I am very sick
want to read a weird story?
I haven’t written fiction in a long time.
But this is the kind of fiction I write.
I don’t know, I’m sick as heck.
Retrograde Star
Track 1 – ~insurrection~ feat. LUMINOUS
mercurie at Observatory Stage
She waits there in silence and darkness on the stage for the set’s first perfect instant. Everything here is brilliantly glowing, and she knows the crowd can see her, but the last DJ ended their set a little down-tempo so she can afford to take her time here.
The crowd can’t feel it, but she can. The air is pulsing, the earth is trembling.
The creature that landed here from the stars ages ago, that gave the festival the name Impact City, that has been asleep through six years of annual attempts to wake it, is stirring.
mercurie is one of dozens of Summoners performing on stage this year, grasping at her hard-won chance to be the one to imprint on it.
But more than that.
Thousands of people have arrived for the seventh year of Impact City. When her stage lights flare on and ~insurrection~ kicks to life, she can see the sea of people moving like a shoal of luminescent fish, painted and dressed for black light.
And she’ll imprint on them too.
Track 2 – Accelerate
Jackpot at Lakeside Stage
Accelerate is an up-tempo number even for him, and he paces against it, arms swinging, completely overcome by nervous energy like every single time he stands on stage.
And otherwise, he tries not to think about it.
The Summoner who won at Astral Bounty not only had his wish granted, he became famous. Apex is a household name now, because of the power of the meteor child he hatched.
And next will be Jackpot. He stares out through the strobing stage light, at the way the dancing crowd seems reduced to slow-motion in front of him. Only he is moving full-speed, and he’s going to use that to his full advantage.
No one plays Impact City twice.
It’s going to be him.
He smiles down at the front row, and they all return his smile.
Who else could it possibly be?
Track 3 – Fatale
HER at Temple Stage
Temple Stage is dark, surrounded by trees that block the view of the other stages. No one else is here. No one else’s sound can penetrate this place, and even the moonlight seems to struggle to touch a stage that belongs only to HER.
She doesn’t need flash. She sways gently toward the audience, and in this moment, with the low notes of Fatale buzzing in their lungs, they too belong only to her.
She inhales the sound, deeply, and feels herself swell with the mood of the place.
HER, the artist, the performer, has something the other Summoners don’t have.
Raw power.
That inhaled note comes out, deep and rich and powerful even against the bass of Fatale. Some of the dancers stop in their tracks, rightly transfixed.
Impact City trembles at the sound of HER. And even this meteor child will be hers, and with it, anything else in the world she could want. A litany of wishes dances across her heart as she sings, and more and more dancers stop their movement and begin to sway, enraptured.
Track 4 – destined feat. Wildfire Youth
Contagion at Horizon Stage
A large mask hides most of the audience from them. It hides the trees, the feeling of the wind, and the starlight above Impact City, but they know Horizon Stage. They have spent every night here since the festival started.
When the sun rises, this will be the first place it reaches. In fact, Contagion stands in the exact first place to be illuminated, hours and hours too early for dawn, and paces. For this track, most of the heavy lifting is done by the projector, bathing Contagion and their costume in shifting light and shadow as the deep, grimy sound seeps into the audience. Sparks of light, the energetic and driven rap of Wildfire Youth, lend the track an almost vile effervescence.
Contagion breathes deep and the air, even through their mask, tastes like smoke machine. The stage is flooded, mysterious, as befits the site of the meteor child’s awakening.
Contagion is not miced. The audience can’t hear them any more than they can hear the audience. The crowd may as well not be there, except for the thrilling feeling of their attention buzzing inside the mask.
Jackpot vanished for half a year to rehearse. HER prepared a new track for her devastating vocals. Even mercurie, a relative novice, has been working on her stage effects.
Contagion did research. And, unknown to the audience, like they always are, they begin to whisper the incantation they found into the beat of “destined”.
Track 5 – Radium GIRL
mercurie at Observatory Stage
From the center of the festival grounds, the impact crater where the meteor child fell to earth, a deep and booming sound cracks through the night, and the music stops for a split second so the tremor has no competition. The speakers squeal momentarily with feedback.
mercurie cranes her neck to try and see over the trees. Faintly, she can see the brilliant lights of Lakeside stage and the ominous statues marking the path to Temple Stage. Those lights, too, flickered.
Then, the lights return to their pale blue swirling and Radium GIRL takes over the air, an up-tempo number. This is the song that summoned the dead to her side, this is the song that summoned mercurie as she is into being, the song that forged her from the slag of her old self.
Just like they rehearsed, the spirits behind her begin to move as the stage lights die down, glowing the same eerie blue-green in a ballet of death and regrets. The crowd gasps.
That’s right, mercurie thinks. You’ve seen Summoners before, but have you seen a Necromancer?
She sways along with the dead, joins in their dance, joins in the spectacle.
This is who I am, she thinks so hard she can feel her heart piercing the noise, projecting into the center of Impact City. This is who I am.
Accept me.
Track 6 – Apex Ultimate
Jackpot at Lakeside Stage
The shriek of feedback startles him just as the last number starts to fade into Apex Ultimate, and for a second Jackpot is slammed out of his rhythm. The audience can feel it too, and soon their shocked silence and stillness gives way to eager chatter.
It’s happening. This is the year the meteor child at Impact City awakens.
His head starts racing. Who did it? Whose music reached the center of the crater?
It wasn’t his. He’d know if it were, wouldn’t he?
Apex Ultimate starts to throb through the speakers and the crowd is still watching him, stunned, as he comes to the realization that he’s been frozen in place for almost twenty seconds.
He takes a deep, deep breath to steady himself and flashes the audience a broad, completely fake smile. If the party ends here, the meteor child will find someone else. But, maybe there’s still time to attract its attention.
As the first climb in a song full of steep drops begins, he spreads his arms open wide and breathes through the song until he can feel the flare spirits with him, invisibly cranking the temperature on stage.
And then, just in time for the bass to drop, he kicks a switch to turn off the stage light and lets the spirits do the rest of the work in deep-scarlet supernatural firelight.
The crowd gasps, but Jackpot can’t feel any more from the crater. He’s lost and not even the flare spirits can comfort him.
Track 7 – Spiral*bind
HER at Temple Stage
The knocking from the crater didn’t shake HER, she couldn’t afford to let it. She took in a deep inhale to prepare for the piercing first high note of Spiral*bind, an enchanting song meant to snare hearts and sway those dancing bodies laid out in front of her.
She has so much she wants. She is a bottomless pit of yearning, and she knows that with this voice, she is deeply, deeply contagious. The crowd wants more, they want more HER, and they want her to be the one that reaches the meteor child.
In wisps like scattered cobwebs, the Shadows emerge, summoned by her voice, dancing around the periphery like moths circling a lone porch light. Like the rest of the world, the shadows revolve around HER, desire her.
But no matter how much power she pours into her voice, the crater doesn’t answer her. She empties herself into the darkness, spills her limitless desire and formidable soul into the crater, and nothing answers her.
Her gaze settles down not on the unmoving crater, but on the dancers in front of her, their adoring gazes fixed on her.
Fine, she thinks in the silence between notes. I’ll take you all instead.
And it takes a moment, but she does smile.
Track 8 – Event Horizon
Contagion at Horizon Stage
Event Horizon looms behind the last song’s fading outro like a storm on the horizon. Contagion can sense the crowd’s growing anxiety, even though the mask. They’re not wrong to be anxious. Impact City always gets chaotic at this time of night, as Summoners unleash everything they have to awaken the meteor child.
Their invocation worked. Everyone heard the creature stirring in the crater. Now, Contagion has all of its attention, and Event Horizon is starting.
Contagion is not here to have some idle wish granted.
Contagion is here for power, and they can feel the meteor child approaching, so close to being ready to grant it. The power to smash everything, to rebuild everything, to shape the world itself in Contagion’s own image and stamp out the world’s powers, great and small.
Only now, so deep into the ritual, does their heart begin to race. It will not only be their perfect world. It will be a world with no way to stray from perfection.
The silver-blue light of Luna herself accompanies them on stage, not as any part of the show, but to watch, as she loves to. Her light dissipates through the smoke, concealing Contagion further as the ritual continues behind a veil of deception.
Now, Contagion can feel the meteor child’s gaze on them.
That’s right, they think. I awakened you.
You’re like a child to me.
Luna smiles.
Track 9 – Echo Eternal Feat. Angela and DJ Brickhouse
mercurie at Observatory Stage
Another deep rumble echoes out from the impact crater, so intense and so close that the power to Observatory Stage, briefly, is cut. The music vanishes into silence for a second, enough to throw mercurie off her rhythm and cause her to stumble. A ghost catches her before she hits the stage, gathering her in phosphorescent arms.
Then, the music comes to life again. She and the ghosts take a moment, take their places again, and rejoin the dance.
It's waking up. It’s responding to someone.
She can’t feel anything different. Would she know, if she were the one it was watching?
Forget that, she thinks to herself.
Just dance.
“Everybody! One, Two, let’s move!” she shouts into her mic. DJ stuff. Normal things, to hype up the crowd. And herself.
The dead aren’t her backup dancers. She’s theirs.
And together with this painted, glowing audience, they’re so much more beautiful than she is on her own.
Everyone has wishes. Every person in that crowd has a wish. Every ghost on her stage has a wish, even those betrayed by the world.
Don’t come to me, she thinks to the crater.
Come to us. Accept us.
Echo Eternal is dear to her. A close friend’s beautiful vocals, another friend’s determined rap, her own music, and the dance of the fallen. And now, the eager audience of Observatory Stage, fully alive and moving. The song has never been more wonderful to her.
Another crack resounds from the crater, and every other stage goes dark.
But the music doesn’t stop at Observatory Stage.
Even when the white light pours in from the crater.