[b]The Exhibition:[/b]

The reception hall is in a Rococo style made possible by the end of rare mineral scarcities. The halls of Versaille with the roof painted with depictions of Arthurian legends taking the place of the Greek and Christian myths of the original renaissance-styled paintings. Arthur and Guinevere take the place of Adam and Eve in the high-arched frescos above. 

On the right is the Castle’s tower, the hotel, where the guests and performers are staying. Crystal has the penthouse, naturally, at the top of the tower. On the left is the exhibition hall, where Crystal’s established herself. From here you can see the huge stained glass bay window of the hall - it’s a light panel, though, made to glow like Notre Dame’s rose window without affecting the clean lighting of the exhibition below. 

Here, though, Red fits in with the smaller crowd of die-hard fans just as well as Brown and Pink. Sure, she turns heads and a leopard wearing only denim beach shorts is excited enough to ask for a selfie with her, but that’s true of a lot of other people in this audience, too. Turn your head and someone has a look that’s just as powerful and committed as Red’s is, just pulling them in entirely different directions. 

Like 3V, who is ridiculously easy to find in the crowd from her position o’er top of it. 3V is dressed mostly in swirling red tattoos and artfully tattered rags, held aloft on the shoulders of two wolfgirls carrying her around. This does not look to have been her idea, but her article on Sirius Drinks has made her a guest of honour here, and we do not always get to choose how we are honoured. It’s hard to tell if she’s pretending to have more fun than she actually is, or if being palenquined around on scantily dressed wolfgirls is so decadent she’s trying to pretend she’s having [i]less[/i] fun than she actually is. She might still be deciding for herself. 

Someone in kangaroo cosplay, complete with Moon-Bounce™ shoes, assumes Red [i]must[/i] be here for the transhuman wrestling performance, and she enthusiastically grabs Red by the wrist and bounds her through the circulating crowds to the Ring, Brown and Pink invisibly following behind in her wake. The corner of the exhibition hall dedicated to the odd-man-out performance, the group of amateur-professionals so in love with the act that the entire cohort’s willing to work for the rate of a single performer, in exchange for getting an oversized share of the venue. 

Black power cables tangle the floor like jungle roots, drawing up from holes in the floor where stage technicians work unseen. An aluminium canopy shines above the ring like a halo - A century ago these lights would have run hot tungsten, hot enough to set fire to the wooden pegs that held the coloured gel filters.

Lights this bright run cold, now. The sweat that drips from the wrestlers below is all exertion. Gels and wooden pegs are as archaic as accepting the genes inflicted upon you by birth - these lights have automatic tracking, rapid switches in colour and contrast, giving a performance as rigorously choreographed as the match itself. That is to say, perfectly timed until something more interesting happens, and then the ad-libbing gets hectic. 

A fox-girl has the actors’ beat-sheets pinned in a spreadsheet, and is doing her best to keep the whole thing seamless. The lighting has to feel like it was doing it all by itself, that the ring is as much alive as the wrestlers, because everybody knows the ring is as fake as the castle it’s in. Commit hard enough and you could make people choose to forget it. She works as invisible as the cuts in a movie, the punctuation in prose, to make that possible for them.

Tonight it’s the prestige match. 

The babyface tonight is a rabbit boy, bunny ears tied back in a ponytail. He’s got a tight martial arts getup and practices his wing-chun into the air, a kind of rolling rapid strike style of fighting that has him constantly twisting and pivoting on those long feet of his. He’s billed as Lago, and normally he’s great - fantastic, even, his acrobatics and soaring jump-kicks are incredible - but it’s the first time any of these wrestlers have worked a crowd this large before. He’s getting stagefright.

The ref works with him, doing a worked routine about how his opponent hadn’t shown up yet. This is for the crowd. Lago is doing his best good sportsmanship routine, refusing the win without a fair match. He can’t sell it though, even teeth like that can chatter.

The ref’s a girl named Ceaufie, she’s crushing it. She’s vanilla, can’t afford her mods yet, so she has to do her best with a fluorescent-purple ponytail that goes down to the small of her back, and she’s almost good enough that Keats can get his lines out naturally through the stage fright, with him just working off her energy. Still, the kangaroo has dragged Red close enough to the ring that she can hear the sigh of relief when the lights cut.

When the lights came back on, The Ultimate Werewolf is perched on the opposite ringpost like a gargoyle. The lights hit his face just right to make his eyes glow red, and he lets loose a snarl from deep in his gut and out through foam-flecked lips.  Thick gobs of drool fall to the mat below.

The lights flicker. The Ultimate Werewolf is face to face with Lago. Lifted up on tiptoe it’s Lago that has the height advantage by a few inches but he’s still the one forced a step back by this, and The Ultimate Werewolf sneers down at him.

Someone in the audience screams themselves hoarse from cheering.

A bone conducting patch runs down the Werewolf’s right cheek, disguised as a scar in his fur. He turns to the crowd. “This? It’s a full moon tonight, the biggest night we’ve ever seen, and this is what you bring me?”

The crowd goes silent, tense. Lago shoves the Werewolf in the chest with both hands. “You leave them out of this. It’s me you’re here for.” Everyone hears the quaver in his voice. The Werewolf had already recovered from the push.

“You think you’re worth my time?” He licks a claw, slow.

Lago stands his ground. “I’m going to have to be, aren’t I?”

The light panel of the gigantic window above goes red with the light of the blood moon. They didn’t even ask for that one, Crystal asked for it special after seeing the test run of the routine. The rest of the convention might not have got the sense something magic was happening here, but they turn their heads as one and get a sense that something must be. When The Ultimate Werewolf throws his hands wide, arches his back, and howls like a real starved wolf, it fills the entire hall. It’s all him; They always have to kill his mic before he does this bit.

Lago does his best to remember what he’s rehearsed, but The Werewolf made it easy to forget, no matter how many times they’d drilled this, that anyone here was pretending. It helps, honestly, that the bunny boy’s entirely forgotten about the crowd now. 

…

Do Brown, Pink and Red even [i]like[/i] wrestling, or were they just kind of dragged here? Does any of this [i]do anything[/i] for them?

Somewhere else in the hall is an Egyptology setup. A recreation of the trials of the Egyptian afterlife by two men who have made themselves into chilling recreations of Horus and Anubis. Nine feet tall, barrel-chested, impassive. The intensive body modification would be nothing without their complete commitment to the role of Gods, but they move with such precise and uncanny movements that the illusion is perfect. It takes conscious effort to remind yourself they're mortal, and even then there's doubt heavy in your chest.

They sit in a pyramid temple and perform the rite of judgement, weighing hearts against feathers and separating the worthy from the unworthy in the crowd. Someone November knows has been selected. Which colours would have been drawn to this performance, this rite of judgement?