kingtycoon | Entries tagged with world of my own

Patchwork
World Constructed World Mega City

Fenster
Quickchannel Goldendream’s House of
Houses

From:
Short Interludes withPeculiar Folk of the
Capitol

By:
Pir Earth over Stone Pinepath

Citizen
Fenster is an unassuming type, a man of very limited physical appeal, but with
a certain avidity of intellect that leaves one feeling overmatched once he
begins. He is very retiring however and
is not easily drawn into conversation. I
was compelled by his bashfulness to be introduced to him through several
intermediaries. Once acquainted though,
he was very pleased to make demonstrations of the prodigies that he has
assembled in his home. When simply asked
about the impressive model of the city in his house, Fenster was strictly at a
loss for how to explain himself he did, however, answer specific questions
easily and without discomfort.

Sir,
your model is of exceptional design, it is truly a marvel. May I ask when the idea to create it came to
you?

Ah, you see, I ah… So the model itself, here – this building,
just near my own house, as it appears on the model – this was the first
building. You see, here by the Quick
Channel. This building was started many
years ago, in two-thousand and eighty-seventh year in fact. It’s a storehouse for a vintner operating
just outside the city. I’ve not been to
the winery, but here you can see, the stone I used is the same. It’s like this with all the models, you
understand, I use the materials of the building they represent. They were building the storehouse, you see
and I walked by because it was in my path and I found an unused piece of the
limestone – the cladding for the structure.
You can see it just outside, it’s the same stone. Well I took the stone and amused myself in my
idle hours by trying to shape it into a replica of the storehouse. That was a great many years ago, of course,
but here it is, the first.

So
your models are all built from the stone of the built from the same materials
as the building they represent?

Oh, indeed yes, to me,
that’s the main thing. That they
match. You know, the first model – the
storehouse, I made it too large. It was
the stone I had and I didn’t have the skill, then, to make it any smaller. If I had, I’d not have needed to give up so
much of my house to the model! But
yes! Yes, I am told by other enthusiasts,
there are so many of us, it turns out, when a new building is coming in, or a
road. Some of the foremen, they’re
acquaintances now, friends even, and they’ll…
Have you met Dion Shortstreet?
He’s one of the builders - one of the Knights of Craft- their religion, you know, the Maker
Faith. They are great supporters of my
avocation, they see it as a holy work, in their religion. Well Dion, he will always spare me some
material, and sometimes a copy of the architectural diagrams. If it’s a structure he’s particularly proud
of, he’ll ask for a model of his own, I can hardly help but oblige! And he’s a good example but hardly the only
one. They like to help and I like to
show them the work – the builders. I
understand that a spare model of the Cathedral of Masons that I made is at Wei,
on their hill – the Churchmen, they say it is a subject of some of their
devotion.

Just
so Fenster, that is where I first heard of your project. (Fenster is visibly pleased, he squirms at
his workbench) But this accounts for the
new buildings, as you they are constructed, you gather a spare piece of the
masonry. What of the older structures,
Klial has many very ancient buildings after all.

It’s very flattering that
you’ve heard of my work even at Windheart, they spoke of it to you?

Yes.

Wonderful. You’re right of course, you’re right, smart
fellow- there are so many buildings, old
buildings. Well, here, look at this one
(He picks up and hands me a carved piece
of wood, it resembles one of the tiny insula that are common on the Oxbows, far
from the city center) That is a building on a street called Sucker street. Named for a mollusk of some kind. That house has stood on the same spot for ten
generations. Would you believe it? It’s a very modest old house. Well?
Where did I find the wood that would match? I’ll tell you – I asked them.

Them?

Yes, the house’s
inhabitants. I told them I’d like to
take a bit of board from the side or a piece of the roof. They told me I could. Well, that house? They handed me a bit of the roof that had
come off. You’re best going after a
storm. In a neighborhood like that.

How
many houses on just Sucker road?

Sucker Street! Street.
Oh, let’s see (He counts, somewhat
slowly, a row of models in his great model of the city) Seventy Three, thereabouts, North &
South sides. There may be more just now,
or fewer. Very mutable, the oxbows. I must go back soon.

And
each of these models is made from the same…

Yes, it has to be exactly
the material that the house is clad in.
Clad, you see, clothing. I don’t
fashion the guts of the buildings. Just
the outsides.

Well
what of the palaces of the Kannyltine!
Some of those are clad in gold, no?

Oh, aye, they are, they are
that… (He has a forlorn expression that
is immediately revealed to be a farce, he is making a joke at my expense, well,
he is trying to) You see. Gold.
The Last Kannyltine. I wrote to
him, you see. I wrote a letter and I
went to the scribes to have them make it proper, for his eyes, you see, and he
liked my letter. He sent some people, I
imagine people of very great status to come and see my project here. I was not present, you understand, I wasn’t
allowed in their company, but they came here and they saw. They must have liked it very much and said
something to the Kannyltine – he had his own smith here the very next day with
an amount of gold and he showed me how to hammer it into leaves, and I’ve used
the same bit ever since.

Remarkable! Do you think that Ettis XLVII came here
himself?

Oh! I hadn’t thought of that, but he might
have! I wish I’d have cleaned up a bit
more! The gold is nice isn’t it? A nice touch, but I’m most proud of the
roads. And the rivers and the bridges,
and the trees. Oh the trees. (The
model does have roads, and it does have water and bridges, but it lacks
trees. Instead there are leaves
positioned throughout the model.)
You see, a leaf to match each tree.
I coat them in wax, they’ll last forever – but the leaves match.

Amazing. How many buildings are there Fenster?

Oh, altogether? Many thousands, probably. I imagine.

You
really don’t know? Exactly?

Ah, yes, I fooled you. Yes, here it is. (He
produces a tattered piece of parchment, it is heavily marked). One hundred and forty seven thousand eight
hundred and ninety four. Well, ninety 6 –
after today.

Again,
amazing.

I must return to my work,
but I can answer questions while I do so, I’ve had so much more time, all these
years since I’ve retired from the service.
Would you be kind and make the coffee though?

Building
of Adventure Corpse Land Boarding School of Horrors

The Dark
Labyrinth Madrassa, The Unseelie Nursery At The Silver Grottoes

Commonly, in
the lavish courts of the Flower Dynasts of Rosecrown one will spot a courtier
who seems strangely out of place. Among
the Knights of the Gladiolus Orders, or
the Provocateurs of the Daffodil Schools, all in their excesses of finery, you
might see someone at the Lord’s elbow, drably dressed with only the foxglove
sprig carved in jet or ebony or obsidian as a simple badge. These courtiers, are conspicuous by their
lack of arms, their lack of a retinue, their lack of any significant
presence. One cannot attend one of the great
cotillions of the Rosecrown Sodalities without every attendant calling out
names and titles, positions and affiliations, and yet with even with grace honed
to a perfect edge, one cannot learn the names or the identities of these
Foxglove marked courtiers.

Not every one of the Rosecrown Houses has one
of the Knights of the Ordo Digitalis, and those that are so lacking are notable
for the failures of their intrigues and the fragility of their security. While the Madrassas of the Tulip Courts teach
the arts of Story & the Madrassas of the Rose Court teach the arts of
governance, and each of the Schools of the Progression of Seasons have their
own subtle and unsubtle arts, the Winter-Madrassas teach those secret and
unseemly skills so needful at court and so shameful to countenance. Secrecy among these schools is paramount and
none is more secretive or more exacting than the Madrassa at the Silver
Grottoes, the Unseelie nursery.

The Peaks of the southern
Rosecrown frontier have ever been a bulwark against invasion, the great snow-clad
peaks that reach high beyond the clouds fencing the Julusti subcontinent,
saving it from all invasions save One.
Silver Peaks are not empty, though they are no longer the frontier they
once had been, rather they are a fastness, a remote internal bastion. But while the rare air and penetrating cold
of the high mountains no longer provides a hedge of defense from the outside,
there are guardians there still, who train up the very few in the proper arts
of courtly defense and the unseelie arts of courtly subterfuge.

The Silver grottoes are
indistinctly named, a supposed region of the Silver-Peaks, it is an indistinct
name that offers anonymity, for how many silver grottoes are there in those
mountains? Hundreds, at least
dozens. Yet there is the one, among the
many, which is a place of strange and dark reputation. A pit in the mountains so deep that the sun never
shines upon it, a dark place carved into the mountains long ago in the search
for the now spent silver veins. But
through unknown interventions of history the abandoned mine, a maze in the
perpetual darkness became for the Rosecrown Sodalities, the training ground for
their court assassins.

The Labyrinth itself is
known to occupy a very large area – based upon the omniscient and ancient
records of the Kannyltines, it is known that the mines were once of great providence
and were exploited accordingly. The
excavation itself took place over many generations and the seemingly endless
vein was exhausted only after centuries of extraction. The excavations remain, a great chthonic
palace, a rock depth beneath the mountains.
Though materials remain, indicating the breadth and depth of the
Labyrinth, the documentation of its whereabouts have been eradicated
systematically through long & secret campaigns.

Very few are those
candidates who survive the labyrinth. It
is said to be a tomb, to all those who die within, those who could not navigate
its perils. And more than mere darkness,
hunger and thirst, it is said that the many dead, gathered in that place walk,
and seek to destroy all who would surpass them in ability. Nevertheless there are a few who do survive
the passage and enter the Silver Grotto, finding themselves at the Foxglove
court where they are trained in the assassin’s arts and the sinister work of
the Unseelie courts.

Principally, the Foxglove
Knights are poisoners, extortionists & killers, but they likewise bring knowledge
of the defense against these nefarious arts to their patrons. Such patrons pay an inordinate fortune to win
the favors of these courtiers – though they still are less expensive to train
and maintain than members of many other knighthoods. The disconcerting, and often worrying thing
about the Digitalis Courtiers though, is that none now alive can say who their
masters are, who the Counts and Dukes and Mahatmas of their school are, least
of all the students, who approach the Madrassa in utter secrecy, utter darkness
and with only the greatest courage. There,
they train in darkness, learn and study in darkness, are never exposed to the
sun while in the chambers of their grotto for the dozen years it takes to learn
all their dark arts. And at last, it is
said, when one among them is sufficiently trained to leave the Nursery, it is
made known to them by the blinding light of the sun, which they are able,
finally and at last to see – at the end of their cruel journey into their
haunted catacomb.

It is said as well, that
those who leave the Madrassa on their feet never willingly leave the sunlight
thereafter, that they are energized and empowered by the light as if it were a
potent drug, and that even by the dark of night, they rest their eyes only
briefly, and then in the presence of many lighted candles and under the starry
sky. Whether this is so, whether the
Foxglive Knighthood is really so rare, so disciplined and so fiercely trained,
none can say – save for their own fraternity – and none among them ever speak
of these matters – or if they do, they each and all tell a wholly different
tale, keeping their secrets secret and their sinister arts unspoken, unheard
and unseen – these are the matters that are learned in the Night Madrassa.

Misplaced
Wildlife Ominous Floating Castle Secret Government Warehouse

The Albatross Vault at The Nightcandle Harbors

Out on the Dagger-Sea, the
ice-laden gulfs of the Imperial South there are glacier hewn isles, grooved and
scrubby, treeless. The tracks of the
sea-serpents, they’re called and upon one of these tall, inaccessible rocks the
Kannyls of Nightcandle, of old – in their Colonial Vanity did cause a great
vault to be built. Carved into stone,
hard to achieve by ship – but inapproachable by any other means – save the once
in a lifetime freezing over of the harbor.
The vault is carved in the cliffside and the hewn out rock was recovered
to form a great dome overtop the handmade caverns. Once constructed the great edifice had a
purpose known only to the founder of the vault-
A Kannyl of Nightcandle’s earliest days called Zarraw (of a now lost
line of that family) – but after the earliest dynasts of Nightcandle were
replaced by their latter Imperial lords the place was put to rest as a
troublesome folly, impossible to access – except by the albatross, tern and
seahawk – all of which creatures nest there in their seasons.

But
later innovation of an existing folly is a hallmark and a point of pride for
the Lords of Nightcandle – who have turned the use of the inaccessible,
impossible vaults to stranger ends than any could have imagined. In the hunts and journeys into the Utter
Dark, into the fallen realm of Sorrowblood and into the Raindrinker interiors,
and as well into the Rimal Steppes they have gathered those strangest birds –
by eggs, all hand raised and let loose in the aviary at the Albatross
Vault. So that the inner chambers and
the inmost rooms are haunted by man-eating birds larger than horses, or by
plump water birds, four pawed and wingless, or by the paw-winged trunk clinging
feathered monkeys. A vast panoply of the
pinioned beasts gathered from the Imperial East, exotic and peculiar, all are
housed in these vaults. Or were, for the
impulse to gather the menagerie, like the impulse to build the vault was a
fading fancy of a dynasty replaced and replaced again here by avid naturalists,
and there by spirited hunters, and oftener than not by the complacent and
neglectful lords who rather rightly turned their interests to human
affairs. And so by sporadic
interventions and avoidances in alternating turns the Albatross Vault (for the
Albatross never varied their devotion to the spot) came to be a strange and
haunted ruin – a wild menagerie of strangely-bred and otherwise extinct creatures. Some new, some forgotten – and on nights of
fatal consequence there have been seen great, fathom-winged birds leaping from
the place, blotting the moon and stars from perception – and the sailors of the
ice-clad harbor know too well the uncanny calls of the prisoned raptors that
are of no place but this one.

Here
and there, a Lord of the Bay, a Tunkannyl, feeling secure in his walls, or a
Rinkannyl goaded to present the trappings of heroism will send out from their strongholds
at Wormstone or Weatherrock some gallants or vagabonds – whichever is in the
vogue of the time – to try and reclaim or rediscover or to merely revisit the vaults. Invariably this fateful enterprise is doomed
to a fatal end, but here and there, someone does return. These few survivors maimed and broken will
tell a tale that is retold until the next lord of the Bay decides to spend his
surplus heroes on the exploration, motivated by the stories he must have heard
at a young age – of a lone survivor – who had seen the great toothed-storks,
the sealbird or the spiderhawk – mad and deadly creatures that certainly
frightened the child-lord, but always with the succulent coda- “and the man returned with a feather of solid
ivory, inlaid with gold, clutching only this one beautiful treasure, he washed
at last to the shore.”

At times like these I like to remember that I'm almost 40.

After a very long day full of progress bars and upload templates & field management I got drawn back to my imaginary world- you know the one, the one I go crazy and work on endlessly, the one that I consider to be my main work in life.

So yesterday I realized something I wanted to work on, and then I did work on it. Because I love doing that and being busy and useful to myself. I do not like washing dishes or cleaning up after myself because those things just don't seem useful.

Actually - let me talk about that thing - see, I was in the midst of the winter malaise because of all the effing cold and dark and I thought "I should have more fruits." But the thing is - I kind of don't like eating fruits. I don't mind them, but I... I don't even know. I like Square Meals. There's hardly any square fruits. What I decided to do was to just make potions for a few weeks. I mean, I got a blender don't I? Ain't I got a blender?! I do, so I bought like, nonsensical amounts of fruits and have been grinding their bones to make my juice. Anyhow - a couple of weeks of heavy potion consumption have left my guts somewhat out of proper order. My thought was to substitute all sugar and candy with fruits and then to drink them up all the time. Anyhow that was fine, as things to do go, except that there's a trashbag full of peels and cartons and peels and washing out the blender is a nuisance and... For all it's dietary imperfections the peanut-butter nutella diet is tidier with less hassles about cleanups. Anyhow I hate cleaning and love messing. I would make a sweet nomad, wandering the earth, littering it with peels and cartons as I move to less messier pastures.

Tomorrow, I'll clean up - I have to, no one will do it for me, and I'm supposed to be a kind of person. The kind of a person who has a clean blender. This reminds me - actually, of when I was a salesman - you'd always be pitching people on how you'd save them from hassles. People hate hassles. I bet 100% of all people dislike hassles, if someone did like hassles, man, I bet you wouldn't even want to know a person like that.

Of course, I like complicated challenges with no payoff a lot. I love that stuff. That's not a hassle. That is weird pleasure.

It came to me that I could work harder on my imaginary country and I realized that I could paint a whole big map of it. I work better from maps - they give good ideas, geography=history you know - all human experiences are predicated and mediated by the local environment, so I work on setting up the world as a bunch of pictures. A bunch of feet by a bunch of feet - this is going to be a big-fun and big fun project. Also? 0 payoff, and extra effort. But washing my blender is a HASSLE. It's weird being alive no? My size 14 shib-shib is thrown in there for scale.

Here's the first pass on the upper northwest corner -