This is the first chapter of a novel that I'm going to be writing for my patrons that I'll be re-posting here a few weeks after each chapter drops on Patreon. It takes place in The Undercroft, a game world I'm developing for Creepy Assassin's upcoming ImagCard RPG and each chapter will be very poorly illustrated by myself. Enjoy!
"Overlooking Fretraci" by Stone Lovecharm
The elevator raised and lowered, raised and lowered, over and over again. Slowly, it moved slowly but steadily as it brought batches of merchants and traders up and down to and from the surface. Everything came through this truly most landlocked of “ports,” everything from little individual barterers with their entire life’s savings in their packs to the representatives of trade consortiums that could only manage to drag a tiny fraction of their stock daily with them to laborers looking for a few odd-jobs in exchange for coin or relics or whatever else the potential Contractors had that the potential workers wanted to scientists and tinkerers looking for big problems to fix with their big minds to mercenaries looking for whoever needed protecting or killing today. Two operators stood at its base, one ready at a moment’s notice to take over when the other got tired, and a team of engineers scurried about its base and clung up its side, fixing little bits here and there in real time as it continued to run. It wasn’t a large elevator, not like the one on the other side of this massive cavern, but it was certainly the most frequently used and neither stopping it nor allowing it to run more than a few minutes without maintenance was an option. It was the main artery of this place, and it was an old one clotted by time and barely holding itself together against the ravages of a life too-hard lived.
On the other side of this massive hollowed-out space surrounding a large dome of volcanic rock that protected The Citadel, the place where the wealthy and powerful lived, was the vastly larger and less used elevator. Built expressly to bring the surface-dwellers down so the lower-classes that had followed the upper-classes of The Old World into The Undercroft could buy and sell the things they needed so the results of their own labor could go to supporting The Citadel itself, α City was to be the trading capital of their little refuge in the days before the lower levels had even been discovered.
It had grown outward from The Citadel at its center like a bicycle wheel stretching out into the ten-mile-wide cylinder that made up this cavern, reaching nearly half-way around in a huge half-circle before Free Trade City had sprung up on the opposite side. At first it was only a handful of tents where those who couldn’t get the permits to live in α - but were more than welcome to serve within its borders during the day in exchange for a tiny fraction of what the city’s residents earned so long as they quietly returned to wherever they had come from when “night” came - had made their home, but it grew slowly into a small town and ultimately the centerplace for The Lower Rebellion when the lower-classes had risen up against their “oppressors.” By then The Lowers below this level had been excavated out and the “Lowborn” made up of a combination of the lower-classes and the mutated that had been shunned from Citadelian society had grown distant from their leaders thanks to living most of their lives an entire stratum away from them. In the generations since Fretraci, as the city was called in the local dialect, had evolved into the larger of the two trade cities.
A monstrosity of mixed wires and steel that represented definition “CobTech,” as the Lowborn called their modern inventions cobbled together from pieces of The Old World, the city’s handmade lift ferried hundreds of Surfacemen up and down daily while α’s perfectly engineered and machined Old World elevator barely ever had call to even move in an average day. The first city had decayed into a remnant of its past self, dusty and crumbling with only those who still held true loyalty to The Citadel making it a home while the second city, looked upon as a near-heresy committed against The Highborn in the time of its formation, had grown into the crown jewel of civilization outside of The Citadel.
Sometimes that crappy little freight elevator would bring as many as six down at once with their meager supplies, but more often it could only accommodate two or three with their metal carts piled high with boxes and sacks and suitcases and brightly-colored rolly-carts. He recognized some of the containers. Where he came from, up in the Citadel where The Old World’s memories were still remembered, they called them “luggage.” Coach, Prada, Louis Vuitton, Chanel, he knew many of the brands still because his people had prioritized continuing to know them. They had even retained some of their status within the society that he grew up in, the Citadelians often paying Contractors massive piles of coins in exchange for a single oversized leather bag dug from the depths by some expedition or another.
That didn’t matter here, though. Here they were all “ArchTech,” archaic technology, a remnant of The Old World before the surface became poisoned and The Undercroft with its numerous layers of hollowed-out circular chambers had become home to the people of the world who had hoped to survive without massive cellular degradation and mutation being their constant companions.
Sometimes, he was surprised at how well he could see the logos and designs at this distance. The light here was dim, only provided by a handful of bright electric lights mounted to long poles, thousands of individual burning lanterns filled with vegetable oil and mounted to buildings or carried in the hands of the inhabitants, and the occasional bioluminescent mushroom harvested from the caverns deep below their feet or unusual ArchTech electric device found in the buried layers of The Old World even further below that. It was nothing like the constant brightness of The Citadel.
Everywhere you looked under The Agate Dome that protected that place was a bright bulb filled with the distilled phosphorescent essence of those same mushrooms that he would occasionally see clutched in the hand of someone passing in the streets below, growing ever dimmer as the traveller occasionally nibbled little bites out of their combination snack and lightsource. And The Crystal Tower itself towering above all the other roofscrapers from its position at the center of it all, made from glass and steel and decorated with the agates that had long ago been harvested from the ceiling of The Dome, beamed with the millions of tiny plastic bulbs that had been embedded in every inch of its surface that wasn’t translucent. They were strange little dots of plastic with tiny specs of metal deep within that glowed constantly without end, never dimming, never burning out. He knew from experience that the light of that becon of a building reached all the way to the outer cavern walls. Sometimes he wondered if that would be the last thing left in The Citadel: The Crystal Tower with its dusty Crystal Court within, empty and quiet and ever-lit for all eternity.
Somehow, even growing up in that level of brightness it had only taken him a few days after leaving to fully acclimate to the dim of the rest of The Undercroft. He had travelled from Fretraci to α, from The Lowers below this layer to The Glowgrotto below that; he had even slipped into The Great Towers that bordered The Undercroft on two of its sides and peeked into The Dark Labyrinth that sat at the lowest known layer when the need arose and he had yet to find a part of all of this that he wasn’t able to see clearly in.
Sometimes he wondered if he had some kind of mutation that allowed him to see more clearly in the darkness than anything in his personal history would have allowed. He certainly had other mutations that his family had kept secret and the stigma against any mutation at all was so great within Citadelian society that sometimes parts of an individual’s genome were even kept from themselves lest they “spill the beans” and ruin a family’s reputation. No one wanted to be shipped off to The Glowkeep just to keep their family from having to endure the disgrace of having a potentially breedable mutant in their midst. He wondered if maybe everyone was mutated, if maybe the social order that had ruled The Undercroft for all these years had been created after fleeing here and if the histories they told themselves were more myth than truth. Maybe everyone was Lowborn once.
He shrugged to himself and pushed the thoughts away. It hardly mattered now. He could see, and that was what was important. He had learned about Utilitarianism while he was still under The Dome. Philosophy, like most subjects that were considered the potential pursuit of a gentleman, was required study as a child of The Dome. He had read Bentham and Mill, Sidgwick and Epicurus, but he hadn’t learned the essence of their teachings until he had left. There was something about living a life of utility that made a far better teacher than reading ever had.
He could have gotten closer to the elevator, gotten close enough to even buy some of the things the Surfacemen brought down if he had wanted, but he liked this building. It was one of the tallest in Fretraci and gave him a decent view of the entirety of the city, and while he doubted that there was anyone left under The Agate Dome to come looking for him anymore with the way things had been going when he left, he liked to keep an eye out for anyone who looked a bit too clean to have ever stepped foot in The Lowers or who looked too uneasy to be entirely comfortable around the poor and mutated. If, on the off chance someone decided to come looking for the lost children of The Citadel, he wanted to see them coming a mile off. Further, if possible.
Access to the roof wasn’t strictly allowed to the public, but he was a Seeder. The family that had tended to the gardens and farms within The Agate Dome and had kept The Citadel alive for generations, the Seeders had been renowned even long after they started leaving the actual work of their near-holy task to machines and for some their name still held enough sway that his Citadel ID got him access to places that he otherwise should not have had. It was cheap, perhaps, but it got him what he wanted and that’s what mattered.
“Found you!” an upbeat voice stated from behind him. It was sweet and bright and happy; too sweet for the sour lives here, too bright for the dim cavern, and too happy for the consistent depression that accompanied living underground.
“Fucking hell!” he shouted as he jumped, nearly off the side of the building, before he caught his footing on the very edge of the unmarked sudden drop that made up the end of the roof and pushed himself backward. He very nearly stumbled there as well, his body instinctively lurching his ass outward as it prepared to take a fall with the most padded part of itself, before he caught his footing and straightened.
He heard her giggling as she walked up to stand alongside him.
“Mahyu,” he said in greeting with a nod as he continued to look off onto the city with as much poise and half-interested dignity as he could manage despite his heart still pounding at the unceremonious death he had nearly suffered.
She had always been quiet, since the first day he had met her. He had been at a pub on the edge of Fretaci chatting with Dante, a distant cousin of his whose family had been shipped off to The Keep generations ago, about a potential job; he took a sip of his tea, his vision momentarily obscured by the oversized mug, and suddenly there was this girl in the seat next to him. He had coughed so hard against the liquid he had suddenly sucked into his lungs in surprise that he honestly thought he might die from it until it had finally sputtered out of his nose along with several long runs of mucus. The scent of mint had remained with him for days, tingeing everything he ate or drank the entire time, and it was nearly a year before he wanted a cup of the stuff again.
She seemed to be unable to make any sound with her feet and unless she were intentionally tapping on a wall or whistling as she went, sneaking up on people was non-optional. He had, more than once, seen her “sneak up” on someone who was looking in her direction. Somehow, she just simply tended to go unnoticed.
“Oh, serious Sem,” she began with a fake scowl and her lips pursing as she spoke in an artificially deepened tone that she called “guy voice.”
“Sorry, didn’t know we were being serious and dramatic,” she said with her face fighting the smile that twitched at the edge of her mouth as she affected a similar pose to his own: arms crossed, eyes gazing forward across the city.
He held it for a moment longer before a smile creeped across his own face. Citadelians were taught to posture from their earliest of days, to put on particular airs that could be used to control “The Masses” and to always affect the perfect composure in any situation. Emotions were a luxury that they could afford only in private; you cried when you were supposed to cry, laughed when you were supposed to laugh, and scowled when you were supposed to scowl. Every emotion had a purpose, a reason for being utilized that helped further your causes. But there was something about being out here that had broken him of so much of his training.
“So, what did you want to see me about?” he asked finally. She had sent word through a courier yesterday. A tiny child born with a very specific form of telepathy that allowed them to “browse” the overall public consciousness rather than zoom in on a particular person’s thoughts. They tended towards either courier work, where their ability allowed them to find individuals exceptionally quickly by searching for sightings of them, or research work where they could compile significant amounts of information from the encyclopedia of the zeitgeist itself. Unfortunately, the second profession suffered from the issue of misinformation tainting the data, but with actual encyclopedias being extremely rare they often still acted as the best sources of knowledge available.
“We got a job,” she replied simply and he finally allowed himself to turn his head to look at her with one eyebrow raised in question.
She was young-looking with long hair made of bunched locks that ranged from orange to red to pink to yellow to brown. He wasn’t sure how old she was, and he wasn’t entirely sure she was either. She had grown up in the depths below them as one of the many urchins that found their way into The Glowgrotto and while her face was young-looking, he knew from her body that she was at least woman-age. She was tall and curvy with a large ass that she consistently stuffed into a pair of multi-pocketed black pants that didn’t seem to have been originally made in her size, a surprisingly narrow waist compared to the rest of her, and reasonable size breasts that stuck out enough through her grey vest and grey-checked flannel shirt to be noticable but not so much that they were distracting. A woman’s body, certainly.
“Do tell,” he invited her to continue.
“Don’t know yet,” she replied simply with a shrug before she turned away from the ledge and gave him a friendly punch to the shoulder that very nearly made him lose his footing again as she started towards the roof door. “C’mon, we got a meeting with Dante in twenty minutes.”
