"She's like that, and more, and everything? Um, ain't ever been quite like this," Lyra said, true enough, following his eyes to the trapeze and then sweeping around the room, higher than before. Too focused on who else was here, she hadn't looked up yet, so she hadn't spotted the mural painted up one wall. Hard to pick out details in the party lights, but from here it looked like a stylised cityscape, though the skyscrapers turned dark and twisty as they stretched toward the shadowy ceiling, and put Lyra in mind of something, maybe cornrows? That didn't feel like Fern's art, the desert made of lights, and when Lyra turned her head toward the dance floor, Fern's image on the sheets had changed. Sometime when she wasn't looking, the hand reaching up from the cactus and the hand reaching down from the sky must have met, but there was no telling what had happened when they did. The cactus was gone, and there was a storm, a darkness, a hole growing in the sky. "These people," Lyra said, shaking her head to try figure out what she was feeling. "They just get it, y'know, that life is nuts sometimes? And they throw themselves into it, and it's... it's all fucking weirdly beautiful, ain't it? I dunno, yeah, sometimes things are like this. Do you wanna dance? I feel—" something. Energised, maybe? Like dancing, she hella felt like joining everyone else on that floor and dancing.