#also vralk

[honourablejester]

Numenera Setting Notes: Points of Interest Part VI

Heading now to two very different and widely separated parts of the world: Vralk, a volcanic militarised nation to the northeast of the northern Beyond, and the Rayskel Cays, an island archipelago far out into the ocean west of the Steadfast.

I’m putting these together because, to be completely honest, I’m not really vibing with Vralk? There’s  a couple of cool bits and bobs in there, so I wanted to include it somewhere, but it’s just not the bit of this world that’s exciting to me. If anyone else wants a survivalist expansionist military nation state that lives in a volcanic hellscape, Vralk is for you! But it’s not really my scene, so I’m gonna skim through it and then move on to the Rayskel Cays, an island chain that is very much more my speed. Most of this entry will be the Cays, to warn you. I love them a lot.

(Got a little long, because I love the Rayskels, allow me to burble about them)

Part VI: Vralk & the Rayskel Cays (Ninth World Guidebook)

Vralk:

Hellsfont, in the Firefang Mountains of Vralk. It’s a five mile radius field of living fire just hanging out. And by ‘living’, I mean fully intelligent and empathic, and therefore capable of being negotiated with to a limited extent, so you can, for example, ask it not to burn you. If you make it safely into the field, there’s lots of fire-immune lethal biomechanical monsters in there, and also the ‘cinder giants’, which are eleven 9ft tall humanoid skeletons in numenera armour just scattered randomly around the field, still standing but inert, coated in white ash, and immune to all attempts to loot them.

The Gate of Stars, in the city of Nabir Enthru, Vralk. Nabir Enthru is an industrial forge city with an ancient rivalry with Morlash Kor, the Vralkian capital, but the bit that intrigues me is the Gate of Stars, which is the main entrance to the city. The wall around the gate has been riddled with small alcoves that hold the ‘stars’, small motes of solidified light that were looted from the crystalline crown of a vast statue in the Firefangs. These lights flash under various circumstances, and several have been identified as flashing if, for example, an ultraterrestrial entity passes nearby, or an invisible creature passes nearby, or a weapon of level 7 or higher comes into range. But there’s a bunch more that flash and what they’re flashing for hasn’t been identified yet. IDK, it just feels really cool to me.

Norde, a port city on the River of Sorrows, Vralk. It’s built below the river, in a sunken depression 120ft down from the water level, with a thick wall and set of levees keeping it from being flooded. All the piers and docks are built at the top of this wall, and a single floodgate lets a cascade in from the river above to bring water into the town. The physical set-up of this place is just fantastic. There’s also three 3000ft spires in here, wide at top and bottom and narrowing in between, which makes me wonder if the depression was meant to be a foundation/base for something that the spires were meant to hold up. It’s just a cool town.

Mount Errow, in the Firefangs, Vralk. This is another of the mini-adventures scattered through this book, and it’s … It’s giving me Subnautica vibes? Despite being landlocked? Basically a nano named Demanisix Mal discovered that Mt Errow, a very active volcano, has a synth facility inside the caldera that is attached to a three mile deep shaft that deposits you into a vast magma chamber with an ancient subterranean city along one wall. Demanisix, before she vanished into the depths never to be seen again, left a journal naming this place the Errow Cascade and describing it as ‘a voluminous installation—possibly an entire hibernating city—that straddles a subterranean magma sea’. Which, you must admit, is cool as hell.

The Rayskel Cays:

The Slavering Falls, the central structure around which Rayskel culture is based. The Rayskels are a spiral archipelago that curl around the Slavering Falls at the centre of their inner sea. The Falls are what look like a circular underwater waterfall, actually cascades of silt falling over the ends of a massive circular pillar structure that, every so often, and randomly so no one knows when it’ll happen, becalms the seas around it and rises above the surface like a giant piston, causing an actual waterfall at the surface. It’ll stand up there for a week or so, and then plunge itself back down in under an hour, sucking anyone still on it down with it. All sort of things are collected on the Falls as they rise and fall, treasures and airels (spongefish used as currency and also considered living pieces of the moon), so trying predict when it’ll rise is a huge deal. And kids in the direct vicinity of the Falls are raised from birth to be ‘moonbabies’ to dive the Falls and search the tiny nooks and crannies for treasure even while it’s sunken.

As well as material gain, the Falls are the centre of Rayskel religion. While religion differs from island to island and settlement to settlement, most Rayskel religion is based around the worship of the moon, considering the sky another sea like theirs, and the moon as the mirror of the Falls in the sky. So the Falls are variously considered to be trying to mate with the moon as they rise, or perhaps a lover or sibling of the moon trying to reunite with her. And, the little detail from the Rayskel religion that I love so much, most of the islands consider that when a person dies, they need to be put under the waves for three days so that the soul can leave the body to become a bioluminescent creature in the skysea. I adore this. At the end of the three days, the body is pulled out, and can be recycled. If someone drowns and is not pulled out, or dies on land and is not able to be brought to the sea, they are considered lost forever and never mentioned again. That has so much pull for me. The stars are bioluminescent souls swimming in the skysea, and you have to spend your time beneath the waves after your death to join them. And if you can’t, you’re lost forever. There’s a lovely cultural thing to get teeth into, the tension and time limits around the care of the dead (also it’s just really beautiful).

I don’t know, this immediately feels so vibrant and real. I love this element so much, this central phenomenon of the islands, and the culture and beliefs that have grown around it. Also … when I die, I absolutely would not mind becoming a bioluminescent fish swimming the skysea. At all.

The Cays also have a bunch of cool transport options. You’ve got your normal range of small boats, of course, but there’s also things like iuskies, which are 40ft tall kite-like plants that you can use as natural sails for small craft and/or surfboards, and bubbleboats, which are hardened semi-circular top shells of duems, huge jellyfish looking creatures that shed their hydrophobic shells once or twice a year, that have been turned into quite efficient near-hover boats.

They also have very common non-human inhabitants that mingle with humans freely in the form of the Echryni, amphibious humanoids.

The Cays are known, somewhat, from the Steadfast, particular in Anculan and the Sea Kingdom of Ghan, and work is being done to confirm where the archipelago is and establish actual trade routes with it. I just. Further sight unseen, I’m already loving them as a setting. But. Some specifics:

Vonnai, on Darnali island, possibly the largest city in the archipelago, a massive, compact, walled construction that piles interlocking buildings on top of each other, docks tucked into their bases and passages and walkways running through buildings into each other. There are four lunar (tidal) powered gates that allow access in and out, two by land and two by sea, only during the day. The ruler lives in the only separate building, a four storey hovering tower, along with her husband, the architect behind most of the city, a man who specialises in harnessing tidal power. Which means this is a ninth world city, not a prior-world city, built by modern genius (with, granted, the usual understanding of prior-world numenera as a helping hand). I love it.

Kinider and the Terrible Exhale, down the southern end of Darnali island. The Terrible Exhale, or just The Hale, is a seasonal phenomenon of the southern peninsula of Darnali, where small bubbles of noxious fluid, containing small creatures, detritus and debris, are carried across the peninsula by a wind. The bubbles explode, releasing noxious gas and turning anything in them into shrapnel, laying waste to anything in their path. This happens several times a year. As a result, the village of Kinider is buried under a beach in strange structures called ‘sinkers’ to avoid it. Sinkers are strange, transparent, glasslike tubes buried in the earth, with webbed membranes across the top. There are exactly 100 of them, and no one knows what they are or how to make more, so the town is extremely pressed for space. Also, the tubes are fully transparent, and not much sticks to the inside of them, so privacy is also an issue, as well as seeing … crawling things in the earth around them. And stuff decaying in the earth around them. The views aren’t good, is the thing here. This is such a weird little town, and I love that it exists. Interestingly, because of the housing shortage, a shanty town village has sprung up on the surface a little up the beach, but it’s destroyed every Hale, and its survivors have to rebuild all over again every time. So there’s … tension. Heh.

Dyn’s Scar, on Augh-Chass island. A milky white stratified inland sea, the Scar has a cool top layer, a warm middle layer, and a lower layer that often freezes, sending sunken icebergs floating to the surface. The surface is covered in float pods, 10ft by 15ft floating plants. The shore is ringed by hyperfungi that sprout after rainstorms, shoot up to 6ft tall, and then violently fling spores everywhere, which would be fine, but each spore release includes one ‘hyperspore’, an intelligent spore that floats into a living creature’s ear and tries to steer them somewhere new to start a new colony by submerging the host in water. If you can’t resist the spore’s ‘suggestions’, you find yourself somewhere strange with no idea how you got there, and feeling the urge to go for a little swim. In the depths of Dyn’s Scar, in the warm middle layer, is a city of an extremely intelligent race of multi-eyed tentacled amphibians called gedyr, who think humans are mostly dumb animals to be hunted, and are fully capable of speaking human languages. This whole area is just fantastically weird, and I love it.

The Omaris kibics, on Omaris island. The whole island is scarred by hundreds of miles worth of open trenches called kibics, some of which are a mile wide and half a mile deep. The walls are golden cement inlaid with elaborate designs, including designs made of light, fossils of ancient or non-existent creatures, ancient languages, and inlaid technology. The floors of the kibics are made of a porous silvery substance with a consistency varying between packed earth and warm tar, and which secretes a viscous purple substance called glaili, which a group of local nanos have discovered can be compressed by certain machines, although the process is a work in progress and results vary from a pretty red stone, to a power source, to actual numenera. The walls of the kibics also contain entrances to various underground structures and complexes across the island, many still unexplored, with the potential to contain ancients know what. The whole island is just one massive weird constructed landscape full of weirdness and discovery.

Maer Outpost, on Omaris island. It’s a trading outpost built at the site of a collision between a ship and a young bellowing naek, which if I’m reading this right is basically a weird sky whale: “Bellowing nyeks are behemoth amphibian creatures with multiple finwings and a long, serpentine tail. They spend most of their lives in the air, flying and leaping above the ocean’s surface. Once they reach a certain size, however, they become waterbound, able to breach the surface only rarely. The sight of a fully grown bellowing nyek breaching is one of wonder to even the most hardened and experienced Ninth Worlders.” The Outpost is built in the midst of the wrecked ship and the naek corpse, and the survivors found that there was a lot more salvage than had been in the ship. Apparently naeks are full of numenera? Or possibly portals. Because the shipwreck camp developed into a trading outpost where anything can be got, and if you can’t find it the first time, you might be asked to come back in a couple days and it’ll miraculously be there now. Heh.

Edelmid island, as an environment. Because it’s weird. The whole island is covered in huge strange ring structures, called Grask’s Hoops, made of compressed dirt and sand that’s hard as rock and about as fertile. When dry, it runs in rivers, but hardens when wet into perfect rings, spreading outwards. They can go up as well as out, and the largest is 200 miles in diameter and a mile high. At the centre of these hoops are groups of plants called Crowns of Kavess, which gelatinous raspberry-red growths in crystalline shapes. They’ve adapted to Edelmid’s weird as hell weather, which rains sensations, including scent, sounds, and touch, which can be lethal if the sensation happens to be pain. The Crowns of Kavess ‘drink’ these sensations, and, after large storms, come together as colonies to ‘fruit’ numenera from the largest growth. Specifically artifacts, the most permanent and powerful of numenera. They defend these numenera and themselves during this vulnerable time by dusting the entire area in red dust that compels any creature it touches to defend the Crowns and their fruit to the death for 1 hour. So. This island is a fun and possibly lethal, but also possible profitable, time?

Rynach island, I’m only going to skim this, but it’s an island defended by psychic trees and housing a city-lab complex inhabited by transhumanist bioautomatons called kathons who believe firmly in self-improvement through self-modification, and have a lab complex made of light hovering above the forest. They have bioenhanced cybernetic symbiotic dolphin-like mounts/companions called guins that live in canals through their houses. It’s whole weird thing in there.

Darrad, a sprawling mining town on Angmorl island. It’s sprawling to cover the massive network of mining tunnels seeking ‘blue essence’, material found between rocks in the area that can power numenera, but is only sparsely inhabited, less than 2000 people. And possibly part of the reason for that is that, a while back, a rumour started circulating that the blue essence was the souls of creatures buried in the earth here, and the miners promptly rebelled, terrified they were messing with their own or other people’s ancestors. Blue Datasphere, the mining company running the town for a faraway investor, responded by basically massacring the town when the miners refused to cooperate, and built a second one, where miners have to agree to a temporary mutation that renders them mute to work there, in order to keep the rumour from re-spreading. But verbal communication isn’t the only communication, and keep that lid tight is still an issue.

The Rysors, between Angmorl and Augh-Chass, ten tall, towering, near identical ‘islands’ that rise hundreds of feet above sea level. And they move. They’re called the ‘Walking Islands’ or the ‘Walkers’, as if you’re watching from the shores of the nearby islands at exactly the right moment after twilight, you’ll see them get up, shake themselves off, and start weaving through each other as if interacting. Around when this happens, a high-pitched echolocation signal is emitted in their vicinity, and sometimes the Rysors glow during this event. People trying to go near the Rysors feel heavier and heavier the closer they get, and often find they’ve lost time when they return home. So like. Alien islands? Just hanging around.

The Rayskel Cays are definitely up there with Lostrei’s Glass Sea as one of my absolutely favourite parts of this world. I love them so much. Though, yes. If anyone is getting the impression that I like the maritime, watery parts of this setting a lot more than the burny bits of it, that’s probably true. But the whole thing about the dead needing to be placed under the waves in order to become a bioluminescent skyfish in the afterlife is just … I want to play someone from the Rayskels. In the Rayskels. I want to explore this place. It’s fantastic.