The sprawling city

The city is a vertical city, not a horizontal one. Everything slopes. Buildings look like cardboard boxes stacked haphazardly. The steep hills throughout don’t help. The weather stays nice year-round, but the bay is a site of grotesque tragedies, the details long since forgotten less because of time than collective disinterest.

The tongue walkers - these men enslave the tongue creatures that live in the sewers, beating them into submission. The tongues are stretched out flat around two wooden cylinders and tied to themselves, creating a tongue ouroboros. The men sit on top on wooden chairs and ride the tongues like a treadmill.

The hissy girls - these girls are actually snakes. It’s a coping technique for the girls (for dealing with the dangers of feminine adolescence in an unsafe place) and expert mimicry for the snakes. If a hissy girl is caught or even suspected of snakehood, she’s killed and left in the street to be run over in a warning to all.

The sport of pel-mel - four players enter, five leave. Incredibly popular among youth.

The rememberers - they do not eat food, only soil, so they inevitably die, but some people dedicate themselves to remembering or recreating the horrors that passed through this place. They wear necklaces with the faces of unborn and long-dead virgins, which is inevitably upsetting to the virgins.

The cleansing - on certain nights of the year (usually portended by particularly brutal violence or a particularly hot night) blood becomes afraid and runs from the highest points in the city to the lowest point by the bay. People lash themselves to any sturdy nearby surface to avoid being taken over by their blood. Any loose blood flows down the cabrastone streets until it reaches the bay.

The 11th district - the people who live here are doomed. People outside the district can pass into and out of it, but those who are born within it can never leave it. Attempting to leave usually results in loss of limbs or, depending on the primary active constellation, electrocution. The magical barrier appears weakest when sagittarius is most visible, where the punishment may be only the loss of one’s sense of taste and time.

The drivers - the gangs here ride bunched up on expulsion-powered two or three-wheel vehils that they use to terrorize others swiftly. The drivers are the most ruthless. They sacrifice a blood brother to the ancestral conquedors for the honor of driving one, throwing their comrade’s bodies in the bay to be eel food then gouging their skin with chalks.

No comments:

Post a Comment