Mono Mondays: Fireworks
On Mondays, we like to support our resident artist, Mono! They're an up-and-coming scribbler of things dark and weird, and we consider ourselves lucky to have leeched onto— er, formed a mutually beneficial relationship with them. You can watch Mono hard at work creating various pieces on their YouTube channel. For those who don't feel like watching digital paint getting splashed around, we'll be showcasing a different piece of theirs right here every Monday.
This week's piece is the result of a barge fire.
It looked something like this.
Mono attended a festival over the weekend, and one of the local highlights was a fireworks show, launched from a barge a safe distance out on the open water. Thing is, this festival is an annual one, and somehow, for the past several years in a row, one of the highlights of said fireworks show has been when the barge inevitably catches on fire. Whether this is because the fireworks operator is inept, the sheer number of explosions guarantees a fire, or, as Mono suspected, they've begun setting the barge on fire as part of the show, the result is the same: before the end of the show, one end of the barge gets enveloped in a ball of flame, and the gathered crowd duly cheers.
From that image came this week's work.
This pyrotechnic display was tied into the lore by explaining that the students of the imperial magic academies, as part of the graduation ceremony, put on a show. As in our world, they're out on a boat to keep the chances of Bad Things™ happening down. Unlike our world, the show is graded, which puts a bit more pressure on the prospective magicians. And, circling back, students deal with that pressure in ways that are occasionally unusual. For example, one of the academies has an unofficial tradition of "screwing up" at one point during the show, briefly bathing the boat in flames. Allegedly, the first time it happened was indeed an accident, but the student who had fouled up their mana control tried so desperately to convince everyone that he meant to almost kill everyone that, in his "honor," the accident gets replicated every year.
Last but not least, you may notice something about this picture. It isn't a picture of the light show. It's a picture of a poster advertising the light show. Aside from the words at the top of the picture, your clue is that the "artist" who made the poster signed their work.