Open The Market The Festival of Sorrows, a Bully Harbor Holiday

[Perila Z. Mogul]

OOC:
Sad Merry 5th!
So this thread is all about celebrating the traditional Merry 5th holiday of the Festival of Sorrows, in which the grief and despair buried in the hearts of all Bully Harbor's citizens can be released without judgement for a day, a sort of shared communal mourning intended to be Therapeutic and Cheaper than sitting in an office jabbering to an expensive stranger. Also Cheaper than the Bully Harbor tradition of Going Postal, which the city's administration much prefer avoiding.
This thread doesn't have to be a particularly serious one, more just something fun and emotionally-charged for all our dear mentally-unwell animal people to let loose in.
Join in and join back out at will, do whatever you'd like while the city mourns for a day.
I hope to maybe have more threads like this for the various Imperial holidays, make them feel just a little more special.
Though this thread is listed as in the Marketplace, where the bulk of the despairers gather, you can theoretically have your characters wherever suits them.
No need to think too hard on timelines, if you want your character to participate, do so!
Enjoy! Despair!

BIC:
The sailors at port and a good number of soldiers at the Barracks, the dockworkers and warehouse workers, the clerks and secretaries, the trash sorters and Smelt newsies, nearly everyone got Merry 5th off; because though it wasn't technically a drinking holiday like nearly every other Bully Harbor tradition, beasts absolutely still drank, and every tavern from Pritchard's Pebble to the Blue Crab Saloon was packed... because nobody liked to deal with this day sober and the bartenders worked hard.
Porter and foot traffic slowed as Parades of Despair roamed the streets, made up of beasts of all creeds and classes weeping and wailing, some tearing out their fur, others flagellating themselves with traditional Therapeutic Flails, some donning strange frowning masks with tears painted spilling down their cheeks.
Bully Harbor had a lot to cry about, and the Festival of Sorrows was for doing just that... taking out all those bottled-up and grog-drowned emotions and dragging them up to the surface for a little while, giving them a little light, a little time.
Remember when your uncle exploded in that freak grog brewing accident and altered the course of your life forever?
How about all those generations of unprocessed familial trauma and grief from the wars that happened seemingly every decade like clockwork, taking a little more of your dwindling number of loves ones and the only home you ever knew each time?
Take to the streets, my mentally-unstable Bully Harborian friends and neighbors, let the whole city quake with your howls and sobs and the cheap paint-thinner grog flow.
There's a lot of grief to let out here, release it for a little while, maybe try some traditional Mourning Dove Toast at the food carts while you're at it (with Wet Turnip for those young and old with chewing difficulties) and wash it down with some Drowning Sailor Grog, specially priced and watered-down for the occasion at any place where booze is sold.
The Merry 5th Festival of Sorrows has come. Grieve a while, because once Merry 6th rolls around the Economy's cranking back up again and there'll be no more time for tears until next year.

 

[Colonel Harvon M. Jere]

Colonel Jere strode through the crowd in his usual full regalia, chestful of medals swinging and sabre at his side.
Many of the folks kicked up quiet a racket as they thrashed and moaned and boozed, shook their fists at the sky, cried "Why, world, WHY?" and got poorly-made tattoos of their lost loves at various sketchy tattoo tables.
The old fox both loved and hated this holiday. He appreciated it for its openness and honesty- it was rare beasts here did much with their emotions besides drink and punch things- but it also made him feel hollow.
He bore a lot of grief on the regular, let it out in the privacy of his office or his own home, thinking of his dear departed Thaddeus, or his father, or any one of his comrades lost in the half-dozen wars he'd been through for this city.
He stopped at a food cart ran by a rat with a wooden eye sniffling over the toast he was cooking over his portable woodstove, and purchased one of the Mourning Dove Toasts.
This version consisted of a chunk of wood pigeon cooked over a sunny side up Mystery Egg lain atop a somewhat burned slice of bread, and the Colonel nibbled gratefully at it as he wandered and people-watched, trying to rouse up enough of his deeply-held emotions to produce some tears.
He thought of Thaddeus' pale face, mouth hanging open and eyes staring blankly, and swallowed a lump in his throat before taking another bite of toast.
This 5 gilder chunk of burned toast is for you, you rogue.

 

[Nycaria Blayre Lafrey]

Nycaria Blayre Lafrey, Chief Detective of the Crossroads Detective Agency, for her part, sat quietly outside at a cafe table near the packed streets and sniffled into her coffee, wiping her nose on a fishbone-themed kerchief. She missed her dad. Never got to spend more than a couple years with the fellow before he up and drowned in the Harbor, but she carried on his and his buddy Nichact's baby, the CDA, for him.
By all accounts, he'd been a special ferret. A rogue and ne'er-do-well from the Navy turned roof-climbing, steel-swinging, case-cracking detective, and a playwright and poet who submitted his works to the Smelt and Harbor bookstores to boot.
He died in what, his late thirties? They could've had a whole life together, and Fate decided to make him fishbait instead of a father.
And Nichact Reptilius, he vanished not long after. Whether he was involved in her dad's mysterious death or not, the monitor lizard was just one more part of her father's life that was stolen from her. They'd been the best of friends, her mother said.
Why did every damn beast in the Imperium have to grow up in a broken household?
No wonder Bully Harbor was rife with suffering. Everybeast's life was miserable!
The ferret lowered her head and began to sob softly into her coffee, chest wracked, bowler tipped over her brow and tears splattering the brown surface of her beverage.
"W-why..." she mumbled. "H-Hell's bells..."