THE NORM is a tiny bubble of reality floating in the PSYCHODARKNESS, an endless sea of hungry non-existence, teeming with grim and terrible THINGS which swim through the Midnight of the Soul.
800 years ago, the Norm was Liberated from THE LIMINALS, massive hyper-genius psychic oozes, who had enslaved all other life on the face of existence.
20 years ago, this part of the Norm, the ULTRANOR ARCHIPELAGO, secured its independence from the continent of SUPRANOR in an explosion of bloody violence.
Ultranor lies near THE BOUNDARY, the freezing-cold wall of thought-stuff which keeps the PSYCHODARKNESS out.
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THE GENERAL IDEA
IDYAMAT is the second city of Ultranor, after Besomar, the capital. It lies on the inner coast of Utvox, the largest, farthest and coldest of the islands.
On the southern coast, there is a bubble of incongruous heat - the Idyamat-Utvox Climate Anomaly, or IUCA for short.
Fields of barley, and white tents where crickets are mashed for their protein, bask in soupy heat. In the woods, prefab cabins moulder next to lost shrines of the Pre-Liberation Era.
Blankets of dieselly sauna-fog roll across the valley from 7AM to NOON, as the anomaly fluctuates and boils the sea. The neon signs hiss.
Beyond the valley, a ring of ancient pine-trees, then of granite cliffs, then of solid ice, and then, beyond that, the dead gravel of greater Utvox. The road leading out of town has a warning sign: STOP AND AFFIX SNOW CHAINS.
As soon as you pass the boundary of the anomaly, temperatures plummet to -20°. Bring a parka. And some cigarettes.
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THE SHAPE OF THE CITY…
A bit like a hand.
The index and middle fingers form THE DOCKS, while the ring and pinky fingers make up SHALESIDE. The hand’s thumb is BIRCHEN TERRACES, the nice part of town (where the mayor lives).
Beyond the city, the forearm where the underground river surfaces is the AGRI-DISTRICT, where the barley sways and the crickets are mashed.
To the forearm’s east, the OLD FOREST, a pinewood riven by old stone walls - which have been standing since before the Liberation.
Finally, above the fields to the west, THE UPPER VALLEY, the largest area of undeveloped land, encompassing the centre of the anomaly and all of Idyamat’s hinterlands. Mystery lurks there.
+MAZUT+
…AND WHERE YOU FIT INTO IT
The government in Besomar, once every decade, sends out public servants with a decently sized grant and a small but reliable ocean-crossing boat.
These people are called Auditors, and it is their job to, basically, be nosy fucking shits. Poke around, flash badges, smile broadly, make stupid jokes with dockworkers and local government luminaries alike.
And then write it all down and report it on an encrypted radio channel.
Everyone hates Auditors, unless they think hey're being nosy for them.
+MAZUT+
THE DOCKS
A Local: Frederick Max
The city-state of Vresmar is nu-future, high-corruption, big business. Fredi here claims to be Vresian - so why’s he out here, in dogshit nowhere?
He’s got the accent. He’s wearing fashion from years back, a baby-blue knitwear suit that keeps him just sweaty enough to look awful.
His papers are out of order, and he brings a locked briefcase everywhere. He says everything in a suspicious manner, he stands with his hand over any drink he gets, and he never shares cigarettes.
Fredi loves deals, to a pathological extent. He’s always looking to get a cut, make a buck, waste his money, go dancing, you know - Businessman Things.
1d4 Possible Secrets for Fredi:
Fredi is a spy for the International Balances Union, the hyper-capitalist super-governmental organisation in charge of Supranor.
Fredi’s briefcase contains a high-power bomb he stole from a lab in Vresmar. A corporate kill-squad wants it back.
Fredi’s briefcase contains a magnetic tape, upon which is the last remnants of a secret prototype aero-vessel from the Insula Avis. The tape’s worth $1,000,000. Shame he doesn’t have a tape reader - can he borrow yours?
He’s a Liminal, a 500-pound hyper-intelligent ooze, wearing human skin like an ill-fitting suit. He never steps on scales or fragile things, and doesn’t get most human customs. He’s looking for old ruins from the ancient Liminal civilization in the Upper Valley.
A Place to Waste your Money: Galya’s Bar
A fucking edifice, a filthy breezeblock building down on the waterfront, crowned with hissing neon signs and advertising billboards.
People primarily come here to kill neurons. It’s not really a social bar, so much as an anti-cognitive bar. The vodka is cheap, and bathtub strength.
The regulars are all sodden alcoholics and depressed dockworkers. People with fascinating, incredible life-stories that you’re never going to hear, because they’re face-down on a plastic table in a pool of rum and spew.
Galya herself is a stout, scowling figure. She’s the neutral ground, the city arbitrator - the mayor in people’s hearts, if not on the election roll. There’s a big list of photos with red Xs over them, labelled “BARRED LIST”, and right next to that, there’s a shotgun on the wall. She takes no shit. None at all. Keep that in mind.
She keeps her dead uncle in the basement. Herman was a hard worker, but a caligination at the Chogorr Field made him, first sick, then dead, then once again quite terribly alive. He’s mostly sludge now. She hears him slithering around, down in the pipes under the bar. He croons away, at night, singing about the moon and the Insula Avis.
A Faction to Piss Off: The Utvox National Party
Utvox isn’t significantly different from Besomar, at least in terms of culture - it’s generally thought of as an adjunct to the capitol, the benchmark for comparison with the more far-flung parts of Ultranor, like Yulmoth and Tchnika.
Except if you ask these jagoffs.
These guys (who are, let’s be frank, Actual Fucking Fascists), think that Utvox is the only real part of Ultranor (the rest are, of course, slaves to corporate interests back in Supranor).
They hang around in their clubhouse on the water, a former shipping warehouse converted into a draughty pub. The place smells of mazut, and the sweat of inadequates. They like to shout at ships if they’ve got the “wrong” flag on them.
The other locals hope they pick the wrong fight, someday soon.
Who’s in charge?
The leader of this miserable little political fistula is Dries Noa, a runny-nosed middle-management clerk working for the office of Fraans Shipping and Solutions on Pillbug Street. He affects a jocular workingclassness, but it’s easy to see through that to a general classlessness.
Dries is exactly that type - remember, if you object to what he just said - “it’s a joke.”
What are their assets?
Numbers
A Small Fleet of Civilian and Fishing Vessels
Smuggled Old Model Guns
What do they want?
Utvoxan Independence
Dries Noa as Mayor of Idyamat
To Kill a Coupla Commies
A Place to Get in Trouble: Volto-Mare Shipping
Volto-Mare is the biggest company in the world, bar none. They have reach even here, far from their monolithic office complex in Mese. The Volto-Mare compound down on the docks is basically fortified, and is guarded by any number of corpo goons from Besomar, armed with overcharged stun-guns that are a bit less than less-than-lethal.
Anything of actual worth moving in and out of Idyamat passes through the Volto-Mare complex, under the watchful eye of Ninoslava Mari, the sharp-dressed, chain-smoking district manager, whose youthful eyes are an inexplicable and pants-shitting shade of red.
Ever in Volto-Mare’s concrete harbour nest is the Good Ship Accountant, a massive container-carrier which looms over every other ship in harbour. The covered shapes on the deck are not guns, no matter how many recently deceased journalists say so.
Somewhere the People Don’t Know About: The Wreck of the Amber Trader
A wooden ship that came to Utvox some ten years after the Liberation, filled with brimming hope and bright-eyed explorers.
The events of their expedition are recorded in the journal in the captain’s yet-unflooded cabin - the strange green land they found here in the distant cold, the sicknesses which afflicted the crew, and the horrors which came to bedevil them.
The Amber Trader sank as it fled Utvox - and for good reason. A homunculus, mussel-black and rankly artificial, lurks in the hold. It drilled through the hull and made breakfast out of the crew. From the bivalve-vents of its shellac armour, their faces stare out desperately.
The homunculus slumbers most of the time, but should The Humming Tower sing once more, the creature will awaken - bleary, but hungry.
+MAZUT+
SHALESIDE
A Local: Micro Fone
He wanders the parks and the forested ways, smoking, delivering micro-poetry - much in the manner a boxer delivers jabs, or an assassin delivers hollow-points. He has big hair, and a wide smile, and a funny little wink, and a green corduroy overcoat.
Citizens have been driven to drink by Fone’s poetry-bombings - not that he had to drive them too far, to be fair.
It wouldn’t be so irritating if the poems were any good.
Why is he called Micro? Well, he’s 4’8’’, but he insists that isn’t the reason.
A Place to Waste your Money: Jen’s Jeneral Store
Owned by a man fond of puns. Jen Jensson is a sphere, basically. A lardbucket with bright red cheeks - he’s always chewing apples or cashews imported from somewhere - he’s quick with the mint gum or the menthol cigarettes.
The shop sits in a charming forested plot - it’s held a number of things across the years, but they’re all dead and gone, replaced by the cheering orange shell of the Jeneral Store, and its long porch, with the infection of wind-chimes and cheesy memorabilia.
Gas centrifuge components sit on high shelves, next to cigars from Ongosa and shiny cases of +P Ammunition. Jen can get you almost anything.
A Faction to Piss Off: The Alarmist
Despicable, miserable journalism spews forth like a river of sewage from their towering office on the Shaleside shore. They have barbed wire fences around their offices, and rent-a-cop guards, since someone tried to kill the Editor. For the third time.
They publish horseshit, lies, stinging editorials, sudoku, filthy pictures, steamy gossip about public figures, lies, crossword puzzles, half-assed political columns, and lies.
The Alarmist is half owned by the editor, and half-owned by a vague and shadowy multi-media conglomerate in far-off and rainy Mese.
Who’s in charge?
Don’t you forget it: Editor Mikael Dripp runs this shitshow. The man is, basically, a cigar. You’d barely see him for the smoke in his office. He’s unsettlingly calm. Placid like a mule, with a cold, cavernous stare. All silver hair and beer-gut and poorly fitted brown suit. He has a personal computer, which is pretty novel, and serious blackmail material on pretty much everyone of any importance in town - which is even more novel!
What are their assets?
Money from International Corporate Interests
The Ear of the Public
The Repealing of Libel and Slander Laws After the Revolution
What does the rag want?
International Recognition
The Next Big Story
Better Security and More Deniable Goons
A Place to Get in Trouble?
It’s a boring residential district, really. You could break into some guy’s house, but don’t come crying to me if you step in a bear-trap.
Somewhere the People Don’t Know About: The Lime Caves
A tangled network of dead-drops and long, shallow caves - many caves are wide enough to roll down, but not tall enough to crouch.
They’re used for a hundred different purposes, and everyone who frequents them thinks they’re the only one in there. Weapons smugglers, drug smugglers, drug-makers, cultists of a couple of stripes, secret police meetings, secret anti-police meetings, and other weird shit.
At the bottom of the caves, is the Grey Fault, a four hundred foot long, four hundred foot deep and one foot wide slip-and-slide down into the wet intestines of the earth. Hope you’re not claustrophobic.
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BIRCHEN TERRACES
A Local: Mayor Britta Yong
What a smooth operator. Is that a cravat? They call her Teflon Yong, because nothing sticks to her - corruption scandals, sleaze stories, open bribery, strange guests at the mayoral manse - nothing sticks!
It all just slides smoothly along the tailored red suit with the giant shoulderpads and fucks off into the sky.
Britta is a charming, disarming, very-good-looking hyper-capitalist sociopath, and she runs Idyamat with a light touch and a giant bag of money marked LOOT.
She’s somehow still the mayor, despite the fact that anyone you’d care to ask hates her fucking guts.
A Place to Waste your Money: Valentin Galleries
This outsize, white-elephant mall was started by Valentin, the premier Vresian clothier’s company. The greatest megachain in the world - and this is the final link, the pinky toe dipped into the possible markets of the frozen hinterland.
Only half of the shop-lots actually have anything in them, and the brightly lit, high-modern interior is full of discarded trash and unswept floors. You can get anything cheap, plasticky or commodified here.
There’s the Valentin shop, of course, which takes up a full eighth of the mall. It is, basically, a maze of outdated stock, slowly becoming mothmeat as it all moulders away on the racks.
A Place to Get in Trouble: The Mayoral Manse
Shiny post-modernist cube-mansion built ten years ago on the crown of the Terraces.
A locale for debauched shit, long-term guests that are either supermodels or diplomats,
Somewhere the People Don’t Know About: The Church of Teeth
Close to a different boundary, far, far around the exterior from Ultranor, the dead, square continent of Extranor sits silently. A layer of rock on top of a cuboid sheet of faintly luminescent stuckforce - the Antipneumic Sheet.
And deep within it, slumber the Old Things - denizens of the PSYCHODARKNESS so immense they could leap up and snatch the fitful sun in their jaws.
The Teeth are an international criminal cult dedicated to killing them. And they have a branch all the way out here, because they’re interested in things in outer Utvox. They keep a minor member of theirs, Britta Yong, in charge around here, in order to keep a horse in the race.
Anyone could be a member in disguise (I.e. There's a 1-in-6 Chance.)
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THE AGRI-DISTRICT
A Local: Hermanni Marinko
A very bitter man, who spends his days mashing crickets in a big machine to get at their oh-so valuable proteins. A grey, square, lifeless man - with glassy, glassy eyes. He wears huge square bottle glasses, and a white jumpsuit covered in cricket stains. He carries a milsurp handgun openly.
He was involved in the War of Independence 26 years ago, firing mortars at the coordinates of Supranori colonial garrisons. He’ll tell you all about the long whistle, and the short, sharp reports.
The Union of Ultranor, venal, corrupt, and very capitalist, is not what he was fighting for.
His grey and nearly-uninhabited house has a basement, and that basement is full to bursting with mortar shells. He sleeps right above them in a sleeping bag, and dreams about the long whistle - and the short, sharp reports.
1d4 Secrets for Mr. Marinko:
Hermanni’s a member of the Sons of Saukants gang, working as a mechanic and “bomb guy”.
Hermanni has been surreptitiously poisoning the cricket protein. The first anyone will hear of it is a string of random illnesses both here and in Besomar.
Hermanni didn’t actually serve in the War of Independence - his brother did. He has assumed the valour and identity of his dead sibling.
Hermanni has been, in his off hours, building a big fuck-off bomb. He’s gonna blow up the city bank, just for something to do on the weekend.
A Place to Waste your Money: Boxer’s Barn
From 8PM to MIDNIGHT every seventh day, there’s a proper barney at Boxer’s Barn. A fight club, you might call it. The ring is made of corrugated plastic sheets, and they throw down hay to soak up any blood that might be spilled.
Folk from town come up here to consume cheap beer, and peanuts, and watch two muscled, shirtless people batter the absolute fucking piss out of each other. It’s primal entertainment.
You can join in the events, if you like - either as a spectator or as a slab of ham for the show. Just talk to the owner, Boxer, who’s six-foot-six of flushed skin, bald head and muscled fat, crowned with a perfectly curled miniature moustache.
A Faction to Piss Off: The Cricketmen
They aren’t a cult. Don’t even suggest it! They meet in private in disused barns because their membership is exclusive, not because they’re up to anything. They apologise that you’re not hip enough to be involved, you artless brickhead.
Alright, they admit, the cricket masks and the chanting are maybe a bit much. But they’re an art group! It’s a social experiment. Your reaction really says volumes about you, you know that?
When they sit with their ears against the ground and claim to be listening to God’s voice, they’re talking about the land and the climate, that Mayor Yong and her capitalist cronies are ruining!
Who’s in charge?
Nobody’s in charge! This is an anti-hierarchical art collective! Well, I mean, Imya Neisvestno does all the finances and has the members’ ledgers, but that’s just because she’s smart! And a Very Good Artist! She likes to talk, in between cups of lapsang, about how the spirits of the land have really inspired her work, and the natural beauty and rich history of old Idyamat really drives her.
What are their assets?
Fear, Surprise and a Fanatical Devotion to High Concept Art
Anonymity
A Surprising Knowledge of Hidden Pathways and Weird Shit
What do the Cricketmen want?
An Actual Art Scene Around Here
A Meeting Place That Isn’t Shit
To Unleash Their God from the Undervalley and Ascend to Glory
A Place to Get in Trouble: The Grain Elevator
The work of a deranged physical engineer from Xere, Silvero Venta. He’s currently dead. He was widely regarded as a serious danger to public safety, moral character and general sanity back at the Kultur Institut du Besomar. When they sent him to Idyamat, he was nearly in handcuffs.
What did he build? An insane cantilevered skycoffin of jump-formed concrete, through which tons and tons of grain move each year. It is not an exaggeration to say that Idyamat feeds Ultranor, and that the Grain Elevator is the centre of that.
Nobody knows exactly how the fuck it works. There are buckets, chains, conveyors, water-clocks, lifting screws, various useless control rooms - all that we know is, we put grain in, and grain comes out when we want it.
Don’t think about the people that have fallen into the grain and disappeared into airless, shimmering gold. Don’t think about exact weights.
Somewhere the People Don’t Know About: The Humming Tower
A twenty-foot tall edifice of intertwining, intestinal pipes that stands by the river-mouth, hidden in a short forest and a tall concrete pill. Lies about asbestos keep everyone but the auditors and scientists from Besomar away.
The pipes are translucent black - some glassy, glossy substance on which pallid sludge coalesces on humid mornings. You could easily crawl into a pipe, go caving in the warren, which rises twenty feet above and sinks to an unknown depth.
Sometimes, the tower sings. Never for too long, or too loudly. The scientists who were in the pill when it sang last time woke up to find themselves preparing a field for planting. A week had passed, and they didn’t remember any of it. One of them remains missing.
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OLD FOREST
A Local?
There’s a few of them, but they’re all weirdos. People you might want to avoid.
The smell of sap hangs thick in the air, and stone walls run between the trees.
These dry walls are ancient - Pre-Liberation, 900 years old, or more. Who made them? Enslaved humans? Escapees? Mysterious locals, driven to the grave by the Liminals….?
The locals use them to hang their washing on. Quaint little cabins, vegetable gardens in clearings, and lots of tiny little shrines.
1d4 Strange Locals:
Nanna Borislava, an 86-year-old biker with an LMG and a pocketful of burdock-flavoured boiled candies. She has a garage out here along a mud track, but she’ll only fix or tinker with your vehicle if you’re an anarchist.
Bong Ripcord, real name hopefully unknown. Indica or sativa? He has 86 different strains, and a beard the size and shape of a whole raccoon. He insists he will die if he is ever not high as the moon, and there’s no evidence to suggest he’s wrong.
Bigtime Badtime, whose parents were very unkind people from Vresmar. He’s actually a really nice guy - call him Timey. He’s a naturalist, and he studies the unique beetles of the forest.
Pawel the Funny Werewolf, who is neither a werewolf, nor very funny. He lives alone on a hill. He used to be a clown, and he used to go to anger management classes, but he gave both of those up the day he cracked and bit an old man’s nose off in a fit of drunken rage.
A Place to Waste your Money: The Eld Wishing Well
People assumed it was a well. What else do you call a twenty-foot-wide hole which disappears out of sight and has water at the bottom?
They only used it as a well for a few years. Then, once the effects of drinking from it became known, they started using it for executions. At least, one can assume that a person hurled down the Eld Well would die.
The vegetation crowds close around it, thick briars and towering ferns. The city government fenced it off after a few tragic accidents a couple years back, and the high galvanised slats are covered increasingly in moss, birdshit and trailing creepers.
They say if you throw in some currency and shout your wish, then it just might come true, in a chain of unrelated events that smell of bleach and crushed metal.
A Faction to Piss Off: Sons of Saukants
Aivars Saukants fought in the War of Independence 26 years ago. He was in a tank crew on the island of Uzno, during the worst of the fighting. He killed, he fought, he grew sharp in the teeth and dark in the mind.
When he came home, he started a motor-club, which eventually became a violent gang, by simple consequence of his membership. His house has bloodstains, because he lives there. His sons solve problems with crowbars and sawn-offs, because he raised them.
Everything Saukants touches goes blood-red, and begins to smell of beer, trauma, and nicotine. He’s a social locust swarm, and everything runs down towards him in the sump.
Who’s in charge?
Old Saukants, of course. He’s a miserable woodwose giant of a man, but age and illness has gotten to him, and he barely leaves his cabin out in the woods any more. Now his four sons - Eizens, Einars, Elmars and Eriks - run the motor-club back in Shaleside, and, of course, the violent gang.
What are their assets?
Big Motorcycles and Heavy Hauling Vans
Lots of Overly-Macho Alcoholic Friends
Cheap and Unpleasant Weaponry
What do the Sons want?
Lots of Money, Drugs, Fast Cars, Etc.
A Diagnosis and Treatment for Aivars’ Illness
Love
A Place to Get in Trouble?
It’s a forest. The whole thing’s full of wolves, staring deer and Idyamat Public Safety Rangers - with the safety off.
Somewhere the People Don’t Know About: The Snail Door
It’s right on the edge of the Anomaly - in a little bowl hollow that’s ringed on one side by the eternally melting ice-wall. The meltwater runs in a slow trickle down the black rock. A spirally cavern, covered in hundreds, thousands, even, of snails. Blue ones, red ones, ones with rainbow eyestalks and unnatural frilly bits. They carpet the walls and leave everything covered in glistening slick.
It’s a doorway. It doesn’t go anywhere real.
Reality Scientists have confirmed that the world is a bubble in the PSYCHODARKNESS - have you ever seen the mutated kind of bubbles? The nearly-foams? The big bubble with the tiny, tumorous adjoinders?
Well, down there, past the Snail Door, the trees grow tall, and the sky isn’t, and everything’s covered in glittering slick, and small men with wide eyes and see-through hands pace among the leaf-litter, and they stack stones.
+MAZUT+
+MAZUT+
THE REST OF UTVOX
A Local: Baum (The Werg)
Nine feet, from the bottom of his pillar-shaped leg, to the crown of his horned head. A sasquatch-looking fellow, with immense and snaggly teeth, thick black fur, and a floral-patterned shirt. He wears tiny little sunglasses, and has a polyester hiking rucksack full of interesting nicknacks and chorizo.
The Werg are the heroes of the Norm. Normally, they’re only found in the high, frozen passes of Wergland, back towards the interior of Supranor. They were made to be soldiers by the Liminals, but led the revolution against them. As it stands, everyone assumes the best of them.
When people assume the best of Baum, they are usually correct. The man’s basically a saint. He strolls up, snow thick in his fur, adjusts those tiny little sunglasses, and asks: “Hey man - you got a light?”
1d4 Possible Secrets for Baum:
He’s been stealing money - to donate to an orphanage in town.
He’s been hunting down Hermanni Marinko - because the guy really looks like he could use a hug.
He’s been stockpiling illegal drugs in a disused bunker - to combat the methamphetamine crisis facing Idyamat.
He’s going to break into Mayor Yong’s house - to steal all of her goddamn money.
A Place to Waste your Money?
None out here. You could always bury it in a hole, but the paper they print it on is cheap and fragile.
A Faction to Piss Off: The Army of Ultranor
They patrol the blackened gravel - for spies, soldiers, and possible incursions from the PSYCHODARKNESS.
Double-rotor copters scream overhead. Insulated jeeps in red. Gammon-faced thugs - big moustaches or tight hair-buns. Red mil-plas armour and Chekinov branded machine-guns. They take no shit and will shoot you for yammering.
They avoid Idyamat itself - Zaporon Airfield on the east coast is their lair, a towering edifice of konkrete-brutalism, vending machines, military avtomachs and frost-rimed radio towers. They’ve got a stealth bomber over there, with the words ACE IN THE HOLE spraypainted across the cockpit cowling.
Who’s in charge?
Well, the General Staff back in Besomar, but General Felicia Haldor is the law in Outer Utvox. Black boots, red fatigues, a firm scowl, teeth stained black by something. She lost her eye to an Antivital 30 years ago, and the mottled crater suppurates smoking sludge whenever she gets angry (which is often). She’s got a non-standard-issue revolver, and wants to hunt communists for fucking sport.
What are their assets?
Overwhelming Force
Modern Military Hardware
A Stealth Bomber
What do the Army want?
Glory & Respect (Requires Something to Kill)
Direct Authority over Idyamat City
A Tank Battalion, If They Can Get It
A Place to Get in Trouble: Chogorr Caligin Field
Huge black rigs are nailed into the dead centre of Utvox. They rattle and howl when blizzards pass over them. The crew are mostly Yulmothik, and speak that odd isolate-language with a low, cold drawl.
346ft below the rigs, there sits a lens shaped layer of black Caligin - effectively, fossilised PSYCHODARKNESS.
Why the hell would you want that? Study is the safest answer, but “weapons development” and “deliberate antivital creation” pop up in sordid rumours. What else?
In those bubbling lakes of frozen oblivion, dormant THINGS slumber - the crew of the rigs use neon and firedrills to extract the Caligin, but it’s also their job to put a coruscating incendiary slug (or forty) into the heads of these dreaming horrors.
They haven’t missed the shot, yet.
THE UPPER VALLEY
A Local: The Human Bomb
You’ll never guess what he does.
Somewhere the People Don’t Know About: Undervalley
A complex left behind from ancient times, deep beneath the entirety of Idyamat. Smooth halls in black stone, shaped like veins and guts, and pulsing brain-pattern floors. The doorways are towering, slick, thickly immense.
The Humming Tower, the Grey Fault, the Wishing Well and the Grain Elevator serve as entrances to this, the palpitating heart of the IUCA and the source of Idyamat’s wet and clammy heat.
Wander through insect-gardens, algae-pools, immense biological laboratories where half-finished and malformed Werg float in cysts of thick black sludge. Follow arching bridges over drooping immensities, sleeping palaces where the formless once cavorted, that now lie stark, and dripping, and silent.
What sleeps down here? What fitfully operates the controls of the Humming Tower, maintains the Hydraul for purposes unknown, hums loudly for the Cricketmen - and sometimes stoops to answer the wishes flung down the Well?
A surviving Liminal, obviously.
It weighs five metric tons, and it can see into people’s dreams anywhere on Utvox. It’s the smartest thing in Ultranor, by any metric you care to apply, and by all of the ones it invented, too. It flows along the organic halls of the Undervalley with the force and speed of a wet and bleachy subway train. And it is not idle.
A genuinely enjoyable read and some great ideas. Would love to hear more on the setting.
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