Everyone's seen the raver. He speaks nonsense, but nonsense that seems on the edge of clarity, just close enough to understandable that you stop and listen for a while, trying to make out the method to his madness. He stands on the corner in great intersections, at the edge of subway entrances, and spouts words, words that feel like they mean something important even though you can't tell what. Every so often some spoilsport calls the police to remove him, and he politely stops shouting and speaks with them entirely coherently, leaving and finding somewhere else to speak, usually the next day. He is never arrested, and he never stops for long.

And somehow, something about what he's said always seems to stick with you, like your grandfather's wise advice that always came back to mind at the right moment.

No one's seen the seer. She's a blind woman, everyone agrees on that, and she always seems to arrive in time to avert disaster when one group of young idiots or angry toughs targets another, or some innocent who reminds them of someone they hate. She shouts at them that they should be ashamed of themselves, and the victims get away, and somehow the anger never turns itself on her. The urban legend everyone's heard is that she once stepped between two gangs about to draw knives and guns on each other, planted her cane in the cracks of the pavement and started reciting the Lord's Prayer, and they were too embarrassed to start a fight, or to go around her to reach the other gang. The details are different with every telling, and so everyone knows it's just a legend, and never happened.

The details are always accurate, though. She's done it five different times, after she saw a vision of a man in a bad suit doing the same in an old city somewhere else. It always works, for her.

Everyone knows the painter's name. She's been sitting in the backs of buses for decades now, taking up the whole back row with paint, charcoal, a stack of canvases, and a pair of sketchbooks. She sketches the view through the windows, paints the people who sit down before her. Sometimes she takes a break and sits in the park, but she never lets anyone see her works in progress there. Other times she brings the canvasses down into the subway for a few days instead. Ten blocks of a boulevard downtown are named after her, and a dozen of her best works are on display in City Hall and the government buildings around it. The best talent the city's ever produced, everyone is sure.

She paints the city not as it is, but as it wishes to see itself. And then she adjusts the images, softening them or making them starker or, when she is very lucky, not at all, and puts them on display to show the city how it is, and change how the people see themselves.

No one knows the piper's name. Everyone knows what he looks like, but not his face, or anything about him. If you take walks along the parkways or across the bridges, you meet him, a ghost in a hooded mask with a unicycle and a set of bagpipes. His music carries far beyond his cycling routes, and few people haven't felt it stir their heart in the evenings, reminding them of something they haven't felt in a long time, or a passing emotion they felt on the bus when they saw two strangers interact earlier that day.

He feels it all, while he's piping. Ordinary musicians play their heart out. He plays everyone's heart. It's exhausting, sometimes, to be the whole city, and have to hide himself even from himself, but it's worth it, to feed the city, emotions. Only five people understand how he shapes the city, and only one other knows about it.

The fifth of their number doesn't shape the city. He used to; in fact, he was better at it than any of them. But someone - something - realized that the way he was going, soon he wouldn't be serving the city, he'd be leading it; the city would serve him. He walked the streets and found knots of people arguing, and with a few well-placed words in passing, the argument would divert, and end the way he'd rather it - toward unity and accepting everyone, usually.

He was hard to catch; every trap seemed to be defanged by someone wandering by and then mentioning something in passing to the boy child, and then he'd choose another route and go uncaught. In the end, they had to threaten a whole city block, a trap he'd walk into with open eyes because he couldn't resist the bait.

Half the block was ruined, or died, and now he sits in the small rooms in the spire above the penthouse in the tallest building in the city, a prisoner, and can do nothing but listen.

The other four haven't met in person once since then. But they don't need to. They walk, and ride, and listen, and watch, and the city shines.