- Revolutionary Capitol
- yuk yuk yuk
- Wrecking the City of Dreams
- The God of Pollensbee
- Exorcism
- Spiders
- Majik lol
- False Devil
- Most Wondrous Society of Cadgers
- Darshinika
The statue dominated the square, its long shadow swallowing the wooden stalls around it. The rider's lip curled in a haughty sneer, his
What had once been Alvin David McElveen was starving. Not a single drop of water nor crumb of bread had crossed its rotting gums for forty-seven years, but that was of no concern. It needed true sustenance.
Decades before, it might have spent weeks or months tracing leads of fairy rings and tales of local miracles to find a place to feed. Now it could feel the spells and magic draped in the air. A thousandth part of him recalled a memory of learning that catfish worked similarly.
Alvin's stomach growled. The things
It had been years since McElveen's mouth had opened.
Kateřina Procházková
Katka, Kačenka, Katuška, Káťa, Kaťka, Káča, Kačka
Cathrin
Palais Equitable
d’Poyais
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jekyll_Island_Club
Sannikov
http://scpsandbox2.wikidot.com/quis-contra-nos
The Wreckers Of Dream City
Lukas Zajic would be forgotten the moment his body hit the ground. This fact was something he would freely admit. He was an only child, and his parents had long ago stopped trying to contact him. There would be no fond remembrances of his character after he had passed, no songs sung about his deeds. He had no particular skills, no hidden well of character. He did not even have a distinctive scar or other feature.
Even his life story was utterly unremarkable. Thinking that he had impregnated the daughter of a local innkeeper, Lukas had fled his hometown for the nearby city of Jihlava. After spending three years engaged in manual labor, unemployment, and petty theft, he had moved with a friend to the imperial capital of Vienna. It was said that the building spree promised gainful employment there for a young man of sound body. Rumors regarding the attractiveness of the city’s prostitutes also played a role in his decision to move.
There, he had found lodgings with a Czech family - a brother and sister - above a book store in the south of town. The three of them quickly settled into a routine - he would stumble in early in the morning, and do his best not to wake them, while they would rise early in the morning and do their best not to speak to him. He was usually on time with his rent, but tried to spend as little time as possible in the apartment, preferring to enjoy the nights in Vienna in seedier locations. It took him four weeks before he even realized that the brother and sister owned the shop below.
Lukas had never had an interest in learning reading or writing, but he knew that shopkeepers could be well-off. Once, he’d wondered idly if they might be sufficiently rich to merit a quick robbery. He glanced at the walls, the newsprint still visible through the thin green paint, and moved on to other thoughts.
[better intro
One day, as Lukas walked into work, the German supervisor, Mueller, looked up from his newspaper at the front desk and nodded to him.
“Zajic,” he grunted, “You’re late.”
“What do you mean?” Lukas protested, “I still have five minutes before we head out to the site!”
Mueller shook his head. “No good. Dvorak’s out today. You’re with Vesely’s crew up in the Innere Stadt.”
Lukas’ stomach dropped. The Innere Stadt was in the center of the city, nearly an hour’s walk away. He had even waved at Vesely’s crew as they passed in the horse-drawn bus. He let out a stream of vile expletives in Czech.
Mueller’s expression didn’t change. “Still late,” he said, turning back to his paper, “More than half an hour, you get half-pay for the day.”
Lukas turned bright red. The only way to get to the site in time was to take another bus, this time at his own expense. He thought of giving this fat Kraut bastard a real piece of his mind, when he heard the clop of hooves against cobblestone and realized that the bus was beginning to pull away. He bolted through the open door and onto the street.
“Waiiiiit!” Lukas yelled in German, running “Fucking waiiiiiiit!” He waved his arms back and forth at the departing bus. As he tried to close the distance, he did some math in his head. A bus ride all the way to the center of town would be at least fifteen haléř, about a half hour’s work. With another thirty haléř for lunch, plus the fifty a night for his room, and a full kroner to keep Dominik the bookie from breaking his arms, that only left one kroner for drinks - barely enough for seven beers, and nothing left over for evening company. He cursed his luck.
Lukas ran pell-mell towards the bus, cursing and huffing as he got closer. He was only a meter or so away from the rear when the horses began to trot, widening the gap. “Worthless sons of whores !” Lukas shouted in Czech. A few passengers at the rear of the bus turned to glare at him.
His legs pumped acid as he sprinted. The horses whinnied, and the bus stop. Lukas almost had enough time to register what was happening before he slammed into the rear of the bus.
For a moment, everything was stars and light. Then, the sensation of liquid trickling from his nose reminded Lukas where he was. He banged a hand on the side of the bus.
“Wait!” he yelled as he made his way to the entrance on the side. He dug into his pocket and counted out the change. In front of the bus, a line of school children moved across the street. Probably the reason for the sudden stop, he thought.
Lukas was suddenly aware of the thin sheen of sweat that soaked through his shirt. The ticket-taker shrank back as he approached. Trying not to look the young man in the eye, Lukas dropped the half-handful of coins into the ticket box. All around him, the passengers gave as wide a breadth as possible. Wiping his nose with the back of his hand, he felt a shock of dull pain. Lukas pulled his hand back and saw it was covered in blood.
The rest of the bus ride, Lukas cursed every living and unliving thing he could think of.
“You look like hammered shit,” Tomas said as Lukas approached the work site. Tomas leaned against the plank fence surrounding the site. From the sound of it, the crew hadn’t gotten started on the demolition yet.
“At least I only look that way sometimes,” Lukas grumbled, “You manage it always.”
Tomas grinned. “I was wondering if you’d make it in time.” He tuned to
“Give me a hammer,” Lukas said, “I’ve had a hell of a morning.”
The pair walked onto the site, chatting as they took up the heavy mallets and crowbars from the entry station.
They joined up with the rest of the wreckers, still being instructed by Vesely, the crew leader. The buildings were a collection of old structures from centuries ago. They needed to be torn down by the end of the week.
“Be safe,” Vesely said, “but work fast, goddammit.”
Lukas was assigned to what looked from the outside like an old convent, along with Tomas. As he landed the first blow on the wall, sending splinters of ancient stone flying in every direction, he felt his spirits lift.
When the bell rang for lunch, the crew had already demolished the first and ground floors of the convent. Six centuries of history, gone to rubble in a morning. The crew made for the canteen tent next to the wooden fence.
As Lukas headed out from the rubble, Vesley stepped in front of him. Like the other workers, Vesely’s nose and mouth were obscured by a bandana he wore to block the choking rock dust. “You arrived late,” he said, “half-lunch. You know as well as I do.”
“Are you joking!? Are you fuc-” Lukas began. But Vesley had already begun to walk away. The conversation was now over.
Lukas grumbled, but headed to the basement, sledgehammer in hand. Experience had taught that Vesley would be back to check his work after lunch, and if it wasn’t satisfactory, he would chew Lukas out in front of everyone.
Part of the basement wall had already been demolished, leaving a small section of the wall standing before it veered into a corner. The stones laid in a heap, waiting to be hauled up to the ground level. Lukas decided to continue his work heading towards the corner - it would look far more impressive if he demolished the remainder of the wall and began to tear down the next.
His hammer struck the stones nearest to the corner. The ancient rock crumbled beneath the blow. Lukas stumbled as the hammer kept going past where the bare earth should have been. He yelped as his momentum carried him forward. He tried to find purchase on the ground with his feet, but slipped on the rubble. Lukas fell to the ground, his chin smacking on a piece of rock. For the second time that day, he saw stars.
He laid on the ground a moment, cursing existence. He could taste blood in his mouth. Slowly, he released the hammer and raised himself up on his scraped arms. Pain radiated out from every part of his body.
In front of Lukas was a small square hole in the earth. He began to get to his feet. Down among the rubble, Lukas could see small shards of what looked like rotted wood. It must have been part of a long-abandoned trick door.
Lukas froze, mid-crouch. No one went to the trouble of making a basement false door unless it was something valuable. Jewels, perhaps, or maybe gold. He could just make out a shape in the darkness of the hole. Lukas lunged forward, falling awkwardly on his knees. Whatever it was, it was worth it, he thought, as he reached a hand out and groped blindly.
He grabbed hold of the things inside the exposed hiding spot. With a triumphant yell, he pulled them out, and looked at them. His heart sank. They were a set of thin journals. Three of them, cheaply bound like the five haléř books they sold on street corners. Lukas grunted in dismay and tossed them aside. He pushed himself up until he was resting on his elbows, trying to see if any additional booty might be in the small hiding spot. There was nothing. Still, he pushed his hand into the hole and felt around the edges, vainly hoping that something might be more hidden.
After several seconds of groping, he realized that there was nothing. He hissed in disgust as he pushed himself to his knees. With a well-aimed kick, he collapsed the small hiding spot. What kind of damn miserable miser would keep a hidden compartment just for some lousy journals?
He spotted the journals in one of the piles of rubble, and grabbed them. Tearing them to pieces out of spite seemed the best course of action.
With a hand on each end of the spine, he began to pull the journal in opposite directions, trying to tear it in half. But it wouldn’t tear. His muscles strained, but the book would not give. At least none of the other workers were there to see this, he thought.
He opened the book to tear it in half lengthwise along the spine, then stopped. Rather than German or Czech handwriting, the pages were crowded with rows of typed letters he had never seen before. Squiggles and semi-circles and patterns he had no names for came together in little columns that soared into the sky. The smudgy black ink sparkled like gems across the page.
At once, Lukas knew the story of the journal. An ancient barbarian king, his tribe decimated, wandered through a desert infested with venomous snakes, in search of a spirit that would restore him to his former glory. One of the snakes promised the king that it was the spirit he sought, then bit him on the leg. The king killed the serpent, but the leg began to swell, and swell until it was larger than the king himself.
The story ended there, with the king in the middle of a lamentation that had no exact translation in Czech or German or any other language Lukas knew. Flipping through the next journal, Lukas found more of the strange lettering, enticing him with meanings he knew would require months or years of study. Without opening the third, he knew that he would find yet another world, all his yet not at all his own. More than anything, he wanted to read these books, trace their intricate knots of ink with his fingers, things he had never wanted to do before.
[the first time he had ever felt
"Lukas!" The shout woke him from his stupor. Tomas was walking towards him from behind. Lukas scrambled and shoved the journals under his belt, untucking his shirt to conceal them. He turned toward Tomas, making noises that sounded like apologies as he waited for his mind to clear.
"Christ," Tomas
Tomas and Lukas came together from Jihlava
Lukas Zajic was forgotten before his body hit the ground.
Just like every morning, Susan awoke to the pale purple light of the sun streaming through her window. Just like every morning, she had a breakfast of eggs, sausage, and coffee.
As she ate the sausage, she remembered how difficult it had been to recreate the exact taste of the meat from her memories of childhood. It had taken several months and at least eight thousand tries, but had certainly been worthwhile.
When she was done eating, she took a shower and brushed her teeth. Then, just like every morning, she put on her jacket and headed outside. As she stepped out onto the street, the same chill she always felt passed by her. She never minded. The brisk weather was one of the things that she enjoyed about Pollensbee. Susan allowed herself a moment to admire her masterwork in its entirety. Sixty thousand people, living, breathing, and having free will, or something close enough. Eight thousand miles of wiring throughout every building and lampost, along every street. One million, six hundred thousand gallons of water, not a drop wasted.
Buildings, streets, electricity grids. Social customs, lives. All crafted to her perfect specifications.
The moment passed, and it was off to work for Susan. Swell as Pollensbee was, no city could run itself.
The first order of the day practically ran into Susan. During the night, a gust of wind had torn torn a branch off one of the elm trees that lined the street outside of Jane Lattimer's house. She sighed. Nights were always tricky. Even the best systems had some openings for entropy when she wasn't there to monitor and correcting their workings. And even she needed to sleep like a normal human.
Lesser minds might have considered it to be a non-issue, but Susan could see the larger picture. The branch might become a symbol of chaos and mismanagement, causing discomfort to the good people of Pollensbee. Far better to fix it at its source than allow worry and disorientation to fester. She closed her eyes and imagined the branch as it should have been. Providing a place for one of the six hundred thirteen grackles that resided in Pollensbee to make a roost. Giving shade to a child. That sort of thing.
And that was that. When she opened her eyes, the branch was a part of the tree again. It had never fallen. Susan continued along her way.
Over the course of the day, Susan made six-hundred forty-four alterations, slightly above average. Most were minor, at least to the untrained eye. But Susan recognized the importance of every single one.
The Richardson family was the last change that she made. She frowned as she came to the ranch-style house. From inside, she could feel the resentment of Lisa towards her mother-in-law. Something to do with a broken plate.
Susan sighed. The Richardsons were a particularly difficult family; this was her third time this month righting wrongs inside the household. Despite the precision of the system that Susan had developed, ensuring the maximum happiness and utility for each family, the Richardsons were always fighting about something or other. Susan had once attempted to explain the dynamics of Pollensbee to them, about why they really had nothing to fight about. She had been met with blank stares.
Unlike the Wisneskis, the Richardsons were too central to the community to simply be removed. Eric Richardson was a board member at the public library, and his social interactions were central to at four distinct networks of citizens, encompassing a total seventy-eight individuals. Lisa's work at the car lot was invaluable for thirty-nine functions as well. And the children, Emily and Jane, were crucial components of the social hierarchy at the Pollensbee High School. Susan could no more wish them away than she could the wiring for the street lights. Better to fix it and move on.
Susan closed her eyes, and imagined the Richardsons as a loving family once again. When she opened them, she no longer felt the hostility radiating from the house. She smiled and moved on. After a shower and a hot meal, imagined to exact specifications, she went to sleep.
The next day, Susan followed the exact same routine. Same breakfast, same breeze. As she went to work, she frowned.
Same broken branch. Broken in the same way. It only took a moment for her to set it right, but it disturbed her all the same. She considered taking some protective action, maybe removing the tree altogether, but decided against it. The tree was involved in countless, minute interactions throughout the day, all calculated to maximize overall happiness. She imagined the branch fixed and moved on.
As she went around righting the wrongs of Pollensbee, Susan began to feel a fuzzy fatigue settle on the edges of her vision. Something about that branch.
She hadn't felt tired since she first began her work with Pollensbee. When she had first moved to the city thirty years ago, "basket case" would have been a charitable assessment. Domestic strife, crime, drugs, disorder. She could sense all of it. It would have been simple enough, maybe even better, to wipe the city away altogether, like she had done with New Lebanon and Fulton. But she relished the challenge of correcting the wayward city. And, she had to admit, walking down the tree-lined path between Maple and Dunn, that the place held a certain charm for her, even in the days when the city seemed to wheeze.
After six years of intimate study - of census records, of building plans, of hand-drawn maps written in symbols only she could decipher - Susan was ready. Taking a deep breath while sitting at her dining room table, she pictured the city as it should be. And, with that, it was. Gone was the dirty Pollensbee with its filthy streets and furtive drug deals. The water pipes leaching toxic chemicals into the taps of every sink in the city vanished. The surly meter maids became, in an instant, morphed into gregarious public servants.
And that had been that. Pollensbee had run smoothly ever since that day. Well, more or less - no system, no matter how intricate, could run perpetually. But with an occasional nip and tuck, the city stayed effectively the same as it once had been.
That night, Susan returned to her sparse apartment. Just to be sure, she reached out to Pollensbee with her mind, feeling the contours and searching for possible breaks. Finding none, she went to sleep.
The next day, Susan skipped breakfast, skipped correcting the air pressures to allow for the breeze to brush past her as she exited the apartment. Instead, she rose from her bed and got dressed before simply deciding that she was in front of the broken tree.
The branch was there, lying on the sidewalk as it had been before. Mocking her. And everything she tried to do for this town. All her plans. She had to fight the acid rising in her throat. The last time she had let her frustration get the better of her, she reminded herself, New Lebanon had happened. Or, more precisely, hadn't.
Every problem had an optimal solution, she remembered. The world, at least the visible world, was a place of inherent order. All she had to do was find the solution and the order would be restored. But as she devised a solution, she would have to put together a stopgap. With a thought, the tree and the branch vanished.
As she moved to leave, Susan thought that she noticed hairline fractures she had never seen before, spidering across the brick of the Lattimer house. She shook her head and assured herself that it was just the stress.
That day, there were eight hundred thirty-seven mistakes to correct. A thirty six-percent increase from normal amounts. Albert Nitti had even sworn, on the street no less. A brief moment had fixed his attitude, but Susan felt shaken nonetheless.
She had to be vigilant; any mistake, any broken system, could fester and eventually bring down the whole thing. She realized that now. To shut her eyes was to give the enemy, who- or whatever it was, time to regroup.
Susan did not sleep that night. Instead, she studied maps and figures. Grids of Pollensbee as it had been, census figures of Pollensbee as it was and would forever be. Logically, there was no reason why these acts of defiance should exist, let alone multiply. The system was perfect, without room for error.
Without any room for error, she thought, the only possible source was from outside. An infection. She had removed Pollensbee from the world to prevent just such an outcome. But it had spread anyway.
The sun rose to Susan hunched over reams of paper. Around the edges of the room, the sheets were organized into color-coded stacks, each on a particular issue. As the paper drew nearer, it became increasingly disorganized, laying in heaps or balanced in teetering stacks. Around Susan's seat, the information began to spill off the page itself, figures and graphs dancing in the air around her. She would keep Pollensbee the same.
The sun rose and set. It was the first day that Pollensbee had been without Susan's corrections. There were no overt changes in behavior. A sideways glance here. A muttered curse there. But the people could feel something different. Something new and uncertain.
The sun rose again. The space around Susan had shredded. The information move freely, removed even from its representation in numbers and graphs. She had been updating the reality of Pollensbee to incorporate its existing caffeine into her bloodstream.
Every problem branched into another problem, which branched into a previously solved problem, which affected the outcome of some previously unforeseen issue. There was an order to it all, and she would find it. So far fractals and complex sets had failed utterly to offer a single, unified explanation for the phenomenon. But she would find it. She would.
It was on the third day that the caffeine finally gave out.
There was Pollensbee, laid bare before her in white paper and black ink. There was the outside, decaying whenever she glanced towards it.
Then, there was an infinite, roaring blackness, and nothing else.
Susan awoke to a loud honking. She started and saw a blue car, horn raging, charging its way through her window. Almost without thinking, she imagined a set of steel bars in front of the glass. The car tried to brake, but it had built up too much speed.
There was a heavy crunching sound, followed by the long mewling of a dying car horn. She looked and saw the blue hood of the vehicle had been torn in several places. There was no sign of a driver. Still half-asleep, she thought she could see the twisted metal of the car's hood begin to bend and twist, pushing its way through the bars.
She looked around for her notes, her energy redoubled. This madness was just more example of what happened when she let down her guard, even for a moment. This pandemonium would not stand - a car, ramming a house! Really!
The notes had been everywhere, all around the room, when she had fallen asleep. Now, there was not a single sheet of paper anywhere. She searched, then tore, through the room, seeking the papers with the real Pollensbee. Nothing. No notes, no anything. It was then that she noticed the muddy prints leading to the kitchen.
The door swung open, shards of glass and ceramic swaying slightly in the strong breeze. Susan felt a pit in her stomach. The car was one thing. This was far, far worse somehow. In a moment, the kitchen was restored, everything whole and in its place. It didn't make her feel better.
Susan concentrated, and imagined herself in the town square. She had to get those notes, to make everything right. The park was clean and the grass swayed in the cool breeze. Children played around her. Couples walked hand in hand. She opened her eyes. She was still in her kitchen. The pit in her stomach grew. Never before had she been unable to imagine herself somewhere in Pollensbee.
She tried recalling the grocery store, with its exact piles of produce. Nothing. The malt shop. The library. She stood where she was. For the first time since she found her power, since before Pollensbee or New Lebanon or any of the other failures, Susan walked, not because she wanted to, but because she had to.
As she walked down the streets of Pollensbee, the sheer density of mistakes closed in on Susan. Lamp posts were toppled, spouting clouds of curtain fabric from their stalks. Fingers emerged from walls, swaying upwards and downwards, as if in a breeze. Men and women with faces twisting and melting in endless loops.
Susan tried to right the problems as they emerged. Lamp back. Branches righted. Benches corrected. But this was nothing but treating symptoms. Whatever disease it was that afflicted Pollensbee, it wasn't some mere glitch. It had to be something much deeper, something at its very core.
After a few more blocks, she came onto a whorl of ants, covering every surface of what used to be the Stop-N-Save. Their fat, red bodies rippled in the breeze, causing the entire scene shimmer slightly. At the very edge of her hearing, Susan could hear their ten trillion little legs scraping in unison. Mocking her.
A moment of concentration, then the entire block was gone. Susan didn't even realize it at first. It was there, then space folded in on itself instantly, leaving only the park and the library directly next to one another.
She started. There had once been pollution and disease and disgusting corruption of everything that was important in this spot. But now, there was purity. Or at least a lack of rot. Looking around, she saw disorder, directly defying her will. She saw New Lebanon and Fulton and the dozens of other towns that had simply refused to be happy. That would rather be destroyed than submit to a plan.
She gave Pollensbee its wish. Swathes of the city simply weren't. Abominations were replaced by emptiness. Mr. Richards with the nine chattering mouths was gone. The fire hydrant growing fractally into the sky vanished.
The city seemed to recognize what was happening, shrinking away as she approached. It made no difference. Even the parts of the town that had not fallen to corruption were purged. They held the seeds of disorder. Years of work, thousands of hours, all gone in an instant. The gibbering screams of the city didn't even register with her. Already, she was planning her new city. Somewhere that would not fall. A place that would accept her perfection.
It took hours, but finally, she was down to the last block. All around her was emptiness where Pollensbee had once stood.
The branch sat on the sidewalk, twisted and dead. The source of all this disorder, all this chaos, it hadn't changed in the slightest. Just like the broken tile in New Lebanon, or the dead grass in Fulton.
Susan stood there, facing the hateful thing, the only aspect of Pollensbee that remained. Then, the branch was gone. But the feeling, the small itch at the back of her mind, was still there.
It was then that she realized. The constant of chaos hadn't been a branch or a patch of grass or whatever. It had been her. From her childhood until now, the world had never been as it should have been. Her calculations hadn't been wrong. She had been.
There was only one thing to be done, then. She concentrated on herself. Then, just like that, she was gone.
In the place where Pollensbee and its god once stood, there was nothing, pure and orderly and still.
Laura felt the family's pleas etch on her palm.
"Last night, I woke up, and there was this creature staring at me. Just staring from the side of the room. I screamed, but no sound came out," one of them said, probably the wife. Ratch had a hard time with multiple people. There was a reason Laura avoided crowds.
"We tried other… well, y'know, before, but they weren't much help, to be honest," said one of the family. Laura nodded. She hoped she was nodding at the correct person. "Then we heard about you and your, well, your gift, we thought it might be a good fit."
"Her gift." It was always something like that. The fact she couldn't see was a "specialty." Her deafness was an "ability." The combination made up a "talent" or a "skill" she apparently possessed. One client had described succinctly as her "thing." It was always something separate, something given or received or attained. Something comfortably non-specific, that could be extracted from her. They made it sound so easy.
At least they weren't calling her "brave" for continuing to live while deafblind.
Ratch continued to sign away on the palm of her hand. She had bound the daemon to herself some time ago, back when her sight had first begun to deteriorate. Since then, the daemon had begun to take on a bit of an accent - it wrote words with long vowels across the top of her palm, almost on her fingers, while shorter words dug into her hand. If she hadn't known better, Laura would have sworn the creature was becoming aware.
After a few minutes with the couple, Laura was reasonably sure she knew the situation. A lesser shade of some kind, usually caused by a low-level vice practiced over and over and over again. It seemed that the creature was able to posses human by whispering in their ears. Nine times out of ten, it was just an instinct that wanted to find a warm body.
The husband and wife had both been possessed, and both eaten as much jewelry as they could get their hands on while under the spirit's influence. Both had, in their words not been able "to shit for days." Laura guessed that the creature was probably some spirit of decadence.
Since time immemorial, the encounter of one's first anavatchur has been an unofficial rite of passage among devoted Wanderers of the worlds. Even the bravest of travelers trembles before the sheer size of this crypto-arthropod as it goes about its silent work.
This is to say nothing of the awesome sight of its feeding, as demons are rent, screaming and howling, limb from limb. Few have beheld such events free from spiritual and psychic scars. For all the terror that its feeding rightly invokes, the anavatchur is practically harmless to corporeal entities and, indeed, serves a critical role in spiritual ecology of the worlds.
Although certain Wanderers insist on referring to the anavatchur using the term Mutlicorpus daimonophagus, it is widely agreed that these scholars are wrong. The first attested encounter of the creature was by the summoner and heresiographer Purusavyaghra of Rajapura who, in his monumental work The Rites of Nine Hundred Bells, described an encounter on the planet Mars with a "sage, in the form of a many legs, digging at the ground in a ceaseless pattern." Indeed, the name "anavatchur" is nothing but a shortening of the word "anavatchurithambapikarumikamarupaavasanilatikan," meaning "the wise spider which devours red soil." That the scholar Purusavyaghra missed the multiplicity inherent in the existence of anavatchur should not be held against him; at the time, common understanding held that all of existence was divisible into a mere five worlds. Unfortunately, no description of the pattern itself has survived to the present day.
In the fourth century AB, with the rise of technology allowing Wanderers to inlay cold iron with brass and silver, travel and observation between multiple worlds became infinitely safer. It was during this time, also referred to by historians as "The Second Tide," that the simultaneous observation of multiple worlds became widespread. At an unprecedented pace, scholars ranging from Giang Thị Tien to Desmond Sweetgum began to make crucial breakthroughs in the study of worlds, some of which remain locked in the Archives to preserve the integrity of lesser minds. In this heady atmosphere of discovery, it is not surprising that many creatures and phenomenon should escape the initial review of scholars. Indeed, a creature as relatively forgettable as a twenty-meter psudeo-spider scratching seemingly random patterns into dirt would scarcely have drawn notice at all, had it not been for the grisly dismemberment of a demon king and the keen eye of a devoted fabulist.
In all of the Library
The demon-laden cart thundered over the slick cobblestones.
Similce watched from inside as the city whipped by. Even behind the layers of iron, she could feel the tremoring of the brass horses pulling the vehicle. Opposite her sat the molten remains of Bazan culture, glowing within its tightly-sealed brass container. Between shimmering fragments of evening ritual and respectful pronouns, artificial spirits glided silently. Similce narrowed her eyes at the vessel on the floor of the carriage. Fifteen years of work and countless sacrifices, metaphorical and otherwise, had gone into the creation of this vessel. Soon, she thought, Baza will be whole again.
Angelina couldn't help but feel let down as she began to summon the demon.
The Most Wondrous and Expert Society of Procurers, Barbers, and Deliverypersons, commonly and derisively referred to as "the Fetchers" or "the Cadgers" for short, is the largest union of individuals and entities employed in the procurement of necessary but difficult-to-obtain components for magical spells and artifacts. Due to the invaluable nature of the Society's work, as well as its thousands of contacts and agreements granting it monopoly on a variety of magical goods, it is one of the most powerful, if [something confederations to be found anywhere.
History
The Cadgers were formed in 1731 as a result of the union of the three most numerous magical procurement firms in Seville - [names]
Structure
The Society is comprised of eighty-seven separate organizations, each known as a "sodality," and prefixed with the title "the Numinous Cohort of," followed by the name of its trade1. Each sodality within the Cadgers specializes in a particular category magical substance or ingredient; for example, the Numinous Cohort of Harvesters specializes in the procurement and production of plants and raw plant products with supernatural qualities, while the Numinous Cohort of Beetles works with dungs and offals from extraplanar entities.