04-14-2020, 02:18 AM
(This post was last modified: 04-14-2020, 03:34 AM by neon_jellyfish.
Edit Reason: missing words!
)
Thank you guys!!!
Day 104
We have another Oddliday to celebrate today! Today happens to be the Madness Day in Oddwickshire. (Do not mistake it for Positive Madness Day, which I made up on Make Up Your Own Holiday Day to lift the mood of people who don’t get to live in Oddwickshire)
Madness is the norm in Oddwickshire, but if everyone was absolutely crazy all the time, the queendom couldn’t function properly, so Oddies usually tone down the madness just a little bit for others’ sake. On Madness Day, however, they can let the madness loose and do whatever crazy stuff they want.
On this day, you see most people wearing the craziest, gaudiest outfits, mismatched socks - those are especially popular, and all kinds of absurd hats.
Street booths and sweets shops sell the special Madness Day treat - the mad!eleines. Mad!eleines come in all kinds of bright or pastel colors, and all kinds of flavors, but plain, vanilla, lemon and lavender are the most common ones. They’re traditionally sold in special paper bags with funny prints on them. Aside from the usual mad!eleines, there will be a black one in the package, and that one will give you some sort of side effect, like turning your hair to a nice shade of acid green or make you walk backwards or talk in incomprehensible gibberish for a short period of time.
There will also be a little surprise, like the magic polarization lenses (they are used to see through the fog in Oddwickshire, I mentioned them last year when we were visiting Quirkmore), but unlike the usual ones, these have crazy colors. There are also small trinkets with glowing crystals from the Underground and magic color-changing glass marbles (they’ll change their color continually, but you can say what color you want them to be and they’ll stay that way, so kids can play with them and tell each other’s marbles apart).
Bags with marbles are different from the other two types, so if you want to get a set of marbles, it’s easy to do. If you collect ten bags of marbles-mad!eleines and show them at any place that sells mad!eleines, you get the shooter marble to complete the set for free. Shooters have special effects, like glowing, magical holographic fish swimming in them, spinning galaxies, stuff like that.
If you’re really hardcore, you can order BlackBag, where all the mad!eleines are the black ones, and the surprise is also black-colored and usually a little spooky - most common ones are black lenses that make everyone look like a ghost, but I once saw a spider pendant that actually crawled around the lucky winner’s neck and spun filigree cobwebs.
Most cafés and restaurants will add dyes to their drinks on this day, so if you want a neon orange latté to go with your mad!eleines, go for it.
Many crazy contests are held all over the country, like walk-on-your-hands races, eye-soup eating contests, Oddwick has its own special Spot the Secret Agent Game - agent Morgenstern will dress up in something silly and then crank the stealth mode up to eleven and walk around the town, and if you can spot him, you get a coupon for a treat in a café of your choice, or an extra big bag of mad!eleines. Some people train the whole year for this! But the winners are still few and far between, and most of them don’t use their coupons, instead, they ask Elazar to sign it and keep it as a family treasure and a memento of their extraordinary achievement.
Here’s a photo of Elazar in his costume:
![[Image: dffb09d9ce620c3781e6a53256046662.jpg]](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/df/fb/09/dffb09d9ce620c3781e6a53256046662.jpg)
And here’s Elazar slowly turning on the stealth:
![[Image: aca051214c6ec00f639d0ec32fce342d.jpg]](https://i.pinimg.com/564x/ac/a0/51/aca051214c6ec00f639d0ec32fce342d.jpg)
And finally, there’s the all time favorite - the booby-trapped Maze Hopscotch Tournament!
Maze hopscotch started as an innocent (well, as innocent as it gets around here, which might be debatable) children’s game. The classic hopscotch was too primitive, so the layout gradually grew into more and more intricate mazes. Then it was too boring to just have to skip over the stone and not touch the line, so small traps were added. The maze hopscotch gained so much popularity, that big mazes designed specifically for this variant of hopscotch, but in epic scale, were built in both Oddwick and Quirkmore!
Oddwick maze is in the Underground and it looks like classic haunted catacombs with Indiana-Jones-esque booby traps, and ghosts and ghouls and other monsters add more difficulty in later rounds. Quirkmore’s maze is a tangle of tunnels made of Quirkmore’s signature wrought iron and glass, and rather than physical booby traps, it uses magical and psychological (and sometimes hallucinogenic) trickery. There are magic mirrors that confuse you, apparent dead ends that aren’t actually dead, and bubbles filled with who-knows-what that will give you the funniest (or maybe the spookiest) hallucinations if you accidently burst them.
Iaso and other healers attend the tournaments, and both towns cover the cost of Schwarzgrabs’ services for the contestants, so it’s all pretty safe, only about two dozen people die each year (and then they’re big stars later, telling everyone how they died and got reanimated again). Both mazes also hold games for kids with all booby traps deactivated, and offer tours, so if you don’t feel like playing but want to see the mazes, you can. But there are amazing prizes to be won, so a lot of people try their luck each year, to win one of Rebecca’s mind-blowing inventions, a made to measure spell by Rosamunda or a small personal airship (including flying lessons with Beatrix).
Fun fact - the top score for both mazes belongs to none other than Her Insane Majesty herself.
The crowning event of the Madness Day offers a sight you won’t get to see on any other day. Queen Isadora walks from the Castle to the Triangle Square, greeting her subjects, then she boards a special airship (it looks like a hybrid between airship and a classic Montgolfier balloon with an awful (and heavy) lot of decorations and is piloted by Beatrix, of course) and flies to Quirkmore to greet people there, all while...
...you might want to sit down...
...wearing a pastel-colored gown!!!
Iaso and other healers attend the Pastel Gown Tour, and both towns cover the cost of Schwarzgrabs’ services for the onlookers, so it’s all pretty safe, only about two dozen people die from shock each year (most people got used to it by now. It was almost two hundred when Her Majesty started this tradition in the first year of her reign. The day is still fondly remembered by all of them).
Once the dusk falls, huge parties are held on all bigger squares in both towns, with holographic projections into the fog, glowing drinks (there are zero alcohol versions for kids or anyone else who doesn’t want to drink) and funeral and creepy circus music, and in the end, the Pastel Gown is offered for sale in an auction (the money is then donated to wherever it’s needed) and Her Insane Majesty launches the contest for the next year’s Pastel Gown (it’s a very prestigious contest, and couture salons invest a ton of time, effort and the best materials into their entries, because when a salon places well in the contest, they get flooded with orders for a long time to come).
Whew. I'm kinda tired from all the mad merriment. I hope you had fun!
Day 104
We have another Oddliday to celebrate today! Today happens to be the Madness Day in Oddwickshire. (Do not mistake it for Positive Madness Day, which I made up on Make Up Your Own Holiday Day to lift the mood of people who don’t get to live in Oddwickshire)
Madness is the norm in Oddwickshire, but if everyone was absolutely crazy all the time, the queendom couldn’t function properly, so Oddies usually tone down the madness just a little bit for others’ sake. On Madness Day, however, they can let the madness loose and do whatever crazy stuff they want.
On this day, you see most people wearing the craziest, gaudiest outfits, mismatched socks - those are especially popular, and all kinds of absurd hats.
Street booths and sweets shops sell the special Madness Day treat - the mad!eleines. Mad!eleines come in all kinds of bright or pastel colors, and all kinds of flavors, but plain, vanilla, lemon and lavender are the most common ones. They’re traditionally sold in special paper bags with funny prints on them. Aside from the usual mad!eleines, there will be a black one in the package, and that one will give you some sort of side effect, like turning your hair to a nice shade of acid green or make you walk backwards or talk in incomprehensible gibberish for a short period of time.
There will also be a little surprise, like the magic polarization lenses (they are used to see through the fog in Oddwickshire, I mentioned them last year when we were visiting Quirkmore), but unlike the usual ones, these have crazy colors. There are also small trinkets with glowing crystals from the Underground and magic color-changing glass marbles (they’ll change their color continually, but you can say what color you want them to be and they’ll stay that way, so kids can play with them and tell each other’s marbles apart).
Bags with marbles are different from the other two types, so if you want to get a set of marbles, it’s easy to do. If you collect ten bags of marbles-mad!eleines and show them at any place that sells mad!eleines, you get the shooter marble to complete the set for free. Shooters have special effects, like glowing, magical holographic fish swimming in them, spinning galaxies, stuff like that.
If you’re really hardcore, you can order BlackBag, where all the mad!eleines are the black ones, and the surprise is also black-colored and usually a little spooky - most common ones are black lenses that make everyone look like a ghost, but I once saw a spider pendant that actually crawled around the lucky winner’s neck and spun filigree cobwebs.
Most cafés and restaurants will add dyes to their drinks on this day, so if you want a neon orange latté to go with your mad!eleines, go for it.
Many crazy contests are held all over the country, like walk-on-your-hands races, eye-soup eating contests, Oddwick has its own special Spot the Secret Agent Game - agent Morgenstern will dress up in something silly and then crank the stealth mode up to eleven and walk around the town, and if you can spot him, you get a coupon for a treat in a café of your choice, or an extra big bag of mad!eleines. Some people train the whole year for this! But the winners are still few and far between, and most of them don’t use their coupons, instead, they ask Elazar to sign it and keep it as a family treasure and a memento of their extraordinary achievement.
Here’s a photo of Elazar in his costume:
And here’s Elazar slowly turning on the stealth:
And finally, there’s the all time favorite - the booby-trapped Maze Hopscotch Tournament!
Maze hopscotch started as an innocent (well, as innocent as it gets around here, which might be debatable) children’s game. The classic hopscotch was too primitive, so the layout gradually grew into more and more intricate mazes. Then it was too boring to just have to skip over the stone and not touch the line, so small traps were added. The maze hopscotch gained so much popularity, that big mazes designed specifically for this variant of hopscotch, but in epic scale, were built in both Oddwick and Quirkmore!
Oddwick maze is in the Underground and it looks like classic haunted catacombs with Indiana-Jones-esque booby traps, and ghosts and ghouls and other monsters add more difficulty in later rounds. Quirkmore’s maze is a tangle of tunnels made of Quirkmore’s signature wrought iron and glass, and rather than physical booby traps, it uses magical and psychological (and sometimes hallucinogenic) trickery. There are magic mirrors that confuse you, apparent dead ends that aren’t actually dead, and bubbles filled with who-knows-what that will give you the funniest (or maybe the spookiest) hallucinations if you accidently burst them.
Iaso and other healers attend the tournaments, and both towns cover the cost of Schwarzgrabs’ services for the contestants, so it’s all pretty safe, only about two dozen people die each year (and then they’re big stars later, telling everyone how they died and got reanimated again). Both mazes also hold games for kids with all booby traps deactivated, and offer tours, so if you don’t feel like playing but want to see the mazes, you can. But there are amazing prizes to be won, so a lot of people try their luck each year, to win one of Rebecca’s mind-blowing inventions, a made to measure spell by Rosamunda or a small personal airship (including flying lessons with Beatrix).
Fun fact - the top score for both mazes belongs to none other than Her Insane Majesty herself.
The crowning event of the Madness Day offers a sight you won’t get to see on any other day. Queen Isadora walks from the Castle to the Triangle Square, greeting her subjects, then she boards a special airship (it looks like a hybrid between airship and a classic Montgolfier balloon with an awful (and heavy) lot of decorations and is piloted by Beatrix, of course) and flies to Quirkmore to greet people there, all while...
...you might want to sit down...
...wearing a pastel-colored gown!!!
Iaso and other healers attend the Pastel Gown Tour, and both towns cover the cost of Schwarzgrabs’ services for the onlookers, so it’s all pretty safe, only about two dozen people die from shock each year (most people got used to it by now. It was almost two hundred when Her Majesty started this tradition in the first year of her reign. The day is still fondly remembered by all of them).
Once the dusk falls, huge parties are held on all bigger squares in both towns, with holographic projections into the fog, glowing drinks (there are zero alcohol versions for kids or anyone else who doesn’t want to drink) and funeral and creepy circus music, and in the end, the Pastel Gown is offered for sale in an auction (the money is then donated to wherever it’s needed) and Her Insane Majesty launches the contest for the next year’s Pastel Gown (it’s a very prestigious contest, and couture salons invest a ton of time, effort and the best materials into their entries, because when a salon places well in the contest, they get flooded with orders for a long time to come).
Whew. I'm kinda tired from all the mad merriment. I hope you had fun!