Undercity
<infobox> <title source="name"><default>Undercity</default></title>
<image source="image"></image> <header>Basic Information</header> <image source="map"></image> <label>Type</label> <label>Location</label> <label>Inhabitants</label> <label>First Appearance</label> </infobox> These are the dark spaces of City magic, they're a form of Knotted Place.
Description
As they are places where the natural order is inverted 'unnatural' things appear.<ref>Up until a location was disturbed. That which was flat and ordered becomes uneven, with droughts and floods of meaning and concept. Spiritual flows concentrate, interrupt, feed back on one another, and disrupt.
And that which was hidden becomes obvious, and the obvious is buried, and much of this is subtle, except for places where it is not. The same spaces that could form an animus if given enough depth are all there, as shallow impressions and greater ones, or even ones that aren’t actually meant to be, that are jarred into existence by the great shuffling and confusion, or pressed in by the flows of certain spirits into certain impressions, digging those impressions deep.
And as a town forms a dark half, the impressions are filled, the universe contrives, power flows and people form, with vague memories of histories that become sharper as they are defined and clarified, with roles as simple as ‘the third smartest child in class’ or ‘the boy who is good at sports’, until a rough balance has been reached.
A dark underside to the town forms.
Once that rough balance has formed, the flooding of spirit and other powers form an equilibrium, though it is imperfect, and spirit and other energies steadily flow out, from the town above to the town below. The town above steadily loses people, the town below gains some, but only to a degree. It is uneven, and when the town above dies, the town below will die too.
Among the uneven impressions and varied roles across the town, many of which are now filled, the flows continue to push things out of balance. A space for a man who is meant to be big and tough creates a man that is drawn out to many times the size he should be, made far tougher. The space reserved for the child riding on an adult’s back is formed not as a shallow puddle that will dry up in a moment, but as a pond, lasting and stagnant, growing larger, creating tributaries. - Excerpt from Wild Abandon 18.a</ref> They do not damage the city they mirror as the Innocence is too well secured to be affected.<ref>Undercities are alternate neighborhoods or cities that arise from similar imbalances, but are heavily pressured by the surrounding innocence (something of an immovable barrier), they require more distinct imbalances, power sources, or dynamics, and produce bulges or inversions of the city. The power that naturally pools around very powerful Others or relics, vacuum from seals and protections that are too ‘airtight’ or inflexible, or other surpluses of energies can produce the bulge or inversion.
It is rare for the Undercity to be borne or affected solely by only one of those things. Power and excess energies will naturally pool or distribute in different ways in this hard-to-reach bulge of a space, and it will be a natural place for imbalances to form and/or be resolved - whatever the original neighborhood/settlement lacks that other places nearby have will be represented (often higher crime or authoritarian powers). It will catch some excess energies and have certain manifestations in the population as a result. It is also very common for the barriers between the undercity and another realm to be very thin, with high influence from other realms.
Undercity denizens (sometimes just called ‘denizens’) are dark reflections of other populations, often free of usual rules, including innocence, and can be impulsive and aggressive by nature. They can mingle with Others without really flinching; expect to see many Prices Others, Aware, and the victims of Rapacious practices in Undercities. The warping of undercity denizens tends to be subtler, and has to do with proportions - when the ‘smarts’ get handed out, so to speak, more get shortchanged and more get benefits. Roles or capabilities can get exaggerated, and other kinds of distortion can happen, depending on the nature of the undercity and how it formed. An undercity that formed out of a reflexive need for Nature could see feral features (fangs, horns) in the denizens, and one that formed out of a power imbalance could create a subset of the population with too much or too little power. It is not uncommon for the city’s residents to instinctively and actively seek out means of managing or capitalizing on the balance - a ritual of feeding the weak or feeding visitors to animals for the Nature imbalance, or formalized, ongoing gang struggles to feed the city that had a War vacuum. - PACT DICE</ref>
The way supplies tended to work here, there was a lot of fuzzing, as Lucy, Verona, and Avery had termed it. There was probably a better technical term in the books, but they hadn’t gotten that far. One truck, once in a while, would be diverted from highway to here, leave its load behind, or things stolen off the back of a truck would be moved to a warehouse in the factories or downtown. Then, somewhere in the process of being repackaged and rebranded, there’d be more, but it’d be Kennet-below-ified. Other sources of supplies like what the factories output in questionable canned food products, meat from hunting at the fringes pressed into containers with ambiguous quasi-meat products, there would be more of that more.
From there, it got distributed, bartered for and paid for in cash at the various key points of delivery. Just like Jessica Casabien’s raincoat with an uncertainly endless supply of chocolate and protein bars in it, or glamour, things could thrive off that fuzziness. Normally. That process wasn’t working like it had a few weeks ago.</ref>
Residents
Examples
- Kennet Undercity
- Undercity at Oslo<ref>As they travel through Norway, however, they are forced to cut through the Undercity in Oslo. A neighborhood the unawakened cannot enter, rife with Others, and a large population of hundreds of the dangerously Aware. There, murders are a daily occurrence that do not even shut down affected businesses for the full day, most dogs are strays or attack dogs, and, pertinent to this anecdote, the lion’s share of children smoke and drink, with some doing hard drugs casually. - excerpt from Famulus, quoted in Bonus Materia
l: Famulus Text</ref> - Underside of Paris<ref> - Excerpt from False Moves 12.z</ref>
References
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