The City that Devours Itself

Shoutouts to my good friend and fellow roleplayer Astra, who helped me with the tables and provided constant support in the making of this post.

Maybe this strikes you as pretentious crap - it kind of strikes me that way, but it serves a purpose. The Inquisition campaign I've run for over a year is highly classicist; cosmology has slowly accreted into a set of knowns and rules that I've pigeon-holed myself into operating inside of. And so I long for something very different; a world that can be shaped and reshaped as best fits the adventure, rather than having to find the adventures that fit the world. Neither is wrong, but one is what I want right now. So without further ado...

Phuoc Quan

The Nature of Ouroboros

One should not go about trying to make sense of things. Let the blind masons and perhaps the Reverend Mother Echo Minor worry after such temporal matters. For those who are caught inside the interstices of "reality" in dreamlike Ouroboros, thought of theory amounts to little.

What is known is that sometime during Ouroboros' existence - whether it be distant past or impending future - a great shattering occurred. The city exploded into a thousand thousand iterations of itself, and they were scattered across timelines and universes. All these cities exist, though not simultaneous in space or time, and that should isolate them from another?

Except things keep slipping in through the cracks.

Most of the time they are from other Ouroboroses that are like ours, just a few meters or minutes away, always there but never quite here. Usually these are merchants with a miracle cure we've yet to develop, or refugees with a horrible plague we happen to be immune to. Sometimes they are conquering armies, and that is when Dominatrix Botfly proves herself a hero, if a bastard as well.

But sometimes they are other things, wrong things, things from Ouroboroses very unlike our own.

One might pass through an alley they have walked all their life to find themselves on a dark and unknown boulevard. Night has fallen, the lamps are unlit, and something howls to challenge a moon which should not be. And nowhere is the sign of the Queen.

Some Incursions

They are/were/will be many. These are but a few notables.

Most famous in recent memory was the Night of Seventy Seven Houses, when delegates from no less than seven other Ouroboroses arrived amid great confusion to an important council vote. Remarkably, all had arrived to address the same issue, but their methods of addressing the epidemic of lotus eaters varied wildly (this is why dancing in pleasure houses has been criminalized and the lotus eaters themselves have gained a permanent council seat). Equally remarkable were the level heads of the house representatives, leading to a uniquely bloodless incursion. Surely none will forget the dauntless rhetoric of Reverend Mother Pazuzu Juvenile, though all have forgotten whether she has ever existed in our Ouroboros. Either way, she and her house are here to stay.

Perhaps the most bloody incursion in recorded history was the Battle of the Nine Day Noon, where the sun's progress halted at its zenith and remained there for more than a week. This coincided with the spontaneous appearance of an invading castrati army with unrecognizable heraldry in the Plaza of Green Glass. This deadly force seized most of the city before Dominatrix Botfly was able to reassert control. How she accomplished this has been forgotten, but it is remembered that her house rose to great prominence after this tragedy.

And maybe strangest of all was the unnoticed invasion of identical dopplegangers of every man, woman, child, and dog in the city. Not only was this a large scale incursion, but more curious was that none of these dopplegangers seemed to have any memories or notion of which Ouroboros they had come from. Most of them were put down by the castrati, but they couldn't have gotten all of them.

Max Strasser

Street Encounters 3

1	They look like you, but lifeless and bloody and torn and entirely nude. A small crowd has gathered, but none of them seem to notice you; neither do the castrati cordoning off the area.
2	A creeping man pushes a cart of bodies, he is not an undertaker, he beseeches onlookers in a creaking voice to tell him where more of the fruit may be found. Why do the bodies writhe so?
3	A woman walking ahead of you freezes and drops her vase, screams, then turns and walks somberly into an alleyway, vanishing into thin air as she crosses some invisible border.
4	Boys handing out broadsheets, proclaiming the end of a war, you are named as saviors of the city, "the king" will honor you at a great festival on the next new moon.
5	An inviting melancholy flute tune, always just around the corner, you want so badly to follow it, any moment now your body will take off running to chase down the sound.
6	A beggar squats at the mouth of a storm drain, but they have no alms cup, their form hidden beneath a formless robe, look closely and you can see their tongue flick out, scenting the air.
7	The last eight corners you've turned lead you back to here, but every time there are less people in the street.
8	Troglodytes seize the street in a storm of bloodshed, taking hostages of the lame, sacrificing the beautiful, doing battle with the castrati coming down the lane.
9	A wrong turn leads you down a broad deserted boulevard you've never seen, the way back is lost, two moons hang over head but the sky is empty of stars, nothing moves in this quiet place.
10	You turn left into nightmare. Bleeding eyes peer from the soft skin of every building, and inhuman shapes skulk quickly into the darkness to await your moment of weakness. Who can say how long this terrible night will last.

The Question of the Queen

There is a doubt nagging at the mind of every citizen: where did the Queen come from?

Is hers an ancient bloodline of this world, as she claims, or is it from some Other Ouroboros?

Could she be from an enemy iteration, planted to bring us down from within? Are her decrees all designed to soften us for a killing blow?

Or is the Queen a memory of our Ouroboros as it was, and not as it is? Has she faded from reality into legend? Here are the Queen's men, but when was her last public appearance?

Shintaro Kago