A Foreign Feeling in a Country to Match (Mage)

By the second day at Black Rock City I'd managed to train myself to stop staring, although I'd still look at things/people just as intently. Everyone was an artist and a lunatic and a mad scientist all at once. The first night we all headed down to the central area together, and I got my first good look at the Man. Up close, he looked more like an electrical tower than a person, because you couldn't really see the head from the bottom. He was covered in neon tubing, little twinkling LEDs, ribbons of reflective fabric, and luminous paint. When they lit him up after sundown, he looked like a giant carnival ride, although Median said he wasn't going to move until the last night, just before they burned him down.

After staring at the Man for a while, we wandered around some more. There was always something going on - we saw a group of girls in mylar ballet costumes dancing to what I eventually recognized as the Sugar Plum Fairy dance number from The Nutcracker, sped up and almost obscured by booming drums. Later on, Median took us to a smaller tower that looked like a silver tree and introduced us to some people he knew from a website in California. I found out that after Burning Man he was going to the University of California at Berkeley to study computer science. I was impressed - I'd always found math hard, only Median said it wasn't really like math, but more like speaking another language or a secret code. Inri and Phenex were also going to Berkeley; she was going to be taking Peace and Conflict Studies, and Phenex was planning to study Rhetoric. That kind of surprised me, because Phenex didn't really talk much, although he was always giving you looks that made you think he'd said something anyway.

Median's friends were kind of cool, although my father would have disapproved because a lot of them said they were witches, although the way they said it sounded like "witches", if that makes any sense. Like they were just calling themselves that, but it wasn't really the right word because the right word hadn't been invented yet. Fata Morgana, a tiny woman with black hair and henna tattoos all over her face and hands, took me into her tent and gave me a tarot reading. I felt a little uneasy, because fortune-telling was a sin, but she was being so nice I didn't want to say no. Her (huge!) tent was draped with black velvet inside so no light and very little noise could get in from outside, and she had small lanterns with bulbs inside that changed colour hanging at each corner. There was incense burning in a small brass pot hanging from the ceiling - it smelled like violets and cloves and made my eyes sting a little. She poured some cold, mint-flavoured tea into tiny glasses, then we sat down in the middle of the floor on big, soft pillows, and she laid the cards out on a bright yellow scarf.

In a triangle pointing towards me, Fata put down "The Heirophant," (upside-down), "The Chariot", and "The Ace of Swords". In another triangle facing herself, she put down "The Star," "The Sun," and "Judgment," which looked a lot like how Dad said the Rapture would be. She frowned and said that I'd just liberated myself from an oppressive authority figure through an act of will (which was true, although I wouldn't have gotten all that far if Median hadn't picked me up), and that I would be "Awakening to my inner light." I wasn't sure what she meant, and the incense was really starting to make my eyes sting, so I just nodded and thanked her and went back outside. I didn't notice Median go into her tent, but about fifteen minutes later he came out and as soon as he saw me he gave me another one of those big lopsided grins of his and two thumbs up.