Orelyan Street is a street in name only.  Bearing the name of a favored duke to the crown, the main drag through the fort-dependent city of Quinza is paved with pulverized shell and lined with less than two dozen tall-framed structures, their foundations propped on four-foot stilts to keep them above tidal surge and flash floods.  Daily, it bears the weight of foot-traffic for ships' crews and those trying to symbiotically survive on them, the even clip of heat-wearied soldiers' matched boot-steps, the piss of burro-drawn wagons and the scratches of small scavenging reptiles.  Here, a butcher boasts smoked alligator tail, "mellowed in goat's milk" for improved flavor.  Across the way, that same gator's hide is being tanned in back of a leather-goods and dry goods store.  Further down in the shade of a sprawling banyan, half-naked youths with sun-browned skin are making great gladiatorial sport with a few slats of bark containing a land-crab and a spur-heeled toad.<br/><br/>Heat rises palpably, and the daily rain is yet to come. Heat lightning occasionally ripples through the bruised and semi-conscious clouds that oppress the sky, and the merchant vessels visible at the end of the street nestle into the broad piers to furl their sails and suckle this land's oil and trade-able game.  A monkish cleric of some monastic order or another drags his dogcart of smoky red wine bottles, casks, and kegs-- his bare feet and cart's wheels are black with the ash-rich soils of the insanely jagged hills where grapes grow in freakish terraces, and his wiry old frame moves with the steady determination of discipline and familiarity.<br/><br/>A soft rumble of thunder teases the populace... after a few days of this heat, the whores go to half-price because no one wants to sweat more than they already have.  Conversely, the prices tend to leap in an afternoon rain, when the taverns open their heavy wooden shutters to fill their sand-mortared structures with cool breezes and it's no rare thing to see the denizens of this swampy lowland standing in that rain, staring up in the sky to where the steam of the undersea volcanoes meets the downpouring black clouds with ripples of wild lightning that speak of the gods' own revelry.<br/><br/>This is Quinza, and you are here.