Flower Clowns

## In the Spirit Realm

A Flower Clown is a spirit-realm being which sometimes also exists in the earth-realm. Like other spirit-realm creatures, it looks sort of like a regular (bird) person, but also very different, with a feather-ish cloak and strange tent-like wings which it uses to walk. It is about twice the size of a regular person, and the feather-ish of its wings is because they are made of layers of flower petals.

When a Flower Clown is nearby, the scent of heavy flowers fills the air even when they're out of season. Like other spirit-realm creatures, it is not actively malevolent but it is very dangerous; it's best not to go looking for it if you smell its approach. If you *see* the Flower Clown, it becomes aware of you; if you anger or frighten it, terrible things will happen. (Old uncles have long lists of behaviors that bother clowns, to warn the little nestlings...)

Some have had less terrible interactions with Flower Clowns: a very common tale is of a traveler sighting one, a few seconds of mutual looking-at ensuing, and then the clown disappears and the mortal discovers it's very nearly the following dawn. One famous story is of a lost boatman slowly led back toward familiar mud-paths, only to find his village has moved on in their migration without him in the months or years that he's been missing.

A solitary out-of-season blossom found in the forest is a physical sign of the recent passing of a Flower Clown, and since it's full of spirit-realm power without any of the danger of encountering the Flower Clown directly, such a flower is extremely good luck.

## In the Earth Realm

On the Night of Flowers, four to six people dress up to embody Flower Clowns for the ritual that opens the festival. The Flower Clown costume consists of four stilts to be held in the person's hands and feet, a large lightweight wickerwork-based mask/headpiece, and a cloak. The stilts are custom made for each performer and the mask gets broken often enough that it's replaced every couple of years; each cloak is a work of art, a clan heirloom, and a sacred treasure kept safe in the priest-house storeroom. The cloak is made of feathers moulted from the members of a specific clan, sorted by color and chosen for the crafting and upkeep of this piece; the feathers are arranged to look like flowers and blooms. A given cloak will tend to have flowers of a given color or small set of colors, for aesthetics and influenced by the practicalities of being made from the feathers of a group of related individuals who probably have similar coloration and markings in common.

After their symbolic retreat from the fire-lighting part of the festival, the Flower Clown actors have their costume feather cloaks removed by Utanji initiates who will then go store these heirlooms. The Flower Clowns then don makeup and clothing which preserve the colors they'd worn with the full costume on - heavily stylized makeup, very outlandish bird markings painted on human-looking faces, which makes it clear that they are still meant to be Flower Clowns in a new subversive people-shaped form. In this mode they are loaded up with flower necklaces and sent out to distribute them to people for good luck.

It's good luck, by the way, to fuck a Flower Clown on this night. There are weird dirty stories about accidentally fucking an actual spirit-realm Flower Clown instead of the hot neighbor who was wearing the costume earlier

out-of-universe knowledge: it sort of roughly resembles a Quetzalcoatlus.