The razza, fully organized by the Lions, had six main stages. They hadn’t bothered to name them – atul already knew what music each stage would play – as they were situated just close enough to each other that on the edges of any stage you would be irritated by the noise pollution of the ones adjacent. The upside was that no matter where you were standing at the razza, you would hear something. Cacophony or catharsis. The set list was up to the razza goer, they could choose to wander to wherever their siren sang. A sonic journey- a soundtrack.
The stages were:
The central yurt, the Hip Hop Stage.
The forest, the Techno Stage.
The clearing, the Heavy Metal Stage.
The temple, the Psytrance Stage.
And the ziggurat, the Drum and Bass Stage.
And then, of course, there was the pop-up beer bar.
The central yurt, all its ribs of great bamboo poles, and scaled up to the size of a circus, was designated the Hip Hop stage. Huge and round, with many flaps for entering and exit, but still sealing the sound inside, it served as the nexus for the razza. If not for the crowd, it would be quicker to just go straight through the yurt to get to any one spot.
There was no more beloved kind of music in Orca. It was the poetry of the urban jungle, the sky-scraping towers and temples of commerce - megalopolises and metropoles of the Godlikes. It was the music of orcan ancestors, and not of elvan ancestors. Songs of perennial experience, universal to Godlike and orcan, the hardship of oppression yes, but also the triumph of liberation. Majestic triumphs. Exodus. The movement of your people. Indeed, it was more than a genre of music, it was more than music itself, it was a movement- more than a movement, it was Da Kultur.
There were four pillars – graffiti, break dancing, rapping – also known as emceeing – and finally, the most celebrated musical artform of all, deejaying. Certainly, deejaying extended to more than just Hip Hop, but the honor of thraking holy bubhosh ghash music – how did they do it? – of the very Godlike Beings themselves from their holy black discs, the only format which were unaffected by the electromagnetic pulses released from dragon’s breath that covered the realm, the sacred black discs.
Orcans had reversed engineered some of the magick music machines to create their own beats and produce their own tunes. Still these facsimiles of the ancient devices, scavenged together all ramshackle from upcycled parts, could not hold a candle to those of the Godlikes. But on the other hand, something more raw, more resonant, more real, more than true but trill. For the first half of the razza, it would be all original music. For Da Kultur. Suffice to say, the Hip Hop Yurt was dope.
At the Techno Forest, bamboo had been creatively spared to create a mystical maze of bamboo, the running bamboo streaking up and curving back down into benches and seats. Candles had been lit everywhere, both to let those traveling through to see where they were going and not trip themselves up, as well as to create a magickal feeling of fireflies dancing their own celebration all amidst them. Ringing the techno stage were hammocks, and while they were large and secure and comfy, and one could lay in to take a break, or even get a nakaz zug-zug, this was not unexpected. The hammocks were just to delineate the boundary, letting those who enter know that once they were inside, they were transported to a different dimension, a completely different vibration from the rest of the razza.
Because techno music was music that orcans danced to.
Of course, it was very ironic that the bastion genre of electronic music would be represented in a forest, but really, it was the juxtaposition that really made the kop ting ting vibe, so that the techno-orcans would feel comfortable enough to dance, without any feeling of judgment. Because they were not dancing to perform, but to become. To simply become one with the music.
The clearing was the fiyah stage. The clearing stage, where there was no stage at all but just a large expanse of cleared bamboos, which were then stacked and cobbled into effigies and obstacle courses. There were very many Burning Orcans – effigies roughly of an orcan with pointy stick head, arms stretched out sideways, and legs splayed wide – stood up in random scatterings, sometimes in a gathering of two or three facing each other, sometimes just out of left field with nothing around them, lonely and eerie. There was also a slide, which was very popular until too many butt splinters left its reputation in tatters.
Of the obstacle courses and climbing structures, the highlight was the arch. It stretched across the clearing, made only by simply binding more and more uneven bamboo poles all bundled together, hoisting the great pole ever higher, so that the natural ductility of the bamboo would drift towards the ground by the grasp of Reath, until it had finally reached the ground again, like a rainbow. Repeated many times, it created a sky bridge, no railings, handrails, or guardrails at all. Just a bundle of bamboo stretching across the twilight. But it was stable enough that a dexterous orcan could make their way to the top and admire the view. Still, it was not high enough that plummeting from the top would lead to orcan death. Directly underneath the arch’s apex would be where the performances happene d, and at some point, the entire arch would light up on fire. Hard not to admit that was pretty metal.
The temple was again a bamboo structure, it was a tall bamboo fence ringing around the stage with only one opening, wide though it was, facing the nexus yurt. Instead of an actual temple, the back wall of the fenced in structure was painted into a cosmic pathway leading into abstract blocky representations of the swirling galaxies, and in the very center a naz orb, bright white with fluorescent paint, to ponder upon.
Bonfires around it were lit to further cast chiaroscuro into the facade- double slits were cut out so that the light of the fires would fall through the circular bamboo enclosure and lay out the lines of a pentagram. If it were darker it would look like a bridge to the moon, replete with a tall mystic gateway to frame it, and a fae daemonic summoning pentagram underneath. This was where they would play the beautifully intricate psychedelic trance, the music of the Lost City of Goa, of the Monsoon Subcontinent of the Green Path.
The Monsoon Subcontinent, it was a cradle of the Godlike Beings, and most of the orcans who could trace their ancestry from this place lived in the village of Gangotri, where they celebrated all the traditions of all their manifold and diverse religions without recrimination. Lawrah absolutely loved psytrance the first moment she heard it, but of course hid that fact from dear father, for Raigo knew what was up with Da Kultur around psytrance when it came to orcans. But what was more important – she could listen to it secretly in her room as much as she wanted with her black disc player, even though after lunas of searching all she could score was just one of the ancient black discs – was that she had never listened to it on drugs. And to her naive and gullible and easily influenced young orcan mind, she supposed that she was in fact supposed to do drugs before listening to psytrance. But of course, appreciating psytrance does not need narcotics.
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The ziggurat would be the biggest structure on the grounds though. Repeating pyramidal girders buttressing geometrically up as high as they dared, it was well over fifty meters tall and thrice as wide. Instead of carefully planning out the architectural and structural logistics of such a temporary structure, they just built it, then knocked out all the girders they didn’t need on the lowest level to make way for the dance floor. This made the ziggurat a fundamentally unstable structure, but a few jerry-rigs here and there and it was determined that it would last ‘til the next rote at least. Probably. But they were going to burn it before then anyway.
There was absolutely no food tent, or water tent. BYOS, sha orcs. But there was:
The pop-up beer bar.
It was easily the biggest space on the grounds, a vast multilevel structure all of twisted and gnarled bamboo, woven together by pure orcan strength for extremely rigid helixes that were shoved together and bound by further stripped bamboo fibers.
Ninety-nine kegs of Murdoc, Rhagan’s Tooth, Loroc’s Lag, Young Master, Gulbru’s Gose, hard kombuchas they swilled themselves, and dozens of big stone gourds of Vostok vodka – accept no substitute – that it would be enough to get all the youths completely blitzed for an entire fortrote. For the secret Lion Stash they had more of those stone flasks of straight rye, and a great big tub of their very own lion swill- a malt liquor. They had hijacked a beekee’s sloop filled to the brim with Protorcan corn, and stole the barley from Farmer Kherkzerg, a curmudgeonly petrolhead who had wildly offensive takes about the direction of the Horde, and slopped the swill together in a bunch of ancient scavenged porcelain bathtubs.
The Lions, having a completely captive market and total monopoly, saw an opportunity to make some Bit Coin, and charged an arm and a leg for them- twenty coppers for a beer! Thirty for the fancy ones! Fifty coppers for a hard kombucha?!
Zholl, Zhon and Deyandra were Lions though, so they not only got to rudely cut the line, what semblance of queueing could be achieved in the mad scramble for drink, but they all got drinks for free. At the Zedheads’ insistence, atul – except for Lawrah who wanted to flaunt some of that durban nazge – picked up tankards of the simple malt liquor swill that they were calling simply Lion Malt Liquor.
“Aight! Mog me, atul, we better dose now, we want it to end before the razza gets shit.”
“Weren’t we gonna tang out for as long as we could?” Githarie was so ready to go tang tang.
Zholl, who had a totally different agenda, said “Ai! Githie, the music is going to suck after four. That’s sleazy hour. Atul will just be looking for a hookup, trust me, we’ll want to gimb some place to ting out then.” He would figure out a way to shake Lawrah away, he was sure.
“Whatsha all waiting for?!” Gromnir exclaimed, and then he took out the big bag of psilocybe mushrooms that he had grown in the fields of crap where a bunch of orcans liked to take poos, cleaned them not too carefully, and dried them. If the pham had known the exact provenance of the thin, gnarled nakaz shroomies, they would have devoured them all the same, after all they were orcans one and all. It was that very reason that they preferred not to know, and declined to ask how Gromnir came upon them, when he shoved a big handful of them into each pham’s cupped hands.
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This seemed on purpose to egg the performers of each tent to play louder than the others and overwhelm the scene with their preferred tunes by brute force.
The Rolands and the Korgs, among many others.
It would always be better than some nostalgia bait memberberry muttshit.
In the rest of the razza, peeps were there to be seen.
A bundle of sticks was stronger than one alone. This was called in ancient times, well before the Lost Age- a fascii.
Though if the fall was at just the wrong angle, it might mean revolutions of transmogrification before the body would return to its former strength or, for that matter, shape.
Their brushes were too thick to do any detail work.
It was very much reminiscent of the Celestial Escalator leading to Ultima.
The Million Wars had vented out any hate across arbitrary borders, as well as hatred across faiths – hardly any followed the Mysteries anymore when the suffocating lie that the God Empress was a God was cast across the realms – artificed and conjured by the Partition, and Da Kultur had become as accepting of different walks of life, as it had been before the British had ever set foot upon Mother Monsoon’s soft, fragrant earth.
It was in the name – psychedelic – and the songs were certainly enhanced by psychedelic drugs, so Da Kultur was to consume as many psychedelics as possible before raving to psytrance. It made sense.
Nothing Lasts… But Nothing Is Lost, by Shpongle. Her favorite song was Levitation Nation. Oh how she loved those lute riffs!
It really depended on how appreciative a listener could be. Under the influence, or not.
Bring Your Own Shit. Self-sufficiency was another highly praised value of the Horde.
A rogue trader elvan brand of Gose, it was puckeringly tart and marketed to the orcans - they used orcish after all, ‘gul’, and they were the ‘ghosts’ for their skin was fair- hence, the ghost brothers, the Gulbrus.
The beekee was a sharku. He resisted, and while it was the Bear Brigade that took the coup-de-grace, Zholl and Zhon too put in a few hits, just to show the rest of the gang that they were loyal and had therefore also partaken in a bit of the old ultraviolence.
An extremely large sum of money, enough to be an entire bit, was called ‘Bit Coin’, but they would not make close to the amount that an entire empyreal bit would cost. Bits were, after all, the most valued asset in all the three realms.
To be fair it was the only product offered that had been infused by their surplus value of labor, so they felt like- hey c’mon, we made this stuff by hand ourselves, doesn't it mean it should cost more? But really, they just hoped no one would get it so they could drink it for themselves. And no one did buy it but the most pampered gurls of Rothera, the daughters of the big bois: Forest Master Gratch who worked nearly half the big bamboo forest with his three baby mamas and fifteen children, and Harbour Master Bergok who had a fleet of captains, including Captain Grazichi, Zahul’s hated rival. Oh, and of course, Chief Varoka.
Absolutely no relation to the Lion beer of the Lost Land of Sri Lanka, situated just below the Monsoon Subcontinent.