The floating world – a place where dreams comes true.

It is a place of colours and wonders, of whimsical merriment. The buildings are lit up with candy-coloured firelights, and the streets are strewn with flower petals of all fancies. Goldfish swim madly in the air, whacking anyone who wasn’t paying attention with their tails and vendors offer translucent balls of glass candy of every colour, with the promise of beautiful dreams if you’d just let one melt on your tongue.

But even with all the other wonders that filled the streets, nothing could compare with the main product which the floating world existed for – The Zinnia. The beautiful men and women known as flowers of loyalty. They sit behind the bamboo wood of the canary cages, dressed in gorgeous outfits of brightly coloured silks, staring at you with doe-like eyes and imploring you to buy them from their cage and offer them their freedom. Not for too long – maybe an hour or so, and in return, they would do anything you wanted them to.

That is… for the right price.

[A/N: Moved this over from LJ because idk... I just need a change I guess. XD There's going to be an addition to this verse that I'm writing right now, but for now I'll just be slowly transferring fics until I can get out something new. ^^

For those who haven't read this before, the world which this fic occurs in is based on the Yoshiwara district in Edo Japan, but in a futuristic era which, in my mind, has the conveniences of the modern world in candy-colours but with old world traditions. This was probably inspired by a movie ‘Sakuran’, which I watched a tiny little bit of during a holiday with friends, as well as this picture, of which I can no longer remember the artist’s name. And also probably inspired by the extremely good manga ‘Ooku’.

The meaning of the flowers are based on the Japanese interpretation called Hanakotoba. However, I chose the flower Zinnia to represent the courtesan-like characters in my fic more because they are candy-coloured rather than of its meaning.]

Review by Sehun's Review Cafe (71/100): Many thanks for the review, even though I don't agree on the comments she made about the story's grammar. Not to say that the grammar is perfect since I tend to work on the basis of semantics rather than actual grammar, which is very subjective. Still, the reviewer's entitled to her own opinion and I do agree that my sentences tend to be either too fragmented or too verbose/complicated in my taking of artistic license too far. =P Something I do need to work on.