[Alvadas Location] The Crooked Playhouse

[Bedlam]

The Crook is one of the oldest buildings in Alvadas, though no one seems entirely sure how it came to be there. Ancient and unfathomable, it is like the city itself. There is a mystique to this place that not even the most jaded of citizens can shake, and draws visitors from outside the city like iron to a lodestone. It remains, in its own curious way, one of the holiest places in Alvadas, and one of the easiest places to stumble across by accident. One always enters the Crook the same way; through a great stone arch into a tunnel leading beneath the earth. The Playhouse itself is an amphitheater, pieced together out of both wood and stone irregularly. There is a half-circle stage above the pit—where people stand from below to watch—and with five layers of galleys—seats with benches and seats for those who can afford it—above, all around. Everything seems to be all wrong. There are no right angles, where there should be curves there are only crooked series of straight lines and the whole place is built five sizes too large. There are streamers of deep red and purple everywhere, blowing in a wind that is not while a sky of artificial stars or a sickly sun looms overhead. There is a macabre beauty to the asymmetry of the place, like a scene cut from an Akvatari dream. . . . Except for the stage; perfect and beautiful in its proportions, an island of deceptive sanity within the madness. If the Crook is a business, then it is a very odd one, made possible only by the devotion and respect of the people of Alvadas. One copper will get anyone admitted to the pits, while silver or gold will get the viewer a seat in the high, lonely galleys. Most of the actors are brought to the Crook as small children by those who revere Ionu or simply cannot care for them on their own, and there trained to excel on stage. There is a play put on every eighth, tenth, fourteenth and eighteenth bell, the tenth always tribute to Ionu, free for all attendees. There are no sermons in Alvadas; what they know of their God comes from cryptic dialogues in the Temple of Ionu and the plays of the Crook. The attitude of the place is fervent, both on stage and in the audience. The plays themselves are saturated with illusions, a hauntingly perfect seeming of reality in a place where everything is unreal. NPCs : Fabel Fabel wandered into the Crook when he was young enough to find his way, but before he was old enough to be taken seriously, with only the clothes on his back, a heavy iron key around his neck and a turn of the lip that might sometimes be mistaken for a smile. He's gotten older and bigger, and the runt of a child has turned into a handsome young man, but his smile is still the same. No one is entirely sure about anything when it comes to Fabel, but it is rumored that he was marked from birth, the reincarnation of a soul so ingenious that Ionu saw fit to pull him into the game from the very beginning. Routinely vanishing to Ionu-knows-where for years every decade or so, no one is quite sure what Fabel has been up to. He is capricious as a cat but with less empathy, cryptic and charismatic at the same time. He is the Crook's best actor and its prominent public face. Skills: 75 Acting 50 Hypnotism 45 Persuasion 30 Leadership Lores of Ionu, Alvadas and the Crooked Playhouse. Gnosis: Illusionism: 3 Name: Stara Alophenne Race: Human DoB: 50th Summer, 491 AV PoB: Alvadas Title: Actress Skills: Acting: 54, Dance: 47, Acrobatics: 34, Play Musical Instrument (Flute), 34, Massage: 23, Painting, 20, Rhetoric: 31. Gnosis: N/A Additional Info: Stara is a beautiful, willowy, tall ginger woman who is an actor at The Crook. She was named after the stars in the sky, because she was born under them and had an Ethaefal as a midwife. When her mother died shortly after childbirth, the Eth took over her rearing, and Stara was installed with the same sense of loneliness and longing that the Eth felt. Her passion for people led her to a career as an actor, where her delight in people and personalities could be bought forth and expanded upon. She is fond of music and dance, good food and strong alcohol. Stara delights in the joys of love, both romantic and sexual, and with both men and women. She loves in a dramatic way and often suffers with break-ups because of this. The woman is strange, and sometimes quite far away in her own dream world, where everything is a stage and she can just paint the world in her own way. She is a highly strung individual, but is very sincere and dislikes lying. She also hates bores, prudes, and those that are easy to read. She loves to uncover mysteries and will work patiently to get those she considers interesting to open up to her.