Green stood for unoccupied, blue for ‘services have been ordered’, orange for simply ‘occupied’ and red for ‘do not disturb under any circumstances’, that was what John read in the FAQ segment of the ordering app, while waiting for his order to arrive. He was somewhat uncertain what they could need the red function for, given sex in the lodges was actually forbidden by the terms of service. Something that John had wrinkled his forehead at in surprise. After a few seconds, his common sense had kicked in and reminded him that it was, in fact, odd of HIM to assume that an opera would just allow him to have semi-public sex.

‘I suppose it’s in case there are private talks going on or something,’ he thought, half-heartedly listening to what was going on below. A single person had stepped in front of the red curtain and started to set the mood for the story. For a start, it was just the usual fantasy babble. Lots of big, magical words being thrown around. Even in the physics breaking world of the Abyss, it seemed a fable was the most popular kind of opera.

While he was somewhat bored of the, so far, quite standard tale, Sylph was hooked. The narrator was enthusiastic about his job, it had to be said, and the orchestra sitting in a trench in front of the stage was underlining his performance with a soft melody that spiked and swelled at the right times. It was a well-studied act.

“…and so it is that in the stable but imperfect kingdom of Leftfrania, King Kaloring sits in his throne room and deliberates his decisions,” the narrator came to an end. He left the stage to the side and the curtain slowly began to rise. A moment of silence ensued, as the orchestra rested their hands.

‘Leftfrania? Kaloring?’ John was bemused by those names and chuckled a little bit. Turning her head to him, Sylph looked questioningly. “It’s a rather lazy renaming of the kingdom of West Frankia and the dynasty of the Carolingians that ruled it,” he explained.

“Ooooh, the predecessor to France thingy?” Sylph asked.

“Colour me surprised that you knew that.” John chuckled a little bit more, especially when the thunderstorm elemental bloated up her cheeks. “Sorry, sorry, I should bow to your knowledge, my cute concubine.”

“Yeah, you should! I fill my brain with all of this random history stuff you keep learning about and here you mock me for it. Mean John, very, very mean John! I demand cuddles!” Since she was already in his lap, that was an easy thing to give. “The concubine is appeased,” she hummed after a few seconds of deep embracing.

She was about to become even more appeased as two knocks on the door warned them that someone was entering. “Your order of two bottles of wine and a chocolate cake, sir,” a waiter stated as he fluidly entered the room. Literally, in this case, as he was some sort of slime lifeform of the green variety. John had never even imagined a male slime. If he had, however, it would have been quite a bit worse than what he was actually looking at. In large part, probably, because this slimy male wore clothes that covered his translucent torso and his entire lower body was one flowing mass with no genitals in sight. Only his face, the twirled moustache, inexplicably black, and his voice gave away his gender.

With boneless arms, he quickly placed the order on the table in front of John and then bowed even as he flowed backwards out of the room. “Thank you,” John barely managed to say before the waiter diligently nodded and closed the door quietly behind him. Both of the wine bottles were already open, so John just had to pour himself and Sylph a glass.

John didn’t fancy himself a wine drinker, but he also didn’t fancy himself a particularly experienced drinker, period. As a matter of fact, he wasn’t even completely sure if he ever had wine before. If he did, he had been so drunk he didn’t recall it. On this specific occasion, the red liquid pouring into his glass seemed adequate. Sylph, on the other hand, had insisted on getting wine from the start. All of this Discordwine she had drunk during her stay on her home plane had made her curious and now she was seeking something similar. From her description, it had been rather sweet, so he got her something along those lines.

“Just drink in moderation,” John warned her as he sipped on his glass.

“Moderation is my thirteenth title!” Sylph declared and downed half the glass in one gulp. Small mouth or not, this tiny girl could swallow. “Very tasty, very sweet, kinda fruity, dunno how good it is in comparison to other wine, but it’s nice. Very nice. Want more… but! Moderation!” Sylph placed her drink on the table. To her credit, she did actually keep her hands off it, instead following the play.

The curtain had risen at this point, revealing a set that looked like the inside of a medieval castle. Torches flickered on stone walls, with tapestry hanging between them. Each of the banners depicted a soldier in boots, carrying a scroll. The advantage of a magical set was that nothing was a mere look-alike, everything was genuine material.

There were three people on the scene. The king on his mediocre throne, a servant lady holding a salver filled with cheap bread and a noble in clothes so fine that, aside from the royal cape, they were more luxurious than anything the king was wearing. That noble stomped from the edge of the stage towards the throne, each step accompanied by a heavy drumbeat. “My liege, if I may have a word!”

Sighing heavily, the king turned his gaze from the servant to the noble. “It is not as if I could deny you, cousin. I am dependent on your taxes, after all.”

“While I am not dependent on your head wearing that crown!” the noble spoke out loud, causing the servant to avert her gaze and stay silent. “Have you heard of the peasants and their frivolous festivities?”

“Yes, I have heard and I am pondering, cousin,” the king responded. “They feast and dance and continue the species in degradation. I have great worry.”

“Great worry, why is that?” the noble asked. “Is it true what I have heard? That you plan to rein in their excess?”

“Do you not approve?”

“Far from it, Kaloring, I forbid that you meddle. They feast on my grain and the children they bear so mindlessly will make easy serfs on my lands. All of that dancing is truly getting them in a mood that is great for our country!”

“Great for us or great for you?” the king asked.

“One and the same.”

“Do you bear the crown?”

“I bear the coin, gold enough to forge a thousand of your crowns.”

“Yet, only the one I wear will hold value among all of them.”

“What preposterous arrogance, that something has value because it rests on your head.”

“It is not my head that makes it royal, it is my face, my blood and my reputation, cousin.” The king was clearly struggling to contain his annoyance at this point. The orchestra swelled as the monarch rose from his seat of power and stepped down to face the noble directly. They broke into song.

It was a battle between two baritones. The king sang about arguments to the societal collapse that such frivolous activities would bring to the kingdom, while the noble continued to emphasize the benefit of the merchants and himself. Every so often, their arguments would break down into a refrain of two simple sentences shouted back and forth. “I have the coin!” “I have the crown!” repeated four times before they separated in an angry rush, only to end up on opposite ends of the hall and continue their argument as before.

Although the main melody of the song stayed steady, the supporting violins accelerated more and more as the debate got heated. As logical statements were discarded in favour of past grievances being voiced and emotions being spouted, the noble shouted, “Old tyrant you, of bent back and weary neck, would have us forget to dance if you could!”

“Perhaps I shall do just that, lord of gold! Without the dance to rouse appetite and lust, perhaps our people will remember what they must!”

Stunned and with the discharge of music through the loud tones of several tubas, the noble stumbled back. Then the song was over. “You cannot be serious, Kaloring!”

“If the dance is the source, to dance is forbidden. Servant,” the quiet woman opened her eyes, “inform the heralds, my decision is made. No more dances in Leftfrania.”

“As you so wish, my liege.”

The curtain slowly fell and gave everyone a moment to chew on the event that had unfolded. “Booo,” Sylph declared her dissatisfaction, “forbidding dances is mean! You shouldn’t do that!”

“It’s certainly tyrannical,” John could agree without a moment’s hesitation. “However,” he added shortly thereafter, “I get what the problem of the king is. Fundamentally, he is faced with a problem in society that he needs to solve, but his most powerful subject, apparently powerful enough to be in open disagreement, blocks his every idea on the matter. Since he can’t do nothing, he lashes out at whatever he thinks could solve the issue.”

“Yeah, okay, sure, but banning dancing isn’t going to solve things! Why are people even that addicted to stuffing their faces and dancing, maybe he should look at that! How do you say, uhm, fight the illness not the disease? No, that’s just… audible sigh, that’s just the same thing twice… it’s… ah, fight the disease, not the symptoms!”

“You’re right,” John told her and sipped a little bit more on his wine. “Most of the time. Sometimes fighting the symptom is very effective at fighting the disease. Especially if it’s a passing one. We’ll see where they take this entire metaphor.”

The narrator stepped back out and informed everyone about what happened. “The king’s new law was spread throughout his lands. It was popular with the old and unpopular with the young. Popular with the settled and unpopular with the adventurous. The adventurous that now had a lot of time and energy to focus on something that wasn’t dancing – and there was just one man that wished to take advantage of it, in the name of all of the jealous nobility.”

The curtain rose again and this time revealed a set that seemed to be a dark alleyway between two houses. Standing between two doors, the rich noble spoke to a man who moved in dancing motions without pause. “The old king has gone mad, as you can surely attest?”

“For sure he has, for sure he has!” the dancer declared. “My Veitstanz is unending and the king made my very existence a breaking of his law. I am exhausted and sick and now I am in fear!”

“Veitstanz?” Sylph asked her summoner.

“A German word for a phenomenon where people would dance until they would be too exhausted to continue or dead,” John explained. “Just an artist feeling creative and plucking a word from somewhere and using it almost correctly. More wine?” Enough time had passed that he felt he could refill Sylph’s glass without her getting too drunk too quickly.

“Yes!” she enthusiastically agreed. A moment later, they toasted. All the while the scene continued. It wasn’t terribly interesting and could be summarized in that the noble pledged his support to the dancer as the head of a movement against the king. The following music number then had the dancer putting on a great show, into which more and more young people joined out of the nearby houses. The dance spread through the crowd, awakening repressed fervour, as the noble rubbed his hand with a content expression in the background. The song was lucid and unsteady, which fit perfectly for the absolute chaos the dance was. The choreography masterfully depicted the feverish and fractured unity of the mob.

The curtain didn’t lower to transition the scene this time. Instead, the entire stage turned. The mob danced along, remaining on the relative spot, making it seem as if they were running into the scenery of the castle. “What is the meaning of this?” the king shouted over and over again through the transition. “Stop your dance, it is outlawed!”

“We will not, he cannot,” the crowd shouted, “so we will never. We are all the dancer now.”

The king tried to stem the tide, but there were too many bodies. Eventually, he vanished between the dancing limbs and was not seen again. His crown, however, resurfaced on the head of the dancer. “We are all the dancer now!” he declared and the crowd cheered. It seemed as if the dancer tried to sit down on the throne, but his condition kept him from doing so. “Call the nobles, call the nobles, let our supporters see their new king!”

A new song started, this one erratic from the start. The dancing, writhing mob condensed around the throne as one by one nameless nobles were brought in. Each time, there was a pompous introduction and the list of their honours, each time that was ended by the refrain of the mob demanding that they too dance. Each time, the noble obliged and joined the mob, swelling its number as they went from unimportant lords to finally the so-called lord of gold.

The rich man stood before the mob, listing all his accomplishments. By himself, he took three times as long as all previous nobles and two times he was interrupted by the mob by the usual demand. Finally, the dancer declared in a line so deadly that it ended the song abruptly, “You will dance or you will hang!”

“For what could you hang me? With what authority?”

“I have the crown.”

“I have the coin!”

“I do not care for your coin. You are the mad in my dancing world. Now dance with us or hang.”

And the lord of gold danced. Danced and danced until the people in the throne room started falling over from exhaustion, until only he and the dancer were left. The noble collapsed before the dancer. In the end, even the new king fell and with him the curtain.

That was the end of the play.

“Huh,” John tilted his head. “I liked that.”

“Shuuuuper on the face all… alle… allegory for collectivism, boring! More dancing!” Sylph stumbled over her words. “It’s just about oppressed turning into oppressor, way too direct!”

“Well, I like simple messages sometimes,” John mused. Sylph wasn’t attacking his taste, it was important to understand, she just didn’t like the play as much as he did. Neither of them made a statement about whether it was objectively well written at that point. They had watched it to kill time and each gotten a bottle of wine into their system in the process. John had also been regularly distracted by putting some of that chocolate cake into Sylph’s mouth. “How about we watch a movie we know you will like once we get home?”