HamSandLich
MEAT WIZARD
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Forros, The Tessellation
The Jade Caste Champion Forget Not Our Resolve was a veteran of Estasia's Long Without and was one of the last Alchemicals to submit to Lux's national reconquest campaign. Though defeated, Resolve never truly embraced the philosophy of The Unity and maintained strong, private disagreements with Estasia's course of action throughout his service. When he felt the call for Metropolitan Ascension a few generations after Estasia's reunification, he took his chances and deserted alongside a core of sympathizers and a few dissident champions, claiming that Autochthon bade him depart. Though his exodus was long and difficult, Resolve at last found a place for his followers to settle down close to the Far Reaches, in an irregular nation-chamber with walls and floors made of interlocking hexagonal columns.Forros' nation-chamber and the surrounding reaches are climatically and tectonically unstable, some part of the Great Maker's anatomy that heats and cools to extreme temperatures at semi-regular intervals. The hexagonal columns that make up the floor, interlocking like honeycombs, move with the weather, reorganizing into plateaus or canyons as the weather changes. Sometimes, exposed columns are covered in red hot circuitry, venting waste heat into the air or bathing in rivers of coolant that run along the chamber's temporary riverbeds. The rapidly shifting temperatures make for volatile weather, it's not uncommon to experience monsoon rains, arid siroccos, chilling fog, and balmy winds all within the space of a few days.
Forros' superstructure is a tessellated polygon of massive jade cubes. Each of the cubes that make up the city is a municipal charm unto itself, some general use neighborhoods, others specialized industrial sectors or administrative districts. To deal with the regular quakes and wild climatic shifts, the city makes use of gravitic municipal charms to rearrange its component modules into new configurations, retracting some into its interior while exposing modules ordinarily kept within to the outside. From shielding residential modules from the weather, to rapidly adjusting its industrial sectors to deal with new resource veins, to civic art displays, to even slow locomotion, Forrosans boast that their city can adapt to anything the world throws at it, though visitors complain how the layout is confusing.
Culture
Forget Not Our Resolve disdained the cult of militat supremacy espoused by the Philosophy of Unity, and his original generation of citizens was selected from those who held similar views. During their long exodus, Resolve made alliances with many tunnel folk clans and cultures, and peaceably assimilated some into his fledgling society. While pragmatism has forced Forros to participate in wars of defense, militarism is still very much disdained and it is a point of pride for the Forros that it has never attempted to raid or conquer another city.Modern Forros maintains an Octet-style caste system but has friendly relations with several tunnel folk cultures who wander near and through its nation-chamber. Several practices linger from the tunnel folk that Resolve allied with: vision quest initiation rites for children leaving the creche; lovingly decorated ceremonial "honor braids" worn by populat workers; the domestication of several lesser machine spirits for labor and transport; and the cultivation of extremophilic molluscs and fungi for food and ornamentation to name a few.
It's common to channel aggression and conflict resolution into competitive sports and tabletop games. The city's entertainment culture reflects this, with numerous athletics tournaments and elaborate board and card games being broadcast over the city's public display screens during the off shifts. Low stakes gambling for small handmade items and favors is allowed, but organized gambling and fixing rings that breed political corruption are a semi-regular problem.
Cuisine
Forrosan cuisine features several mollusc and fungal dishes gleaned from nearby tunnel folk. Workers out on resource gathering expeditions seed and harvest chemosynthetic snails and bivalves in pools of coolant or on the sides of red hot pillars. After the meat is consumed, the shells of these creatures are ground down into fertilizer for edible lichens and fungi grown in the city's hydroponics facilities. Forrosan Harvesters additionally keep a secret process by which they introduce special mold spores to prepared nutrient terrine to impart a sharp, acquired taste.Vitruviums
Forros' anti-militarist founding ethos exists in a polite but perpetual tension with the necessities of living in the Reaches. Aggressive spirits and gremlins are a regular problem, as are raids from both unallied tunnel folk and occasionally the Octet. Estasia has attempted to annex the breakaway city several times in its history, and at one point briefly occupied it before being driven out by fierce guerilla fighting.Martial arts schools, called Vitruviums, are common in Forros, open to all regardless of caste. In peacetime these are billed as centers for athletic fitness and spiritual health, prioritizing nonlethal techniques and emphasizing that they do not advocate violence. When under threat of invasion, they instead serve as a source of partisans, assassins, and commandos who specialize in decapitation strikes to end conflicts swiftly. It's considered impolitic to openly acknowledge this reality, but everyone knows of it and uses an extensive lexicon of slang to talk about it instead.
Forros' Tripartite Assembly has a complicated relationship with the schools, recognizing them as a potential challenge to its authority but unable and unwilling to actually dismantle them, they're too entrenched in Forrosan society. For now, the vitruviums remain amenable to the Tripartite, in part due to active attempts at transparency and dialogue by both parties, but the idea of rebellion, however unlikely, remains a source of anxiety for many in the government. As the Octet's new Convergence Era progresses, Forros' growing proximity to Estasia has sparked an upsurge in school membership by citizens fearful of Militat incursion.
Select Vitruviums
The most respected vitruvium, the Diodic Dance Sect practices Swinging Pendulum Style, an Autochthonian equivalent of the Swaying Grass Dance. While the sect's populat partisans were instrumental in ejecting Estasia from Forros during a brief occupation several generations ago, today the vitruvium is seen as a bastion of establishment orthodoxy. For years now the sect's ethos has become calcified around respectability and tradition, even the music that they dance to must conform to codified patterns. Inner disciples lack much of the revolutionary leanings of their counterparts in Creation, and frequently rub shoulders with Tripartite members.The Pankratarium teaches numerous styles with minimal esoteric qualities; Diving Glider (Falcon) style, Steel-Crushing Vice (Bear) style, and Red Eye Boxing (tiger style). The school prefers a broader curriculum over intensive specialization, students join largely to train for competitive boxing and wrestling circuits, or to hone their bodies for non-martial sports, not to contemplate spirituality or cultivate perfect martial form.
The Hekapoda are one of the oldest vitruviums. Specializing in Centipede Style, the school's teachings hail from tunnel folk shamanic warrior societies. Today favored by those who participate in tunnel expeditions, the school keeps a number of live centipedes as mascots, tasking novices with feeding the creatures as an exercise in attentiveness. To advance to the highest ranks of the school, practitioners must venture into the Reaches and seek instruction from the sect elders who sequester themselves in the tranquil darkness to hone their techniques.
Life Among Extremity
Forros' nation chamber is a harsh environment that vacillates between sweltering heat and bitter cold. Before Forget Not Our Resolve settled in the area, it was known to but largely considered undesirable by most of the Octet. Forrosans make do with the wasteland by co-opting its extreme qualities. The extreme temperature shifts are useful in a number of metallurgical and chemical procedures for generating exotic substances, while the geothermal waste heat and rough atmospheric conditions are harnessed to generate electricity. Burnt out pillars are scavenged for components while the coolant rivers are siphoned for industrial use. Forros moves, slowly, to position itself close to deposits of vital resources or towards areas where the climate is briefly more temperate. While not as wealthy as places like Kamak or Xexas, Forros has access to plentiful deposits of jade, orichalcum, and adamant and its surveyors foresee little risk of resource shortages in the immediate future.While its nation chamber is livable with effort, actually extracting its resources would be nigh impossible without the qitarak, tamed machine spirits resembling oxen sized mites with nautiloid shell abdomens. Originally domesticated by tunnel folk, Forros would never have survived its early years without them. The qitarak's translucent shells contain chambers large enough to fit two people snugly. Properly trained qitarak can maintain their interiors at certain temperatures, allowing them to either transport passengers through extreme weather or keep volatile cargo stable. Individual qitarak often bond with work-groups and become stubborn if they go long periods without their familiar handlers. Forros maintains large herds of the creatures for resource harvesting expeditions, often trading with tunnel folk for new stock as well as a handful of other tamed machine-spirits.
The climatic fluctuations mean that Forros' nation-chamber is one of the few permanent places in Autochthonia where true elementals naturally coalesce in large numbers. Most of these spirits are as transient as the weather that births them, but they are often ferocious with vitality, living out their short lives to the fullest. Forrosan clerics have extensive protocols on propitiating the wild spirits and monitoring the demiurge lines for buildups of elemental essence.
Gazetteer
Not a location so much as a configuration the city takes, The Aedilion refers to when Forros rearranges its component cubes such that its superstructure resembles a hypercube, a hollow cubical space nestled in the center visible to the air, shielded from the weather by fields of crackling energy. The Aedilion is the form that Forros takes to host its grandest civic festivals, athletic games, and martial arts tournaments. The central space is where the action happens, the city's habitation modules facing inwards so all citizens can look out the windows to watch. Events that happen during the Aedilion include qitarak races, pillar tossing, card game tournaments, and the ever popular National Vitruvium Exhibition. Tetrathalons where the competitors must alternate between athletic events and tabletop games of skill are a recent, but much beloved, addition.The Journeyman District is a chronic headache for the city's Sodalts. A prototype municipal charm designed to replicate Sova's conurbation technology, it is intended to be a detachable module that can settle down as a remote mining colony while the rest of the city moves on. For years the project has been beset by setbacks, malfunctions, and general mismanagement, the castle-sized vehicle sitting in a drydock in the city's interior. Successive lead engineers have redesigned it over and over again, leaving its insides a tangled maze of corridors and abandoned equipment. With the project stalled indefinitely, vitruviums have begun to use the district as a training ground for parkour and illicit duels.
Currently, Forros is positioned near the Aerobellum, a row of tunnel entrances containing building-sized cooling fans that regulate the nation-chamber's temperature. Currently, the Aerobellum's turbines are whirring down, having accrued a coating of particulates and dust after decades of nonstop use. Forros sends expeditions into the Aerobellum's passages to scrape the coating off the dead fans, harvesting trace rare minerals blown in from elsewhere in Autochthonia.
Persons of Note
Technically, Didact Irorsan is "just" an elderly populat worker, but as the Diodic Dance Sect's grandmaster, he is de facto a personage of extreme importance within Forros. Projecting the air of a wise and enlightened sage, the Didact is in fact rather corrupt. While Irorsan's perpetual assignment to aide duty as a Vitruvium instructor is standard practice for elderly martial artists in Forros, him using his school connections to requisition greater luxuries even beyond what is allotted for a sect elder would be a great scandal if uncovered. He hides the extent of his malfeasance behind an air of dignity and faux respectability, using bribery, blackmail, and intimidation should those fail.One of Forros' more promising atheletes, Edias hones both his body and mind to compete at the Aedilion's Tetrathalons, participating in sprints, card games, boxing, and tabletop wargaming in quick succession. Recently though, he's undergone a spate of bad luck, accidents, and whiffs both on and off the field. The rut began, he believes, after he returned from pilgrimage to Gulak, with a set of decorative laminate playing cards he bartered from a fellow pilgrim. Originally decorated with depictions of famous Champions, the deck now portrays inauspicious events that mirror his own misfortunes. Edias has tried to get rid of the set but it keeps finding its way to him.
Eldest of Forros' Alchemicals, the Moonsilver Colossus With Utter Majesty, accompanied Forget Not Our Resolve on his exodus and stood guard whilst he completed his metropolitan assembly. Today, she spends most of her time soaring high in the skies of the nation chamber, her colossus body shaped like that of the hawks of long gone Creation, but with silvery geometric wings and thrusters for tailfeathers. Officially a monitor of the nation-chamber's atmospheric conditions, Majesty indulges in riding the killer winds that accompany storms with a glee that even Clarity cannot dull. A small following of foolhardy citizens mimics her daring, skydiving in wingsuits and gliders from airships during more pleasant weather.
An extraordinarily rare Lesser Elemental Dragon of Air in Autochthonia, Sjardax the Rimeworm has alternatively served as a bane and an ally of convenience to Forros since the city's earliest days. An embodiment of nation-chamber's geomancy, Hallathrax was there when the city was founded, doing battle with Forget Not Our Resolve's circlemates and followers. A skeletally thin white-blue serpent, Sjardax's singular cyclopean eye has become a symbol for the dangers of cold weather in Forrosan culture. The beast has come to know the Forrosans over the centuries, and while it is far from friendly to the city, it has reached a sort of simmering detente with the metropolis, only attacking when the blizzards are particularly bad. Invaders receive no such restraint, and Sjardax has, knowingly or otherwise, served as an additional defense for Forros against raids and conquests several times.
Proximi
Forros maintains contact with the rest of the Octet, particularly Kamak and Yugash, but its strongest diplomatic ties are with several tunnel folk polities who range around and through its nation-chamber. Its relations with these allies, called Proximi, are formal treaties, regularly renewed by Tripartite diplomats and tunnel folk elders. Forros relies upon the Proximi for trade and defense, co-opting them as merchant caravans to other nations and hiring them as mercenaries to protect from raids.Unlike Nurad's Gateway People, the Proximi are not considered Forrosans but instead citizens of independent nations. Forrosan diplomats receive and treat with them as they would with representatives of Octet governments, and proximi treat Forrosan envoys as they would respected guests from other tribes. The Proximi regard Forros as something of a neutral ground for their own inter-tribal meetings, a market for goods, and sanctuary from the nation-chamber's rough weather. Several vitruviums accept proximi members, and some Forrosan dojos are actually branches of schools that originated among the tunnel folk.
Notable Proximi
The nomadic Yamua Fanur were the ones to introduce the domestication of qitarak to the early Forrosans and to this day the city relies on them to bring in new stock of the machine spirits from the Reaches. Individual Yamua clans worship their herds, believing each herd has its own divinity formed from the networked mass-mind of its components. Young adults practice qitarak tipping as a coming-of-age rite, sneaking up and frightening the creatures so they tip over and humorously expel steam from vents in their shells. They do this to herds of both other clans and Forros; long standing treaties stipulate that the youths cannot be harmed for doing so but allow those who catch the offenders to nonlethally humiliate the culprits by cutting off their honor braids.The ancestors of the Kajeke were exiled from Kamak in the aftermath of its failed Communal Revolution. Today they live in a three-dimensional maze of steam tunnels and water pipes, harvesting algae from the walls and harpooning cave-fish and albino caimans. To prevent from catching respiratory illnesses or skin infections, the Kajeke wear hermetically sealed diving suits at nearly all times. A remnant of Kamaki privacy culture has evolved into a belief that secrecy is holy; they do not give their names to outsiders and remove their suits only in the safety of their own homes.
Denizens of the Far Reaches, the Venderandi batfolk reside in the vast chambers of a dead industrial organ called the Sonoral Aspiratorium. They fly on leathery wings and dwell in inverse cathedrals suspended from the ceiling of the world-engine, raising swarms of bats for guano fertilizer. Venderandi spend much of their time singing, even when doing other tasks, echolocating by the sound of their music bouncing off the Aspiratorium's walls. Venderandi priest-kings believe that the Great Maker's slumber is perpetuated by song, and if he were to ever awaken, his dream that is the world would end.
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