Book Tour: The Heart of Curiosity

Welcome to Versia! City of the Arts! The home of the biggest, brightest theaters in all of the Republic! 

The city of Versia is built around the arts. The citizens live and breathe them, and theater folk are held in high regard. Dancers, singers, actors, and showmen of all sorts flock to Versia to make their names. Some end up as waiters, shopgirls, and factory workers in the less flashy districts of the city, but for many they find their dreams in the Theater District in the heart of Versia. 

While many smaller venues exist throughout the city, the most famous and esteemed is The Curiosity, a grand old building that has stood at the center of the city for over a century. Visionary Jandro Curio, a man from a circus family, was one of the first to realize that static locations could be just as successful as traveling shows and allow for far grander displays. Partnering with, and later marrying, a young inventor named Lexia Dalhart, he built the grandest theater with a great stage and an auditorium that could seat twelve hundred patrons (later expanded upon with the addition of a balcony and additional box seats). Though many entrepreneurs have followed in Curio’s footsteps, opening various venues in what we now call the Theater District, surrounding The Curiosity as well as scattered throughout the city, The Curiosity is the gem in the city’s well-spangled crown. 

Like any establishment with a long history, The Curiosity has gathered its share of rumors and legends surrounding it. These range from the harmless (that the theater contains secret passages and hidden rooms), to the exciting (such as the persistent but fanciful story regarding a treasure secreted within the old structure), to the downright morbid (a gruesome story that resurfaces every few decades that the current propmaster is switching out bits and pieces of his flesh and blood dancers with mechanical “improvements”). However, in spite of this nonsense, the theater remains a shining beacon of the arts that anyone would be happy to visit.