Xell; Chimera City

[Steerpike]

Xell

Chimera City

[/b]

Out of the unreal shadows of the night comes back the real life that we had known.  We have to resume it where we had left off, and there steals over us a terrible sense of the necessity for the continuance of energy in the same wearisome round of stereotyped habits, or a wild longing, it may be, that our eyelids might open some morning upon a world that had been refashioned anew in the darkness for our pleasure, a world in which things would have fresh shapes and colours, and be changed, or have other secrets, a world in which the past would have little or no place, or survive, at any rate, in no conscious form of obligation or regret, the remembrance even of joy having its bitterness, and the memories of pleasure their pain.

- Oscar Wilde, from The Picture of Dorian Gray

It rises from the sea like a primordial goddess, hallucinatory and many-faced, its towers hunchbacked and glittering '" a malformed gemstone of a city, flawed but grotesquely resplendent, carved into innumerable fanciful and often disturbingly beautiful shapes.

Xell; also known as Chimera City.

Here rules the so-called Manticore Duke, reluctant and plagued by night terrors, cloistered in the opulent intricacies of the Smiling Palace, the architectural heirloom of the collapsed Elder Empire from which the Panarch reigned supreme over half the world, some thousand years past.

It is a city of many creatures and races, phantasmagorical and incorporeal and malignant and lascivious.  A menagerie of vibrant flesh and lurid emanations.

The orchidfolk are perhaps the most common '" purring to one another, whispering in their spore-tongue, unfurling their fibrous limbs, caressing one another's gorgeous, multifoliate bodies.  They are the city's gossip-mongers and its roaming, sentient garden.

Then there are the Defunct: a machine people, manufactured many millennia ago, some say by the city's original architects.  Now, after the death or departure of that legendary sire-race, they are servants without masters.  Their wires fray; their minds erode; without a purpose they live a nihilistic, meandering existence.  Many have become disconnected with reality, wandering the streets like rusting vagabonds.  A few are violent; some of Xell's more gruesome murders have been the work of Defunct succumbed to the psychosis of the existential abyss.

Above, insectile gargoyles brood amidst the city's thousand pinnacles, the ivy-clad clocktowers and the temple belfries and the secular spires of mercantile powers.  They cluck and chitter and turn their moth-like heads to and fro, flexing their lithe arms, milky muscles taut and glistening in the nacreous moonlight and the eerie, phosphorous shimmer of Fablesea below.

In the beds of the wealthy and the poor alike linger squat, elfin imps, called mormo (said, by some, to be the bastard progeny of the Mara themselves), suckling at the dream-marrow of sleepers like lampreys, coiled oppressively on their victims' chests, suffocating them, eyes gleaming like greasy jewels in the gloom.  The dreams of the lonely and loveless are more likely to be visited by the succubi known as empuses: sultry, sensual spirits who leave their nocturnal lovers moist-skinned and anemic come morning, fatigued from the dark vigor of their phantasmal fornication.

There are humans, too, of course.  Innumerable, libidinous, hubristic, rutting like rabbits, proliferating across the length and breadth of the wide and weatherbeaten world.

Across the city, in every quarter and ward, the Innocent are born, white-souled infants whose absolute purity of imagination gifts them with the ability to transform the world around them '" until the onset of puberty and the inevitable desiccation of their miraculous talents.  Their ability is in some ways kin to the dangerous Manifestations of the Truly Mad, whose entropic conjurations only sanity or death can quell.

Then there are the city's many thousands of magi, men and women who learned or purchased their powers '" a by and large unkempt and foul-smelling lot more likely to be found shuffling tarot cards on a street corner or peering wild-eyed at the entrails of some emaciated pigeon than weaving sorceries in the halls of merchant-princes or the similarly well-heeled.  A few, of course, manage to drag themselves from the gutters, finding patronage from those who have need of their usually esoteric rather than pragmatic capabilities, but most are damned forever to the slums of Xell, practitioners of a mongrel magic, a pale shadow of the wizardries spoken of in history.  Unlike the Truly Mad theirs is a voluntarily sanity, but with control comes diminishment.

And of course there are the Glib, those silver-tongued epicures with their suits of sharkskin or ghoul-leather, and their swordcanes, and their stagy enunciations, who strut about the decadent squalor of Etchtown or Blackmire as if daring you to strike up a conversation.  Their power comes from Lies Told Artfully and reality itself cannot afford to trust them.

And what of the Xell's districts, its sections and neighborhoods?  They are many and variegated, each more colourful than the last.

On high gantries between Xell's towers philosopher-rakes in jeweled masks duel with razor-nailed gloves and gaudy rapiers over matters Existential, Rational, and Immaterial.  More than a few drops of blood have been shed on the twisted roofs beneath, over quandries such as Quentin's Fork, or the niceties of Graain dialectics.  The more cool-headed of the students sip absinthe or sherry in the brothel parlors of St. Echidna, preferring the mock-violence of a good game of Pandemonium! to the excesses of their classmates.  They look out over the greenish canals, and sigh, and maneuver their ivory pieces in unlikely gambits, calculating each move for novelty and elegance as surely as victory, the game's phases interlocking like stanzas of concretized poetry.

At street level, the markets of The Swell bustle and throng with merchants from across the strange, mellowed continents '" from the haunted, windy reaches of the Echo Moors to the misty Gossamer Isles and a hundred realms between.  Here spellmongers and wizened crones and foppish half-shee haggle with suited vulpines and cloaked things that might be devils or switchskins or less definable entities, trading riddles or mystic secrets for bottled dreams and Experience and rosebuds from the Garden of Shadows.  Those that don't barter pay in the bone coins of Chimera City, etched with the runes of ancient, miserly gods.

In the shabby-genteel borough of Basilisk Row the age-mottled manses murmur and groan, while their inhabitants '" threadbare bluebloods, centuries old, with barren coffers and brittle hearts '" parade the mildewed corridors in bygone finery: eccentric tatterdemalions bickering with their ancestral spirits and their own demented visions, sipping brandy amongst the cobwebs and the must of their sagging, decrepit homes.

In Moray Wharf, above the gesticulating prostitutes and briny stevedores of the docklands, scientists labor in their glassy laboratories, distilling tinctures that evoke poetic inspiration, or fashioning crystalline automatons (crude imitations of the mutable, shapeshifting Glassmen) for Xell's wealthy.  A few Metamorphosists seek to transcend the frailty of human form to pupate from what they believe is merely a larval stage, wrapping themselves in membranous cocoons suffused with transmutative plasms in search of ascension.  None have emerged from this limbo '" yet.

In the district of Mothfire junkies trip on mirror/tea and BlissOut, bonewine and skulldrop and embertime.  Crime thrives in this city: the police are corrupt and easily bribed, and whole tribes of thieves prosper in the rundown places, in Corax and Badsaw and Worm's End.

Below the city in the sewer-levels, Sanguine Victor and Gob Isinglass (King of the Black River) fight out their now decades-long turf-war, their ragtag warrior bands of humans and ratheads and mercenary wraiths scrapping over a reeking labyrinth of moldy stone, contending viciously for scavenging rights while fighting off ghouls and troglodytic beasts.

Deeper below, in the crazed, spatially suspect maze-realm of the lower catacombs, flushed and desperate supplicants cut their palms to dribble hot blood into the sepulchral altar-bowls of the Flea.  Thus invoked they creep from the rancid darkness: man-shaped, pestilential ghost-things with flesh fashioned from filth, eagerly lapping at the profane offerings of their petitioners, doling out their toxic curses and tumorous execrations in exchange for benediction.  It is said that any flea killed with malice becomes a Flea after death, but the cynical scholars in Wombspire Academy laugh their ragged, smoke-stained laughs at such folkloric folly.

Even deeper lie the tunnels Beneath, where tenebrous, unsettling things that make the Flea look like harmless bugaboos stir their alien limbs and think their obscene, inscrutable thoughts.  Some of these ruminations reach the surface as half-corporeal horrors, to stalk the alleyways of Sallowfield and Blackmire and Worm's End, devouring the homeless or the merely careless until Chimera City's police-force come with their jigsaw-golems and their sputtering, stuttering pistols '" though often as not such petty duties are farmed out to bounty hunters and foreign adventurers, washed up from Fablesea like so much driftwood, flotsam of a thousand cultures.

And beyond?  Outside, past the bandit-haunted stones of the Thornroad, the Tangle broods.  Its thorny tendrils creep up about the city's outermost suburbs, perfumed with belladonna, obscuring the nebulous beasts and clusters of hissing, faceless slaugh.   The slow advance of the Tangle's mossy eaves bring to the countryside a certain oversaturated green darkness peculiar only to that mythic wood '" and the discordant, giggling laughter of the Faerie.

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Before there was the Cadaverous Earth, there was Chimera City.

Here's my latest world, an amalgem of previous works (notably the Tangle).  It's intended in some ways as CE's whimsical and ethereal twin/opposite - or at least its ghostly cousin.  Where CE is brutal and visceral, Xell is subtle and mysterious - or that's the idea, anyway.  Not with a bang but a whimper.

I plan to run with this one, much more than I have with some of my other side-projects.  In fact I might even split my time between this one and CE.

However, this is going to be my last post for awhile: I'm going to Italy for a month, so consider this a preview of a sort.

Cheers![/ooc]

[Superfluous Crow]

Well, even if you can't answer, i thought i might comment preemptively.
When you say that Chimera City came before Cadaverous Earth, do you mean they are different periods of the same world or that you worked on Chimera before CE?
I love when old and classical monsters are taken and converted into something new, like you (and some other setting i can't quite remember atm) did with carrion crawlers, so nice to see a spin on gargoyles (or at least their name). Orchids could also be cool, as well as the insane machinemen.
Child sorcerers is a great idea which could lead to interesting characters of sorts. Or very annoying ones. THe metamorphists also sound interesting.
Also, you start by saying it rises out of the sea, but near the end you say that it is surrounded by forest. And is there anything across this maybe-sea?

[Steerpike]

[ooc]I'm not gone till tonight, so fortunately I can answer.  When I say that Chimera City came first, I mean that it came first in my head, and I'd written quite a bit about it before I started the Cadaverous Earth (many elements from CE were stolen from the original version of Chimera City, most notably the nectar of the Elder Tree).  They're not intended as the same universe.  The closest thing Xell's world has experienced to an apocalypse would be something closer to the vague cataclysm in Mieville's Looking For Jake, and even that's probably too extreme.  Instead of a scarified and mutilated land full of deserts, mountains, and blighted swampland the landscapes of this world have been almost gentled by time - though they are not, I hope, without their own particular terrors.  Instead of grave-spawn, there are phantoms, instead of demons, devils...

This quote from The Dying Earth is perhaps somewhat closer to what I'm imagining: "Nothing in sight, nothing of Earth was raw or harsh - the ground, the trees, the rock ledge protruding from the meadow; all these had been worked upon, smoothed mellowed.  The light from the sun, though dim, was rich, and invested every object of the land, the rocks, the trees, the quiet grasses and flowers, with a sense of lore and ancient recollection."

Combine that with these paintings and a touch of dark Faerie, and that's Xell - well, plus a huge, ancient city (where would any of my settings be without huge, ancient cities?).

The city lies between the Tangle and Fablesea.  There's a world beyond both, and cultures and creatures from across that world will make appearances, but at least at the start the focus will be on this one city.[/ooc]

[LD]

preferring the mock-violence of a good game of Pandemonium! to the excesses of their classmates. They look out over the greenish canals, and sigh, and maneuver their ivory pieces in unlikely gambits, calculating each move for novelty and elegance as surely as victory, the game's phases interlocking like stanzas of concretized poetry.

Sounds interesting. I always love it when people who create a new world also create appropriate games to go along with the world. It makes things seem more realistic and put-together.

Good luck on your trip to Italy, may you return inspired!

[LD]

In the beds of the wealthy and the poor alike linger squat, elfin imps, called mormo (said, by some, to be the bastard progeny of the Mara themselves), suckling at the dream-marrow of sleepers like lampreys, coiled oppressively on their victims' chests, suffocating them, eyes gleaming like greasy jewels in the gloom. The dreams of the lonely and loveless are more likely to be visited by the succubi known as empuses: sultry, sensual spirits who leave their nocturnal lovers moist-skinned and anemic come morning, fatigued from the dark vigor of their phantasmal fornication.

I would be interested in hearing how these vile creatures (reminiscent of incubi and succubi, but for explaining morning fatigue rather than other things...) are eliminated.

These remind me of a Slavic creature- a batlike creature from Slavic myth... I wish I could remember the name. It was said to emerge from the caul on the back of people's necks, I believe, and then to suck the energy out of others.

-Tentatively welcoming you back. I suppose you will return in 2-4 days!-

[Steerpike]

A Brief Ethnography of Xell

Glassmen

The name 'Glassmen' is, of course, a misnomer, for the silici, as they are also known, are a sexless species, lacking procreative abilities altogether; though, of course, whispered apocrypha persist of the fabled Spawning Kilns somewhere deep Beneath where the original golemancer-alchemists crafted the Glassmen in ages past, the laboratories are long lost, become little more than a myth in Glassman legendry.  Thus, the Glassmen of Xell are all that remain of the race: with each that shatters (and they are a fragile people) the population dwindles, though a good number of the creatures do linger in the streets of Chimera City, endowed as they are with biological, or perhaps more properly technological, immortality.

The question of Glassman origins is but one of the many surrounding the enigmatic creatures, and the Glassmen themselves seem quite as ignorant as anyone as to the answers.  How, for example, do the Glassmen reshape their scintillating bodies with such ease, without first superheating themselves?  Dissections of dead Glassmen have yielded no clues: upon shattering a Glassman's fragmented form is rendered immutable and inflexible, bereft of the incredible fluidity of form, the supreme malleability of configuration for which the Glassmen are famed.

Though most Glassmen have a repertoire of preferred forms '" often vaguely humanoid, though many Glassmen commonly masquerade as beasts, or giant, iridescent insects, or stranger hybrids of different species, or more abstract personae still '" all of them are capable of reorganizing themselves in almost any conceivable way, though they cannot dramatically alter their size.  To watch a Glassman morph is an exercise in disorientation, inspiring a peculiar mix of nausea and wonder: rarely are they wholly static, preferring to shift and mimic and flow, elongating and shortening their limbs, faces and features twisting like liquid crystal.  Only their colours, fixed at 'birth,' remain constant.  Rarely the Glassmen combine their bodies, flowing together and intertwining, remaining individually discrete and immiscible, humming gently with pleasure '" the analogues to sex are obvious.

Other questions immediately present themselves.  How do the Glassmen see, for example?  They lack organic eyes, or mechanical counterparts, like the Defunct, and yet they seem perfectly perceptive.  How do they produce that resonant humming by which they speak, conversing with their strange, echoing accent, like a human voice trapped in crystal? How do they think, without discernable brains, or their simulacra?  There are many hypotheses, invoking everything from Oorchian Animism to contemporary golem-theory, but none have been adequately proven. Hundreds of other questions of varying esotericism can also be phrased.  Do the Glassmen have souls?  Are the Glassmen truly alive?  Etc.

Whatever the answers to these questions the Glassmen remain a visible, sizeable part of Xell's sentient population, though their numbers do not compare to those of the orchidfolk, humans, or ratheads that throng the city.  Most hire out their bodies as vases, statues, and ornaments, or earn coins working as exotic buskers in the city's more salubrious squares, but since they do not require food or drink they cannot be truly impoverished in the same sense as Xell's ragged, plebian hordes can.  As in every species a few mad individual Glassmen turn to adventure and travel, even becoming warriors, though this last path is a rarity for the silici: their combat style depends on dodging and flowing around an opponent's blows and then killing quickly, with razor-edged glass blades or similar self-made augmentations, but a single firm blow, especially from a club or mace, can spell doom.  Medicine and sorcerous healing has no effect on Glassmen, nor can they be repaired mechanically, as the Defunct can; amongst Xell's surviving Glassmen many are missing limbs, or nurse cracks in their bodies like unclosed wounds that can never scar.

Orchidfolk

The garden of Xell, and the gossipmongers, the proliferate orchidfolk are a beautiful if fragile race who flourish in the streets of Chimera City.  Their bodies consist of a thick, fibrous base resembling a twisted mass of roots or tendrils, a slender trunk-like stalk or stem that protrudes from the central mass and tapers towards the tip, and an immense orchidaceous flower containing a stamen, carpel, and several sense organs, though these do not closely resemble humanoid equivalents.  These organs include light sensors something like primitive eyes, appearing rather like eye-spots, which allow orchidfolk limited vision - though notably they are unusually sensitive to colours.  They have highly developed scent receptors and concave hollows that look like petalled chambers that function like ears.  Orchidfolk spend anywhere from six to ten hours a day rooted firmly to the ground, with their roots buried in the soil, drawing in nutrients and moisture; during this time the creature is dormant and inactive, though not nearly as unaware as a sleeping humanoid.  When they wish, orchidfolk can uproot themselves and achieve surprisingly dexterous locomotion by propelling themselves with their tendrils, which are totally prehensile and so can double as 'arms.'  These limb-like appendages are hypersensitive to textures and tremors, helping the orchidfolk to navigate.

Like other plants, orchidfolk are photoautotrophs and so synthesize carbon dioxide into food using sunlight, releasing oxygen as a waste product; they draw water and minerals from the soil using their roots.  Thus, if allowed time to absorb nutrients from sufficiently rich soil, and given enough exposure to sunlight, orchidfolk produce all of their own food; they are not an agricultural species, nor do they hunt '" indeed they do not "eat" at all, lacking any mouth-parts, along with anything resembling lungs.  They have few dedicated internal organs, relying on more fully distributed systems, which they can regenerate if given time.

While orchidfolk possess dense clusters of nervous tissue their (indisputable) intelligences are far less centralized than those of vertebrates and similarly structured species '" they lack dedicated brains as typically defined.  Many of their nerve clusters associated with sensory inputs are located in their 'heads,' however, making them very vulnerable to attack in the same way as human heads are, with the added distinction that orchidfolk heads also house their reproductive systems.  With regards to reproduction, the mobility of orchidfolk eschews the need for pollinators such as insects, and greatly facilitates the dispersal of seeds.  However, many orchidfolk subspecies display colourful markings that closely resemble insect markings; these features have become almost totally vestigial from a survival standpoint, though they are often a source of pride, and sometimes annoyance when insects are accidentally attracted.  Orchidfolk are almost uniformly monoecious '" both male and female '" and so are totally capable of self-pollination.  Some, however, choose to pollinate with other orchidfolk using highly ritualized, courtly mating rites.

Beside their locomotive capabilities, the most distinct orchidfolk characteristic are their remarkable languages, which consist entirely of secreted scents.  Individual scents function as graphemes, much like human letters; scent-clusters thus form morphemes and word-like units that can be strung together into complex sentences.  The orchidfolk can vary the intensity and concentrations of their scents, as well as the timing of their release, thus achieving equivalents of tone, timbre, pitch, volume, and rhythm.

Evolutionary anthrobotonists have suggested that the huge range of orchidfolk scent-glands used to produce their language were once used to attract insects, but after the advent of orchidfolk mobility they gradually evolved into their current forms.  It should be noted that just like humanoids and other sentient creatures the orchidfolk languages are totally arbitrary: that is, there is no intrinsic relationship between a given scent and its meaning.  Thus, the orchidfolk have not one but many languages, which are further broken down into dialects.

Fascinatingly, the orchidfolk can also understand humanoid speech, and can even learn to write.  Long periods of contact with oral/aural speakers has led to the ability to transliterate spoken and written languages into the corresponding scent-based ones.  Thus the orchidfolk, a notoriously 'chatty' race, have found themselves a niche as purveyors of information, as well as aesthetic objects.

Orchidfolk culture is radically different than humanoid culture.  Orchidfolk tend to live in collective groups or plots, crowding closely together.  They are not wholly communal, though their lack of sexual differentiation has led to a fairly egalitarian culture; they still compete for food, mate selection, and political roles.  They are, in general, less covetous of material goods than humans, but as accomplished tool-users (and indeed relatively accomplished tool-makers) they have been known to acquire weapons and other implements, usually shared amongst a group and kept in a central space, but sometimes more selfishly guarded.  They have no metallurgical and few agricultural skills but are quite adept at wood-caring and minor horticulture, their chief art-form.  Most orchidfolk enclaves keep carnivorous plants much like humans keep watchdogs; these they lull into docility using scents when they need to.

Orchids have neglible senescence but do periodically shed some of their petals.  They raise children in common, although most would admit a particular affinity for those offspring who are their biological clones.

Ratheads

Roughly the size of a human child, the rathead is a canny, tough-spirited creature, a crouched, sinewy pigmy given its name by its almost comically oversized visage '" that of an enormous rat.  Apart from its huge rodent head the rathead has an incongruously smooth, almost hairless physiology, usually well-muscled and supple, often adorned with tattoos '" in particular street-maps or maps of the sewer systems Beneath, with various members of a given 'mischief,' the standard rathead social unit, comprising different sections, districts, and levels of Xell.  This the mischief uses to navigate, though ratheads naturally possess an intuitive sense of direction that verges on the uncanny; indeed, the rathead talent for urban movement blurs considerably with the brand of (predominantly) rathead shamanism they call the Knack, more formally known as scramblemancy to its fewer, non-rathead practitioners.  It should also be noted that the rodent resemblance ends at the head: counter to the deeply mistaken (but widely held) belief that ratheads conceal tails in their pant-legs and use them as prehensile appendages, the species is tailless.  Their rat features do include sharp teeth and noses simultaneously sensitive to olfactory cues but unperturbed by what humans would consider rankness.

Ratheads are born in large litters '" up to six, usually '" and mature quickly, reaching cultural and biological majority between ten and twelve and generally living into their mid-thirties, with particularly hardy individuals seeing their fortieth birthdays and the hoary-whiskered elder shamans occasionally living further into their fourth decades.  They are sexually egalitarian but ruthlessly meritocratic: weak or unskilled ratheads tend to die quickly, succumbing to disease, hazards, or urban predators before reaching adulthood.  As children ratheads are quickly taught the skills necessary for survival.  These include but are not limited to scavenging (the principal rathead trade), acrobatics, prestidigitation, pickpocketing, and general stealthiness; rathead pups are further impressed with a thorough knowledge of Chimera City's many environs and districts, with particular emphasis paid to the city Beneath and underworld dealings.  Most learn one of Xell's cant dialects, further punctuated by squeaks and growls, more signals than words.

The rathead habitat is fairly transient, as most of the species live a sort of vagabond existence.  The quasi-permanent camps of rathead mischiefs are called middens and are often located underground in sewer anterooms, stripped tombs, and similar alcoves Beneath.  Middens are invariably well-hidden and well-marked with rathead urine, and include caches of food, goods for trade, and weapons, usually knives, clubs, and a few small pistols (mostly derringers); they double as safehouses for rathead thieves, who can claim sanctuary at any midden they please, according to their loose codes.  Scavenging and thieving rights are bitterly contested, however, becoming entangled with more general underworld politics, spilling over into the turf-wars of other gangs, for which mischiefs frequently work in mercenary capacities.

Prejudice against ratheads in Xell is extreme aboveground, with the whole race deemed untrustworthy and plague-ridden; whether such stereotypes force the ratheads into their habitually criminal ways or if such tendencies are innate (giving rise to the stereotypes in the first place) is a matter beyond the purview of these pages.  Because of their undeniably superior talents for traversing the often maze-like passages of Xell, however, ratheads are sometimes trusted enough to carry messages in exchange for a few coins.  Ratheads encourage their children to work as messengers in order to better familiarize them with Chimera City, and the secret ways of passing through it.

Switchskins

The curious double-folk of Xell, the creatures called switchskins have dual natures: each individual actually coexists with a second entity, sharing the same body, or else (perhaps) replacing that body with their own.  The transformation occurs at sunrise and sunset; scholars speculate that it may be triggered by some energy in sunlight itself, but as has been noted, nocturnals still shift into their diurnal forms come sunrise even when trapped in lightless chambers; possibly the original dynamic of transformation was keyed to sunlight, but has since become a purely organic function operating independently of exterior stimuli.  Evidence against this latter hypothesis includes the indisputable fact that as the days grow short in the winter months, a switchskin spends progressively longer in its nightskin, and vice versa in summer.  Whatever the case, the transformations of switchskins are inevitable and irrepressible.  Hence the two distinct switchskin forms or selves: a dayskin and a nightskin, diurnal and nocturnal, duskling and dawnling.

The two binary halves of a switchskin do not share any mental connection between one another; they do not share memories, thoughts, or experiences.  When a nocturnal awakes in its diurnal half's body, it does not remember the events of the day, anymore than the diurnal will remember the events of the night before it awoke, at the moment of dusk.  The two halves seem to share a number of physical properties, with one particular and all-important difference: they are almost complete colour negatives of one another.  Where a nocturnal has skin of whitest alabaster, jet black eyes, and raven-black or purple-red hair (typically), a diurnal has deep black skin, white eyes, and white or golden hair.  Some features, such as tooth and bone colouration, remain constant.

Like so many races in Xell, understanding of the switchskins remains incomplete.  Are they the same individual with two different personalities and pigmentations, or in fact two wholly distinct beings that occupy one body, or two bodies that switch places?  If the latter, where does the other body or soul go when its counterpart manifests?  Switchskins do not sleep '" they are seemingly incapable of it '" and do not dream.  Other, less biological problems assert themselves.  Though the old morality stories of less enlightened times paint the dayskins as benevolent, loving creatures and the nightskins as cruel sadists, such a clear-cut moral binary is clearly inaccurate: the two halves are not extremes of some complex ethical equation, but complete individuals in their own rights.   Dayskins do tend towards 'honest labour' whereas nightskins seem to prefer a more hedonistic lifestyle, but this may simply be a consequence of their broader social context; few all-switchskin communities exist, and switchskins may simply be responding to the worlds in which they find themselves, one geared towards work and diligence, the other towards revelry and carousing.

Despite the apparent separateness of dayskins and nightskins, certain physical commonalities suggest a close link between a switchskin's two forms: injuries, tattoos, and other physical changes are 'carried over' during a transformation, and a pregnant switchskin woman is pregnant in either body (most switchskins communicate to their other halves through letters or recordings, sharing life-altering decisions).  The law falters in the face of switchskins: should a dayskin be punished for a nightskin's crime?  At the moment, the answer is broadly 'yes,' but this may soon change, as many are arguing for laws that reflect a switchskin's double nature.

Apart from their obvious differences, switchskins are otherwise human.  Most of their origin stories speak either of two separate humanoid races that warred and then chose unity to stop their conflict, or of a single race that split themselves into two halves; this latter sect often assigns a series of much-disputed traits to either side, suggesting that dayskins embody one half of a persona, and nightskins the other.  A few crazed switchskins are obsessed with the idea of Coalescence '" that is, the merging of the two halves back into a singular whole.  Just as many want to permanently separate themselves from their twins; there are some rumors of dayskin cultists who shun their nightskins as parasites and wish to eradicate their other halves entirely, but such reports may well be apocryphal.

Most switchskins have accords with their other halves, seeking out an agreed-upon location at sunrise or sunset in order to prevent confusion when their other half awakes.

[Steerpike]

Reserved for Phantasmagoria

[Steerpike]

A Synoptic Compendium of the Sorcerous Arts

The Glib

The Liars; the conmen of reality; the masters of Lies Artfully Told '" the clever, always-eloquent magicians called the Glib are common in Chimera City, canny tale-tellers of the most adept, sometimes sinister variety.  The Glib charge their lies with sorcerous power much as the Profane do their curse-words, but where the Profane destroy and pollute, the Glib transform and decieve.  Glib can not only make their lies incredibly believable (indeed, becoming one of the Glib begins with simply becoming a good liar), turning others into their puppets and mental slaves, they can also bend the world around them.  A powerful Lie can convince the very matter of the universe to rearrange itself into the semblance of something else, transmuting it, at least temporarily, twisting it to the will of a Glib.

The principal application of the Glib's magic manifests as a form of Fabrication.  Unlike the Innocent and the Truly Mad the Glib cannot properly conjure; those things that they appear to create are falsities, illusions without true substance, quickly dispelled.  With a few empowered words, however, one of the Glib can create the semblance of almost anything '" though the more outrageous the construction, or the larger its scope, the more difficult such a falsehood is to maintain.  Sometimes, however, the illusion of truth can be more powerful and convincing than truth itself.  Glib can Lie doubles of themselves into being, and similar figments, giving them the brief but compelling trappings of animacy and verisimilitude.

The Glib are more than merely loquacious, however.  Many are master wits, and their barbs sting.  While not nearly as potent as the bone-shattering pulverizations of the Profane, the sharp jabs a Glib can leave wounds, persuading flesh that it has broken: rapier wit indeed.  Conversely, a well-delivered 'compliment' can persuade tissue that it is not wounded, and so the Glib can also heal, though not so effectively as the Innocent.

Humans, switchskins, occasional ratheads, and a few glassmen have all been known to become Glib.  The orchidfolk are theoretically capable, but the great emphasis on truth found in their information-based culture, and the social stigma surrounding embellishment, discourages all but the most rebellious orchids to take up the Art.

The Profane

Much like the Glib those magicians known as the Profane utilize language to affect their sorceries, but where the silver-tongued Liars use eloquence and subtlety to coax and confuse the minds of others or the very matter of the universe, bending the world to their caprice, the Profane prefer brute force, ravishing reality with the vicious, irresistible energy of obscenity.  They spew charged blasphemies and slurs from lips stained black with the filth of their utterances, a studied vileness somewhere between incantation and street-slang.  Nothing is off-limit to the Profane: they draw their puissance from transgression, from casting off the artifices of society and the rules of nature, pissing on the taboos of etiquette, remaking existence with salacious gesticulations, scatological jokes-cum-magic, a brutal urban liturgy of meanness and vulgarity, the Art of causticity, the essence of rudeness.

Air curdles, blood freezes, water boils: what the Profane lack in precision they make up in the sheer power of their ugly pronunciations.  One of the Profane can shatter a door to splinters with a single screamed syllable, bruise and batter flesh with a gesture.  They speak the unspeakable, pray to forbidden idols, relish in the unclean.  Some are said to eat the flesh of men, or worse things, and become ghouls when they die.  Others say that the most powerful Profane ascend (or descend, or in any case transform) into the Flea upon death '"  one of many theories as to that spirit-race's obscure genesis.

Profane sorcery is essentially a destructive discipline, the opposite of the Innocent's conjuration or the profuse Fabrications of the Truly Mad.  They can ravage and maim but never heal, break bones or sear the very air with a curse but never mend or ameliorate.  Humans and ratheads have the most talent for this particular form of magic: Glassmen, while theoretically capable of becoming Profane, would scorn such sorcery as counter to their aesthetic creeds, while the mute orchidfolk lack scents of sufficient acridity in their perfume-language to construct analogues of the requisite indecency and so would be restricted simply to gestures, limiting their capabilities.  The fatuous mothlings are not intelligent enough to comprehend the social mores that the Profane necessarily break -  beastliness, it seems, is lost upon the truly bestial.

[LD]

Welcome back.
Re: Glassmen.
Do you read Rice Boy? http://www.rice-boy.com/order/index.php?c=258

[Steerpike]

[ooc]Nope - though now I do.  Strange![/ooc]

[LD]

Hope you enjoy it! In my opinion The original Rice Boy  http://www.rice-boy.com/see/ is better than the current story arc. I hope you enjoy.

[Ghostman]

Good to see you're around the guild again, Steerpike. Some questions:

* How large are the Glassmen? Can individuals be of different sizes?
* Is there some reason why Profane sorcery only works with natural (spoken) language? Couldn't a mute being harness this power by penning obscene poetry or painting graffiti? Or by using a sign language?

[Steerpike]

[ooc]I imagine most of the Glassmen as roughly human-sized, though rarer sizes could well exist, probably with a low standard of deviation.

Good point about the gestures; the orchidfolk are going to be pseudo-humanoid so they probably could gesture.  I'll make a note of it in the entry.  I had thought about graffiti, but I'm not sure about whether sigil/glyph/rune magic is going to work in this setting, since it features fairly heavily in the Cadaverous Earth, and I want the two worlds to have a fairly distinct feel to them.[/ooc]

[LordVreeg]

And of course there are the Glib, those silver-tongued epicures with their suits of sharkskin or ghoul-leather, and their swordcanes, and their stagy enunciations, who strut about the decadent squalor of Etchtown or Blackmire as if daring you to strike up a conversation. Their power comes from Lies Told Artfully and reality itself cannot afford to trust them.

Simon R. Green is jealous.
An intersting and arresting detail.  Charisma-based and social heavy, much up my alley.  More on this, my friends, when the time allows.