderful accomplishments of a young Company and people.”]]
“and present the triumphs of a vigorous, self-reliant and independent Company and people. We have built these splendid edifices, but we have also built the magnificent fabric of a popular government, whose grand proportions are seen throughout the wastes."
"We have made and here gathered together, objects of use and beauty, the products of exceptional skill and invention; but we have also made men who rule themselves."
"It is an exalted mission in which we and our guests from other lands are engaged, as we cooperate in the inauguration of an enterprise devoted to the enlightenment of all strains; and, in the undertaking we here enter upon, [[we exemplify in the noblest sense the brotherhood of nations.”]]
From somewhere to your left you hear the Ironborn from earlier mutter, "She sure knows how to...talk."
Felicity, on the podium, breathes deeply to steady herself. It almost looks like she means it.“Let us hold fast,” she says with the building intensity of someone finishing their thought, “to the meaning that underlies this ceremony, and let us not lose the impressiveness of this moment."
"As by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast Exposition is set in motion, so at the same instant let our hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come shall influence the welfare, the dignity and the freedom of mankind.”
She bows shortly from the hip and turns around. [[She removes a pair of golden shears from the pocket of her dress.]]
"Welcome to the Wastes Fair, Survivors." She calls over her shoulder and into the complex megaphone system that enables you to hear her crisply over the roar of a thousand engines.
Felicity cuts the green ribbon and, from inside the Hall, burly 727 workers pull open the double doors to invite the crowd inward and upward.
[[To the future.]] OOC: Okay! That's it guys!
The Wastes Fair is on!
The game is afoot!
A storm brews distantly!
<3 - THE DRTX TEAM
See you at 12pm <3