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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 21:57:29 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Set article directory.LAYERS OF THE ERFAt roughly three times the size of Earth, Set is an immense planet with an immense orbital reach. From the furthest graveyard orbit down to its untouched, unknown core, the verticality of Set is as impressive as any given layer of the planet. All the more striking is that life exists on virtually every level, be it man, monster, or things stranger still. Each level carries its own risks, population, and mysteries. No slice of the planet has been completely explored. The following is a list of all of the known layers of Set's underground, ordered from outermost to innermost.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 21:57:39 GMT -5
THE SURFACE
31km - 0km
The land, the sea, mountains reaching for the sky, and anywhere in between are all the most populous and diverse regions across Set's surface. They are home to an unimaginable diversity of biomes, features, towns, and cultures, spread across a vast, unpredictable world steeped in wilderness and mystery. Set's surface-dwelling population is virtually unknown; minimum estimates from Space Looney sources suggest at least three billion people live above ground. Even that figure is fully acknowledged to be a likely understatement.
Of note is that Set's surface is a variable concept. Some areas are substantially higher than others, some substantially deeper. The highest natural peak on Set - Pyretip Peak, at 31.3 kilometers high - serves as the maximum altitude of its surface. The deepest point on Set has yet to be measured; some oceanic trenches and volcanic rifts extend hundreds of kilometers down and have yet to be fully charted. Some cave systems, while shallow from sky to floor, circle down into even the Chambers of Myth. Erupting structures and land formations routinely gouge immeasurably-deep holes into Set's surface. Few of those to survive the trip up have attempted to measure their ascent - and fewer still are reliable.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 21:58:59 GMT -5
THE UNDERGROUND
0km - 5km Below
Even below Set's surface, the underground teems with life. Wildlife thrives in surface-connected cave networks, underground lakes and rivers flourish with subterranean vegetation, and townsfolk from above dig deep for resources - mineral or otherwise. Cave access to the surface is plentiful, accessible, and often used - regional conditions permitting - for safe and discrete transport. Many towns center on conveniently-placed caves, both for the natural shelter they provide and the easier access to underground tunnels. Lakeside caves - or caves with lakes - are favorite settlement locations.
Just as the Space Loonies dominate the sky, the ordinary Loonies dominate the underground. Looney bunkers and surface installations penetrate deep into Set's crust, some sprawling unseen for kilometers across and down. Mining, hunting underground fauna, and harvesting subterranean flora are all common sources of resources for the Loonies. Just as towns favor cave entrances for their access to the underground, the Loonies favor them for their access to the surface.
Underground communities are hardly uncommon. Many exist relative to the conditions on the surface, hiding from monsters or harsh weather above, or reaping the benefits of a thriving underground. Even nomads are hardly strangers to tunnel networks; some even elect to remain below ground entirely and live solely by wandering Set's enormous cave systems. Below ground, the Loonies maintain an unassuming, even comfortable peace with their subterranean neighbors, often as vital contributors to the security of their shared caverns.
The underground is as far as most meatscapes extend. Few followers of the Cult of Meat are willing to venture deeper. In contrast, meat monsters are no strangers to the immediate underground. Many thrive in the darkness, living through their raw strength and instinctual cunning. Moreover, the meat monsters that penetrate into the depths of Set are often engorged in proportion; lumbering apex predators threatened only by Looney miners and gravity. Tunnels close to meatscapes are typically overrun with meat monsters.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 21:59:55 GMT -5
THE DIRT LAYER
5km - 10km Below
Despite its name, the Dirt Layer is hardly sedimentary. In hand with surface conditions, sentient life, human or otherwise, rapidly tapers off as depth increases. Meat monsters refuse to push into the Dirt Layer due to its distance from their native homes in the meatscapes. In their place, monsters of the underground grow more common, more dangerous, and more aggressive. Conventional plant and animal life remain relatively consistent in number, but change considerably in the Dirt Layer. Those few who make the Dirt Layer their home are almost exclusively Loonies - who, much like the wildlife around them, are unfazed by the depth.
Most surface-connected cave systems end in the Dirt Layer. Open space is scarce by comparison to the upper levels of the underground. Much of the life of the Dirt Layer - including Loonies - lives within isolated pockets with little or no access to the caves around them. Most cluster around tributaries or branches of underground rivers from above or below. Valuable resources are often inexplicably less common around the Dirt Layer, which further discourages settlement or expansion from above.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:00:12 GMT -5
THE GRAVEL LAYER
10km - 20km Below
Life as a whole gradually loses out to the increasing depths and pressures in the Gravel Layer. Monsters grow fewer in number and compensate only in viciousness. Plants and animals thin to near-absence. Surface conditions become totally irrelevant in the pitch-black depths of the Gravel Layer. Despite it all, the Loonies remain, surviving in deep bunkers or mining outposts from the Dirt Layer. The deepest known Looney bunker is the Munch Command Post in Patzaghd, extending from an estimated 18km below surface at its entrance to roughly 26km at the bottom of its primary fusion generator.
Natural resources slowly pick back up in the Gravel Layer. Gravel is not one of them. Caverns in the inappropriately-named Gravel Layer are even more constrictive than the Dirt Layer above. Only a handful of surface caves continue down into the Gravel Layer and a scarce few more extend past it. Access to the surface is restricted almost entirely to emergence holes and chasms leading up from the Chambers of Myth. Most Looney bunkers tend to cluster around these formations as a matter of convenience. As a result, bunker networks in the Gravel Layer are noticeably more common.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:00:23 GMT -5
THE STONE LAYER
20km - 30km Below
Accurate to its title, the Stone Layer of Set is almost entirely stone. Few cavities exist in its nigh-impenetrable darkness. Ordinary life and even monsters are rare, starved, and often no more than lost wanderers from the Gravel Layer. Once again, without heed to the odds, the Loonies persist, only marginally less common than those above them. Many continue to cluster around shafts leading up from the Chambers of Myth, but many more are entirely encased in stone. Whether a result of landslides, their own ascent from the Chambers, or even a willful action on their part, the Stone Layer is the home and tomb of many a stubborn bunker.
Resources in the Stone Layer are significantly more common than in the Gravel Layer. Elements that may have been non-existent in the Dirt Layer abound in the crushing pressure and searing heat below. Magma pockets and flows gradually become more and more common as depth increases. Civilization outside of Looney bunkers is, almost without exception, completely absent, even including ruins. Geological activity, however, remains noticeably and inexplicably muted.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:00:48 GMT -5
THE MAGMA LAYER
30km - 200km Below
Looney inhabitance mostly terminates around the molten flows of the aptly-named Magma Layer. As per its title, intense pressure, deadly heat, limited oxygen, and liquid rock are all commonplace. Geological activity picks back up - almost all at once - at roughly 60-80km below Set's surface, depending on region. While the Magma Layer is a treasure trove of mineral resources, the risk of exploration far outweighs the benefits for most miners. Life is gone in all its forms for at least a hundred kilometers into the planet. The few exceptions are terrifying monsters with few rivals on the surface.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:00:59 GMT -5
THE GREAT FILTER
200km - 500km Below
At the bottom of the Magma Layer is a gap dividing the crust of the planet from its mantle. The intense pressure and heat of the Magma Layer give way into an open chamber below. Air in these caverns is, in some areas, breathable. Subterranean rivers, lakes, and even entire seas are common. Mountain ranges formed by strong geological activity at the bottom are prominent landmarks. Life coats the floor of the Great Filter, visible from above in striking bioluminescent displays of fungi and animal life.
There is, however, a problem. At the bottom of the Magma Layer, the Great Filter is a dead drop some hundreds of kilometers down, often into pools of magma or bundles of towering stalagmites. It is an enormous series of super-caverns, most linked to one another across continent-sized expanses. The Great Filter is, in a way, a subterranean imitation of the surface far above, with its own landforms, continent-dividing oceans, and biosphere. Far above, the Magma Layer is supported by enormous columns of solid stone and the scarce few cave walls. The geological processes involved in shaping and maintaining the Great Filter are, to this day, unknown.
Plants, animals, monsters, and mankind all thrive in the great expanse. Looney bunkers are as common in the Filter as they are on the surface above. Towns and wanderers all go about their lives in a fashion hardly much different from above. Only a few elements are missing from daily life in the Filter. The most prominent are the sun, the sky, and the meat; the Space Loonies and Cult of Meat have no known presence in the deepest underground. Aliens are an unknown to the people in the Filter. Meatscapes refuse to grow in the depths.
In exchange for the challenges posed by the Cult and other aspects of surface life, people within the Great Filter face more peculiar challenges. Pockets of breathable air are uncommon and often claimed by aggressive wildlife. Temperatures shift wildly from place to place, boiling in some, freezing in others. Seepage from oceans and seas on the surface - including the caustic Sea of Hate - can sometimes erupt into floods of apocalyptic proportions. Geological activity is frequent and routinely catastrophic. All the while, the floor is continually pushed apart by erupting ruins.
The Great Filter constrains travel both down from Set's surface and up from the Chambers of Myth. Only a handful pass through its emptiness, delivered upwards through the pillars holding up its roof. Those that fail to climb into a wall or column instead arrive at the Filter's floor. As a result, the Filter is flooded with ruins, hollowed-out Looney bunkers, dead civilizations, and even spacecraft wrecks. Fossilized remnants of societies long past languish in the open emptiness of the Filter like a great mausoleum. Many go on to become the homes for new towns or displaced Loonies. Many more are seen as cursed or haunted - and often rightly so.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:01:14 GMT -5
THE FLOODED CATACOMBS
500km - 520km Below
Lying below the Great Filter is a series of tombs filled with magma, acid, water, and countless other liquids drained from the Filter itself. The Flooded Catacombs are a twisted, incomprehensible tangle of ancient ruins crushed into one another during their ascent from the Chambers of Myth. Some are still rising - and still crumpling against roofward neighbors - and others have settled in. Others still are steadily collapsing into the hole they dug during their climb. Many serve as additional drainage points for the groundwater and magma flows that have consumed them.
People from the Filter rarely venture into the Flooded Catacombs. Every step inside the empty temples and rotting ruins is itself a brush with death. Monsters stalk the ancient corridors of some buildings, others could collapse into their emergence holes at the slightest movement. Some may even be Looney bunkers - full of crazed or paranoid Loonies fresh from fights with the Catacombs' monsters. The tumultuous interactions between the Catacombs and the floor above occasionally drag down towns and bunkers from the Filter. On occasion, the toppled settlement may even plummet past the Flooded Catacombs through holes formed by the ruins below - and may even find itself caught in an ascent atop the rising rubble at the bottom.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:01:26 GMT -5
THE DEEP TOMBS
520km - 1,000km Below
Below the Flooded Catacombs are a mix of countless buildings and bones lost to time. Uncountable shafts lead up to ascending, stalled, and wilting ruins across an enormous maze of labyrinthine caves and man-made tunnels. Life is limited almost entirely to Loonies and menacing monsters stalking the rubble-saturated caverns below. Anomalous activity is the norm in the Tombs; various tenets of reality slip away at random, often on a structure-by-structure basis. Death becomes unpredictable and unreliable. Life becomes totally unsustainable. Residents of the Filter rarely proceed into the Tombs - and the sheer height of their reach ensures that most excursions are shallow.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:01:48 GMT -5
THE CRYPTS OF FIRE
1,000km - 1,200km Below
The meeting point between the Underworld and the Deep Tombs is a ghastly place of impossibility where existence is a tenuous concept. The Crypts of Fire open up from the mazes of the Deep Tombs into an expanse of large caverns, some flooded with magma. Many are dominated by structures in various stages of their ascent. Ruins that linger in the Crypts are scorched, ash-blasted husks, left to melt in the heat. The feeble grasp on reality in the Crypts leaves many in unexplainable tangles, twisted into shapes that defy explanation. Natural formations appear anything but.
Monsters in the Crypts are markedly more intelligent than their peers above. Some are capable of speech, forming limited societies, or even the use of tools. Most are skilled in deception, ambush, and most other forms of tactical cunning. Many are outcasts from the primitive civilizations of the Underworld. Few are anything but vicious. As with their brethren below, a select handful of the monsters of the Crypts display the ability to bend the unreality around them in the form of impossible powers. Looney bunkers ascending the Crypts rarely open their doors.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:02:38 GMT -5
THE UNDERWORLD
1,200km - 2,500km Below
For thirteen hundred kilometers, there is nothing but pure hate and malice in the mantle of Set. Rivers of molten stone and impossible energies flow freely through tangles of unexplainable caverns. The laws of reality are twisted in some places, utterly absent in others. Vicious nightmares of cunning and intellect roam freely throughout the scorching, crushing maelstrom. Life is a sheer impossibility under all but the most perfect of circumstances. Hell, Hades, and many other names have been used to describe Set's wrathful depths. Few have ever disputed their accuracy.
The caverns of the Underworld are immense in scale and impossible in formation. Some are large enough for spaceborne dreadnoughts to fly about in freely, complete with awe-inspiring rivers of magma flowing in physics-defying tendrils. Many are host to the largest buildings to have emerged from the Chambers of Myth. Skyscrapers, cathedrals, and space stations freely intermingle with smaller ruins. Some are still ascending - sometimes, through nothing more than magma or empty space - while others conclude their journey at the bottoms of seas of fire.
The Underworld is home to handfuls of backwards societies formed from the monsters inhabiting its magma-soaked shores. Many are social creatures, bound together in primitive tribes, quasi-religious gatherings, and occasional cities commandeered from the Chambers of Myth. Few follow any structure or sense; many exist for seemingly no reason and do little but encumber their members. The odd inclusivity of the fire-borne monsters of the Underworld does not extend to humans or any other creatures passing through their domains. For many emerging from the Chambers of Myth, the Underworld is the final, painful end of their journey.
The Underworld is not simply spiteful towards strangers. Wars, feuds, and schisms are common in its frictious societies. Many breeds of monsters are hostile towards others, while predator and prey relationships remain mostly unchanged. For some of the quasi-civilizations in the Underworld, war is the only force of unity. Conflicts are often immense in scale, sometimes sweeping across hundreds of kilometers unbroken. At least half of the creatures in the Underworld are capable of exploiting its limited hold on reality. Despite being a small planet's diameter below Set's surface, the impacts of the Underworld's senseless wars are sometimes felt in the world above.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:03:10 GMT -5
THE WRITHING ABYSS
2,500km - 5,000km Below
As the Underworld gives way, another expansive cavern takes over, noticeably similar to the Great Filter. The primary distinction, however, is the size of this gap; the Writhing Abyss is a frozen, lightless drop some twenty-five hundred kilometers. It is a perfect sphere surrounding Set's core far below, connected to the place above only by monolithic pillars of icy stone. In contrast to the immense heat and pressure of the Underworld above, the Abyss is a frozen, airless purgatory, in some ways indistinguishable from the depths of intergalactic space. Monsters from the Underworld fear the lightlessness below and refuse to press into it.
In this absolute void, nothing is static. The colossal pillars holding up the rest of Set shift silently across the ceiling and floor, twisting and bending without regard for their foundations. Some collide, only to pass through eachother harmlessly, as though the entire cavern were made of liquid. Shapeless planetoids drift aimlessly, like gelatinous masses through the void of space. Attempts to penetrate the Abyss end in near-universal failure; objects that fall into the Abyss often disintegrate into formless masses of nondescript matter. The laws of the universe hold no sway in this unfathomable place.
The Writhing Abyss is one of the many challenges that ascending structures from the Chambers of Myth face. Simply maintaining corporeality in the Abyss is a gamble, much less passing through its immense height. Staying within the pillars that lead to the Underworld is a matter of pure luck. Successfully blending from the impossibility of the Abyss to the chaos of the Underworld is no better than a dice roll. Trips from above suffer much the same difficulties heading down.
At the bottom of the Writhing Abyss is a vast ocean, spanning a height of some two hundred kilometers to its floor. It is unknown what this ocean is made of. Given the sheer incomprehensibility of the Abyss, it could be anything - or even nothingness given form. Attempts to determine its composition have been neither successful, nor common. It is unknown if anything lives at the base of the Abyss, whether monster or otherwise. Facts on anything beyond the basic nature of the Writhing Abyss are scarce.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:03:23 GMT -5
THE CRUSHER
5,000km - 5,003km Below
Of the deep underground, the thinnest layer is the Crusher, a sheet ultra-compressed material just below the Writhing Abyss. The material composing the Crusher is made up of various stones, deep sediments, and mixed fragments from structures emerging from the Chambers of Myth. Geological pressures from inside Set and anomalous forces from the Writhing Abyss above push these elements together into a nigh-impenetrable barrier. The Crusher is the second major obstacle that ascending structures face and varies in thickness depending on region. At its tallest, it is roughly 3 kilometers. At its thinnest, it is only a few meters in height.
Most sources claim that the Crusher's thickness is dependent on the volume of incoming structures from the Chambers below, but there are no hard facts on this subject. Due to the difficulties in penetrating the Writhing Abyss, little much more is known about the Crusher. Pushing past the Crusher itself is a challenge few are able to perform after the 5,000 kilometer descent to its outer edge. Further, the extensively anomalous nature of the Writhing Abyss perfuses through the Crusher's inner and outer limits.
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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 22:03:36 GMT -5
THE HOLLOW GLACIER
5,003km - 8,000km Below
Past the Crusher is a network of emergence holes carved into, up to, and just short of the Writhing Abyss. Just as with the Abyss, the Hollow Glacier is devoid of an atmosphere beyond trace elements of vaporized stone. Despite this, pressure in the Glacier is immense, and anomalous events in its hollows contribute greatly to erratic wind currents throughout. Further baffling is the absence of heat entirely; some parts of the Glacier rest in absolute zero, others are simply void of the concept of heat entirely. Occasional gusts of intense heat flow through the Glacier's tunnels like wrathful ghosts, vaporizing stone and ascending buildings instantaneously. The vaporized material is typically flash-frozen in their wake. This rapid melt-and-freeze action has preserved some structures in perfect snapshots of their ascension.
Similarly, many major laws of reality are simply gone in some areas. Gravity, thermodynamics, fundamental elements of quantum mechanics - to push into the Hollow Glacier is a brush with total annihilation from the universe entirely. To date, there have been no expeditions that have successfully penetrated past the Glacier. Information is largely limited to records and accounts recovered from structures that have survived ascension from the Glacier.
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