Ari ♫ ♪ ♬ (gracenotes) wrote in emillion, @ 2013-04-09 10:50:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, !group thread, !plot: founders festival, altair laurent, arielle chiaro, chloe islington, drake liu, merrion priddy |
Who: Ari, Altair, Chloe, Drake, & Merri
What: Day one of the festival
Where: Theater District
When: After the parade, roughly 12-4
Rating: PG
Status: Complete!
Ari could still remember every single festival since she had first come to Emillion as a child of eleven. From the start of her apprenticeship, her master had set her to busking in the street with instruments of his choice. He had given her assignments - play all ballads as dance tunes, play songs from Kerwon in the style or Ordalia, turn reels into laments and laments into marches - and she had stood on street corners with harps and guitars and flutes and fiddles, one notable year in pouring rain, and played. It was not, her master had told her, about the coins that poured into her hat. It was about the audience.
She had learned, from those early festivals, to enthrall and entertain.
She had not done much busking these last few years, though the mood struck her once in awhile, and she was hardly a little girl picking out The Last Rose of Summer on an oversized viol anymore, either. This year, she had ridden a hovercraft in the parade in full elaborate costume alongside the other lead actors of the Founders Play, smiling, waving, blowing kisses. She had run into people who knew who she was off and on these last two years, but having her face on the festival posters had certainly increased her notoriety; people had been clamoring for her signature all morning, and she had finally discovered why. Well, if that merchant thought he was so very clever, she supposed she could at least make the hunt more interesting for the participants.
Which was why she had hurried to divest herself of of her costume after the parade, changing instead into the unofficial Theater District "uniform" of brightly colored and ever so slightly ostentatious finery, jamming a hat on her head, grabbing a guitar case - the mandolin would be too obvious, really - and reemerging to join the revelers. She found a spot at the edge of a fountain where lots of people would be passing, put the hat on the ground, and struck the first chord in a popular love song, quite indistinguishable from the other entertainers except perhaps by the quality of her playing or her voice.