Chapter 70: Chapter 70 – An Approach is a Performance

We’re ready to leave fifteen minutes before we need to be, and Khetzi’s visibly antsy, as though we’re fifteen minutes late. Given the sorry state of, among other things, my hair - and there’s a thought I shy away from - after the, well, soul-surgery and abrupt end thereof, we needed the extra fifteen minutes and are lucky to make it out this early. I had had to take my braids all the way out even with Sara’s command of cleaning magic, and they were a little bit frizzy and wanted to fly away in every direction; Amber and Zidanya took turns doing the re-braiding, and that was an absolute delight, but it’s a delight I’d rather have enjoyed at length and at my leisure.

We’re going to be at this tournament for a few days. It’s a delight that we will be able to enjoy at our leisure.

There were a bunch of clothes in the various closets. I was a little surprised when they vaguely fit, but somehow less surprised when they writhed and shifted after we put them on, adapting to our bodies in order to fit perfectly. They’re some sort of high fashion; Zidanya calls the style High Arcane, whatever that means, but neither Amber nor Sara recognize the cut or the colors, and tonight’s were left separate from the others, in bundles labeled AUDIENCE in capital letters.

And oh, what colors tonight’s chosen clothes are. Purple and brilliant blue are our primary theme, with secondaries of red and a rich dark green, and there’s the occasional splash of black, usually with lines of silver. It works, somehow; the skin-tight leggings that somehow don’t bind or bunch, the boots with the clever little tab fasteners that go to mid-calf, the shirt with the asymmetric diagonal striping that tucks into something that would be a pair of loose pants if they managed to go past the knee instead of ending just above, gathered in a puff of fabric with elastic underneath. There’s jewelry, too; for Zidanya it’s in a blue-green so dark it gives tremendous contrast to the burnished tan of her skin, two shades darker than the dress that leaves her arms bare from the shoulders and somehow both clings and drapes loosely at the same time all the way down to her ankles, and for Amber it’s in a brilliant blue that makes her already-pale skin look white by contrast.

Amber’s outfit is like someone decided that a gala’s theme is going to be arms and armor. She names the shoulder pieces as pauldrons, though obviously they’re cloth, and on one arm the pauldron flows into a spiralling sleeve made of interwoven strips of fabric. The sleeve attaches to a glove that’s worked into scale-like patterns, tiny and overlapping, looking for all the world like a gauntlet. A slight bulge under the sleeve betrays that her bracer is there, matching the one on the other arm, bare other than the pauldron through the shoulder and beyond. The stone hanging just above her breasts draws my eye every time my gaze wanders anywhere near her, and the abbreviated top mostly serves as structural support and framing for her muscles. The pants are just as much a non-functional statement as the rest of her clothes; they’re more of the faux-scale pattern, cloth mimicking what she tells me is scalemail, except for where there are long runs of open skin bridged loosely by stitching a few shades lighter than the pants.

Okay, maybe arms, armor, and incredible sex appeal is more accurate than just arms and armor. At least her boots are no less practical than mine, and wildly more than Zidanya’s.

Sara’s clothes are, to nobody’s surprise but visibly to her relief, a more staid version of mine. Her colors are muted shadows of the rest of the party’s, her pants go down past her knees, and not only is the shirt loose enough to mostly shroud her figure and missing the striping besides, she has something vaguely like an asymmetric jacket which wraps around her side and one shoulder. Her jewelry is in a dark grey that looks like smoke, stark pieces that somehow complete the effect; she looks a little like an aide and a little like a ghost and nothing like anyone worth taking notice of, and she clearly loves it.

Cosmetics are the final touch to our arrayed looks. Zidanya focuses on her eyes with the surprisingly intent assistance of Sara, artistically framing her eyes in a cloud of color that matches her jewelry, while Amber fusses over my face. I’m not entirely unfamiliar with the principles and the utility of it all, though it’s been more than three decades since I’ve actually used it, but my hands shake a bit too much to do anything myself.

I haven’t worn makeup since I was courting Ash.

The results of Amber’s work don’t drastically change anything and aren’t even particularly noticeable from a distance. They’re subtle; a smoothing and slight darkening of the color of my lips, a widening of the eyes, some of the wrinkles starting to form on my face hidden and others I think brought to focus. It’s a vulnerable look, a look that makes me feel doubly aware of every inch of where the outfit I’m wearing clings skin-tight or where, on the arms, it’s cut to show skin along what little, relative to Amber, muscles I have.

Well, maybe I shouldn’t be comparing my muscles to the Paladin’s. My build leans more towards the rangy or wiry, and I’ve never had the motivation to get rid of the softness at my hips and in my face, but the effect is still visible. Even so, the slashes on the shirtsleeves that show off my arms are the last-stage oxidizer for how utterly ludicrous it all seems, and if I had even the slightest reason to believe Zidanya would lie about this kind of thing I’d conclude I was being made fun of; but I suppose that’s fashion, here as it was back on the Fleet.

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Besides, the way Amber and Zidanya look, the way they look at me when I catch them giving me sidelong and utterly unashamed appraisals? Those make it worth it and more, even though I look patently ridiculous and I can’t kiss either of them without risking ruination.

Khetzi takes us on a very different path, this time. We stride our way along halls that wend their winding way through elevated galleries and around the edges of great gathering halls filled with thousands of people, drawing the eye of those whose eyes happen to lift to watch us as we pass, anywhere between five and ten meters above them. Below us are everything from surging throngs vying for time with what I can only presume are celebrities to rooms nearly empty and as nearly dark, filled with long, low couches in front of long, low tables covered with food.

It’s almost like a Meeting of the Councils, in a way, one of those epochally rare events where three or more Worldships will find themselves simultaneously at a large static or, much more rarely, a sufficiently friendly habitable planet. There’s the dizzying range of clothing styles and realms of body language, the wild array of different kinds of food from a thousand different vendors; it’s a swamp of humanity, well, not just humanity, there’s orcs and gamahad and gotz and more that I don’t recognize, and it’s all buzzing with life and pungent with a hundred different kinds of aromas.

It’s vast. I think back on the stadium that we’d entered into; there might have been on the order of a hundred thousand seats in that stadium, and while I knew we were only seeing a percent or two of that number, the teeming thousands of people below us are a powerful statement as to the scope and vastness of this demesne of Lily’s. Of Lady Sheid’s, I correct myself mentally.

There are a hundred thousand people here. If what Zidanya’s implied about the degree to which Imprints here in this scenario mimic life, there are a hundred thousand people eating and shitting and breathing the air here, there are a hundred thousand people walking around through corridors that need to be designed and placed to deal with the flow requirements. A hundred thousand people for whom I suspect loyalty isn’t the right word for their relationship with Lady Sheid, but she’s in charge of this vast and complex machine, and I intend to display at least a little bit of respect, if she’ll return the same.

We’re a procession through those people, on display for the crowd, those who bother to lift their eyes and those who hear the whispers and exclamations in time as we pass. This sinks in slowly; by the time I’ve fully realized it we’re approaching a grand set of double doors, held wide open by a pair of perfectly identical, androgynous humans in simple white robes. I’m flushed brightly from the attention, but I keep my feet steady and stop myself from trying to hide behind Amber’s curvaceous bulk.

Wouldn’t work, anyway. There’s people on both sides of us, now and then; and again, and behind us, and above all around us, once we pass through the doors in Khetzi’s wake.

Steady feet, smooth gait. I keep my mind on that, and my eyes forward. I only dimly hear the announcer’s words as their voice introduces first my companions and then me, and I only distantly note the rich red-purple of the thick carpet we’re walking on, a single strip of exquisite work running to the definitively-not-a-throne that Lillit Sheid sits on.

She rises, narrow tail flicking out and up to wrap around one hand. The other touches her long, upswept horns, drawing my eye to them; they curl around her head, two on each side twining around each other as they form something very like a crown. Her bearing is appropriately regal, given that, and the Lady’s presence hammers out and down onto us like a physical blow.

Even as Zidanya sinks to the floor in a curtsy, and even as both Amber and Sara kneel, Sara with hands clasped together on her knee and Amber with one fist at her heart and the other flat on her thigh, I stand, almost ignoring the pressure. Back ruler-straight, I cock my head and wait.

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