Foreword dedicated to TLMafia
by numberguy
Saint-Quentin, pronounced similar to the number 51 in french (especially if one lacks the patience to insert an 'et'/& in there due to RL-busy-ness and whatnot) is a city which was renamed so after a beheaded fellow's body was found by some important blind broad and buried and forgotten and built a megachurch upon the site where someone with mad architectural skills by the name Eligius found it again.
Funny how wikipedia says "Eligius distributed the nails with which Quentin's body had been pierced, as well as some of the saint's teeth and hair. As he was a skillful goldsmith, he placed the relics in a shrine he had fashioned himself. He also rebuilt the church." like on the way out the door they're like 'oh yeah, sort of as a sidenote he built a church, but you know the stuff with the nails and teeth and hair clearly outmatters this lil' piece of masonry
Idk, maybe it was a small church that gradually got holy-shit-tier.
Like the input one might have found on TL's mafia subforum, before it got to current proportions, while it can still be ignored upon superficial intake, when sufficiently elaborated on by an informed and eloquent disambiguator however the true colors shine bright and close like a rainbow in a place like this, where the westwinds transport clouds superfast.
One can always deduce the major compass points.. like one can deduce what's worthwhile about mafia: the game-overarching meta element when creatively elaborated on within a social setting and/or its compatibility and synergy with pretty much anything else worthwhile, forming a higher whole we'll call Highwhole! for example.
When it gets really eerily interesting is when one lets the mind wonder and go resonate with the quasi-trademarked, idiosyncratic TLMafiacal flow; like I did, so I can tell. I noticed the banner is inspired by Quentin Tarantino's Reservoir Dogs, alas I applied myself and traveled to St. Quentin; and found a cornucopia of resonating hidden references: The Statler Brothers' Counting Flowers On The Wall is prominently (just moments ago having killed Vega with his own automatic, Butch listens enthusiastically to it in the car as it radio-airs, just to encounter Marcellus of all people) featured in the Tarantino's follow-up movie; tieing things together with the line "playing solitaire till dawn with a deck of 51" like the dude's room curtesy of the rug.
So I'm now thinking I could stencil Arya Stark around the places where I find these references (like the Flash one in the anchor and the reservoir beers joint) and it would no doubt be kind of cool, because Arya 51. And I'm an alien, and Donna —the girl I met when I traveled from here to Calais with 1€ and back, whose Book on Mafia this is a foreword for— is Brittish so she's an alien. And there's a hospital helipad just across the wall of the homeless shelter (so you know we get the next best thing to UFO atmosphere quite often) where I get free food, sleep, 42€ every two weeks, showers and wash my clothes gratis.. everyone here seems extraterrestrial for damn sure.
If you /in