Spider's Eye is a giant wishing well
I’ve talked about Spider’s Eye before. It’s the subterranean city at the functional center of the network of wishing wells and compress-space canals linking them. Spider’s Eye isn’t built under an *actual* wishing well, so its designers and planners thought it would be fitting to design it like one. Here are some notable features of the architecture of Spider’s Eye.
Round, stacked-stone walls making up the perimeter. There’s a circular wall, roughly shoulder height for a wishrat (mid-shin on a human kid), going all around the city. It was built using fairly low-tech methods, with the entire group helping to pulley and set stones into place. Building the wall functioned like a lovely barn raising to kick off a festival founding the city. The wall isn’t functional; anyone can get on or over it with a hop. But it’s a great reminder of what wishrats are here for, and feels a bit like sitting on the rim of a real wishing well. The wall is surrounded by a moat fed by all of the feeder canals that converge on the city. The canals do overflow on occasion, so the little wall does help keep water from flooding into the city.
Triangular roof clock. The city keeps with that traditional wishing well look, with a two-sided roof whose slants meet in the middle. Onto that roof, they project data-translated colors that tell wishrats the time of day and season, the short-term weather and long-term climate, and other relevant information. Upon request, they can project stars, clouds, sunset footage, simulated storms (in combination with use of the myriad water features around the city — this is a hit among the puggles), and specific submitted images. A very dynamic sky.
Bucket elevator. Right in the middle of the city sits a massive freight elevator, capable of lifting a juvenile blue whale if it came to it. True commitors to the bit, the wishrats opted to visually design it to look like a gargantuan dented bucket, exactly what you think of as part of the platonic idea of a wishing well. This elevator is used to transport all sorts of bulky things from topside to the city or vice versa. One of its more famous passenger classes is human kids who fell down another well and came to the city to recover. In the event of emergency, the elevator is designed to hold and transport tens of thousands of Indigo, plus a bunch of supplies. Normally, the top is open, but it has a full-seal retractable roof for such cases. The elevator uses all of the modern features and technologies available to Indigo. That said, they did make a giant rope and various-sized handle cranks to complete the look. Kids can even turn a crank to make the empty elevator go up.
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