There are some forms of music that did not survive the long years spent underground. Music was an optimized thing of proprietary computer software, audio libraries, and rotating spirals of human stars sculpted for purpose. Things were done based on beats and earworms and optimization, the most efficient way to insert a buying craving in the mind. In the years since the emergence music has been discovered in bits and pieces again, learned anew or allowed to simply be a warm comforting thing sung between friends over a roaring fire. 

The pipe organ - those enormous, insane contraptions with ten thousand keys, switches and pedals were too unwieldy for the old world and too complex to have been rebuilt by the new. So when you ascend the steps to the sound of a live performance of howling pipe music it is like nothing you have ever heard before. It's music performed not for financial gain, for how could a nightmarish device like this ever pay for itself? It's music not performed for beauty, for its sound is so unique and alien that no one would imagine it if they hadn't heard it first. It's music not performed to develop a useful skill, because each organ is so wildly different that talent in one is not guaranteed to be transferable. 

The only reason to learn to play the pipe organ is as a response to the pipe organ itself. This device is a peer to the mountains. One cannot respond rationally to mountains - one can only climb them.

Princess Qiu Tian climbs this one in her bathrobe.

"Chen! You made it!"

From up in the mad control dais, surrounded by switches and levers, Princess Qiu waves enthusiastically with one hand while her other keeps the spooky beat rolling. She's dripping wet, hair long and hanging down around her shoulders, a trail of damp footprints leading up the marble to her musical throne. From the spacing of the steps a deadly huntress of the ancient world might determine that she'd had to practically bound from her still-warm bath and bound up the steps to the control seat of her terrifying instrument upon sensing the arrival of visitors.

She hits a long string of intimidating notes as she stands up - and in return, reveals a surprising detail about herself. Princess Qiu is... kind of average! Not slender, not rounded, not graceful, not clumsy, not tall, not short, not the most beautiful girl in all the world and not the least. She has a body that's well exercised but doesn't ripple with muscles, that isn't particularly curvy or flat. For all the talk of her exceptionalism she doesn't really show it. She's just a kind of normal looking girl (although when she turns her head to the side and you see her face in profile, [i]oh[/i] - she [b]is[/b] handsome from that angle.)

She leans forwards on the railing around her organ, resting her chin on her hands, tail swishing above her. "And you've bought friends," she said, eyes flicking through the group - and oh, it must be added that her eyes, too, are beautiful, even from here. They're filled with so much intricate detail they're distracting and compelling in a hundred ways, any of which can distract you from how intense the gaze coming from them is. "I am absolutely [i]charmed[/i] to meet you. I am Qiu Tian, future ruler of the world and one true Princess."

She's eager, tensed, focused even though she's smiling playfully. Every part of her feels like it's on the edge of saying "But enough talk!" and pouncing across the room. She's an illustration of anticipation - but moment by moment she stays still and keeps that smile, and the faultless restraint that holds back that obvious intensity is a strangely reassuring thing. For all the sheer force that comes from meeting someone playing a pipe organ atop a pyramid of black marble there is no true [i]danger[/i] here.