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Post by Insano-Man on Mar 25, 2020 5:24:50 GMT -5
THE TRILLION WANDERING
CONTINENT: Ventannen
REGION: Southern Veinlands, Western Bones
CONDITIONS: Meatscape, Badlands, Dust Plains
POPULATION:
- Unaffiliated: Negligible
- Loonies: Negligible
- Space Loonies: None
- Cult of Meat: Extreme
- Wildlife: Meatscape
LANDMARKS:
- Towns: Gulmond, Zasavis, Skul'Naza, Brightspine Pass
- Religious: Black Abbey of the Shivering Ivories, Northern Chimes, Southern Chimes, Zarukat Chapel, Ossuary of the Given, Our Father and Saint's Blossom of the Bone
- Roads: Brightspine Pass, Northern Crossover, Southern Crossover, Trillions' Sight Road, Ivories' Sight Road
- Other: The Trillion Wandering, The Crag of Craving, Darkest Hope Crater, Black Faith Crater, Sealed Crypt Crater, Northern Crater, Northwestern Crater, Northeastern Crater, North-Northeast Crater, East-Northeast Crater, Eastern Crater, Tyranny's Pit Crater, Flooded Crater, Blood Crater, Southeastern Crater, South-Southeast Crater, Southern Crater
SUMMARY
Somewhere out in the western side of the Southern Veinlands is a place where the pacing never stops. It's a permanent pilgrimage that's both a people and a place. It's as much an event as it is a location - and it's gone on so long that it's left a literal trench in the Erf. On all sides are the Cult of Meat, their meatspawn horrors, and Loonies taking potshots from the outskirts. It's all a mercy, a Hell, and a strategic point of interest. Despite being in the middle of one of the largest contiguous meatscapes on the planet, it's one of the most peaceful places in the Cult's viscous realm. That big donut on the face of the Erf is what the men in red call the Trillion Wandering.
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Post by Insano-Man on Mar 25, 2020 5:25:10 GMT -5
THE WANDERING
The Trillion Wandering itself is a giant circle of empty earth so thoroughly beaten down by foot traffic that it forms something of a half-torus dug into the ground. It's been walked for so long, by so many, that it's at least ten feet tall at its shallowest and thirty feet deep at its lowest. The soil there is barren, battered, and smoothed down. No matter how many times the meat tries to reassert itself, there are just too many feet for it to contend with. All along its periphery, on the inside and out, stone-and-bone towers preside over the circle. Cultist camps, both permanent and temporary, dot the inner edge. Not a single place is outside the watch of the Cult's transformed. Not a single thing ever gets past the ring without either flying over, or plopping dead in a thousand vivisected pieces.
Inside that trench are the Trillion; the primary patients of the Black Abbey of the Shivering Ivories. The monsters stalking the circle are all transformed cultists. Meat monsters who used to be sons to someone, or sisters to someone else. The unlucky, the unwary, and the underestimating are all parts of a massive march in a neverending roundabout. They're controlled by the Abbey's transformed and goaded along into stalking that circuit. Some are still partly people, and understand it's all for their benefit. Most of them are screaming freaks who've lost all their sense and sanity. Some walk, some stalk, some sprint, and some slither. One way or another, they're all waiting their turn for one of the Abbey's transformed to come along and try to put the person back into them.
As much as no one can really be sure of how many meat monsters are meandering along the line, most are reasonably sure that it's not a trillion. With that said, the Trillion Wandering is one of the largest collections of meat monsters on the planet - which is mostly thanks to the fact that it's also the largest collection of docile meat monsters on the planet. Even then, "docile" is relative; even with Cult transformed watching night and day, incidents of violence are a given. Monsters jump eachother on the march, other freaks run screaming into the line, and some are just trampled when they trip up. When Loonies stage an assault, harvesters hit the place, or when Space Loonies run a bombing campaign, all the shooting and screaming is enough to whip up the old hate in all the monsters. With an estimated minimum of at least 700 million monsters marching daily, nothing living wants to be there when something blows.
When that's not going on, and when the mutants aren't mangling eachother, the Trillion Wandering is - for a million-monster march - surprisingly inviting. Cultists set up camps along the route, to hold sermons, to watch over the lost in the trench, and even to play music for the damned waiting salvation. There's a celebration every time a soul is saved, a serenade every sunset, and guided reunions of friends and family with those they gave to the Abbey. If you just stop to ignore the non-stop squealing, howling, and gut-turning slurping noises, the Wandering never gives up the image of a place of reflection and redemption.
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Post by Insano-Man on Mar 25, 2020 5:25:30 GMT -5
THE BLACK ABBEY
The Black Abbey of the Shivering Ivories is the base of operations for the salvation squads of the Wandering. It is, itself, almost something of a city on its own. It's a vast, sprawling fortress of black foundations and off-white walls like a giant checkerboard carved from bone. At its tops, it's all capped in crimsons and draped in golds. As with any other major Cult position, it's built as much like a bomb shelter as it is like a house of worship. Everything is heavy, reinforced, and just about indestructible to anything short of a massed artillery barrage. Guard towers are low and stubby. Anything that could fall over is packed in with plenty of neighbors - or reinforcing struts - to keep it standing in case something blows.
As much as military necessity has kept the place packed, the Abbey still has the flair of a religious site. The Cult's curving, swooping lines and otherworldly organic beauty all decorate everything. Murals and memorials to people and pilgrimages past cover up the walls. Sculptures of saints and saved sinners rise up from rooftops. Statuary of the Eighth and the Ninth of the Whispered Names - LEADSCREAM DOOMFINGERS and GREASEGRIP MURDERHANDS, as the Abbey is not fond to wear openly - stands tall wherever it wouldn't catch a shell during an attack. In between it all, the little pits and cracks of old war wounds stand proudly unrepaired across just about everything. The Black Abbey's been a black crater at least ten times in the past. Ask any of their priests, and they'll say that with a smile - with a reminder that the roof went right back up as soon as the shelling stopped.
The people of the Black Abbey are considered among the Cult's most pious. Their population is almost 80% transformed, most of them deeply respected and dangerously mutated even among the Cult's top monsters. Their lives are a daily submission to the Cult's humbler teachings. The rough exterior of their house of worship is all there only by need. Few are fighters. Fewer rise to passion for war. They draw equally from the Covenant of the Growing Gospel, and the Embrace of the Crimson Cloud. As with most Cult institutions, upper-level leaders are usually drawn from the Pact of Sazuk'Aliah. At 1,536 strong in the Abbey itself, and with the support of around 20,000 cultists in nearby settlements, the Shivering Ivories are anything but small for their stature.
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Post by Insano-Man on Mar 25, 2020 5:26:40 GMT -5
HISTORY
The Trillion Wandering got its start in around 1099 OSC with the up-and-coming Cult house of worship known as the Black Abbey of the Shivering Ivories. What surprises no one is that most locales use the color "black" as a sign of evil. What's not as readily obvious is that it's also a sign of redemption. For the Black Abbey in question, their favored form of salvation was in dealing with those who'd gambled and lost with the meat. They emphasized the restoration of those transformed cultists who'd lost their sanity - but not yet their soul - to their own ambition. To the Shivering Ivories, it was no crime for the faithful's reach to exceed their grasp.
As anyone who's dabbled in the viscous arts will tell you - or any Looney worth his strategic salt - the failure rate in Cult transformations alone is enough to qualify meat-worshipers for death cult status. For the Black Abbey, that meant business was always booming. While plenty of Cult sects had their own ideas on what to do when their pastors started foaming at their gut-maws, just as many were ready to seek outside assistance. That meant putting their feral confessors in irons, dragging them across the blood plains, and giving them over to the Abbey. It only took some 20 years from its beginning, by around 1119, for the Abbey to hit such a point that they had more mad ministers than they could effectively account for.
It was hard to put it into a coherent picture as to just how many half-monster men and half-man monsters were coming in at any given time. They came from every echelon of the Cult, from well-connected bottom-rung families, right on up to the Incarnadine Confessors who weren't quite done slinging psalms. They came from the power-drunk members of the Pact of Sazuk'Aliah, to the half-heretic Driven of the Black Heart. Even outsiders turned to their services when word made its way to them. By 1119, there were so many people looking for help that there was a non-stop train of the unfortunate and overconfident being coaxed and baited along to the Black Abbey. Some of them weren't even people anyone knew; they were just monsters who'd wandered in on their own. As their creed compelled them, the Shivering Ivories took them in all the same.
Most Cult convents would've shut their doors or fallen apart under that kind of strain, but the Black Abbey was crafty. They came up with a funny idea to keep their new charges and projects busy while they were trying to triage their cases. In 1131, when the strain turned out to be too much, they started putting their patients out on a big circuit around the Abbey's walls, like a smaller version of the modern-day Wandering. They orchestrated it as a way to ease the burden on their own transformed who were pulling the strings. Putting the monsters to work by roaming around and chasing eachother's meat meant they could let instinct ease the psychic burden of handling so many mutants at once. It also served as a handy way to secure the grounds - and lure in the never-a-person meat monsters to keep their people-freaks fed.
Within a year, the size of the ring had doubled. In two years, it'd gone up six times. In three, it was sixteen times its original size. The Abbey had to expand twice over to keep up with its own idea. Before too long, they resigned just to making temporary towers and little bone-bunkers for their conductors to keep the show going. It was in November of 1159 that they'd hit the point where they could stop spreading the ring out - and that was only because it'd grown to be nearly as big as the Well of Japes. From there, their turnover rate - successful or otherwise - managed to keep even with the influx of transformed and infected. Their methodology improved, their control efficiency was at its prime, and their ability to diagnose lost causes was the best it could ever be.
Originally, when it was first conceived, the big meat monster race had the title of the "Red Reflection". When, in 1167, it'd gotten so big that you couldn't see one end from the other, and the constant pounding of flesh on dirt-flesh had carved a knee-high depression into the soil, they decided it was time for a change. With so many monsters that the Abbey had to instate a public traffic policy, they gave it its present-day moniker of the Trillion Wandering. It's stayed unchanged since, even as the Abbey's leadership has swapped around a few times. Not many in the Cult have come up with a better way to put it. Only the Loonies have ever thought up something else - and not many can say "Donut of the Damned" with a straight face.
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