The familiar sounds of harbour-creaking ropes, slapping waves, heavy barrels rolling across cobblestones-mingle with voices shouting and cursing in an unfamiliar language filled with clicks, inhalations, and singsongy words that make it sound almost musical. The aroma of unfamiliar spices and tropical fruit mixes with the wharfside smells of fish, tar, and canvas.
Beyond all that, Port Nyanzaru is an explosion of colour. Buildings are painted in bright shades of blue, green, orange, and salmon pink, or their walls are adorned with murals portraying giant reptiles and mythical heroes. Every building sports baskets and clay urns of colourful flowers or is draped in leafy, flowering vines. Minstrels in bright clothing adorned with feathers and shells perform on street corners. Multicoloured pennants and sun awnings flutter atop the city walls. A crowd of children dressed in feathered hats and capes races past you, squealing in delighted terror as a street performer costumed as a big-toothed lizard stomps and roars behind them. The whole city seems to be bustling, sweating, laughing, swearing, and singing.
Features
Medium and Large dinosaurs are used as beasts of burden to haul two-wheeled carts, hoist heavy loads on cranes, and tow boats along the canals. Dinosaurs compete in weekly races through the streets. These brightly painted racing dinosaurs are fast, vicious, and barely under their riders' control. Flowers, green plants, and vines grow everywhere, seeming to spring out of the building stones themselves. The profusion of greenery needs constant tending to prevent roots and shoots from damaging buildings or tile roofs.
The city's defensive walls and towers are topped with colourful awnings to shield guards from the sun and rain. All streets within the city walls are paved with cobblestones or flagstones, and they have deep rain gutters as much as 2 feet wide. Residents of Port Nyanzaru pay little attention to any but the heaviest deluge. Nekomata minstrels wander the streets, performing for anyone who tosses them a few coins. Walls divide the city into districts, and the open archways above the streets are painted with murals of dinosaurs, mountains, and mythic heroes. Crumbling ancient buildings covered with vines and lichens indicate the city's great age.
The ground floors of most buildings are made of stucco-covered stone and have tiny windows to keep out the heat at street level. The upper floors have bamboo or thatch walls with enormous windows to let in the breeze, under broad thatched or tiled eaves. All buildings are richly decorated with paint, ivy, and vivid flowers. Some are painted in symmetrical, geometric patterns of straight lines and sharp angles, while others portray animals, monsters, landscapes, and heroes in a stylized manner unique to Azura. Where space permits, buildings traditionally include a walled yard or garden.
All the city's water comes from rain, so every building has a cistern or wooden barrels to catch water running off the roof. Every public square is built around a fountain or rain basin. With so much water running downhill, Azurans also make excellent use of water-driven mechanical gadgets. Many buildings have water wheels built into their cisterns. Rainwater running through spouts or channels turns the wheel, which pumps water into pools, turns millstones, powers bellows or lathes or saws, or accomplishes any other labour-saving or amusing task Azuran engineers can dream up.
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