Sunlight and Feasting!

Well, the Feast of the Exceptional Rose is more or less at an end, and - after 58 pages of trading gifts, dancing madly, and wigging out about the big finale (which I feel really silly about and heartily apologise for!), it’s been suggested we could use a dedicated space to discuss the lore. Anyone who’s already shared their ideas in the existing threads - I’d be delighted if you could copy them here!

First up, am I mistaken, or can we take this to be an unconventional family portrait of a very unconventional family?

Does this offer any insight into the nature of an Illumination? (That said, Ms Lilac appears to have, well, lilac-coloured eyes, not the blue suggested to be necessary for a tattooist… but, the previous icon used for Mrs Clathermont had green eyes, so, who can say?)

How about the Feast flings? Lettice, the Deviless and the Costermonger are all established characters, and it’s strongly hinted that the Educated Gentleman and the Irresistible Lady are as well… how about the others? Is the Tragedian a known Surface writer? (Given we’ve recently had hints to the fates of Dickens and Wilde…) Does the Presbyterate Diplomat offer any hints to the location of the Elder Continent?

As for the revelations of the sunlight, and the Fallen Cities… hunger? Remaking? The heart of the sun? Sounds like the consequence of a ill-thought-out Correspondence experiment…

Wait, she is? Since when? Is this related to some Fate-locked content?

No, she was just (unless I’m mistaken) a young lady who occasionally appears on the Pickpocket’s Promenade.

[quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook]Well, the Feast of the Exceptional Rose is more or less at an end, and - after 58 pages of trading gifts, dancing madly, and wigging out about the big finale (which I feel really silly about and heartily apologise for!), it’s been suggested we could use a dedicated space to discuss the lore. Anyone who’s already shared their ideas in the existing threads - I’d be delighted if you could copy them here!

First up, am I mistaken, or can we take this to be an unconventional family portrait of a very unconventional family?

Does this offer any insight into the nature of an Illumination? (That said, Ms Lilac appears to have, well, lilac-coloured eyes, not the blue suggested to be necessary for a tattooist… but, the previous icon used for Mrs Clathermont had green eyes, so, who can say?)

How about the Feast flings? Lettice, the Deviless and the Costermonger are all established characters, and it’s strongly hinted that the Educated Gentleman and the Irresistible Lady are as well… how about the others? Is the Tragedian a known Surface writer? (Given we’ve recently had hints to the fates of Dickens and Wilde…) Does the Presbyterate Diplomat offer any hints to the location of the Elder Continent?

As for the revelations of the sunlight, and the Fallen Cities… hunger? Remaking? The heart of the sun? Sounds like the consequence of a ill-thought-out Correspondence experiment…[/quote]

I think you are quite right in your conjecture about the Clathermont household.

Lettice is one of the Mercies, so in that sense is already also an established character. I have had no brainstorms about the other Feast companions.

Reference Key:
Option Title
I’ve often put Descriptions directly under their Options.
(Plain words in these parentheses are simply my personal notes.)
(Italicized words in these parentheses are item descriptions.)

Text for a Masquing option on the “An Encounter at the Feast” opportunity card:

The briefest of encounters
Candle-light in Hollow Street. Breathy laughter. Sudden silence.

Result -
Silence at the Feast

And just like that, you’re alone again. A mask lies crumpled on the ground. A street or more away, you hear a Master’s fluting voice. “All shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well! The Bazaar has promised us, my dears. The Bazaar has made so very many promises.”

Text for the end of the Feast of the Exceptional Rose 2013:

Gold Storylet name -
…sunlight?
(name changes as time passes to the one below)
…a wash of sunlight?
(and once more)
…a fading wash of sunlight?

Description(s) -
What is that light at the Bazaar’s summit? A summery, buttery golden glow! The air of the Neath is warm, suddenly. Forgotten scents touch the air. New-cut grass; mountain-winds; warm stone.
(as time passes, it changes to include the following words)
[Already the light is fading. In a few minutes it will end, and so too will the Feast.]
(and once more)
[The clock is striking half-past nine. The light is very nearly gone. A few glints remain.]

Bask in the light
(a 10-action option that disappears towards the end)

Description -
A crowd of Londoners faces the Bazaar, exulting, weeping at the miracle of it. Some sing hymns. One is selling hastily assembled golden ribbons. A Yelping Patriot claims it’s a French trick.
(as time passes, it changes to include the following words)
As the light begins to dim, a priest falls to his knees, imploring it to return.

Result 1 -
A voice?

“These are my children and this is my light. These are my words in the merciful night. This is the Sun whose commands run below, and the Feast of it all is the way we must go. The One who denied is love’s enemy but the enemy, love, is the last we shall see.”

  • Your Wounds are gone!

  • Your Nightmares are gone!

  • Your Scandal is gone!

  • Your Suspicion is gone!
    (These menaces are fully removed by each basking result every time and noting them once here should suffice.)

  • You’ve gained 1 x Primaeval Hint
    (A distant echo: an apprehension of something impossibly ancient. What will the Masters pay for this?)

Result 2 -
Whose memories are these?

The first descent, the unnaming of flight, that was forgiven and all shall be well. So It said. The second, a shrug and a time. It was fair, It was fair. The third, oh the rage at the deceptions of sand. All of us were, all of us, and now all of us will.

  • You’ve gained 1 x Searing Enigma
    (Mysteries are fire. Truth burns.)

Result 3 -
A voice?

“The first taught restraint and the second betrayed. The third taught us hunger: the fourth we remade. The fifth will live on in the heart of the Sun, and the sixth…”

  • You now have 1 x Elemental Secret
    (The Neath is the place where Earth places the memories that shame her. This is such a memory.)

Result 4 -
A voice?

“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. I will not fail. I have not failed. He will not regret. All these words. All these words. Mark me…”

(Rewards were randomized Primaeval Hints or Searing Enigmas at first. They became Elemental Secrets towards the end.)

Result 5 -
A voice?

“All shall be well and all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well. The marks are a legion: their stories are swords. Be forgiven, O please, O please, let us be forgiven.”

(I’m unsure of the order in which the basking results occurred. They seemed to be completely random; if there was a definite first or last result text, I don’t know.)

Bask in the last remnants of the light
(a 3-action option that appears near the end)

Description -
Londoners weep and shriek, imploring the light to return.

Result 1 -
A voice?

"This is my promise: all shall be well and all shall be well. Crown me with a knot of flames, my love, my love. Forgive me my trespasses. The fire and the rose are one, are one, are one - "

At the corner of your vision, a Radical Factotum hisses, whips out a notebook, and desperately scribbles notes. He catches your eye. “For the Wicked Book,” he offers. “Where we share knowledge.”

Result 2 -
A voice?

“Please,” the voice begs, “let him understand. Let this all not be in vain. Give me your tales, your tales, delicious ones. You are all I ever hungered for.”

At the corner of your vision, a Radical Factotum hisses, whips out a notebook, and desperately scribbles notes. He catches your eye. “For the Wicked Book,” he offers. “Where we share knowledge.”

Take advantage of the distraction
Yes, very pretty. Let’s see what’s in the pockets of all these gawping fools.

Result -
Heaped treasures!

Excuse me - excuse me - thank you - excuse me - do excuse me! You go through the crowd like a weasel through a wheat-field. And what a shiny little haul this is - wait, what’s this blue stuff?

  • You’ve gained 1 x Trembling Amber
    (It thrills with electric life. Something in it glows like the very most distant of suns.)

A Weeping Tatooist
(Unlocked with Entwined in the Intrigues of the Clathermont Family 1)

Description -
“Millicent! Millicent!” A beefy man barrels through the crowd. Where is he going?

Result -
There he goes -

He’s pushing through the crowd after a slender woman - you catch a flash of lilac as she turns. “No!” he shouts. “Don’t go near it! They’re not tattoos! They’re something else!” Then the crowd closes in.

Trap a little sunlight in a Mirrorcatch Box!
(Unlocked with 1 x Mirrorcatch Box)

Description -
If indeed it is sunlight. Perhaps the Calendar Council can tell you, or the Cheery Man.

Your Dark-Carapaced Crustacean is wriggling free!
(Unlocked with 1 x Dark-Carapaced Crustacean)

Description -
It’s trying to reach the light! Hold it up! Or will it escape?

Result -
A sizzle and a crack!

Your Crustacean breaks open like an egg. Something smaller wriggles free from within. Something that giggles.

  • You’ve lost 1 x Dark-Carapaced Crustacean
    (A lumpen, vicious, scuttling thing, patched with fur and fronded with light-tipped tendrils. It moves as if in pain. It’s savage, and oddly loyal. It smells faintly of fish.)

  • You’ve gained 1 x Gilded Crustacean
    (This was a lumpen, vicious, scuttling thing, patched with fur and fronded with light-tipped tendrils. Now it’s still all those things, and it still smells of fish, but it’s also blazing yellow, the colour of a daffodil under an arc-lamp. And it giggles like a school-girl.)

A memory…
The ground beneath your feet is trembling, very slightly. [This will use up your Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre.]
(Unlocked with Putting the Pieces Together: the Taste of Lacre 7)

Result -
If lacre is the Bazaar’s tears…

…what is this light? A laughter? A memory? A blaze of photochemical reaction? Is the Bazaar signalling? To whom, and what? It seems…involuntary.

(There may be one more or a hundred more basking results which haven’t been recorded. Please share them if you know them!)
edited by Zeedee on 3/4/2013

Has anyone tried the Pickpocket’s Promenade with her equipped, to see if there’s any change to her appearance on the Promenade? Even just a cosmetic change to the description text would be interesting to see. (Well, that or the universe would break as you robbed the Costermonger with the help of the Costermonger. :P )

I wish we had spoiler boxes on this forum. I’m annoyed by that high wall of text above me. shakes fist …Yes, I set it up, but I’m still annoyed!

[quote=Sir Frederick Tanah-Chook]First up, am I mistaken, or can we take this to be an unconventional family portrait of a very unconventional family?

Does this offer any insight into the nature of an Illumination? (That said, Ms Lilac appears to have, well, lilac-coloured eyes, not the blue suggested to be necessary for a tattooist… but, the previous icon used for Mrs Clathermont had green eyes, so, who can say?)[/quote]
I don’t think any of ‘em are related by blood except for the technicality of sharing human blood…and I’m not fully convinced they’re all human, ha. To be fair, I’m not fully convinced on the humanity of my character, either. Anyway, I figured what with being experts at inking, the skilled dying of organic substances, Millicent Clathermont and the Clathermont Triplets must have tattooed their own eyes and permanently dyed their hair. It’s been mentioned that the Triplets’ brown eyes are not their original colors (at least for one of them). Besides, I think you only need blue eyes for the Singer of Roses tattoo. The Broken Sun tattoo represents the Neath, right? I’m not sure about the Singer of Roses, but maybe it’s related to the Feast of the Exceptional Rose. As for the Illumination, perhaps it’s a literal and metaphorical enlightenment of the body and mind that can occur. Maybe that’s what Lilac/Mrs Clathermont was hoping to attain this Feast.

Let’s look to love. It’s always the heart of things when it comes to the Bazaar, right? In the language of flowers, the purple lilac is defined as the “first emotions of love”. Lilac was diligently researching love. Her lilac garb was probably an uniform for her like a white coat is for a doctor. If she was hoping to obtain the Bazaar’s Illumination, to bask in its light, to uncover its love story, then the Feast would be the best time for it. Knowledge is wealth and power down in the Neath – as on the Surface. If she discovered the Bazaar’s greatest personal secrets and desires, she might be able to call checkmate on the Great Game and retire as an empress on the Surface.

I’ve been puzzling over the identities of the Educated Gentleman and Irresistible Lady, too. Perhaps they’re simply new characters. If not, I think the Irresistible Lady might be Mrs Plenty. As for the Educated Gentleman, he might be a Snuffer. A charming and intelligent one with an incredibly unhealthy interest in devils… He must be the Bishop of Southwark! …Oh, I crack myself up. I have no idea.

Excuse me, wait, we’ve met Wilde? I’m aware of Dickens but Wilde?! Do share, sir! I’m also quite eager to meet William Thomas Stead and Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury. A few quick quotes from wikipedia on why:
W. T. Stead
“According to his biographer W Sydney Robinson, ‘He twisted facts, invented stories, lied, betrayed confidences, but always with a genuine desire to reform the world - and himself.’
According to Dominic Sandbrook, ‘Stead’s papers forced his readers to confront the seedy underbelly of their own civilisation, but the editor probably knew more about that dark world than he ever let on. He held up a mirror to Victorian society, yet deep down, like so many tabloid crusaders, he was raging at his own reflection.’”
He also thought he heard messages from spirits.

Earl of Shaftesbury
“Although he was offered a burial at Westminster Abbey, Shaftesbury wished to be buried at St. Giles. A funeral service was held in Westminster Abbey during early morning of 8 October and the streets along the route from Grosvenor Square and Westminster Abbey were thronged with poor people, costermongers, flower-girls, boot-blacks, crossing-sweepers, factory-hands and similar workers who waited for hours to see Shaftesbury’s coffin as it passed by. Due to his constant advocacy for the better treatment of the working classes, Shaftesbury became known as the ‘Poor Man’s Earl’.”
He championed human rights for the mentally ill and free education for impoverished children. He also has a nude angel statue dedicated to him in Piccadilly Circus.

A storyline dealing with Charles Dickens, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and their Ghost Club would be splendid, too. I digress, I digress; back to the Feast!

I’m fine with exploring outer space. I’m not keen on the idea of London being flung into the sun, especially when I’m still inside the city. Then again, maybe the sun’s innards are awesome places to inhabit just like the areas of the Neath. This plan to catapult London into the sun makes so much sense now that I think of the time in the early game when I had this dream and awoke to realize that in it, the Sun was waiting for us. Come on, you all had the same dream, right? You unlocked it when you attained the “Recalling a dream of other places” quality from studying graffiti and listening to gossipmongers in Ladybones Road.

I’ve been trying to unravel the Bazaar’s love story for months and I feel like it spewed information all over my character via 10 minutes of sunlight the other day! Actually, I’m not sure who or what the Bazaar is or if the love story personally involved it. For several months, I’ve just suspected there was an important tale with the Sun as a sentient being. Its partner seems to be the Earth. Where does the Bazaar come into this? Is the Bazaar the Earth itself? Its child? The one who bought the Earth’s story? This could have been the Bazaar’s first love story. When I think of the Correspondence sigils that mean “forever hurtling toward the earth”, “love that immolates the lover” and “the mounting excitement when one’s beloved reaches the closest point of his orbit”, I think of the Sun and the Earth’s romantic relationship. I wonder how the moon plays into it. Maybe it’s an “egg” which will produce a baby Bazaar in the future! As a side note, I’m not entirely comfortable with living inside a sentient being that I’ve been treating as mostly unconscious, non-sentient and generally unalive for dozens of years. Okay, I have to stop here. Now I understand why Correspondence scholars are driven to obsessive madness. :-[

Oh, and Mirrorcatch Box owners, if you reveal your seekret ways to obtaining such a marvelous contraption, there will be kitten pictures in it for ya. Puppies are possible, too.

I’m sure others have noticed but if you check the image file for the Irresistible Lady and Educated Gentleman they reveal themselves to be Mrs. Plenty and the Provost of Summerset, though the in game clues do also heavily point to that.

Also, I do wonder if “Lilac” was interested in the markings on the Bazaar. They’re not tattoos, they’re something else. Something worth pondering.

Let us not forget the description of the Elemental Secret (which may be seen on my Mantelplace):

“The Neath is the place where Earth places the memories that shame her. This is such a memory.”

These Elemental Secrets were given in conjunction with the later “Bask in the Sunlight” choices–does the memory of the Sun shame the Earth? Did, perhaps, the Earth leave the Sun for the Moon, or had an affair with the Moon, or some sort of variation upon that?

Do keep in mind, I’m still relatively new to FL lore, so my theories may be particularly crazy. For example, I currently hold the theory that those who seek the Name slowly become Mr. Eaten somehow.
edited by Flipz on 3/3/2013

Egad, the Provost?! Yeesh, that would have been an awkward liason…no wonder he didn’t want us taking off his mask!

Damnit, I’m really regretting being busy on the final day >.<

Wait, where does that image of the Clathermont sisters come from? I played through that whole storyline (I think…) and don’t remember ever seeing it. Was it a new addition, or is there some further content I haven’t seen? For the record, my “Entwined in the Intrigues of the Clathermont Family” story quality is 9.

You’re telling me. I was in a meeting. If I’d known about sunlight, I’d have faked a heart attack or something so I could go home and finish the Feast off right!

Hats off to you Zeedee! I missed that day so you posting this lets me “relive” the moment for the first time.

Definitely concur that Irresistible Lady = Mrs Plenty and Profoundly Educated Gentleman = Provost of Summerset.

Mrs Plenty isn’t hard to guess from her text and (especially) her picture–“noisy where [she] works” and “run[s] a successful business” combined with the palm reading is pretty obvious. The Provost is a little less obvious, but his mention that he “prefers devils” is a huge clue if you remember what his involvement was in the University storyline.

We’ve also met the Affable Spy before (sort of) – she’s got the same artwork as the Tipsy Spy you talk to in the Singing Mandrake. I’m not 100% sure they’re the same person, but it seems like a reasonable guess.

I snarked about this a bit on my Tumblr already, but I think that “living on in the heart of the Sun” may be a sneaky reference to the popular saying “the Sun never sets on the British Empire”. :)

A bit off topic, but would someone be willing to PM me their theories on the identity of Dickens? I know Alexis mentioned he was a named character and people seem to have theories but I am clueless.

I, alas, cannot PM from my telephone - but were I you, Ms Navane, I should find myself infinitely intellectually enriched by discovering Charles Dickens’ full name on Wikipedia :]

Oh! :)

Oh! :)[/quote]

Oh indeed! I was also ignorant until this moment, although I suppose that striking beard should give it away too…
Dickens. Well well. Who, then, is Wilde? I’m afraid I don’t know enough about authors of the period to guess myself.

I had no idea. This is lovely, thank you.