Re: Mirrorspace: Melodya (Planet) Part 3

Ileatril and Caela were both children of rich parents and excellent
dancers. They had got to know each other in a songhall, danced together
every night for weeks, fell in love with each other and decided to found
their own adventuring company. Together with a their best friends, they
became known as the Company of the Deep Song. When not spelunking, one
could find them in “the Clubs that mattered”, dancing like the others or
being celebrated as Ileatrils performances where he sung of the groups
adventures.  After the tragic end of the Company, they founded their own
Songhall. But like everything else they had done in life, they did it their
own way.

The Club- Town they intended to establish was built on top of a hill that
bordered on a small, almost perfect circular valley. They had discovered
that the bowl had remarkably good acoustics, and hired the nearby gnomes
and several famous dwarven stonemasons to perfect the curvature. At the
same time Caela, with the help of and several other mages and quisamae,
developed a powerful spell: a forcefield that could deflect sounds and bad
waether but was permeable to all other things. The spell itself was
researched quickly; the real problem however was finding a way to extend it
over the whole valley and making it permanent. When their resources were
almost used up they approached some old friends with deep coffers, offering
them silent partnership. Enough agreed to continue, and after five years of
secret preparation and construction (during which they spread rumors
about “THE next big thing”), the grand opening came. It was a complete
success.

The couple had engaged the most famous quisamae, vocalists and dancers.
Weathercontrolling magic was used to make sure that no rain interfered with
the festival and spoiled the party in the Club- Town (the valley was anyway
protected from bad weather by the spell-dome). Already during the opening
song, the guests were flabbergasted: never had anyone heard such
perfection, the harmonies of the elven ballad (which lasted for seven hours-
 quite short for an elven ballad from Rummna) travelled through the
audience like beautiful ghosts, bounced against the valleys walls and
echoed back, some of them multiple times. Tears of joy flowed, some people
even fainted.

The gnomish and dwarven artists had not just rounded and smoothed the
stone. They had chiseled out a special structure that improved the
sound, “deepening” it as they called it. It was the first and only time
that  they shared the ancient secrets of their craft with others, and only
Ileatril and Caela knew about that. To the normal eye, the stone walls were
more or less smooth; a huge permanent illusion hid the sound-improving
structure.

News of the “new big thing” travelled fast through Mirrorspace, and the
Deepdome became the most famous Songhall, overnight. The owners had their
investment amortized after a few months. The Club- Town soon had to be
expanded, adding boarding houses and new shops. Every four years, “The Song-
 Feast” was celebrated: the best song of the past four years were played,
the most famous dancers gave their best. The Deepdome influenced the live
of tens of thousands, many lived for the Song- Feast, and many lived
BECAUSE of it, in a very leteral way: the Deepdome was a place were many
fell in love with, and quite a few were sired in the boardinghouses after
the dance. There were even rumors fo spontane orgies at the dancefloor, but
that were only rumors, of course...


The Song- Feast quickly grew into an essential part of the spheres culture.
Imitators spread like mushrooms on every planet- with the exception of
Mirror Prime, because the asteroid was too small and no other rock in the
asteroid belt had geological formation that even resembled the needed
circular bowl, much the chagrin of it´s populace. But no matter how many
Imitators founded new “Domes”, none came close to the original Deepdome and
the Feast of Songs that were held every four years. It was constantly sold
out, and tickets for the Songfeasts were usually booked up one or two
decades in advance.

Competitors tried to everything, including things like sabotage and
character assassiantion. While the former never succeded due to the
extensive security (8), the latter was at least a partial success. Rumors
started to abound of folk who dissapaered while dancing in the Deeopome or
sleeping (or shopping) ind the Club- Town. The owners firmly denied such
accusations, calling it “the defamations of those mired in mediocrity”.
Butover the years, a fair number of people dissapaered indeed.

It was explained by the fact that every year, hundreds of thousands arrived
and departed- some travelled to the other (minor) Clubs in Melodyas Port-
Towns, others fell in love with each other and left head over heels to
start a new live somewhere else. The crime in Deepdome was only marginal
higher than in other cities, most criminals concentrated on pickpocketing,
burglaries concentrated on the boarding houses. There was a brisk trade in
drugs: dream- mist and other illegal substances were in high demand. But
kidnapping or even murder were not often heard of, so virtually none of the
dissapearences could be attributable to crime.




Footnotes

(8) ... both magical and mundane: Ileatril and Caela employed not only
mages and psionics but also thieves whose loyality was proofed by
mindreading and sometimes geas.