Enigmarch 2023: Day 16

[tahnan]

We're back, baby! And yes, by "back" I mean "Day 15 still isn't done" and "Day 16 is being posted on March 18", but this is a marathon, not a sprint.

PDF; text below. You can check your answer here.

Enigmarch, Day 16: Masquerade Ball

If you're solving this after March: first, thank you for even coming back and finding these puzzles, and second, go ahead and skip the rest of this paragraph, and rest assured that everything has been normal all month. Are they gone? OK, good, so for those following along live: first, thank you for your dedication, and second, things got difficult this week. I have a puzzle I really want to write for Day 15 ("room"), and it's way outside my comfort zone—my comfort zone being "lists of clues"—but that's part of why I'm committed to finishing it. A lot of my puzzle attention has also gone to Panda Magazine testsolving. But I'm going to try to catch up, so here we go.

Everyone back? Awesome. Welcome to the masquerade ball for Day 16, whose prompt is MASK; and welcome to my comfort zone, aka "lists of clues". Twelve attendees of a masquerade ball are making the listed disguises; they just need to make some obvious alterations to the provided materials. Careful examination of the masks should reveal the ball's (late) honoree, bearing in mind that even for an expert mask-maker, there's a good chance one side of the mask will be more attractive than the other.

Disguises

1. Collections of poker chips (or, if you're a vampire in Sunnydale, their contents)
2. Less stable, in a creaking, held-together-with-bent-nails kind of way
3. Genre for space operas
4. Emergency
5. Anaïs Nin or Samuel Pepys, notably
6. Small-sized, as a car, Apple product, or skirt, among other things
7. Furious to the point of paleness
8. Like long cylinders of mozzarella, vis-à-vis other cheeses
9. One way to make things stop squeaking
10. As sober as a judge, for instance
11. Long sex organ (in plants! Enigmarch is a family event!)
12. Rain clouds

Materials to be altered

• Adored
• Elongated, in a way
• Features of waves, heraldry, and macaroni penguins
• Ma, Pa, electric, and tea, among others
• Most precious
• Peach, lavender, or baby blue, say
• Pooh-pooh
• Quite a lot
• Removes sensation
• Second word in the title of a 2023 Keira Knightley/Carrie Coon movie
• Target of the RICO Act
• You might get a free one at a grocery store