The Solstice Masquerade
December 10th - January 3rd

Nibiru is a harsh world, slow-turning, tilted close to a bright sun, and the people who live there have grown to revere night, cold, and the starry sky as instruments of blissful salvation. Their most important holiday, therefore, is the Winter Solstice, the coming of dark and snow to cool them for a few months before the threat of the sun renews itself. But there’s more to it than simple celebration. The people of Nibiru believe that unless the Great Orrery is ritually empowered once each year, the world will stop turning properly, and endless summer will destroy them all.

So, for the weeks leading up to the Solstice, the most sacred duty of Nibiru’s elite is to travel to the Orrery, a massive structure built with technology beyond their understanding, by absent beings they call the Starmovers, and revere as extraterrestrial angels. Wars stop for the Solstice. Trials are delayed. There are no elections, no marriages, no function of religion, government, or politics that can be allowed to interfere.

At the Orrery, the chosen delegates explore mazes of mysterious chambers that lock and unlock in response to stately celestial mathematics. They don ritual garb left there by the Starmovers. And they dance four ritual dances, each a week or so apart, in the great ballroom, wearing masks that cannot be removed, in order to keep the world turning.

This sacred celebration is a solemn thing, but for those less superstitious, it’s also a golden opportunity. In the ballroom, secret bargains can be struck. Forbidden affairs can begin, or end, in anonymity. Criminals may seek pardon, or perhaps new crimes. Treaties can be negotiated and signed, in violation of all taboo. But all of that relies on knowing who lies behind which mask.

And then there are those who seek other advantages - the technology and knowledge of the Starmovers. Even a little of it has helped revolutionize what the people of Nibiru are capable of, bringing them solar power, clockwork mechanisms, and a space race yet to be won - as well as laser weapons, advanced physics and chemistry, and other advances that place pseudo-Victorian cultures into a modern industrial revolution like that of the 1950s.

The people of Nibiru are living their lives on the brink of great changes they cannot yet understand. And the Travelers present may have to decide what’s more important: helping them… or taking dance lessons to save the world (if you believe in that kind of thing).


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