Sami's mansion loomed over the hilltop like a forgotten monarch; an immense, 150-year-old Georgian-style monolith carved from weathered limestone and pride. Sami's great-grandmother had built this place out of love for 17th century Great-Britain history and aesthetics. When this grand estate was new, the building was elegant and sleek, but now after 150 years of poor maintenance and neglect it had become dilapidated and decayed. It couldn't be helped; this mansion is just one of many in a big extended family, who have all inherited pieces over the decades.
Sami descended from the main lineage, a bloodline that went all the way back to a particular progenitor who accumulated the vast wealth to its illustrious level that made the family name known to most people in the world: Richenauer. Sami Richenauer was the youngest of five siblings, the most spoiled by her parents and therefore the most care-free of them all.
She was a merry and happy girl with confidence consolidated with a strong glue of swagger; she often wore a white tank tee, her fashionable silver chains hanging above it; perfectly visible on the fresh-paper white, then for pants she preferred baggy cargo trousers, intentional worn looking, and lastly her boots were almost always sneakers, sometimes combat boots.
Her whole look radiated fabulous, ice-cool fashion, on the second up to date. There was probably no person who was so hip and stylish her— at least not in this city....
This was not someone you expected to be a descend of the Lady Fredegund Richenauer, she who bequeathed and bestowed her offspring wealth and luxury for multiple generations now; this woman was one of those people who flourished after the Mechanical Repression, when robots and machines decided on everything concerning human matters, leading to the Sweet Slavery and the Fall of Intellect, a fate proud humans like the Lady Fredegund refused to accept; she and her fellow companions - all human-naturalist - staged a coup to overthrow the rule of calculated tyranny, and restored human self-determination; a world of cruel meritocracy, fierce competition and an uneven accumulation of wealth and resources.
This world was befitting for ambitious people like the Lady Fredegund; this world tickled her senses and stroked her ego perfectly. Cunning, devious, cold and power-seeking as she was, and now free from the mechanical fixed-life, she and her companions established in the following decades a republic spanning multiple planets, each celestial body having its own elective council.
Weapons were forbidden. Everywhere. Weapons and war were the reasons the Mechanical Repression started in the first place; a third world war had thrown the world in disorder and despair, only after fifty long years the planet earth had recovered its strength and regained its stable position once again, thereafter, deciding - all leftovers unanimous – for a rule of Mechanical Repression; repressing those particular human instincts constantly coercing the restless mind into struggle and strife with each other in an endless evolutionary clash for propagating.
Lady Fredegund and her companions brought that struggle back; in her opinion that struggle was something beautiful, something that must remain and must be cherished.
Well, a few generations later her offspring enjoyed full freedom in a world unequal on a high mountain of money. Lady Fredegund was a Machiavellian, a cold-hearted businesswoman and politician, in contrast, Sami was not. Sami was generous and whole-souled; her heart was warm. She liked pleasure and enjoyed the freedom of wealth to its fullest, like how she now set up an amazing party at her mansion— literally her mansion; it was for her only and she lived here alone with a household of two maids and one butler, given to her after her older sister moved to an ever fancier mansion in an even more metropolitan area.
The place where Sami lives is on planet Earth. The city of Ardenburg is located where the country of Tunisia once was. Now after centuries of climate change - with the most dramatic effect being the standstill of the AMOC, which had left all of Northern Europe in a terrible veil of cold and unliveability - the countries of Northern Europe had chosen to join forces and form the Confederation of the Northern Star; this federation of states had moved by force - in one of the largest migrations ever - to the now pleasant and fertile lands of North Africa after the wave of cold, crop failures, hunger and unliveability as a result of the AMOC collapse had completely overblown northern Europe in a vast landscape of constant ice and snow— the local government had been driven out, the local population subdued and chased away like how once the Vandals did centuries earlier.
The capital of this new North African Empire became Neo Carthage, a huge intergalactic city, located on the same spot where the Phoenician city itself once was. Ardenburg - itself a huge city with its own rocket launch field - lies fifty kilometres to the right of Neo Cartago; the two cities are almost connected; so large, densely populated and spacious they are.
For many young people, Neo Carthage and Ardenburg were two great colossuses with an enormous, almost magnetic force of attraction, because almost nowhere on earth - or anywhere else in the universe - did people live so modernly and in such high standards of living; at every corner there was a hip café serving lab-grown delicacies, every street overgrown in trendy clothing shops, buildings surrounded by flowers, trees, green ivy and vertically grown crops. Public parks were wide and everywhere, some even floated on sky platforms, accessible by gravity lifts. Human life blended seamlessly with machine rhythm in a sublime synchronisation of the old world of verdant nature and the new world of glorious progression. Here, freedom and self-determination were holy.
And in this environment people like Sami - metropolitan urbanites with a tremendous fashion style and happy, relaxed lifestyle - thrived and flourished. Throwing parties was something integral in this lavish cocoon, it was like a piece of decoration in a life of pleasure-seeking....
Sami's party wasn't just a blowout for the sake of chaos and fun, it was a celebration, her way of marking the end of one chapter and the beginning of another. After surviving the warped pressure cooker of Ardenburg-Greenhill High, she was officially graduating. But more than that, she had just been accepted into the University of Ardenburg's elite Fashion Design program— one of the most prestigious in the universe.
Sami was proud and in high spirits. The guest list was generous; everyone from every class in the senior year was invited, added with some special friends and people she knew well— one of them Jake.
The centrepiece of the night is the karaoke stage (the altar where Darcy hopes Jake's haughty pride will be sacrificed and his fall celebrated), a hastily assembled wooden platform lit by multi-coloured floodlights and hung with string lights, positioned directly beneath the ivy-draped second-floor balcony.
Sami was not fond of expensive expenses on big name DJs for the music; on all her parties the karaoke stage and people singing the songs they like stood centre— when it comes to pleasure, Sami is very reserved, for her things are most fun when everything is kept down to earth and as simple as possible; status and excessive attention were not so important to her, pleasure always came first.
In the pool house - dimly lit and echoing with music - Sami has set up a "confession booth" for partygoers to spill secrets on video for laughs.
The mansion has many outbuildings and side wings, and to take on so many guests - 311people in total - Sami has made all rooms on the first floor open for accession. In these many big rooms, there will be extravagant food tables on which a diverse range of food will be presented deliciously. Of course, there will remain enough space for dancing and chilling.
This party will be a perfect ending to an era and an usher in a new, fresher and even more wonderful era!