The Festive Everlasting
The Festive Everlasting, Ipos’s bizarre Abyssal realm, resembles an immense outdoor theatrical festival held in a beautiful vale lit by an early afternoon sun. Eager souls play the part of groundlings near the plane’s thirty-three connected stages, while a host of demonic nobility flock to the bleachers and private boxes. The entertainers themselves are recently deceased actors, sworn to Ipos during mortal life, who revel in the chance to perform for all eternity. Hawkers of pleasures both simple and sublime roam the crowds, ensuring that all present sate themselves upon some sort of mind-enhancing (or occasionally mind-numbing) concoction.
The Festive Everlasting possesses an air of idyll, but a competitive desperation permeates the theatrical atmosphere, noticeable to all who know to look for it. At the end of each three-hour performance, the crowd displays by show of applause its appreciation for each actor in turn. The five entertainers (out of about seven hundred) adjudged to have engaged in the worst or least memorable performance are erased from existence, their souls totally consumed by the Abyssal stage upon which they stood only moments before. Those actors who survive a year on the stage join the jeering crowd as demons, only slightly more sympathetic to the plight of the actors than the catty, demanding drama critics sitting next to them.
The Festive Everlasting possesses an air of idyll, but a competitive desperation permeates the theatrical atmosphere, noticeable to all who know to look for it. At the end of each three-hour performance, the crowd displays by show of applause its appreciation for each actor in turn. The five entertainers (out of about seven hundred) adjudged to have engaged in the worst or least memorable performance are erased from existence, their souls totally consumed by the Abyssal stage upon which they stood only moments before. Those actors who survive a year on the stage join the jeering crowd as demons, only slightly more sympathetic to the plight of the actors than the catty, demanding drama critics sitting next to them.
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