CLOCKWORK FLORESIENSIS

8 CLOCKWORK FLORESIENSIS

When the ancestors of the Sinquistion came into the caverns, wretchedly pursued by drainers and

and fresh waves of the Bloom, there were others already there - mechanical men.

It was them who built the Necos, La Ciudead. Perhaps they little realized their nature viz a viz other lifeforms : their artifice well-concealed and appropriate amid the workings of their creation Perhaps they imagined themselves living beings in a stricter sense - that others were artificial, un-living.

(Of course, in matters regarding the risen dead, they are half-correct : but the question of whether a thing breathes or not is not important to the clockwork).

Perhaps they constructed the city by some sort of instinct or mechanical pattern, and the resultant buildings themselves gave (or continues to give, in exile) something approximating sentience - via the tall antennae towers that resist alteration and shoot lightning KEEP AWAY. Perhaps buried, deep within, is some sort of a queen, waiting, unfertilized. Perhaps she has been found by the Shadows and colonized, and the resultant brood will be something entirely new, a fire to clear the drift.

The Clockwork Floresiensis were chased away by the Sinquisition. The Floreisensis long to return. This is paramount. All the other details of their lives are subsidiary to the one purpose: although, being machines they don't pursue this goal creatively, but rather long after it, disorder their lives after it. It undermines them. This is a key difference between clockwork life and actual, formerly breathing (un) life. (Un) life works inside out : it has a nature from which it derives a purpose. Mechanical life is high concept : the purpose first : from that it derives its nature. Even if the situation no longer matches.

The C. Floresiensis still have a presence in the city, in pockets – for one thing they have a finger on the tone RE that opens the Amberduct which allows fast transport through La Carreterra Anaranjada on a silt river. They oil the great pistons and scrape off corrosion which cycle the streets.

These Clockworkers are looked at as nothing but collaborators by the diaspora – they dress pompously and are not properly serviced, technicians though they are, whizzing and popping and rattling and prone to prophetic vomiting of gibberish. (Although there is plenty of bogus work done by hired undead mechanics who don't properly understand their workings - shaking rattles and dunking them in chemical baths). Still - the city is safer than the "Outdoors" and they would see themselves as preserving and the city itself for an eventual return.

The bulk of the Floreisensis were chased into the marches and pretty thoroughly exterminated by the elements.

As it turns out, the nemesis shadows can lay an egg in THEM pretty good too (see the rumination about colonized queens above) – and so infested, their longing changes from the City to their eventual offspring, that incubating and eat their insides, until the composite thing hatching from their stomachs wipes out the village. To host an Egg gives magic powers : and those so "blessed" sleep a dreamless sleep, shivering under blankets, manifesting illusory quarter-shadows : these too lay eggs in Floresiensis, or in their minds they do, and make quarter-half shadows themselves, and so forth, each generation less substantial, until at last the pool of victims are exhausted, or until the real offspring is born and kills everyone anyway.

Half Shadows Quantum O.G.R.E.	This is the end of the process. A war-machine monstrosity. Skinny : tinkertoy type connections : body parts any which way : lots of sharp edges. It will kill everything - and then will most likely go dormant : ant lion like : waiting for further instructions.
Quarter Shadows Bag Katies	There are always 4 : Think of popular descriptions of the 3 Part Goddess : Badb Catha/Macha/Nemain - they from one angle are a rustle of wings and cloth - and at another are 4 figures - talking in the same voice, but with a different font, this sort of thing: Nurse Shadow : This is the part of the split-self that tends to the body : it shivers, it tucks the covers in, shhhs. It will deliver the half-shadow. (Angelpoise) Lamp : Light from which the shadows ascend the wall and change size. This is probably loosely the "machine-soul" of the infected. Sometimes it's a creature with an illuminating sphere, sometimes a torch, sometimes a burning body. Claws : Unhinged fury : The protector. Almost without form. Cutting comes from THAT corner. And THAT. And THAT. Architect : Plots the next step with a protractor and sheaves of paper. Stooped, walks with a limp. Most likely to do the stinging, although any of them could, if it came down to it, resulting in :
Eighth Shadows The Minnow-taur Visibility - 3	The Offspring of a Quarter-Shadow (the half-shadow lets nothing live at all). They run faster and faster (and they better - see above). Very small. Very fearful. Little motes : think the critters swimming around that Jabba the Hut catches and gobbles. Or squigs. Any village around will have them : they are shoo'd away - pests - and operate a little bit like a flash programmed fidget game : you push one away, it goes far, and the center of gravity shifts for the whole bunch : his buddies/proximate points drift off away toward him : the whole school moves, and then comes back together. Often they have some ability to disguise themselves : they look FAAAAIRLY normal : but their glamours like everything else drifts with the group : so there is a tug of the skin : a softening on one side : outlier's lurching motion pulled toward the congregation.
Sixteenth Shadows Baby Visibility - 2	The Offspring of a Half Shadow AND an Eighth shadow it has caught. So : first of all, the group issue is here. The accumulated WEIGHT of the captured eighth shadow : plugged as it is into some hyper complex death machine : draws the others in. They want to rescue their friend. They harass the Half Shadow, as it is weaving itself around the unfortunate. They overthrow it : tear it to shreds : even as it creates the offspring. The host dies too : now you have seven in need of an eighth : they take the baby into their circle : and are quickly dominated by a mind approximately 8 times smarter. No better disguised than the Minnows (really) and they keep the baby bundled VERY well (the odd horror pull away and you look inside the blankets and it's ONLY stars and such). : the thing is, the 7 stay TOGETHER, so there is no distortion.
Thirty-second Shadows Clockwork Habailis Visibility - 1	Some 7th son of a 7th son thing here. Entirely indistinguishable from a Floresiensis. Say, one is a live image, one is a flip-book. You made it kid! You are a (mecho) human again. Except : See below
Big Rig (32) Gh0st Visibility - 0	The child of a Clock Hobbit (aka Clockwork Habalis) and a Clockwork Man. The resultant child might stick around for a while : even grow to adulthood, but they will slowly FADE into the background. Bilbo Baggins that s***. Maybe the hand goes first. Did it get chopped off? Or it it just slowly fade away to the Negative Material Plane. Who can say. Well, the Ghost knows. Maybe. Maybe not. Sure, they are preten....nnding to have undergone an industrial accident : saw, meet hand. But maybe they're not really sure where it is either. Ghosts essentially. (but sliiiiiighly mechanical ghosts, hence the 0) Once they disappear, they are WELL pissed, but can only unwind the maze of negative material (like being covered in a million strands of thin black), or finding your mouse on a malfunctioning screen. They'll f*** with you when they can.

(and herein is a reskin of Scenic Dunsmouth) :

The diaspora in fact survives only in the visage of a single village, Clepsydra, a place of waterwheels and canals. When the time for this too to fall, two heroes arose as they must do in these circumstances (that you hear about – the sample size being exactly equal to the number of tellers : no survivors = no story). They drove back the wave of shrieking undead. They burned out the infection with blue fire.

They persist, restless, on guard without rest, diminishing but alert. They really hate each other.

a : Synchrowulf – that great hero from the wars before, mumbling to himself at the far side of the village, killing without mercy or reason if you look at him wrong. Steer well clear. He will find offense at anything. He has killed for an impertinent remark. He has killed the ogre Humbaab, he has killed the Silver Dragon, he has killed the Watch Witch . . .

He has killed the Watch Witch.

He has killed the Watch Witch. He has killed her again and again.

b : The Watch Witch – frail and threadbare. But here she is, haunting Synchrowulf, appearing in his reflection. Sometimes she even gets him, pulling him into the water until he smothers. Sometimes they have children.

The 2 are always plotting to kill each other, fomenting factions (such as two particularly anti-social creatures can politic - ambitious schemers try to keep them on task - but you'll end up with a knife in your stomach as likely as anything), setting traps for the other. They defend the village well, all that remains of that glorious clockwork civilization in its indigenous form (set aside the clockworkers who are beneath the villagers' contempt). They defend it well, except when they become too caught up in their schemes toward one another.

So the Nemesis shadows sometimes get in. And lay an egg in someone and cultivate a little group around them.

Maybe often get in. Hard to tell. Because there is a BUG in the system – a hiccup of time, an anomaly that runs the clocks backwards. Every time you come to Clepsydra, it runs differently. Sometimes everyone is infected. Sometimes the Shadows are cauterized with violence and it's free and clear. Stay in Clepsydra too long and it resets itself.

The clock resets, but the shadow-spawn sometimes escape and make war in other parts of the Cadaverlands. If they can get out fast enough.

The Watch Witch and Synchrowulf are always insane – that is the price they paid to their clockwork gods long ago for the strength to endlessly resist the invaders. Perhaps they were at first able to remember across iterations - or are able even now but get everything muddled. Holding drifting sand.

Imagine a train turntable – it is lined up in a certain configuration for a while – but then all of a sudden you are at a dead end. That is how the Tic Toc Woods are. They are a source of limitless energy, but it is inward pointing. Someday some enterprising soul might damn it up and create electricity from its weird little workings. Someone like :

9 JULIA ATLAS MOTH

Source : Blood in the Chocolate, Hubris

A cursed sometimes child of Synchrowulf and the Watch Witch, during one of the reboots that went more Rom-Com than Boho Body Horror. Formerly an activist against the destructive exploitation of the Cathedral Arboreal, now a good capitalist busy turning turnips into tincture.

It is her fate to cross from one mask to another, and every project that she undertakes is in essence some sort of trap laid against the designs of her future self. So there are veins of agitation in the Cathedral which Julia Atlas Moth laid, in a prior incarnation as Rainbow or an intermediate form, and being a hyper-efficient maven of machine production she knows too well that the CREATURE she will become - the plugged in hive-mind - the flayer - her inevitable descent from idiosyncratic living machine-woman to mere implement of some larger purpose.

(perhaps this is but summary, the nature of all men : these differently-limbed creatures ganging up against themselves in a great super-Nova-ctopus trying to choke out it's own neck - shabby- chic

in their new but ill-fitting skin suits, changing clothes every 27 days, the down-stream implication of that curse of death loosed by Adam).

The different Julia Atlas Moths slip the bonds of time and appear - here and there - to make mischief for the other. These creatures, by virtue of their wispy semi-physicality and bore-bit eyes attract followers - and despite the falling off over time as the memory fades - enthusiasts persist. If you meet one, chances are you have already met the others - and each is attempting to pull you into their orbit at the expense of these alternate perspectives. They, being the same person, can disguise themselves as other incarnations, and at least some of the time keep straight who they really are and what their purposes were for the impersonation.

TABLE 1 - Julia's MANIFESTATION

1 : Child Julia

Preternaturally aware child - wandering around the Red Swamp.

Red hair - almost druid-like connection with the environment - the trees will bend to protect her. Level zero but possessing copious psychic or wild-magikal power. She will most probably offer you something to eat : a root, a leaf of exotic plant.

Hair : Straight, Red, Long.

If she is encountered OUTSIDE the swamp - there remains a bit of the swamp that is with her - the floorboards are rotted, the tree collapses and is filled with locusts.

2 : Julia Rainbow Moth

In the Cathedral Arboreal - carried around as a shiny talisman by the Silvertip Skink tribe (a little bit lizardman, a little bit bullywog - a little bit 40k orks).

She isn't 100% sure what is going on - she probably believes she is doing some form of activism, or leading them as a gnomic outsider - but they regard her more as a magical object, a god-horn, a coat of colors.

Hair : Braided, Painted rainbow.

The Silvertips will make LONG journeys outside of their territories - to anywhere and anywhen. She tells them that strangers are coming to mine their home, she doesn't tell them it will be her.

3 : Julia Atlas Moth

The Skinks enslaved. They dart around and do mechanical tasks. She has convinced them that they are in hell, being punished for transgressions, working off their sins with boring rote polishing of stone to make Vino Huecovo.

Most of her thralls were troubled before - they were lazy or adulterous or murderers or traitors : and they thank her for purifying them. This is like a seventh tribe, ill regarded by the others.

Hair: Grey - dyed BRIGHT red. Pulled back in a complicated bun with enchanted pins that will pinch on hearing a lie (hers or by others).

There are distribution points everywhere - little meth labs run by little Julias - most are eventually absorbed into the greater Crooked House - they slink toward it : busted up by adventurers and reforming, ever and ever closer until it's long tongue hooks them and the Fattest Julia Atlas Moth pierces the doppleganger's eyes with fishooks.

4 : Julia Atlas

The Sorcerer - who starts dipping into the Vino herself after long keeping things professional : it makes you see in all directions that time goes - down through the floor of the moment : drip drip into the other streams, the long underground that you die and when you come up for air again it's just after you were born and there are two of you eyeing each other through a wall, through a shoji divider.

Hair: Gray - a beehive of a thing, straight up Bride of Frankenstein style, a Marge Simpson.

Brooding in her tower - she will be encountered through a portal always as she does not LEAVE her tower ever, but rather seeds it with doors and brings people to her. Absolute Center. She is after something she has lost, but whether it in particular is an object, or a person, or herself, she, having lost all three over time, she can little tell.

5 : Julia Salt

Hathor of Storms. She haunts abandoned places, brings their mechanisms back to life through tedious bench-work. Brings them to life to drain the fluids from their successors. The horror movie shadow. Masked in grotesque manner.

Hair: Shaved.

She takes joy in causing machines to destroy themselves : be they physical or best laid plans. It is Julia Salt that Julia Atlas Moth fears the most and takes the greatest precautions against - she has laid traps for "The Salt" to spend her energy against : but even these offer a silver string back toward their creator, and traps within traps within traps are necessary to slow her calculated advance.

6 : The Salt Witch

Druid of the Slums, at a level of peace at last. She has given her life to Shülaff the Green Dragon - serving him, combing his hair, polishing his scales. Perhaps she will venture back to the village and become her own mother. It is not outside the stratagems of Shülaff.

Hair : Gummy white tied with other people's hair to complete a wild rats-nest.

Encountered probably on the way back from visiting the mad god himself - he has perhaps tortured her : flayed her or decapitated her but she is past such trivial things and will sew herself back together. Everything is for a purpose and that purpose is Shülaff.

Sources : Scenic Innsmouth. Warhammer 40k Compilation

7 A MINED and MARBLED MAZEWORK

Neccos, La Ciudead, belongs to no one.

It is occupied by the Sinquisition : they remodel it to their purposes : to cultivate and torture : but the city was built by others for others and keeps its own counsel. Everything is temporary : the great apartment blocks slowly turn against each other : passageways to other districts are sometimes closed off entirely by the turning of the gears. It is a place of detour and dead-ends.

The Bloom will ultimately rush over whatever barriers are erected, catch and co-opt the residents. This is inevitable, just as the refugees took the city from it's builders who had lost the city before they finished building it. The implications of this certainty are everywhere. The mined buildings. The pit traps. The elite members of society who sleep with weapons under their pillow for that night when they are called to run interference for the evacuation, giving their (un) lives so that La Ciudead can continue - after a fashion - elsewhere.

A certain celebratory nihilism underneath all the piety. The only sure thing is to continue running.

Nevermind this two cities in one bit. Every square has, rather, a three-part existence:

Animal	Primary	What is right now
Vegetable	Vestigial	What it was in clockwork times. The root.
Mineral	Forward	The Bloom. It's like seeing the girl you are going to marry. The kids to be (zombie incursionaires) are dancing around like little lights. The city embraces these new arrivals, augers of the future. Burns them for heat.

The city whenever you want! Does it happen on the first of the month? At irregular intervals? On high holidays - clockworkings on which have been superimposed the (un) death days for saints? That there is a rhythm is the important thing. Obviously it's turning all the time anyway: but to keep things simple, make it chunky. Lo rez is the best rez.

Take a pile of six sided dice : roll them and stack them in a nice grid.

Numbers that are the same have worked themselves into a single section. Adjacent numbers (2 to 1 or to 3 for instance) have some sort of passageway between them be it bridge, tunnel, gate, etc. Numbers further apart are not connected. For now.

 

1	BLOOM!	There's been a large incursion in this sector. Perhaps a passageway to the Outer Shell opened up and critters are streaming through. The City gets weird. Table C-1.
2-5	The Usual City Stuff	Hierarchy and order. Rage, rage against the lighting of corpse candles with structure on top of structure. See Table C-2 below.
6	CLOCKWORK COOKOO!	The Old City uncovered by time and shining through : Artifacts and gearcraft. See Table C-3 Below.

There's a good chance then that a 1 or a 6 is isolated. Good! If not - the invaders can escape into the general population and you've got real trouble.

Luckily for you, there's table C-4 to help you. Measures of last resort.

 TABLE C-1 : The Bloom has Breached the Barrier

1	Haunting (Ghost)The space is taken over by a malevolent presence. Objects begin to move of their own accord. Stay in one place too long and you get weaker and weaker : older and older - the light that animates your corpse is consumed by something more comprehensive than your survey of self. Imagine carbon-monoxide poisoning, but with eerie laughter and shapes at the corner of vision.
2	Fast Footsteps (Specter)The noises in a J-Horror movie,a child running, on the ceiling, inside the walls. Giggling to itself. The City itself is infected by a malevolence, necrosis from a spider bite of the Bloom. If you follow the footsteps, you will learn things about La Ciudead that you never knew. The Footsteps know everything geographical : the secret doors : who will come again. It will try to drive you : off a cliff, into an ambush. You could trap it perhaps and release it like an egg grenade to sew confusion.
3	Hunter Killers (Wraith)Highly disciplined hunting expedition - commanded by your basic tall dark and armored shade - handsome if you like the void. Darth Vader up on this mother. Although not above feeding on the locals (in fact, probably one of the party is frothing his figurative mouth and can't help it - to be sternly chastised or even killed by their leader) they are after ONE escapee - and are fairly focused.
4	Diggers (Vampire)Minions dig a grave site to deposit their master. They are jumpy. He is half awake. If allowed to persist : he will set-up a castle : a labyrinth : a tower. Space will condense and fold back on itself. All is to hide his rather shallowly buried body : the earth resists all efforts to burrow further.
5	The Fellowship of the Wraith (Skeletons) A caravan of Skeletons. Scared. Pursued by a Drainer of some sort - they think. There is certainly always another found in the morning - all energy left him, bones distended in a way that shouldn't be possible : like one of those flowers you soak in water and it grows 4 times the size. It's one of them : isn't it, who has a nemesis egg inside him. The leaders are arguing : interrogating : turning on each other.
6	Mediocre Wight Man (Wight) He's almost made it. He has fed and fed. He has flayed the skin of corpses and drunk from the well at the center of all apparitions. He is beginning to change. It almost drives you mad : the skin growing again from the bone : the hair sprouting in clumps. Into the barrow, to curl up you chrysalis! Instead, he has found himself here. All will be undone. But yet. The city still offers solitude, in the abandoned corners. Imagine the TMNT Rat King, his bandages, his half-speach.
7	Quinceañever (Zombies) As the lurchers come to life in a Bloom proper : they, the doomed, throw a party. May as well. The Drainers will catch up to them soon enough. But what a party! It has a life of it's own, wrapping up everything in a protective bubble of excess. Even the drainers get caught up in it. Even you get caught up in it.
8	Charlie Chuckles (Ghast) He is a man yet : but he has turned himself into a creature by means of murder and rituals and bone chimes. He's not undead : he's post-dead : reanimated but skipped the dying part. Attended by dancing girls in flowing dresses : they are somewhere along the process but not so advanced. All are wide-eyed at the dark promise of La Ciudead - all will feel particularly betrayed when they are captured and expelled.
9	Screamers (Ghouls)A seemingly limitless supply - pouring from an opening : after some scrap : they can smell it : but La C is a pretty good place to hide : all in all : if you are a living thing. The stench of death is everywhere : it's like water to ditch the bloodhounds. The Screamers don't care. They're knocking everyone over : they are in a frenzy. Citizens out of the way : you're in the way!
10	Nursery (Nemesis Shadow) It's Alien all over again, isn't it. Eggs growing in bodies and energy fields : crackling with electricity. Little hands poking out. The shadow in question is QUITE spent : having done all this : he is draped across the floor like a Persian rug. Most probably he won't even have the energy to rise. But the eggs : they are a hatching.
11	The Duelist (Lich) A jauntily dressed and fairly young lich has taken his first shot at making bone golem/mummy/construct. He has done a pretty poor job : he lacks the patience or the precision for this type of job. What he DOES like is to fight : and he will challenge anyone to knock him out of the circle : this is entertaining for him as he waits. Since he did such a piss poor job of the magic : he'll be waiting a long time. If you can knock him away - he'll be impressed : so impressed he's off to train more to knock you clear dead at a later date.
12	Bones the Barbarian (Skeletons) There are the civilized dead, who on awakening try to avoid being harvested and want to catalog the world and write poetry and torture their fellows to unlock the lost tone . They build cities and such, or steal them. Otherwise, when you wake up : you can make an idol of the sleep from which you emerged, and attempt to return your mind to that place : to revel in the now. No dragon gods for you. Motion. Action. Blade and Fire and Anvil. Those guys, not them guys. And yet : here they have stumbled into a city. How will that go?
13	Royal Refugees (Mummies) Fancy folks who fled with elite guards. A family, with children. They didn't make it. But they almost made it. They made it here. They alternate between homicidal and aristocratic depression. Their duds are trashed - flies are everywhere. They are disappointed that it came to this.
14	Boy Scout SurvivorsThey are young : on some sort of vision quest deal where you expose the next generation to the wilds so that they can push back when the time comes. They are lost. But dangerous - some real talent here. They think they are in a mythic underworld - everything has a double meaning. This can be exploited if you talk to them in an appropriate convoluted manner.

TABLE C-2 :  The City as she Stands
 

1	Slums Here is the beating heart of La Ciudead. Anyone can be found here. Even if somebody is somewhere else in an obvious way : they are also here. The houses are built on top of each other : alleys split into their own alleys : there are always people about: in front of their apartments, selling useless items, taking note of goings on. If suddenly there aren't people, you know something is up. By that point, you're probably too late and have been caught in it.
2	Jail At times they are dark and oubliette-y - little grates with fingers sticking out : boxes stacked on boxes like a Cargo ship. Sometimes they are open air with a lot of freedom of movement but some sort of killer-weird in the fountain and anybody who tries to run will be pulled back and drown.
3	Town Watch Nothing to see here folks. There are guards swarming everywhere. They've set up a command station and everything. Something has gone down. Is it worth sticking your neck out to learn what?
4	Tent Revival A charismatic preacher or illegal cult. Perhaps around a recently excavated cult site. Perhaps around an object. The Sinquistion frowns on any of these object-based worships. They would contend that the TONES are the only source of divinity. But they tolerate some of these as they will burn themselves out sooner if you just let them be. There's always zealots though who can't help it and go in burning and slashing anyway.
5	Market The most intractable parts of the city. Older than anything : highly specialized : usually selling only a single thing with loads of meaningless variation - usually for the worse. Got any +1 Swords! Sure! But each has a flaw : think of it as a signature of manufacture. Otherwise how do you expect to sell a thing as boring as that? Maybe it is a set of 5 and when it crosses paths with it's mate it wants only to be reunited. Maybe it makes it hard to sleep. Maybe it grows hair for the winter climbs and must be shaved every morning. Lux!
6	Sin District Gardens. Libationaires. Prostitutes who have learned to project a small amount of their animating electricity : you too can be a drainer. Brightly lit.
7	Bureaucracy The Singquisition loves paper. Everything should be cataloged, tracked. Universal employment : as long as everything can be filed. There are all sorts of minor functionaries, laboring away. The entire history of the world exists somewhere, written down longhand.
8	Carcinogen LibraryThe Sinquistition is of the belief that the destruction of forbidden books only spreads their essence : the words themselves consumed by fire will reassemble themselves on some other page. Much better to water the heresy down : hide the worst of the lot amid the dross. There are many many of these small libraries : each guarding a single book - it will be surrounded by similar titles, or books with a similar essence. Even magic means cannot divine the location of the needle in the haystack. Perhaps the librarian knows : but he is among the most fanatical and will not help you.
9	Miraculum To succeed in magic is to be spirited off, to gradually to drift at right angles away into the firmament. The body may remain, ill-tended if wiry, but the wizard is elsewhere, doing else-things. To fail? The minor successes that launched such an unsavory career have already separated the user from his fellow citizens. The failures find each other's company. They congregate : poor ashen practitioners selling minor enchantments. The streets here have a static charge : the sense that anything could happen : but will most probably fizzle out first.
10	Closed for Repairs The city, forcibly occupied or not, still needs lubrication and maintenance, lest the great gears stick and shake the foundations. It is old and irritable. Any district can be shut down at a moment : yellow caution tape wrapping around, clockworkers swarming in their lugubrious way, carrying oil-cans and hammers, gathering in circles stroking their chins in contemplation of the city's persistent mystery. Although some of their fellows in the diaspora label these "collaborators", the servitors see themselves as merely another mechanical part of the City itself, and sleep onsite in wire hammocks.
11	Thieves' Guildhall If the City is a great mechanism (and it is!) the many mafias and street gangs and fraternal criminal organizations are the oil that lubricates it's bureaucratic stickiness. (never mind the ACTUAL oil, mentioned above, that must be applied) Usually it is much more efficient to go through a guild rather than braving the bureaucracy, start to finish. Gang territory is everywhere, and best not forget WHOSE territory you are in : but for every Chief there is a fortress : be it a flower shop, the back room of a jazz club, an under-cave, or a homeless camp. It is here the group retreats to if in a war over territory, and here that you will go to ask a favor.
12	Adventurers Adventurers are like a flu-bug descending on a household. They pass from place to place, laying the one low only to move on : expelled, shunned, antibioticked away with the promise of quests and megadungeons. They set up camp at the inn, or a boarding house. Trouble follows. Every once and a while : a group of them will get it in their head that La Ciudead itself is the adventure they seek. These individuals need to be forcibly expelled at once : they tend to dig themselves in. As this is a business best accomplished by seasoned professionals, there exists a domestic career available for adventurers after all. Sometimes two competing "extermination" firms end up under contract to kick their rivals out of their respective neighborhoods.
13	Nobility Formal palaces with thrones and supplicants. The Nobility are generally either Mummies or very old Ghosts - one time invaders, they set up court, and integrate themselves into the workings of the City. Ghosts require rituals to prevent themselves from dissipating. They might be able to grant 1st level spells. The Mummies spend a lot of energy dressing down. Mummies. They're just like us.
14	The Whore of Brouhahon At the very center of the city's clockwork is a Candy Heart : She spells out, letter by letter, the history of the world - in that original language, of snarl and alarm call. The words are long and flowery and devoid of consonants. The Sinquisition says it spells out SOLFEO, over and over again - but looking too long burns out the eyes, so who can say. She is a gas. She is a liquid. She is a solid. She grows inside you. She escapes, from time to time. Has a walkabout - puts on a skin of melted skin and blue gingham. There will be a long parade. Best keep away.

TABLE C-3 : The City formerly Known as 349b5823d04

1	Boarding Hooks Imagine something like the opening scene in Meaning of Life : the City itself in some sort of clockwork imagination can approach and make an attack at the center of some other city : hunt them like Whales. Render them to their core components. Perhaps, even, this is what happened, how ancestor of the Sinquisition achieved escape and the La Ciudead was overwhelmed : a hole in the world through which they fled. You ever punch a guy and he starts bleeding on you and you get scared a little?
2	Analog Gardens Precise. Weirdly blocky like an 8-bit gameset, giving the same elusive happiness. Possessing Wu without Wabi. The entire thing moving as one. A playroom for some executive.
3	High Ceilinged Laboratories High science - lots of glass. Maybe there will be some critters of whatever sort preserved in alcohol or in a stasis field. Maybe it will be an atom smasher or something, just taking two objects and sparking them against each other, noting the color. The Sinquistion loves these. If you can find one, keep it from submerging again, they'll give a nice reward. Turn it into a prison cell/torture chamber.
4	Open Concept Offices These will still have clockworkers in them. banging on typewriters. They didn't leave as the city sunk. They were asked not to by an exec. No walls. Perhaps, as with the Monkeys, pounding away with their pointer fingers, they have produced a SCROLL with a spell. Perhaps it is one that will light the world on fire.
5	Motion Picture Halls Movie halls - still running. Weird, abstract things - oil slides with chimes. A machine that puts a cell in front of the light and it lights on fire, slowly crumbling, pull. Insert another. Often not a hall at all but open air. These are older machines, more deteriorated, more likely to be malfunctioning.
6	Prionpriapus Nemesis Shadow are just the last in a long line of infections that throw off the clockwork. Most are not of the life/unlife axis at all - but rather constituent parts mounted 90 degrees wrong : bad replicative programming : sharp edges that strip the gears. These are junkyards and quarantine : Monoliths working like magnets for misfolded clockworkmen.
7	Spare Parts-yards Graveyards : but orderly : every piece sorted by purpose - color (which can determine age of manufacture) and condition. Spider constructs tend to the parts, cataloging them, piling them up or dropping into pits. Everything is intended for ONE purpose and one purpose only : adapter creep clockwork style. An enterprising murderhobo could probably find all sorts of treasures with banal uses that have extraordinary possibilities.
8	Evacuating Clockworkers The worst is happening and the City has been utterly breached : screaming horrors and shadows are everywhere. They keep organized, but coiled tight tight tight trying to maximize their position into the run-chutes to escape. It is tense. Anything at all could spring the it : cause a blast, loss of formation. This, then, is like an unexploded munition, just waiting to blow up. There are floor captains, with colored vests.
9	Failing Levee Here there has been a big breach, and no matter what anyone does, it keeps on springing leaks. It's one of those intractable fairy tale situations where dozens of doctors from distant lands are called to wake the sleeping princess. In this case engineers. They argue, try outlandish braces or engine pumps. The walls break. The guards push the hordes back. Rinse and repeat.
10	Reloj-bservatory The Stars operated in a manner familiar to the inner life of a clockworkmen. They turned against each other - and great telescopes were constructed for the sheer pleasure and awe at as above so below. Complicated fortune telling dictates policy. Many are now pointed at the Bloom. The old equations applied to these irregular patterns give interesting results.
11	Cookoo Reactor Great beating heart (s) of La Ciudead. This is the kind of thing like an a pulp cover : fair maiden or (perhaps sulking rival) chained up on a cliff awaiting to be consumed as a tax. At the appointed hour, out from a door : often unseen - comes some sort of horror. It feasts and renews the harvests. The offerings may seem quite modernistic : the Sinquisition is not above finding a Reactor and offering someone to feed it.
12	Antennae Towers Tall, transmitting frequencies far off. Or else receiving. Maybe there is a box somewhere printing out the results, or to feed the inputs. Often partially colonized by other critters - as nests, or as towers for slimwizard - who intertwine themselves with the infrastructure - cultivating spark elementals : volterage, ash, and man, who take the form of an army or a criminal enterprise - shambling about as if in a dream, eyes glowing like a single set of embers. They will insert themselves into your life : Ningauble, Sheelba : and commandeer you to find other, taller, latticeworks to climb.
13	Fancy Restaurant The most dangerous place. They have evocative names with many layers of meaning : referencing classical poetry but also tragic military defeats and mythology. Dragons will sometimes come to dine : they, being the most heavy metal of all mortals and immortals, appreciate even more than a clockworkman a meal made of gold garnished with bronze flakes and a tin wedge.
14	The Boardroom Everything decided by committee. If an executive has a rival and wants to neutralize him, if he can get him on the right project he won't surface for years and years. They are sleep deprived, irritable, and trapped. Powerful beyond measure but powerless. There is left over catering everywhere. Stacked on the last leftover catering. Sticky notes and arcane scribbling.

TABLE C-4 : Counter Measures

1	Confetti Blast Dozens of little glass spheres explode, releasing adhesive paper bits. In the vacuum of the sphere's they don't stick, but as soon as they're out in the air, they stick to everything : each other : the city, citizens, invaders.
2	Thrusters Go! A tremendous spring launches the infected block into another in a random direction like a jack-in-the-box. This is devastating for both of them : and also creates a barrier of rubble against the incursion. Survival is possible, but those thus afflicted will be trapped, and given the circumstances, rescue is unlikely.
3	Whippits Out of great gargoyle mouths, the area is pumped full of something not dissimilar to Smilex (Joker Juice). Everyone gets light headed - even the most dour depressive brooders have a happy time - everybody keels over paralyzed - dead or not?
4	Insinuation C-4 Pipes run along the ceiling that instead of waste or steam or other transported substances (although doubtless those pipes are there too – don't confuse them!) is filled with Process Oil. A valve turns and said Oil mists out (from a set of pipes, naturally, completely inert on it's own), mixing in the air to create little pockets of Parallel Possibility. Creatures thus afflicted are parallel-ized, working their way through all the possible permutations of every action – deeper and deeper, spreadsheet after spreadsheet – standing very still lest they set off another chain of events in their head.
5	Orange Crush Bio warfare. A plague house is revealed right at the center of the area - from which are released 1d6 emaciated sufferers from the Crush. They survive, but most who contract the disease turn a predictable color somewhere between Red and Yellow and start to compact until they are little balls. As mobility is constrained by the effects : the epidemic should itself stay contained. One hopes.
6	Blank Holiday A Festival! Celebrating an embryonic Godling with an unpronounceable name. Inside a fountain is an egg : raising the temperature just so will crack it. Either the critters will turn on it and consume it's energy : sating them and making them slow although erratic, or they will fall down and worship before it. Either way, a prepared team of acolytes will arrive and make a temple right there. There is a gravity to all these proceedings, and a magic that will occupy the invaders long past their expiration.
7	K.I.T.E. S.hield Killers Internal, Tarrying for Expected Summons. Secret organization activated. The Underdeep state. Anyone could be a member. There is a red light that goes off and they launch into action. They have no mercy : and empathy only for other hidden agents. Often - upon surviving an incursion, these orgs start doing politics, feeling very sure of themselves.
8	Anti-Barrier-otics A fireline. Mirror magic creates counter creatures. Doubles the intensity of the infection, but they IN even as the Bloom moves out. The counter creatures usually have a defining characteristic : like glasses, or a uniform haircut.
9	Fortress Undeadica Containment. The infected area drops into a chasm. No further action taken. Bridges will be built over it. Flyers and climbers you'd think could just navigate out, but there's something in the mechanism of dropping that makes gravity resist them : so they're well stuck. Enterprising folks from above can try to visit though.
10	Tower Fiends It's only now that you notice these little birdcages everywhere. Kept well fed are little demons with sharp sharp claws. Infernal stirges or what have you. They won't be fed now. At first slowly, then with increasing hunger, they will rampage about for some sustenance. They don't like to go too far from their homes, so it's a pretty controlled system.
11	Bug Chaser Due to a fiendish plot, incompetence, or ennui and moral decrepitude, the official in charge with this sector's defense doesn't resist the incursion. He encourages it! Secret paths are opened to neighboring sectors. It's a full blown epidemic!
12	Power Station To quote Dr. Suess : "Off again! On again! In again! Out again! Through the machines they raced round and about again." This self-same official, distracted from his job by machinations/ malice/malingering, puts his scheming into a more productive use. Sure : the invasion wants corridors to other areas of the City - step right through these, boys! Just tubes, right back to the center of the sector. But they'll keep trying. Meanwhile, the treadmill is generating electricity. That can be used to animate : well anything. Generally something ambitious and destructive.
13	The Good News and the Bad News There's good news and there's bad news. Which do you want first?
	Good News First The Good News : The Towers mentioned above, instead psuedo-stirges, are installed with archers. They have been training for this : taking the odd pot shot, for many months. The Bad News : Upon seeing their success in clearing the square, they take it upon themselves to hire a magician to make their towers levitate : and they set out rampaging across the city.
	Bad News First The Bad News : The critters climbed the towers and expelled the archers. The sector is now defenseless. The Good News : Territorial little guys, aren't they? Not only does whoever took the towers draw the attention of the rest of the infestation, but they eradicate them entirely : appointing themselves the new first line of defense against further encroachment by the outside.
14	The Broom Loom Candles are lit by a suicide team that dunk the surrounding area into positive and negative material planes, rapidly alternating, until the strobe makes the area move in slow motion. It slows and slows until those inside are as statues (including, obviously, said suicide team, who have to keep the candles lit lest the breath of deathless blow them out). Inside : it's its own thing. Continue as before.  But there's no leaving the party.

Christiaan Huygens

If you really want to get fancy, you can make boxes in boxes. A 3x3 grid contains nine 3x3 babies. You can make a whole family tree of a city. There are exits and entrances. And sometimes, suddenly, as the rush of ghouls bears down upon you, there are neither.

Bibliography and some Obvious but Useful Resources : Yoon Suin, Dead Planet, Gathox Vertical Slum, Scenic Dunnsmouth, Denethix sections of Anomalous Subsurface Environment

6 The SEVEN ROADS SOLFEO

La Calle Roja	The Passage Palanquinium	UT queant laxis
La Caraterra Anaranjada	The Alley	REsonare fibris
El Camino Amarillo	The Echoway	MIra gestorum
La Via Verde	The Heroute	FAmuli tuorum
La Avenida Azul	The Cleanduit	SOlve polluti
El Sendero Morado	The Brain Bridge	LAbii reatum
La Rada Perdida	???	S'ancte Iohannes

There are seven paths out of the Ciudead. Each is a frequency as much as a road : if you (or at least one of your companions - range varies wildly) vibrates in the correct manner, you will pass through what is otherwise solid stone. Their physical features are things out of a dream : real enough to drift away pitter patter, but lose the tune and the walls will close back in and crush you (1). The hope is that the shrieking dead harmonize themselves around the strongest voice of the pack: they will be able pass by one road only, and so, even hotly pursued, upon reaching a junction, you can escape.

One way is lost already - the way by water : La Rada Perdida. The Sinquisition mines the Bloom for that ONE revenant who possesses some vestigial memory of the pure tone which will open the gate - who can be coerced into passing on the secret. They have found a number with a weak intonation, a suggestion of the song, but none who can open it yet.

There are certain characteristics that the Sinquisition looks for, while sorting. It's not an exact science. The Sinquistion being who they are, it's not a science at all. It's re-li-djinn. But on the off chance they get a lead on that elusive SI tone, they'll keep trying (2). Well, not really THAT off chance. 0 .5%, so 1 out of 200. That's what the Sinquisition is counting on. If only they could stop killing people while interrogating them.  Very regrettable.

 

Shotei, Takahashi (1871-1945)

La Calle Roja : The Passage Palanquinium

Toxic environment : must be traversed in caravans carried by Cyclops type giants or other native and immune creatures. They tilt and stumble : dumb brutes, ferociously strong, some carry platforms with dozens of occupants. Occasional accident but mostly just close calls. Smaller creatures carry one or two : faster, but out of control most of the time, capering about on two stork legs or flightless hop wings.

Characteristics : Artificial, Fizzy

La Caraterra Anaranjada : The Alley

Barely a road at all. Dead-ends all over the place, or "basalt bridges" : fissures that need to be wriggled through : easily taken by bandits and held to ransom. Garbage is strewn about : strange, indomitable, almost worthless, almost priceless junk : plastic drink containers and circuit boards. This is the most cavern-like of the Roads Solfeo: although there are some concessions for its artifice : gemstones that glitter a dull amber light. Prying them out is a bad idea : the walls are brittle and prone to collapse : but then, they were already anyway. However, in succeeding you have acquired a worthless little dull thing that neither sparkles nor casts anything but darkness.

Characteristics : Gritty, Agitated

El Gran Camino Amarillo : The Echoway

Huge : rounded stone : built for some ancient race of giants? The scale will drive you bonkers. There are all sorts of overhangs and elegant ornamentation, although plenty have been pried loose for the raw materials, for the copper in the piping. Several famous graffitiests do complicated murals. Some are magic. Some are protected by guardian creatures, although the most protective element is that to go far off the central path makes you visible for a long way and other travelers are bound to wonder what you're up to and interfere with your life.

Characteristics : Hollow and Nasal.

La Via Verde : The Heroute

The path of adventure. Your basic dungeon hex crawl type operation. There are torches in the wall, burning constantly, until maybe they don't. Curves and labyrinths around - whispers to itself in a low thrum, come hither sailor. Every room has a secret door, a trap, and a treasure. Often they are all one and the same.

Characteristics : Brooding, tortured artist. Imagine Beowulf in Grendel, mumbling to himself, covered in blood and ghosts.

La Avenida Azul : The Cleanduit

Living but infected bone. Ghostly scarved ladies constant cleaning who polish everything as the fuzz will otherwise return and clog the works. You may be compelled to clean it too. A hand may reach out to grab you, to digest or help you find it's fingers. Were these to wake : other than finding themselves brittle fossils entombed by time, there would be some shaking going on. "That's not a cave, it's a mouth!" kind of thing.

It's important to note that these critters are NOT undead per se : they have no part in the great tree of unlife, they can neither be raised or turned. Think of them more as some kind of microbiome in soil, turning the deadspace into something that the quick can crawl through. And were the soil to sort itself into thought and instict, well.

Characteristics : Congested, Sick.

El Sendero Morado : The Brain Bridge

Elevated over infinite chasms. The bridge is of strong gossamer, but easy enough to fall off of. Built and maintained by spiders, who skitter underneath, it's for hunting and for transport, but the things they are after are spindly and half-formed. If the bridge catches one, a whole lot of activity happens real quick, but mostly they have been hunted to extinction.

Occasionally you might run into a spider, neither side paying attention to anything but their work: "Oh, sorry, are you just doing road repairs? Carry on". A big ask perhaps for a murderhobo, so used to being bit and biting in return, but there's bound to be more of them than you.

Characteristics : Wooly, hairy.

La Rada Perdida

Who can say? It's lost, innit?

Characteristics (alleged) : Flabby, dense.

TABLE A-1 : Under which Tone are you (un) Born?

The amplitude of the number is how well you can pass. A 6 could allow a caravan to pass, a 1 won't even allow you through alone without some sort of amplification (be it by spell, device, chorus, or high crisis) but it shows some sort of potential.

Freq: Rnge:	1 UT	2 RE	3 MI	4 FA	5 SO	6 LA
1	See Table A-2	UT 1 RE  5	RE 2 MI 4	RE 1 MI 2 FA  3	MI 2 FA 2 SO  2	UT 1 RE 1 MI 1 FA 1 SO 1 LA  1
2	UT 5 RE  1	See Table A-2	RE 1 MI  5	MI 2 FA  4	MI 1 FA 2 SO  3	FA 2 SO 2 LA  2
3	UT 4 RE  2	RE 5 MI  1	See Table A-2	MI 1 FA 5	FA 2 SO  4	FA 1 SO 2 LA  3
4	UT 3 RE 2 MI  1	RE 4 MI  2	MI 5 FA 1	See Table A-2	FA 1 SO 5	SO 2 LA 4
5	UT 2 RE 2 MI  2	RE 3 MI 2 FA 1	MI 4 FA 2	FA 5 SO 1	See Table A-2	SO 1 LA 5
6	UT 1 RE 1 MI 1 FA 1 SO 1 LA 1	RE 2 MI 2 FA 2	MI 3 FA 2 SO 1	FA 4 SO 2	SO 5 LA 1	See Table A-2

Table A-2 : On doubles, roll a third die :

Original Dice	1 -1	2 - 2	3 - 3	4 - 4	5 - 5	6 -6
3rd Matches	UT 5 SI 1	RE 5 SI 1	MI 5 SI 1	FA 5 SI 1	SO 5 SI 1	LA 4 SI 2
Any other #	UT 6	RE 6	MI 6	FA 6	SO 6	LA 6

Footnote 1 This obviously begs the question : what happens when the "key" to that particular corridor you are passing dies : from misadventure or deliberate murder or disease. If killed by the inhabitants of the road, then you might need to kidnap one of them, being creatures of the tunnel itself, they'll keep it open. Redundancy is always encouraged : perhaps another member, even if they don't quite have a handle on the frequency, vibrates with something close : so the way will become THIN and perilous but not quite cease altogether.

Footnote 2 There are of course successes, but those who reveal such abilities are generally so brutalized by the techniques used to release it (dunking in water, cold-torture, finger-screws) that they are unable to properly cultivate their gift : or else if they do, manage to escape as the Watery Rada Perdida rescues them its own self.