Let’s go to a party. It’ll be fine. I’m still telling myself that second bit when we walk, straight-backed and dressed for war, onto the well-trod path that runs between the ranks of ornamental trees. They’re spaced about three meters apart from each other, crowns reaching high for the sky and foliage nearly touching their neighbors, and I’m distracting myself from what’s ahead of us by looking anywhere else, and by making decisions about what to put in the eight orbs that are the maximum I can maintain comfortably.

I do a quick gear check. Amber is every centimeter the stunning, tall Paladin, armored in chain. Her gauntlets hang on her belt, rendering her [Conjure Weapon] less useful without their focusing, amplifying effects, and her helmet is tucked under her armpit; otherwise, she’s still dressed for war. About one person in five ahead of us is dressed similarly. There’s no plate among the guests, but there’s a fair amount of chain and what I recognize as leather, with seemingly random rivets on the shoulders and arms. Gross, but I push the thought to the side, along with my curiosity as to what the rivets are for, if anything.

Everyone who’s not in armor is in finery, and that’s where I’m going to fall short, or at least it’s going to be the first, most immediate way in which I fall short. My pants are fine, rugged black cloth with a sheen and a nice sleekness to them, but I’m wearing a pair of dark green steel-toed boots laced with purple laces and a solid-color turquoise short-sleeved shirt with a lightweight dark red jacket of some sort of cotton-like cloth. Compared to the peacocks in silk and satins we’re approaching, I’m dressed practically, I’m dressed for the outdoors, I have absolutely no accessories, and I’m practically somber.

Well, it’s not strictly true that I don’t have any accessories. Amber’s got the Pouches, but I’ve got the re-engraver, whatever its actual name is, and she pointed out that the triangles work perfectly fine as earrings. That’s a bit distracting, since it’s been maybe a decade since I bothered, but I’m getting used to it fine. Besides, I’ve got a gorgeous Paladin. Clearly, I’m winning this one.

I’m stalling, mentally, and trying to find anything to think about other than the actual engaging-with-people part of the party. I shake it off, or try to, around the time we step up to the end of the path and the announcer turns towards us with a murmured “M’lord”.

“Reca Amber Ashborn.” She nods towards me, face and voice impassive. It’s a weird look on her. “My master, Magelord Adam Levi James. We are expected.”

The announcer gets a weird look across their face, like they’re trying to find a way to disagree with Amber. “If your lordship permits,” they say after a couple beats of silence, looking at neither of us, “I would be remiss were I not to make sure the Seneschal knows you have arrived. It is not often we are joined by such august guests.”

Credit where credit’s due, I think to myself, absolutely not breaking into laughter, that’s a much better lie than I would have given. He has no idea who we are, but he knows we weren’t invited. “The Fates blow us where they will,” I say with an attempt at a dignified face. “Let it be as it shall; all will be well.”

That gets me another weird look, but the announcer bails, moving like they’re not in the slightest rush but still outpacing any speed I could sprint at. There isn’t even a whisper of a Skill, so it’s got to be one of the many, many other things I didn’t have access to in my Status before it got locked away. I dismiss it, and look over at Amber, with her raised eyebrow and lopsided smile.

“It’s from a book,” I say, as though it explains everything. Maybe it does; Amber seems to take it as such, and though I don’t know if Cador has a tradition of specifically-oracular speculative fiction in which competing interests with the power of prophecy try to outmaneuver each other and wind up only outmaneuvering themselves, I figure Cador’s gotta have some sort of tradition of fictional narratives. Some of them probably have plausible, vague-sounding bullshit as a weaponized conversation technique.

We start strolling onwards into the party, and it’s hard to focus on anything in particular. It’s an absolute riotous sea of color. The median outfit has at least two huge or billowing pieces of clothing, and it seems like every single piece of attire is competing for what can clash the most garishly with every other piece. Purples, bright greens, and reds dominate, but there’s a fair number of blues of every shade and even some gallant attempts at using browns and greys to make other colors pop more aggressively. Even the pavilion is huge and ornate in its own right, wood and cloth and metal all painted and textured to look like each other instead of themselves, sprawling above hundreds of square meters of grass.

Amber takes the lead. Her clothes are martial enough to be appropriate by default, regardless of coloration, and I’m absolutely happy to bob in her wake like a party favor. Not a particularly awkward one, either; none of my lovers had stuck around more than a couple of years, and most had faded away or left dramatically after a few months, but Melody had liked to take me to parties and show me off. I’d been desperate to please, after… everything with Ash, so I learned how to move through the crowd, how to smile the right way, how to make just the right amount of eye contact.

Story of my life, I guess. I learned something from Melody, just like I learned something from all of them, just never anything I wanted to learn for its own sake.

I put the thought out of mind with the habit of long practice, which is to say, badly. The rumors and murmurs swirling around the party are getting more interesting, which helps a little. I’m starting to put names not so much to faces as to sartorial choices and patterns of sartorial choices; Hytherians with their big floofy sleeves and the Ionderai with their gigantic sweeping hats, Islanders with their clinging pants and high-slit dresses and the Heharai from the Pillars of the Sky with their pants billowing at the knees and their boots halfway up their calves, all four sniping at their counterparts for an audience of their compatriots and both sides of the other division. The servers and guards are snarking and cracking wise when they think nobody could hear them, which seems like a bad move when there’s this much magic flying around, and there’s a few smaller groups mostly keeping to themselves, leaving the central pavilion area to the larger set while they cluster around the tables of food and drink.

Second Degeneracy, I think to myself. Amber had given me a rapid assessment of the possible timeframes based on what she could see of colors and clothing. We’re in a historical time period of some sort, one somewhere between twenty two hundred years ago and twenty seven hundred, by the Cadorian calendar - about eleven long lives, all told, seventy gigaseconds, on the low end. She didn’t have time to give me the run-down of everything we can expect in here, still doesn’t have time to do it, but we have to fit in as best we can, unless we want to “solve” whatever disaster is coming by just killing everyone, or surviving while they kill each other, or something equally degenerate. Not that they’d try to kill us if they figured out we’re from their future, and they’re imprints rather than people; more commonly, apparently, they’ll try to kill themselves if they figure it out, or they won’t believe us and will just treat us like we’re suffering from some sort of reality-rejecting disorder, depending on how critically they’re used to analyzing their own circumstances and behavior.

We drift around. Amber’s clearly minded to do some scouting, so we do two full passes around the edges, picking up as much gossip and mood as we can. I more or less can’t follow anything; the politics, social politics, and exploits are just noise to me. What little I can follow is bragging about conquests and raids, kills and fucks, novel ways to inflict pain and trauma or supposedly-interesting betrayals; the closer to the center, the more vicious, as though there’s some kind of sorting going on. On the outskirts there’s food and drink and people clustering around the tables, and talk of more practical things that I still can’t follow; theology, snippets of magic theory that I don’t have the context to understand, accusations of weather manipulation or whatever Fate-siphoning is, and more.

On that basis, I think, Amber steers us away from most of the clusters of people under the main pavilion. It’s to one of the smaller groups on the fringes that we wind up making an actual approach, and my eyes narrow as I piece together why she chose this particular group as I follow in her wake. She deftly navigates heading there as quickly as possible without letting anyone know we have a goal, and I lose myself in a sort of awe at the grace that parts the waters, or maybe the timing that lets her take advantage of the ebb and flow of the party’s motion.

The group is a wild contrast to the gaudy trend at the party, attired mostly in greens and browns; my first guess of them being some kind of nature-oriented group is borne out when they introduce themselves as “a detachment from the First Druid”, though one of them objects with a sort of tired mien, eyes rolling and affect all drained.

“We’re sent from Herself and the Council of Rangers, but most of the delegation sees themselves as only owing fealty to the First Druid,” he explains as though that means something to me. I’m paying attention, enough that he’s treating me like I’m actively listening, but there’s a table of food and I’m a little busy being both distracted and nauseated by the intense smells coming off of it, a dozen different pungent scents all clashing with each other. “It’s rarely more than a formality, but the Council has a right to know what happened, at a minimum.”

“You’ve traveled far to be a scribe, friend.” Amber smiles at him with predictable effect; he fumbles his drink a little, dropping the strip of green cloth that was wound around the base of the tall, fluting glass. She catches it as it flutters down towards the floor, and he flushes an almost orange shade on pale skin as she winds it back around the glass, fingers touching his briefly. “Careful, there. Someone who doesn’t know what a Ranger is might think ill of you.”

“Blatant. And a Reca.” I’m already looking away from Amber’s display, trusting her to charm whatever information she’s trying to get out of the boy - young man, really, judging by his build I’d guess him to be in his early twenties - by the time the woman speaks to me. “Says a lot, doesn’t it.”

And it begins, I think to myself, reaching for calm as I turn. Inauspiciously.