[ERF] Locale: Madness Command Post

THE COMMAND POST
No one knows what Madness looks like in the present day. Different sources all have different suggestions. Some say it was one of the first Looney bunkers to join in on the Big Split, and that the Space Loonies hit it so hard that there's nothing left to find. Some say it was one of the longest holdouts of the dying Pioneer Network, and that it was abandoned only when it became obvious that it couldn't supply itself anymore. Some say the Cult hit it, ate it, and dumped its digested debris in the Southern Veinlands. No one has any proof - and not many archaeologists have taken to sharing.

What information does exist is mostly in historical archives. Most of it centers on Madness as it was before the Loonies grabbed their pitchforks. It all paints a picture of one of the biggest military installations ever to exist - big enough to dwarf even Castle Wienerstein and Space Looney dreadnoughts. The facility was sited somewhere in walking distance of Zorah's Iris, on present-day Zuhverl. A few suggestions place it on the shores of the Houndsbreak Sea. No one's ever been able to figure out if it's still there - and not many people have gone looking.

Madness was a Looney facility through and through. Even as much as it might've been one of the best-known military installations on the planet, the underground was everything. Staying hidden - if at least only physically - was crucial. The facility was a grid of cleanly-organized hallways, concourses, and hangars. Every last bit of space was utilized to its maximum - for its people, for its arsenal, or for its on-site industry. Resources were sourced locally - whether they were food, water, or pentaerythritol tetranitrate. Mining operations under Madness pushed so deep that the facility had to be supported by a constant chain of construction projects downwards. Never were miners so popular in a facility full of officers.

Meanwhile, the base from above was nothing. From the side, it wasn't much more than an awkward set of doors in a cliff face. Madness was true to the Looney way of life; not one part of the base breached the surface unless it was a door, an elevator, or comms gear. The space around the bunker, around its extensions - all pristine, untouched, and full of life. The complete lack of pollution and runoff made modern-day Looney bunkers look like landfills. In every way, Madness was invisible - even if you weren't counting the stealth shell hidden in the soil.

Some images of Madness still exist today. It's hard for any Looney or history buff not to get a little teary-eyed looking at them. The facility was situated inside a bald, natural plateau, overlooking a wide river and a sandy-shored lake. Tropical trees hung heavy with fruit and birds on the banks of the river. Grass and mud dominated the forest floor. The cliff-face doors most pictures focus on were part of a double-ended, jumbo-sized hangar used only for emergencies and VIPs. Inside, in the hidden halls, it was all concrete and steel, all plastic and polycarbonate. It was Looney life at its best. The bunker was clean, safe, and - best of all - finished.

What wasn't so clean was the underground. Underneath Madness and its plunging city was a maze of tunnels choked with industrial runoff, sewage, and uncorked natural gases. Major cave systems were used as dumping grounds for old hardware waiting for its turn in the furnace. Underwater lakes were drained of their water, then topped off with a tanker's worth of toilet bowls. Some pits were honestly marked as "destination unknown" and used as toxic waste dumps. All Madness ever cared about was keeping its garden clean. The basement was fair game.

For an underground military installation, Madness's population was absolutely massive. At least 40,000 permanent Looney residents lived in and around the facility. Troops passing through numbered anywhere between 10,000 and 80,000. Sandwiched in between the layers of Pioneer Loonies was a supporting civilian population constantly growing into the underground. By the time Madness dropped off the map, its count was around 3,000 - a number that was still growing even during the Splinter Wars.

Even as big as its population figures were, Madness only picked the best and brightest for its staff. The Loonies working in the facility were dedicated, decorated, and deep into the Looney lifestyle. About half of its administrative council were estimated to have at least a century under their belt as leaders - which only made the young blood look that much more impressive. Civilians in and around the base were just shy of full-time soldiers, whether they were on-site doctors, factory supervisors, or just family for the Loonies to go home to. Each one was as eager, educated, and experienced as their military counterparts. Life in the Madness family was full of big shoes.

QUIET BOY'S DROP
Most of the time, "destination unknown" in Madness's underground was sincere. The rest of the time, it was a byword for the tunnel systems deep below the command post; the Quiet Boy's Drop. It was where the base's miners cut their teeth and sharpened their senses. It was where everyone else dumped their sewage, garbage, and mothballs. It held an awkward, needle-point position that made it so bitterly unpopular that it was nothing short of a miracle that it made it into the history books. What didn't make it, on the other hand, was the inspiration for its name.

The Drop wasn't too far from Set's status quo for subterranean quagmires. It was a looping, loping maze of long tunnels, stretching out from a central shaft of Looney-sponsored subterranean sinkholes almost directly under Madness. It was decked with shelves, some of them nothing but bowls of brown or spires of slime. Lonely waystations and supply caches circled down the pit with nothing but auto-turrets to keep them company. Out in the tunnels, stockpiles of disarmed, deactivated, and decommissioned equipment were all lined up together - whatever Madness couldn't keep, it swept under the rug.

Around the top, away from the dripping and dumping, Madness's subterranean city sprawled down. Spires of steel and concrete plunged down from above. Factories, warehouses, and barracks huddled up close in hole-plugging support towers that kept the roof above from coming down. It was all as critical to holding Madness up as it was to keeping its housing crisis in check. The thousands of people in the base had to go somewhere. More often than not, the job of building new homes was just as much up to the miners as it was the engineers.

At the bottom, even with everything the Loonies had already dumped inside, the same miners were hard at work eating into the planet. Mining rigs rumbled along under overwatch from fatboy fireteams. Monster sweeps went on under supervision from Madness's mining branch. They were a mix of the best of the best and the freshest of the fresh. Seasoned miners with anywhere from ten to two hundred years of hard-won experience bumped shoulders with teenagers straight out of Madness's combat schools. It was a prime example of Looney self-sufficiency. The first bunker didn't just grind its own gravel. It trained its own kids right in its own basement.

With imports on a tight leash, the Loonies had to make due by making dozens of exploratory digs. That meant compromising, reinforcing, and re-compromising the underground's structural integrity every month. It wasn't too long before the Loonies realized that they could only build so many supports before the entire thing started sinking - or before Madness turned into a sinkhole. That legacy was etched and strutted into the walls beneath the base. As the Drop delved deeper, mining operations slowed down and scaled down to smaller, sturdier tunnels. At the top, the Drop looked like an octopus. At the bottom, it was a little more like linguine.

It was guessed that the Drop was charted about 3km under the planet's surface. That only accounted for the tunnels the Loonies could keep a handle on. Deeper below were more caves and pits Madness could only guess at based on seismic readings and mapping drones. Deeper down, the slime turned hungry. The stink came from gurgling horrors. The monsters that couldn't spread out into the Loonies' domain swirled around at the bottom, waiting for somebody to fall in. On occasion, they got too hungry to stay below - and the thousands-long list of miner brawls that made it out of Madness is probably only a tenth of the story.