Book 3 Chapter 38: We came. I ate. People saw me. May we leave?
Jacopo grimaced as he lifted his lion mask up from his mouth to eat. He’d wanted a rat mask, as rat’s are of course the best thing to be, but Vampa had said it didn’t fit with the image that he needed to be projecting. The food he was eating appeared to be a baby bird covered in sauce. He enjoyed the crunch of its bones as he bit down and began to chew, then took another of them. It was the best of the dishes that had been prepared for the masquerade, maybe any of them he’d been to recently. The food had been the only good thing about them.
He noticed a number of men and women in one corner snorting healthy amounts of dust off of a silver platter. In another room he’d passed earlier, he’d hear the sounds of vigorous lovemaking involving no less than seven participants. Overall, the nobility of Uptown seemed to be just as debaucherous and lusty as everyone else, which is what Dantes had told him they’d be, as had Vampa. The only difference was that they did their drugs and laid their mates on far nicer materials before they did their best to use them for all they were worth.
“Bold to eat so much of the priciest dish at the expense of the others around you,” said a man smirking behind a fox mask.
He drew a few laughs for his comment which he seemed to bask in.
Jacopo had fallen into one of the thousands of social traps that existed for the nobility of Rendhold. He decided to handle it in the same way he’d handled the other incidents.
“Shut up tiny man,” he said, grabbing another of the small birds and chewing it slowly.
That drew laughs as well, along with a few sharp intakes of breath.
“How dare you, you… mutt.”
“How dare I eat food?” he asked, drawing more laughs as he shoved yet another tasty bird into his mouth, flicking the remains of its feet at the man’s coat.