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[Saxon Hawke]

I recently came across this:

August 3, 2009 in Personal Files by Simon Coal

Files and Records, begin taking dictation, please.

The Festival of Carapaces was amazing.  All those little effigies burning in the night sky!  It’s a great experience, to put all your regrets and triumphs into a woven-grass spider and then light it up.  It’s very… rejuvunating.  And the food!  Dishes I haven’t had since I left home for the academy, drinks and dancing and music.  I feel like a new man.  It wasn’t quite like home, nothing is quite like home, but it was enough.

There is also a reference to it coming up made in an entry in Simon's log on July 19, 2009. However, there is no mention of it in posts from similar time periods this year. This could be because the festival is tied to the Intaki Calendar, meaning it would be almost two years between intervals on the Eve Standard calendar.

I bring it up here, it hopes that Simon (or others) might flesh this holiday out a little more.

[Bong-cha Jones]

Yes, I certainly didn't forget about it this year or anything <.<;

In brief:  It's a local festival that symbolically renews the spiritual life of the participants, timed around the annual molting of the big-ass spider things that live further out in the desert.  It's got some Mardi Gras-esque trappings, in that the old 'life' is burned in glorious spider-effigy and celebrated with festival and (mild) wild abandon.

I sort of doubt that the spider things are widespread (the idea is that Simon's county is pretty isolated geographically, so it's got some weird wildlife).  Simon's take on the Ida is also wildly bound up in the folk customs of his region, to the extent that Ida takes on the shape of religion for his community.  They're, uh, a bit odd.

I could see regional variations, post-first contact, once the communication infrastructure is built up enough that cultural exchange can start taking place between even the most widely scattered Intaki groups.  Input?