People — Velinia

Ten million — the second smallest bloc, and the one that controls the Mar do Coro. Central archipelago, 412 bridges, and a secret tribunal.

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1. The body

Average 166 cm. Patriciate at 170, Arsenal and fishing at 164. A spread of six centimetres — the second narrowest on the continent, behind Kantonal.

Fish every day, white bread, little meat from the land, and a city where nobody walks more than twenty minutes because there is nowhere further to go. Bodies compact and hard-wearing, without the extremes of Brytonia or the height of the north.

Marks

• The bridge leg. Velinia climbs and descends 412 bridges. A Velinian of sixty has the calves of an athlete and ruined knees, and one is recognised by the way he comes down a staircase in any city on the continent.
• Early cataract — glare off water, as in Meridia.
• Lagoon lung. Salt air, humid and permanent. Low incidence of tuberculosis, high of rheumatism. It is the bloc where people die in pain and not coughing.
• The Arsenal hand — the shipyard worker: fingers with phalanges broken and badly set, nearly all of them. The Arsenal of Saint Velino has not recorded a minor accident in two hundred years.

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2. Dress

• Patriciate — Venetian-Victorian: dark frock coat, costly cloth without display, and the mask on ceremonial occasions.
• Sailors and workers — practical, maritime, blue and undyed.
• Patrician women — dark dress, discreet jewel, veil. Velinia is the least ornamented elite of the mediterranean south, and it is deliberate.

The mask — canon of identity

Four canonical masks: Plague Doctor, Bauta, Volto, Moretta. Worn at Carnival, and not only there.