Star Harbor Nights

Perfect stood by the door shell-shocked for a long time after Charade left. When she recovered a bit, she went straight downstairs to give Mr. Buttons a long, floppy earful.

“There are eight million stories in the naked city,” according to conventional wisdom and popular cinema. The number of stories in the Sands are as uncountable as the sands of the Sahara, but some of them are just there to drink. Still, as the events which concern us most are for the moment beyond our prying, let us briefly dip among them.

The easiest and most obvious way into the Club was through the front door. The black door, so called because it is a door that is black, leads one to a darkly elegant antechamber bathed dimly in candlelight and draped in red velvet. Not much ever happens in the entryway. If there's any particular magic in the place, it is the kind of magic which ensures nothing happens. It is a buffer zone, between the world within the Club and the worlds without.

Ray spent about an hour in the park, juggling and doing small tricks with his flame for the crowd. Hascomb Park wasn't the best place in town for busking, but it was close to home and he was in a bit of a hurry. Being close to lunch time, he was able to make a decent amount of money in a short span before he had to head back to Twistville.

At one o'clock exactly, as Perfect was taking a break from inventing to dust the living room, there came a single, soft knock on the door. If she hadn't been told to expect a guest at exactly that time, she would have missed it.

Ray woke up with no idea where he was or how he'd got there. Then he remembered his night of passion with Perfect Jones the night before, which had begun on a rooftop high above the city and ended much later back at her place, an old-fashioned four story brownstone townhouse. Everything had kind of blurred together after that, as the flames within him had stoked his excitement to greater and greater heights until finally, emotionally spent, he'd let the flames expire and collapsed into a rare state of physical exhaustion.