The Casa Dei Portali Piano Competition in Plumblossom Town, Synchron City. Part 1 (of 3)

an ai extravaganza story

Welcome to Plumblossom Town in Synchron City.

Where the days are sweet and peaceful and bright.

There are sasquatch in the bordering areas of town and there are a group of sasquatch living in a gothic mansion in town, but people don’t see them very often.

When people see them, they always want a picture with them.

It looks like the photographer was standing pretty far away for this one.

Some say the sasquatch that do come to town, come to visit the sweetest girl in town, she makes everyone feel good about themselves.

Some of them just like to “help” and hang out. Some of them wander off with no pants because of their trauma, but we will get into that later.

Just remember the “disassociation room” for now.

Here is one of that room’s previous memory loss victims watering a rock.

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“It’s a beautiful day in Plumblossom town!”

“It’s the opening day for the Casa Dei Portali Piano Competition and our journalists are there, to ask the people if they are excited!”

“Are you excited about the competition ma’am?”

“Oh….no. We don’t attend.  I heard there was a WITCH there one year.”

“Ma’am, will you be going to the competition?”

“Oh no, I am going to stay here and take care of my neighbor, Tilda. She gets confused”

Tilda….(below)

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*Cut to a new interview with someone in front of the mansion, Casa Pericolosa.

“It used to happen here at this beautiful cream mansion. We loved to take our pictures with it."

“Then they moved in and painted it black.”

“And now people are upset. You can see it from anywhere in town. It really changed the look of Plumblossom Town.”

“Supposedly there is a deep canal running under it. I can’t go there to look because they put up a forcefield and you can’t get through.”

“There is one kid in town who likes it, he says it makes his clothes look less drab.”         

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It is owned by the “man himself”,

Aldobrando Vincenzo.

He is a sass “man” of myth and legend.

He was spotted driving back from a recent car purchase last week, other than that, no one had seen him since they first moved in (ten years ago). Someone said he was mad because they didn’t include the all-weather mats.

There are different elements to the competition each year, however, some things stay the same.

Each year the top five contestants from last year can pick a “Pleasant Room” of the mansion to perform in. All the rest of the rooms you can choose for your performance have extremely distracting and sometimes insurmountable aspects to them which are designed purely to keep you from winning.

Here are some of the more pleasant choices:

The Hall of Radiant Sun:

Here is a room wherein the piano starts rejoicing that you are going to play it before you even play it.
The Hall of Heavenly Harmony

The room awaits, The Hall of Dark Elegance:

And with grace and ease, you shall play your very best.

It’s easy to keep winning once you have already started winning.

The Hall of Golden Light

This is the only room with a portal that nothing can come through to distract you, it’s just lovely and airy and beautiful.

The Hall of Sky

The Hall of Majestic Dawn

The Hall of Vintage Elegance

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But all the rest of the rooms are designed with DANGER, DISTRACTION, and DISSASSOCIATION in mind.

The Kappa Room:

The Kappa is a cryptid that can drag you underwater.

This is not for little ears, but the folklore of the Kappa is that it has an obsession with a mythical organ called the “shirikodama”. This organ is said to be located inside the human anus.

*Sorry, I didn’t even make that up. Look up “Kappa and Shirikodama.”(or don’t!) Better yet, don’t.

Youch.

“Things have never escalated to that point so far, it’s part of the Kappa’s contract that it will not do this”.

“However, everyone knows, it’s hard to control a cryptid.”- Judge Dante Fiero

So far the worst it has done is try to sumo wrestle someone.

Here is The Portal Demon Room:

It can lure you to the portal and trap your soul. You have to be careful what portals you go through in this place. Also, it has been known to feed on your life force while you play and take the very heart out of your music.

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There was a bad year a couple of years ago when they invited The Leos to perform.

Maybe something was in alignment that year to get them vexed beyond all recognition.

A couple of them just started chewing on the columns.

They made a wreck of the place, so they haven’t been invited back in a couple of years.

The only Leo to behave himself was Leo Bianchi. He was raised by the Bianchi family. You will hear more about them later.

The following year they invited the Cryptids and Gods to play. That was the

"Melodie delle Creature: Piano Competition for Cryptids and Gods."

One of them decided she was going to act out the entire Adam and Eve story for everyone. She burst in on another pianist while they were performing and took over the room.

Then SHE started attacking the columns……… 

One of the visiting gods jumped in, grabbed the apple from her, and leaped through another portal so she couldn’t grab him fast enough.

His friend was behind him moments later with some grapes.

It was absolute chaos.

She went on a rampage after that and started eating whole columns.

They did more damage to the place than the fish did that time they filled the whole mansion with water.

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Another cryptid went crazy chasing after her monkey

…………Who deftly escaped into a portal in the next room,

Only to find himself in the wrong room AGAIN!

That was a mess, poor friend.

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Baga Yaga showed up that year, but she was invisible. Baba Yaga is a witch.

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Sometimes the creatures that attend these competitions are scarier than the rooms themselves.

*The monkey family sued the competition by the way. There are a lot of lawsuits.

This guy is suing because they didn’t have a large enough piano to accommodate his great size.

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There is also

The Shisha Room

The Shisha can do psychic manipulation. It can test your integrity and your courage and sometimes, it can control the elements.

”The worst thing it has done so far is to fill someone’s piano with water, then dry it out with wind, and set it on fire.” - Judge Dante Fiero

The Room of the All-Seeing Eye:

This room is just very distracting. People report having migraines after trying to play in here. Some people have lost some of their eyesight. “It’s best not to stare directly into the sun while playing, it says so in the waiver” -Aldobrando Vincenzo

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This LOOKS like a pleasant room, but random people attending the event get to sit in those chairs and they just sit and talk amongst themselves the entire time that you are playing. Our hosts are always sure to give these congregants icey drinks, soup to slurp, and candy wrappers.

The Congregation Room

This room also looks and sounds deceptively pleasant. AS LONG AS THE BUTTERFLY is happy, everyone will remain happy. But if he doesn’t like your music, he will transform. You don’t want to see that happen.

Butterfly Hall

This is The Room of Foreboding and Regret.

*Usually, it is not recommended that you try playing in there if you are already suffering from depression. It’s a room that forces your shadow work upon you.

The Humid Room

The worst that can happen here is a heat-related illness, respiratory issues, dehydration, cardiovascular strain (in the worst cases), exacerbation of existing health conditions, or electrolyte imbalance. *unless of course that was the year they decided to send in the “vapors”

The Hall of Suspended Watch

That’s a creepy one. The sasquatch just levitates and watches you play the whole time.

It’s a popular choice because it’s less dangerous, so far. If the Sass is happy, everyone is happy; like The Butterfly Room.

A strangely popular choice for many is

The Disassociation Room:

Here you can experience emotional detachment. The image of what you wish to portray yourself as is projected on the wall. That’s why a lot of people choose this room. They wish to be other than they are and they wish to play other than they play. One of the drawbacks though is that it can cause memory loss.

We interviewed Aldobrando Vincenzo about this room and he said:

“And THAT’S why we have THIS PICTURE:

…………From last year’s photo shoot with the media.”

“UNCLE Valentino….”

“He and his memory problems, in front of a tapestry of our great, great, great, great, great grandpa and his ‘legit bat’.”

“We don’t like to brag.”

“This is not something that was supposed to be shared – he forgot.”

“Tread carefully with the memory loss. We recommend you do not perform in that room more than once, it’s in the waiver.”

And finally, here is the

Hall of Spiraling And Re-Configuration

It’s really hard to concentrate with the floor spiraling around you in reaction to your music. A sort of vortex is created which makes very technical playing nearly impossible. Almost everything becomes a sort of fractured fugue.

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If you have to choose a distracting or scary room, the worse it is, the more credit the judges will give you when they are taking your performance into consideration.

Judge Dante Fiero

Judge Giovanni Moretti

Judge Legna Asiatica *“doesn’t give a CRAP”, that’s her tagline.

Judge Serenata Delfino

“We haven’t been able to name a winner for two years so the piles of gold have grown. This year’s winner takes all. It’s high stakes”, -Judge Serenata Delfino.

When asked why Judge Enzo De Luca wouldn’t be there this year, she said, “Oh, he hopes to be back next year. He was having some memory issues.”
*He loved to disassociate and become a Minotaur too much.

We will also be missing Judge Jean Pierre Rêveur as a judge this year because of his memory issues as well. We will explain that to you in just a bit.

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Two years ago a young girl popped into existence from another realm right in the middle of the competition.

She played so beautifully that angels and flowers and creatures and children were born and climbed out of the piano.

Her innovations in the improv section were also a delight

Then she disappeared into another portal never to be seen again!

The year prior they had a guest named Siobhan Russo.

She is a world-renowned Irish / Italian pianist.

She performed three different pieces

and enchanted everyone with each piece.

She won the competition but they couldn’t tell her she won either. She was offered the chance to be the Ambassador of her very own micronation on a new planet and she disappeared before they could let her know. She didn’t even claim any of her prizes! Some people say she performs for the love of the music alone. That is believable.

Salvatore Vincenzo, Aldobrando’s brother, remembers dancing with her before she left.

He felt so bad after she was gone, that he went out and got himself a new car, a new hairdo, and had his leg hair shaved down a little.

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Three years ago, the last winner to lay claim to the prizes was Enoch Harewood. It was a surprise because Enoch had the “JUICE”, but no one realized that rabbits are immune to that. It only affected his clothes, the surrounding walls, and his piano.

This year they had the JUICE again!

Juice, the great equalizer:

They sent sleepy gas out into The Humid Room one year, another year they sedated people through vapors, they have also used hypnotism and mind control before, but they had never put hallucinogens into the juice in the break area. The year Enoch had the juice it was only served in the room he was playing in and in the Disassociation Room. This year, it was in the waiting area for EVERYONE. There was a lot of gold on the line.

Many individuals who came to play that year got knocked out of the running right away by “The Juice”.

This guy just sat there and imagined a tiny version of himself playing and he never played a single note!

Juiced:

So back to Judge Jean Pierre Rêveur, we mentioned he was having memory problems and could not judge this year’s competition. Jean Pierre decided that he could drink the juice. He drank juice his whole life. He knew it was spiked, just not HOW spiked.

He had never “had a problem” with any juice according to him. He started at an early age.

He was running on a bet with his brother that if you disassociated but then chose to project yourSELF up onto the wall, you would not lose your memory, and he thought he was immune to the juice…..so….

Unfortunately, he was wrong about that.

The juice did affect him, it wasn’t NORMAL or even MILDly spiked juice. He felt like a tiny man looking up at himself and the world was on fire. He jumped through the portal that was opened in the room he was in and spent a month or two popping in and out of different rooms.

He looked fabulous whenever he was spotted, but no one could ever seem to stop him long enough to talk to him.

They had been trying to recover him for his brother Frascois Rêveur, so he could take him home.

They finally found him at the end of the stairs, just a couple of weeks ago

Let this be a message to anyone who decides to try the dissassociation room, on “the juice”. It can have ongoing ramifications on your life.

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Here are some more unfortunate contestants who fell prey to “The Juice”:

Juiced:

Juiced:

Nia Juma was smart and stuck with the water:

And so did her agent.

Juiced:

Juiced:

Juiced:

Juiced:

Juiced:

Juiced:

Juiced:

Juiced:

Our friend the Komodo dragon had some juice, unfortunately.

He arrived so hopeful, “Did someone order a cute little baby komodo?”

He had a drink, and by the time he reached the stairs to the room where he was meant to perform he was thinking, “Oh my GOSH! There was something in that juice!”

He already felt like he was changing, he couldn’t describe it.

As he began to play he started to feel like he was morphing and shrinking and things were flying around the room…..

He just kept playing and playing for his life no matter how he felt.

At one point he was convinced that his piano had disappeared completely

He even imagined himself as a different kind of lizard altogether. Now that was freaky.

When he started to feel a little more like himself again, he began to navigate his way back to the piano.

Of course, everything he played was terrible so as soon as he was done flapping around the room incoherently, they took him to a nice recovery area for a nap.

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……………………..See the continuation of The Casa Dei Portali Piano Competition in Plumblossom Town, Synchron City……….part 2….

*Synchron City was so coined by

Tereza Coraggio

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