I suppose it's fortunate that tackiness, at least certain types, doesn't bother me much.  I can look at Las Vegas and enjoy the bits of the machine that work.  It's a different aesthetic sense, I suppose.  I value usefulness, cleverness.  I don't despise the ornamental; I simply don't put it above the practical.

The wedding chapel is in its way eminently practical.  It caters to tourist expectations.  The ambience is, my experience tells me, just exactly what people with aspirations to good taste would find horrific.  I must confess to some amusement on that count.  On the other hand, I don't really approve of the architecture.  The building squats there alone with a protective moat of asphalt.  Such isolation could be a useful security mechanism, but that hardly seems applicable here.  The place is a single story box; I couldn't even find signs of a cellar.

I must admit to being disturbed at the thought of an elder Setite lairing locally.  I expect that dealing with such an individual is not beyond the resources that my current allies and I can bring to bear, but I do not expect the task to be easy.  The peculiarities of this city make the task of concealment much easier for such a creature.  There's a veneer of civilization over the darkness, a sense that this place works according to certain simple rules and no acknowledgment that those rules only work when someone has the power to enforce them.  The missing Prince had a reputation for strength, but I think his city might be more stable if he'd built it better.

Then again, I've never tried running anything bigger than my own household, and that's something I manage carelessly.  I can see that the Prince might have had reasonable motives for obscuring the politics and making allegiances difficult.  A different sort of practicality from mine, one that looks to possession and assumes that his clan will always deal from a position of strength.  Odds that always favor the house are very good for the bottom line but tend to get overturned rapidly by anyone who bothers to parse them.

The art show was truly pathetic.  Even the insults were poorly crafted.  No, not entirely, I must exempt Stephen from that.  If he had not assured me that he travels, I'd think he'd settled here to practice a very different type of art than that he claims.  There is a certain art to making others grovel, but I cannot think that working with the locals requires any particularly adept touch.  I could do it which speaks more ill of them than good of me.

At any rate, I do not see that the perpetrators of such a hideous social event could be worth cultivating.  They lack the sense to look at what is unique about Las Vegas and themselves and instead produce pathetic shadows of what works elsewhere.  I take some slight comfort in Stephen's assertion that there are some genuine artists in the community, and I hope that I'll actually have the opportunity to meet them some day.  I may have no appreciation of their art or passion, but I respect those who have found satisfaction with themselves.

I think that cultivating Severance may prove useful.   I have the impression that a little bit of attention there will go far.  I'll trade skills, rock climbing for building climbing, even discipline for discipline, to further the acquaintance.  With luck, she'll be able to tell me if any of the other Toreador have been waxing rhapsodic about a goddess or dark muse or anything of the sort.  They might be able to keep their mouths shut, but such a thing is bound to leak out into what they produce (assuming they produce anything).

Of course, when we go climbing, I will want to have George standing by somewhere near with incendiary rounds chambered.  I don't discount the possibility that Severance has been corrupted.  She has enough sense to be seen as worth cultivating by others than myself.  I think, I hope, that she has enough intelligence to be a difficult conquest for the snakes, and I believe that a Setite infiltrator wouldn't show as much wit and separation from the Toreador structure as she did.  She blended in not at all and didn't seem to have any influence.

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