Cloud City

Cloud City is a populated halfling city inhabiting a single cloudscraper tree. It is also the seat, or capital, of the Bristlecone Alliance.

[Some questions to be answered:

• Is the Bristlecone Alliance aligned with Standing Stone?
• If so, does Standing Stone still exist?
• Regardless, does Cloud City bear any resemblance and/or connection to bristlecones?

]

Characteristics of Cloud City:

Cultural Expression in Public:

• Territorial and competitive busking. Widely seen as a place for small-town musicians and carny-like performers (contortionists, jugglers, temporary tattoo art on ears) to make names for themselves in the wider halfling world.
• Match Moult: a debutant ceremony when you're eligible for getting groved-up. Can happen again later in life. In rural places, it's a festival within the place of power at a specified time of year. Here in the city you walk around and look flashy, any time of the year. So individualistic! Youth invite people to their private party while walking around, and it's an honor to be invited.
• The Crystalling: during the cold time of the year, salt that has been stockpiled is brought to decorate the branches and over-flavor the food; sometimes the festival is blessed with snow; any classically salty food is likely served
• Whistling ear prosthetics and ornaments for all your dive tower, bird acrobatics, and general daredevilry needs. Wooden fluting, or jingling chimes, or things like that to produce audio and visual effects when you fall.
• The Great Falling: A festival celebrating the dropping of seeds (fertility rite) including races... errm... down!
• Needler's Crotch: An area of town with several prominent peircing and tattoo parlors. Once a religious practice, now increasingly secular.

Halfling-made Features and landmarks:

• Ancient giant burl halfling cemetery with proto-halfling skeletons; superstitions surround this place.
• Free Reign Bar: bar and stable where you can house your Best Friend. Wide-ranging gang/grove of daredevils and smugglers hang out here. Akin to a small number of airplanes maintained for crime reasons
• Simian Post DiveTower: a shortcut down to the lower layers
• Moss Cloud Pens: a place where carnivorous moss cloud are kept until needed for defense
• The Flaming Cone Mall: a central mall for trade and commerce. Deals are consummated by throwing some symbol of relevance into a flaming cauldron. This is where coned bezants are pressed (minted).
• The Flight Inn: an inn nestled nearby, and above, the Flaming Cone Mall. A large message board stands outside. The Flight is a central location for getting and sharing information.

Someone Worth Meeting:

• Zundra: grizzly and buff dragongrown acrobat & juggler, a Cloud City fixture and highly respected among buskers, who can be sought out to resolve territory disputes.
• Xagnee Nightfoot: This chaosgrown daredevil is darkly witty, and seeking worthy companions for the most amusingly dangerous pastimes. Clad in rider's attire or a wingsuit, and earlobes alluringly peeking out from beneath neer engraved whistling ear prosthetics. Any character who might be attracted to nee and isn't in a committed grove needs to make a WIS save to not be a little bit in love with nee until the sun next rises.
• Mawlistener: a Dreamgrown who resides deep in the city meditating. Of unknown age, feels the movement of the forest through a learned or inherited talent.
• Clionee Flibbins: second best busker at just about anything, if you please. Book now for all your Match Moult needs.
• Cedar: the current "leader" of the thieves/spy/urchins guild. Unassuming and nondescript, Cedar is, obviously, hard to find and harder to pin down but they have a wealth of knowledge on what's happening in the city. Since this name is also the title it has no gender suffix. Whatever their name was before Cedar, none alive can tell. Their ears are perpetually covered by a unassuming cover. Intentionally non-quadranary.
• Michael Abramson: Visiting biologist and a Hu-man. Extremely sick, frequently food poisoned, constantly imperiled. Who let him in here again?
• Emidra Feathervein: Proprietor of The Flight Inn. Flee is a retired Best Friend racer. When not running the Inn, Emidra raises the finest Best Friends in Cloud City. There are always several flyers ready to hand perched along the bar in the great room of the inn.

This tree species specifically:

invasive scampering mammal, scary to halflings (brought on an Andorith airship by accident)

Miscellany:

• Religious practices: ritual that binds you into the Ancentrial Braids of your Grovemates
• Halflings hang glide
• Ear-otica