Post by Insano-Man on Sept 21, 2018 12:30:40 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Well of Japes article directory.
THE SPIN CYCLE
Most folks don't live at the edge of the Well. They live on the big, climbing, winding desert circling around it. They cluster around crags, wander across wastelands, and ease around jagged terrorscapes. Occasional scrublands suddenly cut into towering glaciers near the southern edges. Strange and horrible crystalline plains pop into existence closer to the Well. Upwards geodisplacements turn some places into lunar landscapes, full of craters, rubble, and teleporting meteors. In others, it's nothing but floating rocks, occasionally topped by a lonely house. Locals call the place by a variety of curses. Everyone else calls it the Cackling Circle.
Visit the place and it'll hit you straight away. Sense is a precious commodity in the Circle. Lay a road down between towns, it'll be gone before sundown. Dig too far down, the ground'll give way into a thirty kilometer drop straight into a sea of magma. Walk too far from town, it'll just get up and leave. Death stops working right; too close to the Well, people just refuse to die. They keep walking, talking, and making a stink. On Sunday, heat turns to cold. On Monday, cold turns to sideways. On Tuesday, the concept of sentience breaks down and families start eating eachother.
The lack of sense isn't just an hourly idea. Terrain out in the Circle doesn't play nice with logic. Most of it is crags and deserts, but hotspots of strange pop up everywhere. Crystal wastes are a running gag for the Well. They're parodies of everything else; shoe-savaging deserts of crystalline sands, eye-scouring crags made of reflective monoliths, and more. Living stone wiggles and groans on the outskirts, like open lava flows and cooling slag. Some of it gathers together into fingers, spines, and ribs - a lithic mockery of the meatscapes to the north.
The closer you get to the Well, the stranger it gets. Lands of hard light and living illusions swoop down to steal away the occasional explorer. Sludgy, gunky stews of quasi-organic material pool together in inch-thin slicks hovering at chest-level over the ground. Old fleets of the Pioneer Network hover quiet and motionless, still manned and vigilant, completely intangible and trapped between dimensions. Vast coils of gurgling, pulsing rock tangle around eachother for kilometers. Energy is given form, spread out as wavy peaks and valleys of electricity, heat, and motion. Tourism is not popular.
Weather follows the same pattern. Hailstorms of ball lightning zip around the Circle. Birds erupt from the ground and blink out of existence as soon as they hit the air above. Earthquakes happen in the sky, sending clouds and orbiting ships down together. Tornados spin sideways across the ground like giant wheels, flinging things backwards into the air. Stones, boulders, and ruins teleport into the sky from underground - and come straight back down in granite hails. Rain is inexplicably minty. Psywaves, acid rain, meat storms from up north - they're there, but they're awfully tame compared to the local flavor.
All the while, buildings pop up by the thousands each day. The Well's nothing if not greedy. When a structure pops out of the Chambers of Myth, it likes to snatch them away with a geodisplacement and teleport them in underneath. It never ends well. Most end up funnelling into the Well itself - what happens there, no one wants to think about. The rest scatter around into the Circle, usually with a few chunks torn out by more geodisplacements. Manmade husks and strange statues litter the Circle. Towers wind up on top of rocky peaks. Faceless stone giants plead for help from inside of cliff faces. The shortage of sense plays around with them as they come. Castles of ice, blazing dams, machine monoliths slathered in slime - nothing's off-limits.
THE SPIN CYCLE
Most folks don't live at the edge of the Well. They live on the big, climbing, winding desert circling around it. They cluster around crags, wander across wastelands, and ease around jagged terrorscapes. Occasional scrublands suddenly cut into towering glaciers near the southern edges. Strange and horrible crystalline plains pop into existence closer to the Well. Upwards geodisplacements turn some places into lunar landscapes, full of craters, rubble, and teleporting meteors. In others, it's nothing but floating rocks, occasionally topped by a lonely house. Locals call the place by a variety of curses. Everyone else calls it the Cackling Circle.
Visit the place and it'll hit you straight away. Sense is a precious commodity in the Circle. Lay a road down between towns, it'll be gone before sundown. Dig too far down, the ground'll give way into a thirty kilometer drop straight into a sea of magma. Walk too far from town, it'll just get up and leave. Death stops working right; too close to the Well, people just refuse to die. They keep walking, talking, and making a stink. On Sunday, heat turns to cold. On Monday, cold turns to sideways. On Tuesday, the concept of sentience breaks down and families start eating eachother.
The lack of sense isn't just an hourly idea. Terrain out in the Circle doesn't play nice with logic. Most of it is crags and deserts, but hotspots of strange pop up everywhere. Crystal wastes are a running gag for the Well. They're parodies of everything else; shoe-savaging deserts of crystalline sands, eye-scouring crags made of reflective monoliths, and more. Living stone wiggles and groans on the outskirts, like open lava flows and cooling slag. Some of it gathers together into fingers, spines, and ribs - a lithic mockery of the meatscapes to the north.
The closer you get to the Well, the stranger it gets. Lands of hard light and living illusions swoop down to steal away the occasional explorer. Sludgy, gunky stews of quasi-organic material pool together in inch-thin slicks hovering at chest-level over the ground. Old fleets of the Pioneer Network hover quiet and motionless, still manned and vigilant, completely intangible and trapped between dimensions. Vast coils of gurgling, pulsing rock tangle around eachother for kilometers. Energy is given form, spread out as wavy peaks and valleys of electricity, heat, and motion. Tourism is not popular.
Weather follows the same pattern. Hailstorms of ball lightning zip around the Circle. Birds erupt from the ground and blink out of existence as soon as they hit the air above. Earthquakes happen in the sky, sending clouds and orbiting ships down together. Tornados spin sideways across the ground like giant wheels, flinging things backwards into the air. Stones, boulders, and ruins teleport into the sky from underground - and come straight back down in granite hails. Rain is inexplicably minty. Psywaves, acid rain, meat storms from up north - they're there, but they're awfully tame compared to the local flavor.
All the while, buildings pop up by the thousands each day. The Well's nothing if not greedy. When a structure pops out of the Chambers of Myth, it likes to snatch them away with a geodisplacement and teleport them in underneath. It never ends well. Most end up funnelling into the Well itself - what happens there, no one wants to think about. The rest scatter around into the Circle, usually with a few chunks torn out by more geodisplacements. Manmade husks and strange statues litter the Circle. Towers wind up on top of rocky peaks. Faceless stone giants plead for help from inside of cliff faces. The shortage of sense plays around with them as they come. Castles of ice, blazing dams, machine monoliths slathered in slime - nothing's off-limits.
