OOC thread here.
The city of Grand Harbor was the busiest, wealthiest port city in the entire Confederation of Atlantian Dominions. That wealth showed on the docks, where steamships and sail-powered clippers were tied up in the dozens along the wharfs. Those leaving the city were being loaded with foodstuffs, textiles, steel, and other products of the Atlantian Dominions’ vast farmlands and burgeoning industry. The smokestacks of the Factory District testified to this industrial growth, belching smoke into the air throughout the day as a legion of workers, most of them laboring under contracts of Indenture, toiled away within. At the end of their long shifts the workers would depart the factories for the slums of the city, where the Owners who held their contracts provided shoddy housing and ran company stores that offered cheap food they could buy with company scrip. The wealth and power of the Atlantian Dominions was built on the bent backs of these men, women, and children.
That wealth was on display on the other side of town, the neighborhood commonly known as Uptown, where the streets were lined with the luxurious city mansions of the Owners and the high-end department stores frequented by Owners’ wives and the servants they employed to do the shopping. If Grand Harbor was represented by a seesaw, then the end that represented Uptown was firmly planted on the ground under the weight of the wealth and power concentrated in this area. The offices of the city and Dominion governments were in this neighborhood, along with corporate headquarters for a number of major Atlantian companies. Between Uptown and the slums was a buffer in the form of the neighborhoods where various immigrant groups congregated, with names like Little Pagon, Khemedtown, and New Marusany, and the townhouses and apartment buildings of the Leasing class. This buffer also served as a gradient: the further from Uptown, and the closer to the slums, one got the lower the quality of the buildings dropped.
From the Continential Hotel, of course, very little of this was visible. All one could see around was luxury, wealth, and ostentatious displays of status. The Continental, always a place known for sophistication and class, was on its highest level today for the biggest, and first, event of the social season: the Continental Cotillion. Hotel staff had spent the preceding days rushing around to complete the final preparations, supervised by members of the Atlantian Benevolent Society. These luminaries of high society, many of them women eager to exercise influence and political power in one of the few ways permitted by Atlantian society as a whole, were not so benevolent to the lower-class hotel staff. They berated waiters, bellhops, and cooks for the slightest imperfections or flaws, backed up by nodding, appeasing managers who had no interest in taking the side of their employees over their patrons. Through hard work and haranguing the hotel’s Grand Ballroom was transformed into the venue for the Cotillion. The Grand Ballroom was decorated in three colors: gold (for wealth), silver (for sophistication), and pink (for femininity). A large stage was erected at one side, with ramps on either end. This would be where the debutantes and their escorts made their entrance for all the guests to see. Another platform had been erected in one corner for the band.
As guests arrived at the Grand Ballroom, either from their rooms in the Continental Hotel or via carriage from wherever else in the city they were staying, ushers in black tie checked their invitations. All those whose applications to attend had received a formal invitation to the Cotillion, signed by the Social Committee Chairwoman Bethany Pope and the Executive Chairman of the Society George Templeton. Debutantes received “the golden ticket,” an invitation on pink paper with gold lettering, while other attendees received a less elaborate invitation on plain paper. The ushers directed non-debutante attendees to enter the Grand Ballroom through the main doors, where waiters in black tie were moving about with trays laden with glasses of champagne, though they were asked to refrain from drinking until after the presentation of the “debs.”
Debutantes and their escorts were directed to enter through another set of doors, where a line was formed. Each young woman was given a bouquet of pink roses, a gift from the Benevolent Society, and told what to do. Once the Cotillion officially began, Betty Pope would read out the names of the debutantes and their escorts one by one. When called, they would walk onto the stage while the band played a small sample of the anthem of their nation, or a song associated with their Dominion if they were Atlantians. The debutante would curtsy to the room and then walk off the stage on the other ramp and join the crowd. Once all the debutantes had been introduced, there would be a toast and then they were free to mingle, dance, and socialize. The band would play throughout the night to provide music for dancing; the most common and popular dance was the waltz.
In the line of debutantes, the Ashby sisters could hardly contain their excitement. Alice and Mary Ashby were beautiful women in resplendent dresses. Alice Ashby wore a gown of white, while her sister had gone for a more daring dress which blended hues of pink with white. They both happily chatted with the women near them in the line, and with their escorts. Mary Ashby was on the arm of Mason Lockwood, who had a surprisingly rugged look about him for the son of a shipping magnate, and it became clear from conversation that the two of them were long-time friends. Alice Ashby, on the other hand, was evidently infatuated with the dashing young officer Frederick Lawrence who escorted her. Lawrence was fresh from the west, where he had earned some deal of renown for heroics in battles against the indigenous Kialagee people.
Farther down in the line, Calala Klark was feeling nervous. She was the daughter of Justin Klark, the latest in a line of half-Marusan Owners of sugar plantations on the island of Darianna. The other half was muddled, and Calala felt very aware that her skin was just a shade darker than the other women from the mainland. Her escort, John Kabrini, seemed unconcerned about the matter. The sugar barons of Darianna were looked down on in some circles, seen as half-native, but their wealth was vast. One of the families that could match the Klarks and Kabrinis were the Reeds, who were the Owners of one of the largest railroad corporations in the Confederation. John Reed’s daughter Eliza was near the front of the line, with the son of the Governor next to her. The two spoke to each other very little, and apparently there was some disagreement between them. It was not all that surprising: Governor Wilson was a known supporter of the Liberal Party, which was making its political success through attacks on the monopolies of the railroads and other corporations.
The crowd which applauded every debutante as they were announced was equally packed with big names and big pocketbooks. The wealthiest man in the room was likely Orren Boyle, the rotund man who owned Associated Steel. Boyle was the ultimate success story, a man who worked his way up from being a Leasing man, albeit a wealthy one, to being at the top of the Owner class. He had done it through ruthless business acumen and a willingness to play as dirty as necessary to undermine competition and protect his own business, and he reveled in the way that this upset the Owners who traced their wealth back generations to colonial gentry. Boyle was in a very one-sided conversation with Carlos d’Anconia, whose father Francisco was a major business partner of Associated Steel. There were rumors that the government of Honduragua might nationalize all or a part of the copper mines, and Orren Boyle was railing against such an infringement on business.
Observing this tirade with visible disgust were Bertram Scudder, the arbiter of the fashionable and cultured in Grand Harbor and the eastern Dominions, and the author Randolph Eubank. Scudder was a man who looked like a miser and dispensed his praise and approval with such an attitude. Orren Boyle, a classless man with the unfortunate possession of immense wealth, disgusted him not because of the many Indentured workers who died in the steel mills or choked on coal smoke from his factories but because he lacked properly blue blood. Eubank was humoring the magazine writer’s frustrations while observing the room. At one point he waved over Priscilla Raymond, a wealthy and pretty widow, but she quickly found reason to leave the conversation.
There were dress uniforms aplenty, most of them worn by the foreigners who had showed up in larger numbers than ever this year, but two of them were worn by General Henry Tilney and his younger half-brother Frederick. General Tilney wore the dress uniform of the Regular Army: he had served with distinction from a young age, though his last taste of battle had been years ago. Frederick, born to his father’s second wife and eager not to serve in the shadow of his accomplished older relation, had “run off” and joined the Navy. He was a lieutenant now, aboard the ironclad Cawthorne, and thought to be of great potential as an officer. The General and his wife were here to mingle and, to the embarrassment of Fred Tilney, to see about getting him set up with a young woman for a wife.
