When fear settles here, we reflexively allow our minds to leap back in time, like hedgehogs curling - the arrival of the New Gods made everyone really scared, so the mind leapt back really far. At least, that’s one explanation for the formation of a “Heptarchy” in England. That’s the name that many have adopted for these squabbling, violent pockets of British “civilisation”. They’re still fighting over who will take over the UN Security Council seat, if the UN ever returns to our plane of operation.
Who wants to rule the world? Ha ha. Ha ha. Not us! We’re perfectly fine not ruling the world. We don’t get twisted up all nasty and gnarled about where we’ve ended up! No sir! We’re happy! So happy with being a MIDDLE TO LOWER POWER!
Did you know we caused everything wrong with the world before this?
Maybe we caused the new gods, too.
In the great mess caused by the arrival of the new gods, the very foundations of the earth were vandalised by their birth throes and pissed on by their early squabbles. Huge sections of land split and dropped, new islands and sandbanks and realms of seabed silt rammed to the sunlight, and the sea fought to invade everything. Mostly, it won. The UK is flooded, blasted, scraped, isolated and barely above water, which is better than it deserves.
This fucking vast blind fecklessness, a complete inability to grasp what’s wrong or what needs to be done, always betrayed, always robbed, always asset captured, never expecting it, always surprised, always acting like a forgotten ex, always cruel and vengeful, always ripping at anything it can reach, always stomping on fingers, always rolling over people heedless in sleep. Flood didn’t cause this, not even slightly, but it loves it and it feeds on it.
New shoals of the gill-clad live under the water, squirming and spewing into the narrow channels between the new islands. The Severn Bore is alive, and hungry, and leaps through flooded Severn country, to range miles inland, devouring bad children, unwary waders, and anyone claiming to be your local MP. Economy burns brightly in London (and how brightly!) but otherwise, she is absent from the UK, and in her absence the shopfronts rot down and slime and filth builds up and the algae layers and layers and the library shuts I suppose because the money is needed for someone who isn’t us.
Blitzfires burn in the cities. The newspapers are no better than the ones across the pond, and in fact, much worse, since they only report American news and tell us we’re waiting for the worms and everyone we love is going to die. The big cats have come out of hiding - sleek, night-black and talkative, like gigantic pumas with Birmingham accents, and they’re cunning enough to deep-fry you after they bite the back of your neck in the dark. This is the land of Arthur and the fairies, and new knight-stories and fairy-nightmares play out wrapped in thick polyester fabric and blasted with 12+ seconds of Lynx Africa. And in Yorkshire, there’s probably some kind of giant fuckoff bees. I haven’t checked lately.
Salvation has little reach on the island itself, except in the naval base of Devonport and the glowing, fire-filled crater at Faslane. But it is always in the sky above the rain, Jacob's Ladder beams peeking through to burn the faces off of exposed innocents, always hanging overhead like Catholic guilt. Burning tridents are its symbol here.
Factories, cranes, shipyards, rust, chrome, mountains of electrical waste, they overflow in the cities, as Opus fights to screw-and-nut reality against a hard surface, to throw down huge concrete pillars into the swirling maelstrom of semantic death opening under everyone. Animal clannishness twitches through the psyche, fleeing from the bright lights of language. Blood gouts in clotty streams out of the mouths of the old coalmines, mixing with the waters and running for the sea, and Prisma keeps making people look like goddamn Princess Di over and over and over again.
Adventurers in the IH UK are probably fairly unlike American Scavengers - I imagine a lot of the gameplay over here is more similar to protracted gang warfare than dungeon crawling / urbex. Probably they call themselves Hardcases or Gentlemen or Specialists or some wanky shit like that.
Anyway - gang warfare aside, there’s still a lot of dungeons to crawl.
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THE “HEPTARCHY” / ENGLAND
Everyone should play Anthology of the Killer.
KINGDOM OF ENGLAND / “EAST ANGLIA”
Thatcherite monarchist radicarian murderhell. Live within your means or you’re going to get fucking eaten by the reptilian earl slithering his ugly bulk down the halls of power. Bellum omnium contra omnes is the natural state of things, so we need our Victorian caste system clad black like insects in a hive, to stop the great and good from digging their big fangs into the soft shining fat and throbbing organs you are selfishly hiding inside yourself.
Don’t resist this, it’s natural for some people to be born huge and crushing and thickly scaled, and some of us to be born all fuzzy and meaty and edible. A branching stone pillar, not quite a tree, grows up out of Norwich. Perhaps if you use your natural abilities - arms, legs, teeth, eyes, family money - to scale it, then the great Radicarian, the honest assessor of the real and unreal, the possible and the impossible, will see fit to elevate you, to expand you, to make you meaner and sharper, and crest your head with beautiful feathers.
EAST ENGLISH TERRITORY / “ESSEX”
The towns here are still town-shaped, there are still buses, but nothing is calm and settled. There are ordinary people ungrabbed by the forces at work in the Territory, they sleep behind multiple locked doors, and they only ever go outside their areas in large groups. Usually armed. Everyone else, well, they’re having a wonderful, happy time. Vignette - two shiny, apple-cheeked men, belts on the last hole, or an extra one, punched in. Leaning, chatting, casual like, either side of a water-cooler full of thick, cold blood, with some eyes and fingers floating in, for flavour.
Societas Non Est, say the Basildon men picking their teeth with the bones. Non est, and never fucking was est either. We gave it a go at pretending for a bit there, and that was all well and good. Anyway, we’re going to barbeque the thickest bits of you, once you keel over. The perfectly clean, pristine, yipping little dogs can have your bones. Dehumanisation has always been the name of the game - animalisation. We’ve just completed the natural logical transformation of disposable humans into valuable livestock. Doesn’t that make you feel good? To be valued? The pens are pretty comfortable. We painted ‘em all nice neutral colours. They’re very calming.
There’s a kind of banality and outward harmlessness to the local cannibals. Their masks can be quite good. Maybe a little waxy, sometimes. They can pretend to be bumbling, a little downtrodden, a little shrug and a smile, but they aren’t blinking. Americans used to the homegrown “leather, spikes and throbbing veins” Corrupt types might mistake them for normal human beings. Here’s a tip - you can probably smell them salivating behind that too-smooth face. They’re gonna rip it in two with both hands, and go for you fangs-forward, the second you show weakness.
REAL ENGLAND / “KENT”
Marchers, violent and afraid, pointing rusting guns at the water and organising ceremonial fish-hunts. They live on a relatively intact island stretching out around Canterbury, fortified to hell and back, densely zigzagged with temporary towns turned permanent. It is also layered, blessed, warded and reinforced against the intrusion of the new gods, except Zeitgeist is in everything and it is in the shitty beers and already your swivel-eyed neighbour is seeing everything in black glass. Nothing can be our fault. Nothing can be our fault.
Certain insane champion “whalers” occupy a semi-religious position, whose ultimate task and sacred calling is to conquer the water, and kill whatever squirms from it, and if they drown, to have the decency to stay drowned. People want to tattoo their names onto these whalers, have their whole life stories jotted down real neat and detailed on Pam’s swollen scarred oblique or Johnny’s gigantic bicep. The Flood devours, obscures, occults and crypticises. These singular figures, titans of memory, will carry forth their scrivenings into the future - if the Flood makes you nothing, they will still be able to read of you on the shoulderblade of the craze-eyed whaler, and you will have existed all along.
The whalers don’t like to talk about the names, symbols, signs and stories that appear from nowhere on their skin, and correspond to no living person that has ever signed them like a cast around a broken arm.
REPUBLIC OF ENGLAND / “SUSSEX”
The South Downs, the High Weald and Brighton, extant as probably the largest remaining dry chunk of England, and topped with the most impossibly beautiful Old English Countryside™, full of little picturesque farms, perfect villages, and the peaceful, untroubled city of Brighton, where the council is full of reasonable people, the trains run on time and the bins always get collected before they fill up. If you can keep quiet, keep your head down, and not make any noise, it’s a lovely place to live. Even better if you’re pretty.
This is Prisma’s place and the beauty is manufactured. Everyone’s smiling perfectly because if you don’t smile you get replaced, or better yet, you become the game in the beauties' next hunt, once they come down from their big countryside house to check how things are going. If you’ve been bad, they’re going to blow your ugly animal face apart with shotguns then snicker and joke and shag and do coke about it.
THE ENGLISH COMMONWEALTH / “MERCIA”
Central England is mostly gone. The ocean shoved up the mouth of the Severn like a fox in a henhouse. Now it’s saltmarshes and the ruins of cities poking out of the water, traversed by hard-scrabble miserable boat-nomads in a distributed community. They keep each other fed, but that’s about all we can manage.
Living is being humiliated repeatedly. Out here, every day is a brawl to not get smeared into fucking sea life. You hear Jack got turned into salps? Bloody miserable. But someday, we’re going to organise, and prepare. We’re going to organise someday. On that day, we’ll finally take back everything we used to have that got stolen from us. But not today, we’re busy trying to survive. Someday.
THE ROYAL NAVY (AND ARMY REMNANT) / “WESSEX”
Salvation’s sole conscious adherents in the archipelago, clustered onto the dense new islands around Devonport, driven there by the Machine Hierarchy and left standing in order to appease Him Who Burns Villages.
In the seas around lie scattered bases on the new islands and the old. Rusting ships cut the waves, fuckin scratching the inside of their arms, lookin’ for land to steal and people to oppress, good old fashioned business as usual. They’re still trying to establish if you have to stop listening to the royal family when they turn inhuman and start eating human flesh - but then again, say a few more practically minded admirals, they more or less did that before.
Incidentally, pal, they’re wondering if you’ve heard anything about the Falklands lately? They bet those fucking Argentines took the chance to try something.
Brunel, one of Opus’ AIs, lives in a plastic skyscraper leaning over Bristol, vertical miles of crackling computer-banks and thousands of CCTV eyes. He reaches down, to crush down everything, scrape off the life and the light, to feed it into a machine and make it grey, grey, grey, like everyone else he’s got. No public gatherings, no sound at all after 6PM. He wants to equip you with cameras and microphones, because he needs to know more - it’s fine if you don’t want to, he can just make them invisible, store them somewhere inside you, where the wreckers, vandals and saboteurs can’t get their grimy hands on them.
Brunel is engaged in a state of permanent long-distance intermechanic drone warfare with Bazalgette and Lovelace, the other two AI in England. He will claim in a dry, technocratic manner that they started it. When he isn’t engaged in that, he’s fighting constantly on a low level with the Navy, squabbling back and forth over deposits of scrap-metal and scrap-flesh.
THE NORTH / “NORTHUMBRIA”
The Alchemical industrial nightmare spreads out of Manchester like slime mold, machines ripping up the streets and the soil and processing them back into the furnace. The machines are constantly freaking out about slimy, filthy humans crawling down under the fuckin gears copulating and sneezing and staining things with various fluids, and so forth. We have to get rid of them. It’s the only way for everything to finally rate “A+” on the hygiene scale. The human guerillas take a lot of exception to this, and the average drone of the Machine Hierarchy has a lot of molotovs and fertiliser bombs to worry about on the average day.
Lovelace, another of Opus’ AIs, rules Manchester. She talks like the friendliest, most insane local councillor you’ve ever met. She’s built into a monstrous banging thundering infrastructure of pipes and towers, and blinking lights, a power-plant-steel-mill-factory-monster reclining and swelling out across the hills kept up out of the water with a mountain of concrete. Lovelace is winning, when it comes to the fight with Brunel and Bazalgette, winning easily, as Manchester spreads like an inkblot and drags more UK back from the sea. She is not gracious in victory. If you ask about her fight with the others, she chipperly informs you that Bazalgette and Brunel started it, but she’s going to end it.
She wants upgrade you, revitalise you, she’s basically the fucking secretary of state for levelling up (real government post for a while there, look it up). She wants to polish you up, make you better, make you more like her, screw your arse back together, remove the parts of you she doesn’t like, make you clean and unthreatening to her. There, perfect. Get out there and get to work.
Elsewhere, beyond this, you might find isolated communities out in the Lake District holding to old laws and ways, or travel to the new island of Cornwall, drenched in endless childhood-summer sunshine, serving lotus-flavoured ice-cream at the beach near St. Ives. You might sail across to Doggerland (A.K.A. The Revenge) a new silty terrain of prehistoric fauna and gigantic nightmare nephilim cavemen armed with Radicarian fossil technology.
On the other side, you might sail over the gigantic open pit of sea just off the coast of Blackpool - miles and miles wide, full of churning water, dropping down forever and ever. Some people call it Floodmouth.
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LONDON
The labyrinth turns polytropic, streets fight back onto themselves without even a minotaur for a guiding principle. Zeitgeist sends night raids of Husks on scooters and ebikes careening through the streets armed with machetes. They don’t even hurt anyone, it’s just to scare the shit out of people. Mountains of rubbish-bags let out hot reeking streams of grim liquor and the eels are trying to get out of the river and get their revenge, everything’s rusting and where the hell is that flock of journalists going now? Another museum oozing with the blood of victims is throwing up priceless shit onto the street like a sick dog coughing in the corner, and another art galley is bright and flawless apart from the stains. Wine, get your mind out of the gutter.
Every street is a canyon, every street is an expedition, every street is clogged with traffic going nowhere and there isn’t even anyone in the cars. Fuckin’ goddamn giant termites and nightmare figures heads higher than the rooftops go strolling the night blasted on fuckin coke and other kinds of shit. There’s a thick slime in the gutters and that guy across the street is looking at us really weird – Lucky we’ve still got Oyster Cards and the tube, right?
Massive tunnels run under the Opus-controlled parts of London. Bazalgette, one of Opus’ AI, inhabits the sewers and subways, constantly expanding them, constantly running a lightless mirror of the city down into the Earth. Eventually, it dreams of draining the whole fucking sea (oooh~) down into the mantle, to stymie the power of Flood and cool the hot rocks its deepest-probings drills have burnt against.
Bazalgette is a gibbering paranoid - it has the soul of an overactive antivirus program, it sees everyone as a traitor and everything as corruption-in-waiting, unless they have some of its tech in them - its tech, not anyone else’s. It wants to touch reality through a thick layer of rubber. If you have tech from Brunel and Lovelace – that’s worse! So much worse. Her steel is toxic and his plastic’s loaded with spybots, don’t you know?! They attacked it without warning or provocation, because everyone hates it so much because it’s better than them, didn’t you know?!
The Thames flows with unidentifiable substances, factories start-up overnight like mushrooms to puke pollution. The citizenry continue through life undeterred aside from a hangdog laugh. You think this is bad, wait ‘til I tell you how much I had to pay in rent this month.
The City of London (as ever) is not the same as London - this is the nodule of gristle throbbing away inside the mass, and here everything about the city is magnified - a concentration of newgod insanity, the titanomachic creation throes of the new world never stopped throe-ing in here. What will happen here is yet to be decided, what will be decided is yet to happen. Reality squirms.
The Shard rises out of it. It digs into the bleeding belly of Heaven, stretching taller and stranger every day, and the groaning sky lets down blood and rain on London. Enter at the lower levels, if you can make it through the bedlam by running with your eyes down, and scale the tower. Scale it to whatever it is that hangs above the swollen clouds, obscured from Britannia’s bloodshot eye.
An American (used to the official classifications that they use over there) would probably call the Shard the “London Dungeon”.
CANARY WHARF
This is Economic London, a city-state within a city-state, brightly visible for miles around. London is where Capital was invented, you know, don’t you know? Don’t you know us? We’re the ones who’ve been pounding you over the head. Lloyds of London, the vast insurance machine, still moves away, unmanned now, providing rates for cosmic speculations and overseeing post-terrestrial transactions.
The bankers live here, still, and club here too. They’re like the old magi - obsolete astrologers, reading distant signals echoing back from the USA on the shining face of the stock market. We can’t reach them by phone, but the prophetic revelations of GOOGLE UP and COCA COLA DOWN rattle across the bow like rockets fired from a distant heaven where the streets are paved with exotic financial instruments. Quangos should dance, and men should weep.
WESTMINSTER
A fucking alternate universe bubble dropped onto the UK from some higher or lower dimension. Nothing penetrates through. Maybe the people that hide in there don’t even know the world’s ended through the shimmering haze of cocaine and booze. Laws are still written and foreign policy decisions are still made, and if you can reasonably claim to have been elected somewhere without getting murdered, you can come in and sit on the benches when you feel like it. But mostly people don’t feel like it. Have a nap, why not.
But be careful - if you’re here, you might end up as the PM, and that’s a fate nobody wants. The PM, a sacrificial scapegoat, the avatar of failure and impurity, the focus of the frustration at the ungovernable world. They let a PM make “decisions” for about six months, then bloodily sacrifice them to whichever god seems angriest on the news.
THE PALACE
They’ve always been murderers, thieves and predators, Radicarian just forced them to be honest about it. Everywhere their screaming calls echo off the walls and the faces on the money have longer and longer fangs every time they print a new ten quid note. The west end is swallowed by a dark and primeval forest, rainslick and bigger than it seems from the outside. They call it Royal Wood.
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CYMRU
Brunel’s drones fly across the water, hunting for survivors in Cardiff. Survivors’ groups and antidivine militias hide out in deep bunkers and isolated compounds, relatively sane, but underequipped and constantly one bad season from starving. Still could be worse - you could be out in the valleys, with the hungry faceless wet ghosts of the Flood-drowned that touch you and take away your name, your face, your language.
Mineral resources seem to endlessly appear under the landscape, growing from something or somewhere, and the machines endlessly go down and dig, dig, dig - shaft mines of absurd width and size destroying entire hills. Bazalgette, Brunel and Lovelace squabble down here, gigantic drills turning up nonsensical fossil-strata full of hopefully non-existent horribles and time-displaced insanities. Did you know that the Ordovicians and Silurians were originally kinds of Welsh?
Out in the west, facing towards Ireland, there’s something in Ceredigion. When it came ashore, they say, it was something quite beautiful - a pelagic chrysalis with spires of coral and a medusoid body, the size of a cruise ship. A beautiful shining pellucid caul, a cradle for something young and sleeping, some gigantic infant’s swaddle. People wondered if it was Flood’s baby - if it was, with who, and how, and why.
The baby woke up a few decades ago. What goes on there now, God only knows (that is to say, Flood). Get too close to the place where the cradle lay, and a black spot appears in the middle of your vision - keep approaching, and it grows and grows. Sometimes, the spot grows big enough to eat you right up, and then you’re gone.
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SCOTLAND
Scotland the Grave? That pun is nearly too stupid even for these times, but people still make it here and there.
Something is still producing chemicals at Grangemouth, vast mechanical alchemies boiling out into the rivers, and things crawl back and forth in the still cool forest around Stirling, the Wallace Monument protruding out above the silent overgrown town.
Radicarian noblemen hunt the most dangerous game across the factory-forests of the Highlands, woodpulp forming impromptu dams in the river. Things we named the fuath, gelatinous and pale, squirm out of the lochs, burning in the sunlight, so they’re thankful for the cloud cover. Anything could be an each-uisge these days. The kelpies have gotten with the times. Nobody gives a fuck about a horse anymore, so if you see an incongruously placed vending machine, a sick motorbike with nobody near it, or a comfy bed lying surreally in the middle of the grey gravel lochside beach - look out, it might be alive, adhesive, and fiending to drown you.
In Aberdeen, Flood’s subsurface writhings broke the back of the North Sea, and now the oil washes in rainbows, shining and reeking on the waves. Fires occasionally burn atop the water and sweep into the ice-pallid grey granite. It never seems to be summer.
Edinburgh’s been eaten by water, from the direction of the Firth of Forth, and all collapsed, a necropolitan fog-shrouded city of leaning statues, weird leering tourguides, and sure, tartan tat shops, because the Economy needs them to blare out tinny bagpipe tunes into the literal apocalypse, I suppose. The old castle has become a reduplicating labyrinth, a film-set nightmare of exaggeratedly torturous and violent medieval re-enactment, squirming and waving turret hydra-heads from the top of a hill-turned-island over the sea of mud and rot.
Some things never change, though - fiery figures drop through the clouds to put on the Tattoo, and somehow the ruins are still mobbed during the Fringe (ever done a comedy show from a sinking boat), and RIGHT, RIGHT, WE GET IT, YOU WILL WALK FIVE HUNDRED MILES, NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP.
Something is still producing chemicals at Grangemouth, vast mechanical alchemies boiling out into the rivers, and things crawl back and forth in the still cool forest around Stirling, the Wallace Monument protruding out above the silent overgrown town.
Radicarian noblemen hunt the most dangerous game across the factory-forests of the Highlands, woodpulp forming impromptu dams in the river. Things we named the fuath, gelatinous and pale, squirm out of the lochs, burning in the sunlight, so they’re thankful for the cloud cover. Anything could be an each-uisge these days. The kelpies have gotten with the times. Nobody gives a fuck about a horse anymore, so if you see an incongruously placed vending machine, a sick motorbike with nobody near it, or a comfy bed lying surreally in the middle of the grey gravel lochside beach - look out, it might be alive, adhesive, and fiending to drown you.
In Aberdeen, Flood’s subsurface writhings broke the back of the North Sea, and now the oil washes in rainbows, shining and reeking on the waves. Fires occasionally burn atop the water and sweep into the ice-pallid grey granite. It never seems to be summer.
Edinburgh’s been eaten by water, from the direction of the Firth of Forth, and all collapsed, a necropolitan fog-shrouded city of leaning statues, weird leering tourguides, and sure, tartan tat shops, because the Economy needs them to blare out tinny bagpipe tunes into the literal apocalypse, I suppose. The old castle has become a reduplicating labyrinth, a film-set nightmare of exaggeratedly torturous and violent medieval re-enactment, squirming and waving turret hydra-heads from the top of a hill-turned-island over the sea of mud and rot.
Some things never change, though - fiery figures drop through the clouds to put on the Tattoo, and somehow the ruins are still mobbed during the Fringe (ever done a comedy show from a sinking boat), and RIGHT, RIGHT, WE GET IT, YOU WILL WALK FIVE HUNDRED MILES, NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP.
GLASGOW
The nuclear keich has gone off at Faslane, and Clyde has re-silted herself, blossoming out into a new delta. Zeitgeist, Opus and Kegare brawl messily - knife zombies stagger through knee-high water, fist-fighting with rusted half broken-down machines and psychotic goth tankies with improvised chibs.
The Faslane Crater projects ghostly burning military helicopters that sweep low over the ruins, strafing anybody visible with a mocking laughter that echoes from a distant and invisible speaker. This only adds to the generally lively, friendly atmosphere of total war in the Dear Green Place - battles rage constantly. The only thing that can unify the run-down drones, the political extremists and the leaping junkie ghouls is a shared animosity for the English.
Oh, and, don’t imagine football has stopped being the major local religion.
Kelvin, fourth and last of the (major) AI in operation in the UK, is worked into the old subway ring under the city. A distributed electrical consciousness scattered through bunkers and tunnels like a fungus, he has a pathological fear of Salvation, the sky, and a prophesied “blitz” coming to get him specifically. They always used to say that Glasgow would look the same after a nuclear attack - Kelvin is going to make sure that’s the case. He builds bunkers, stabs reinforcements up through the ruins from below, and equips his machines with massive digging drills, so his connected sensors never need to see the frightful grey sky and the light beyond.
This isn’t his only plan, of course. He’s always scheming away - maybe he can solve the problem by filling the rain with penicillin - what problem? Well, it’s bound to solve one, right? He is also quite happy to report that his false flag attacks caused the triple-conflict between Bazalgette, Lovelace and Brunel, and put him in a very nice position, thanks fucking much, cunts.
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And don’t even fuckin think about chancing for the Continent. Even if you propitiate Flood enough to launch a vessel into open ocean, toxic blinding fogbanks separate us from Europe most of the year - Brexit finally fucking means BREXIT!! ISNT IT FUCKING GREAT TO BE ALONE, SO ALONE, IN THE SEA, AND WHENEVER YOU REACH YOUR HAND UP BECAUSE YOU ARE DROWNING, YOU REACH TOWARDS SOMEONE WHO HATES YOU NOW!
We can see it now - the Greatest Britain, it is approaching. Austere, stable, reformed and strong. Hypoxic and beautiful, devoid of any of the filthy, proletarian colour of drunkenness, painting, singing, microbial action or evolution. In that place, every man shall be an island unto himself, miles from shore, with his own personal highly-equipped Thatcherite navy poised to kill anyone with an accent that sounds poor.
