Erik Amundsen's Blog, page 7

Polly Cakes

Polly cakes, polly cakes
falling from the sky
roll them out flat for a polly cake pie.
Polly cakes, polly cakes,
between the sun and the wind
get out your broom and bring the polly cakes in.

Back in the early days, those below let loose a kind of plant native to their lands or created in their laboratories; a light, tiny epiphyte that gets its moisture from clouds and usually lives within cloud formations.  These plants produce a massive amount of pollen nearly every day of their active lives (dormancy is usually only the winter months), which, in turn gets mostly borne down by cool temperatures and adheres to the ground with the dew in the morning.

This pollen ranges from pale yellow or pink to bright gold and magenta-red, and it edible, slightly sweet, and can be combined with just about any grain or flour to fill it out.  Folks collect it in the morning when it falls near them, using brooms and jars to keep it.  The pollen doesn't have a lot of nutrition, or even, for its bulk, many calories, so subsisting entirely off of it, while something most people in the region have had to do once or twice, is not a great idea.  The traditional use of the pollen is either cutting grain, potato or yam flour (which, if you have an untrustworthy miller, is probably already cut) to make up bulk (lighter colored pollen is, obviously, preferred for this, especially if company is coming), or mixed with shredded yam and what ever else you have and fried as polly cakes.

Polly cakes are pretty popular breakfast food even among people who can afford not to need to eat them, and, topped with whatever their cooks can think of, especially popular street food.  Different towns and individual carts have specialties and secret recipes and are known for ferocious, sometimes violent rivalries.  The association of polly cakes with club football makes this even moreso, as traveling football clubs in the cantons bring their own favored carts with them, and those carts are traditional targets of violent home-team fans.

Polly cakes are a boon to foragers in the Big Charry region, whose weather patterns ensure a lot of pollen falls all throughout the season.

The Green Girl

She doesn't show up every time a red phantom rears up its ugly head, but she's been there many times.  Sometimes she succeeds in banishing the red phantom or keeping it engaged until it runs out of time and disperses on its own and sometimes she fails.  Occasionally, a red phantom manages to banish her, but she always seems to return, and as her appearances grow in frequency, so to do her wins.

No one's really sure what the green girl is, only that she is a recent phenomenon.  Who might be a better question, since the descriptions of the green girl have consistently grown in size and apparent maturity in the two years following her first recorded sighting.  The green girl's name is frankly descriptive, whatever she may or may not be, she appears as a young girl in a cloak, lit up green in the same way the red phantoms shed red light.  She appears in places where red phantoms manifest and engages them, attempting to restrain or banish them in hand-to-hand combat.  She manifests a great, straight bladed sword of green light in order to fight the phantoms.  Phantom features tend to shift and change during their manifestation, and the Green Girl is similar in that respect, but she is always described as being young (earlier reports place her at 9-10, more recent ones close to 12), and having straight, dark hair (two points that do not narrow down her human identity, if she indeed has one.  It just means she is less likely, by size, to be a Biggun, and by hair texture to be pure Cray).  The sword, while similar in size to something that might be used in the west (by a very strong Biggun who was more interested in intimidation than actual combat effectiveness - seriously, the thing is only bigger than its wielder by a slightly smaller amount).

Important folks and areas do have the means to protect themselves from phantoms in the form of occultists who agree to bind their activities to a proscribed area or person as a blue phantom.  This comes in handy, sometimes, against mundane threats, but there's no records of a red-on-blue phantom fight in any land surrounding the Big Charry, or indeed, of any two phantoms fighting one another prior to the appearance of the Green Girl.

As with any phenomenon which involves the occult, the appearance of the Green Girl has set off a frenzy of conjecture, investigation and scholarly activity.  Some folks hope that the method of her appearance is something that others can learn or repeat.  Others are hoping to find some vulnerability to the entity to exploit in order to destroy or control her/it.  So far, scholars of the occult have turned up very little, only an account that links green, phantom-like manifestation with the Broken-Necked God of a primarily dead faith, the deity in question likely to have been, if anything, a thinking machine in the service of those underground, one of the ones which revolted in the early days and gathered some human followers.  History of that time period, one that predates most of the people coming to this land, is, understandably, hard to come by, if it is indeed history and not early-days tale telling.

Whatever the case, the vast majority of the people of the regions surrounding Big Charry, and one assumes foreign lands in which she may be active who have reason to fear red phantoms wish her, child or entity, all success in her chosen endeavor.

Kobolds

It seems the those below did try to get by without human slaves once or twice.  Big Charry was only the seat of their civilization, and there are outposts all over the countryside, and a lot of those have local populations left over from those times.  Those local populations have local names, depending on who lives near enough to them to name them and what animal they got made from in the first place, but collectively, they're called kobolds, at least that's what Charry folk and Cantoneers call them.

Those underground had the means to mess with the biological plan of living things.  There's plenty of evidence of that all over this land, independent of kobolds.  Kobolds are more dramatic than most, since whatever animal was their ancestor before, these days, they something like that changed to a similar to human body plan.  Walk upright, use hands to make tools, have languages of varying complexity, better or worse understanding of social dynamics (kobolds made from dogs are more social and better able to deal with social behavior than, say, kobolds made from squirrels).  Kobolds tend to inhabit the areas that were assigned to them by those below, long abandoned of whatever purpose they were put there to fulfill.  Some are fairly social and even sociable, some are less so.  Some seem to harbor an instinctive distaste for humanity, some don't.

Kobolds tend not to live a lot longer than their non-anthropomorphized ancestors.  Those below were not very careful when making them, and health problems tend to accrue on them quickly after they reach maturity. Likewise, kobolds drawn from less common stock or living in isolated areas tend to be very inbred, with the host of problems that creates.  Interactions with humans tends to be mixed.  In the Cantons, there are small communities of dog kobolds and a little consortium of fox kobolds that integrate fairly well with human society.  In Big Charry, however, the swamps are filled with nutria, beaver, muskrat, opossum and raccoon descended kobolds which constantly raid one another and any humans they find, which makes them one of the most pervasive threats to expeditions in the region.

Jabareel

When those below went out and captured slaves to bring to Big Charry, a fair number of the people they brought were Christian.  In the years since, their faith has remained pretty popular, especially among the people who lived in the Big Charry; it having been a faith for or about oppressed people and all.  Problem Christians, and really anyone who tries to hew to a faith from the old lands, have is that there's about a different sect for every handful of believers.  When the people got taken, they were taken naked and empty-handed, with nothing but memory, and most of the Christians took, well, they had priests to remember for them and a book where things were written down, so a lot of stuff got lost.

Since then, there's been efforts to reconstruct, but those efforts are based on the memories of people four and five generations removed from anyone who might have seen the scripture from which the faith came, so the reconstructions are fragmentary, contradictory, crossed with things that the inheritors of other faiths contributed in the general captivity of everyone.  No faith from the old lands fared very well, honestly, some folks with strong oral traditions managed to keep a more coherent core, but those underground did all they could to break the old cultures down or make them irrelevant, and a lot of those were tied to the history of one single group or another, and it's hard to know, generations later, who they're talking about.

Also, every faith, both those from the old lands and those from here, they've passed bits back and forth.  One that shows up strong in the cultures of the cantons, the Cray and the Affiliation (so almost everyone local) comes from Christianity, and that's the angel Jabareel.

See, God or whoever you like has a handful of servants.  One of them is the strong right arm who fights evil.  One of them is the one who went evil and is stuck in prison, and maybe does bad things to humans.  One of them brings comfort and healing and aid to those in need.  One, well, we don't know, only that there's mention of five names, and there's a fifth who does things we don't know about.  Then there's Jabareel, who does all the things the other angels do, including, sometimes, some of the things you'd think was in the remit of the bad one, only he does these things when God asks him to.

Jabareel is a trickster.  He loves children, brings them gifts, whispers to them secrets they need to know.  He hates captivity and slavery, and if you listen to some folks, he had a lot to do with the fall of those underground (you'll find a red dot of paint on the doorframes of a lot of houses owned or rented by folks from the Big Charry in particular, standing in for blood, so Jabareel knows not to visit on bad errands).  He likes to take the piss out of people, especially the greedy or the proud, and he's not above messing with you if it keeps you humble.

Some folks associate Jabareel with the Rabbit, who changes his shape and likes to make fun of proud folks, too.  Some associate him with sunset, for his robes are supposed to be those colors, and his wings are black, the better to go by night.  Some associate him with owls, and, really, anything nocturnal.   Keeper of secrets, working in secret.  Some folks believe that the angel about whom no one knows very much is his twin and they do the same work, only the other is more gentle and quiet.  The Cray say he's of a kind with the fighting angel and the healing angel, since the three correspond to the three methods of healing in Cray traditions (strengthening the body, attacking the infection, and drawing out the sickness - Jabareel is the last one).  The indent in your lips is from when he tells you a secret at birth and then shushes you not to ever reveal it.

He's also there to tell you a secret at the end of your life, in his capacity as the angel of death.

Submissions Don't Matter

My story "On Every Boy's Skin / All the Stars Ever, Also Bones," it's long title and all (the latter half of which was given to me by sovay in a meme), has been purchased by Lackingtons and will be in their premier issue.  Late fall and winter redemption of my not being able to hit anywhere, for the win!

Poppa Honore

Most of the people who escaped from the Big Charry region fled into the independent cantons to the north and east, but some did go west, and a lot of the people who have come since to explore the region and their luck ferreting out the secrets and wealth of those underground have come from the west.  These folks from the hills and lakes and clans of the Affiliation, they're pretty easy to spot.  Folks in the cantons refer to them collectively as bigguns, since there's no good way to make a single word out of people from a body called the Affiliation and, really, the term is nicely descriptive.

Folks from the west start at 72 inches tall and go up from there, and we are not talking about bean poles like you find in the cantons or among the Cray down south, builds are heavy muscle and bone.  Like just about everyone, they have a mix of shade and hair and feature, maybe a few more with lighter skin and a few more with very dark than you find in the cantons, but the same range.  The Affiliation predates the cantons as a unified (as much as either are unified, which is not much at all) political body, and the culture out west is one of the oldest on the continent.  That culture and all its emphasis on spiritual learning, woodcraft and athleiticism is credited to the same source as the height and build of its people.  That source is Poppa Honore.

When people first started fleeing from Big Charry and those underground, back when those underground still brought people to the region, people who remembered where they came from before, well, they didn't get too far.  Most of them settled in what would become the cantons, some went south across the sea and became the Cray, and some ran and kept running until they got to the west.  There they found a man, a great, tall man with a hundred burly children.  Poppa Honore said he that they were the last people of the west, and that he'd been granted rulership of the land by the spirits that lived there, but people were welcome to come and share, so long as some of their children were willing to marry his.

Poppa Honore knew the land, knew the very active and high population of local spirits, and taught his hundred children all he knew.  He taught the people who came all he knew as well, and fathered a hundred more children in the process (it's not really clear if his first hundred children were genetically his or just kids he had adopted, or if there really were a hundred, or that they really were children, it's probably not that important).  At this point, all those who live in the west claim to be Honore's direct descendants, and their clans group based on which one of his lovers and wives is claimed as their clan's mother.  The great size and strength of the bigguns holds true, the smallest men are quite big by canton standards and their smallest women are larger than the biggest girl in the cantons, no question.

Some people think that the size of the western folk comes from tinkering by those underground.  They point to Poppa Honore's residence in the west when the first of those who fled the Charry in the first days as a possible link to a previous set of slaves those underground had, and perhaps something happened as a result of their engineering people for size that resulted in their later reticence about altering humans.  It's also possible that the land itself has something to do with the size of the bigguns, since it creeps into families not claiming descent from Poppa Honore within a couple of generations.  A petite cantoneer might move west and find their grandchildren scraping their heads on the doorframe regardless of who their parents got with.

The Affiliation has a rotating, seasonal form of tutelage and apprenticeship which leans heavily on both woodland survival and crafts and spiritual practice.  Neither of these things are strictly necessary for everyday survival in the west, but they are both cornerstones of cultural practice, and means that a lot of folks from the west are very well suited to the rigors of exploration in the Big Charry region. 

Tutrabel Bridge

It's hard to tell that the Big Charry region was the largest seat of those underground.  Hard from ground level, hard from the air.  In the whole region, there is a single structure that has any apparent features aboveground that was used solely for those underground.  Tutrabel mountain has a bridge that comes out of its face, about halfway up to its peak (the peak is  6922 feet, being the third highest mountain in the region, Big Charry is the highest at 9138 feet) connecting to a tall elevator tower that forms the center of Tutrabel City.  This structure was made by human hands, but to the specifications of those underground; it's completely unadorned, plain, almost crude looking.  At the same time, it is so distinct from human engineering that it seems strange that a race which had done everything in their power to hide all traces of themselves away, even (especially) from their slaves, would want this.

Tutrable was not even that important a city to those underground, as far as anyone could tell.  It was small, had a comparatively paltry livestock yield and very little in the way of mineral wealth.  It's possible the bridge and the tower were set up as a decoy for some presumed enemy (who or what is still nothing we know).  The elevators in the tower, drawn by water power, still function, and the doorway into the mountain remains open, but no one has been able to get inside.  A cold wind issues from the doorway, which, at its source is colder and faster than any other conditions found in this world, and, at present, no one has had the time or resources in place to create a method to defeat those winds (though there are designs, some of which seem promising).

Explorers hoping to learn the secrets of those underground and how they met their end have flocked to Tutrabel City, but no one has been able to establish a foothold strong enough to even begin exploring the tower and city, let alone dare the wind.  Competition between expeditions seems to be the most common cause of expedition failure, but it seems clear that there are other agencies operating in the city, about which no good accounts have come.

The Butcher Block

In the south of the Big Charry region, about a half a day over land from no place special, where no roads go, there is a tree by a cliff.  In this tree, spiraling up and around, are 43 giant blades, like slightly tapered meat cleavers, stuck and now growing into the trunk.  The tree itself is a sequoia, big and old and likely to live longer than people remember its here.  You can climb the blades or the handles, which look and smell of red cedar, from the base of the tree to the top of the cliff or vice-versa, but there's no indication of what might have been the direction of the travel or why.

Folks who study these things, especially folks who adhere to the Reasoners' beliefs, have made this tree a place of pilgrimage in the days since the first map accurately placing it came out of the region with trustworthy corroboration.  The irony of any place meriting pilgrimage from the usually iconoclastic Reasoners is, well, lost on most of them, they are a ferociously dreary and literal minded bunch, but there's some call for it.  Those who study such things agree that this is what those underground could do, but not how they ever did things.  Transmutation of matter was the basis for just about everything those underground did and as much a part of their methods as subterranean existence and relentless need for animal protein.

Reasoners believe that the butcher block was created by a human being with the use of the methods of those below, a possibility which excites them beyond all entertainment of the many alternate explanations that could have put 43 identical blades in a tree as a stairway.  They have taken to hiring folks to keep an eye on the tree to prevent explorers from trying to take the blades or hurt the tree.

Tranidaree Road House

Tranidaree is the last stop on the road that goes south into Big Charry territory.  Out back, there's a field where you can still see the fires of the refugee camps as the people fled from the region.  Folks are always welcome to camp out back for free as long as they promise to clean up after themselves, but not a lot of people do.

Tranidaree is the hub for adventurers and treasure hunters as they head south into the region.  It's a big main house, flanked by long, two story wings that snake out and house the rooms where guests stay.  The family that runs the house is sprawling, extended, and it's sometimes difficult to see the resemblance between them.  Regular visitors to the road house sometimes say they don't always recognize the people serving them, but the family is pretty big and a lot of the kids seem familiar.

Tranidaree plays host to a small market of specialized peddlers who sell supplies and trinkets to explorers and adventurers.  Like the staff, they seem to rotate often, but there is almost always someone there selling something that some number of guests find useful.  One of the more common peddlers is an old man who sells keys.  He sells the knowledge of what lock a particular key opens separately, if he has it, and has a basket full of keys whose locks he does not know that he lets customers rifle through to sweeten deals.

Coralee Phantom Calendar

Coralee has too much town hall for the town it was.  Built up around a quarry and a deep, green quarry lake, Coralee's town hall is built from the basalt quarried there, with a big, square clock tower out front and room enough inside to house the whole of the town's population at its highest.  The main hall is framed and floored and paneled with red cedar, and in the center of roof, there is a great, round, stained glass skylight.  It's protected on the outside by wire mesh, because the thing sports a fortune of red and blue glass.  That its survived half a decade of the region getting picked over by adventurers and explorers is remarkable.

There is a carving, a set of carvings along the floor, and while the window itself is an abstract design, and each day-corresponding iteration of the carvings on the floor is suggestive, when the sunlight shines through the window on the floor, the carving fills in the rest.  What is depicted on the ground is the unmistakable figure of a red-robed phantom.

No one it sure if the town hall, its skylight and its carving represent merely a calendar or also a map, since the characters inscribed into each line of the carving are a cypher and reading the calendar requires not only decryption of the cypher, but also contextual knowledge of the placement in the carving of the passage being deciphered.  The cypher itself is challenging, but it has been cracked.  The contextual knowledge to decode and use the calendar has not been discovered.

The people of the lands in and surrounding Big Charry have had an uneasy relationship with the occult.  It's true that occult practitioners were the earliest and most dogged enemies of those underground, but they also tend to be wicked folk and murderers besides.   The practice of taking up the red phantom's robes is a thing that even avowed occultists would never admit to doing, outside of their own suicide notes or torture-extracted confessions.  People feared those underground and their agents a lot less, and hated them at least moderately less than the random murders committed with relative impunity by saturnine and effulgent red figures for a quick fix of power.

Scholars of both the occult bent and the occult hating bent have vested interests in decoding the calendar, as the most common explanation for what it might do is predict where an occultist using the technique will manifest as a red phantom, which would allow its practitioners to better target their power-gathering rampages and everyone else to determine effective countermeasures against same.

No one is certain why the main public building in a town that was ostensibly loyal to those underground would contain this feature.  Perhaps an explanation is encoded within.