City23 Week 1, “Ancient”
For City23, I’m using Sean McCoy’s original weekly prompts here and Spooky Action At A Distance’s weekly schedule here.
The place: Mazcity, once the gem in the crown of a vast human hegemony on the distant planet Nensh. Said gem is now cracked, in many more ways than one.
Sunday — Rumour
An old well
Citizens who’ve been here long enough love to share the rumour that the oldest part of Mazcity isn’t the Old Imperial quarter, the silk caverns, or the Calabera palace gardens — but in fact an old well, inland and uphill in the west of the city.
Perhaps the rumour persists because, as it belongs to a private estate, no one with any story to tell has explored the well to its full depth. The rumour goes on to say that there is a secret passage dug by insectoid forbears known as “termantes”, a passage that goes under the well and deep into the mountains, older than Mazcity itself.
Termantes fly as readily as man walks, but when we destroyed their nest, they left in secret via an underworld passage built by their grandmothers of grandmothers.
— Stone IX
According to folklore, over three thousand years ago the area that would one day be Mazcity was populated by a rich multicultural mix of humans, gnomes, and termantes. The idea, at least, that termantes existed in the same geographic location as humans (and said termantes eventually left due to the destruction of their home nest) is supported by the runic inscription discovered on Stone IX in Northbay, though in centuries past this was interpreted as a victory by humans over insects.
Folklore holds that gnomes of this ancient partnership were the first to disappear, wiped out in the war with the Old Empire in the east. Perhaps due to this, at some point the termantes and humans are said to have worked together on a plan to dismantle the settlement, in case the Old Empire turned its eye to their continent, known then as the gnomes’ homeland. The humans moved up and down the coast, and the nest-settlement of the termantes was dismantled, so that now no trace of it exists.
Some historians believe that the meaning of the runic inscription on Stone IX is not to claim victory nor co-operation, but rather has a religious meaning that is lost to time. Others question a priori any writing that claims insectoids wouldn’t simply fly to a new nesting ground, especially with little in the way of explanation as to why the humans and termantes would so thoroughly decamp their own settlement.
The writings of Cilva Te describe a city called Mesburie peopled by both humans and “le-termans”, who very well might have been the same as the termantes. Scholars are quick to point out, however, that Cilva’s writings are not intended as history and his mentioning Mesburie was a rhetorical device — a dramatic illustration of virtuous co-operation and its fleeting nature — more than evidence that any place of that name existed.
In a single day and night of industrious sorrow, every le-terman’s home was pulverised and each human’s home taken apart for firewood, and the city of Mesburie was no more.
— Cilva Te
In some of the modern populations of nest-dwelling insectoids far in the western reaches, such as the Telistanji and the Celticks, oral tradition attests that they came there from lands near Mazcity as part of a permanent immigration due to a ‘great evil’. Meanwhile, gnomish records of such an ancient time, which presumably would include the only remaining written evidence, are closed to Talls.
As conveniently fits the old story, there remains no compelling evidence that humans and insects, let alone gnomes as well, co-existed in any real, civilised way in ancient times, certainly not in the areas that were subsequently claimed by the Old Empire for Mazcity.
Monday — Room
The “old residence” underneath the gardener’s cellar
Near the heritage site, officially called “The Calabera Gardens”, is the gardener’s residence, beneath which is a normal cellar. But in the late nouveau period, when the then-current owners remodelled the buildings surrounding the Gardens, they discovered a cavity known as the “old residence”, now known to be the the ancient, crumbling remains of a building from the time when Mazcity was ruled by the Interbellum Kingdom.
In the poetry of Epoctoques, it describes a so-called “heavy room” that “bore witness to the tragedy of the Imperial Civil War in microcosm”, and the old residence near the Gardens fits his description.
The romantic novel El-tla and Romayne, by Hebra W. Doyli (as well as its highly popular stage play adaptation) dramatises the end of the Imperial Civil War as a schism and subsequent feud in a wealthy human family that extends across the whole of Mazcity, and the love of two indentured servants whose masters belong to opposite sides.
The Dorados on the west side of Mazcity live in a grand, though eminently flammable, mansion near the Calabera Gardens. The basement, in which the daughter and El-tla hide while east-side Dorados storm the mansion, is all-but-outright-stated in the novel to be the “old residence”.
Author Doyli, though not a historian, claims that “more than you believe of this novel is true”.
Tuesday — Item
Lenjuro Sono (‘Sono the bell’)
A barn-sized bell that is kept under lock-and-key, for unknown reasons, by a city committee whose origins are shrouded in myth.
Wednesday — Room
The canals and the ‘Highwayman’s Ghost’ tavern
Patcounty in northwest Mazcity is now a fever dream of rows upon rows of cheap housing, but the area used to be a separate locality known as ‘Contmonte’ with its own culture distinct from the riverfolk, the western forest, or the ‘Dilandings’ downriver at the coast.
Alleged to be the first place in the world to use canals, they once crisscrossed the flat lowlands of Contmonte prior to the expansion of Mazcity into the area. Several of the canals that were once the lifeblood of the area have simply dried up, and many more have been filled in and paved over by the rowhouses. However, the main channel still operates, as it is useful for shuttling people and resources from the mountains on the city’s northern fringe to the river.
The official edge of the city is said to be the lock between the canal and Haul Lake, but as this is where the incredibly old ‘Highwayman’s Ghost’ tavern still stands, it is said by citizens that the city ends with the tavern.
Thursday — Inhabitant
Dr. Tracy MacDougall
Doctor MacDougall hails from Patcounty in Mazcity’s northwest and is the proverbial “man about town”. She runs the MacDougall Foundation, whose sole objective in Patcounty is feeding and finding housing for locals, she is on three separate intra-city committees and she has a large backyard filled with displaced pets and livestock which she feeds and rehomes on her days off.
Tracy sees her life as rather normal, thanks to a complex support network of Patcounty “patriots” who see her work as vitally important to the charitable identity of the area, however others have come to think that her efforts are misplaced and that the old, crumbling buildings and literally-ancient zoning laws of the city district are creating challenges of poverty faster than individual citizens, even quite proactive ones like Dr MacDougall, can solve them.
Various entrenched landowners and wealthy, influential Mazcity households from neighbouring districts see Tracy as a jumped-up, overeducated bleeding heart, though 76-year-old Wence Wibberly has lately changed his tune after Tracy saved his life during an incident with a very large wandering crustacean.
Friday — Room
The “back room” of Andavar Brode’s Slate Repair Shop
Another great mystery of Mazcity, the Gnome Quarter, is not the ‘separae’ ghetto that newcomers may assume, but more of an embassy to the vast underground gnomish society that few of the Talls properly understand.
The architectural features of buildings in the above-ground portion aren’t dissimilar to the surrounding districts. This is chiefly due to gnomish architects having been brought in by the post-interbellum Human Hegemony, when the city became more important on the world scale and consequently more wealthy.
Andavar Brode, of the Beney-Ga-Rat Brodes, repairs personal magical slates at his shop on the border of the Mazcity Gnome Quarter and the Mazcity Wharfs, where the land slopes up, away from the ocean, and is honeycombed with the “real” Gnome Quarter, which remains de facto inaccessible to anyone over three feet tall.
However, Brode makes no secret that the ‘relatively modern‘ (at least for gnomes) façade of his repair shop belies the building’s ancient origins. Like many gnomish buildings on the rise, its back room has a lower roof than the front, and smells slightly unheimlich to anyone born on the surface. These “back rooms” are actually the front rooms, only on the underground, gnomish side.
Saturday — Faction
Contracity Rats
The tradition of bigotry and discrimination in Mazcity has shifted from anti-gnome in the Old Imperial period, to practically anyone not wearing a hat in the Interbellum Kingdom, to the pro-human rhetoric of the recent Human Hegemony — whose laws and customs still impact the city’s policies and attitudes to this day.
Andavar Brode has another profession, known vaguely by all, but challenged by no one. He helps to find safe passage for “smalls” (that is, anyone who can fit in the gnomish underground) who need to get out of the city quickly. Lately, this organisation, known as the Contracity Rats, has also branched out into people smuggling, and even helping certain humans who can afford the price.
Despite this, Brode’s official-unofficial position high in the Contracity Rats is remarked upon by very few who aren’t actively seeking his assistance in leaving Mazcity, and the city police (who really only exist in certain wealthy human districts to begin with) are more than happy to let gnome business be gnome business.
City23, Week 1 End
I’m totally going to keep doing this for as long as I can remember because this has been very fun. As for the city itself, I’m writing a novel and short story set in Mazcity so you can consider a lot of this to be a public beta for parts of that book.
