Pool 13

Since the beginning of Evergrace's contact with the outside world, one persistent question has been what to do with the bodies of the "unclean." Different people define the term in different ways, but most agree that the insane, the chaos-warped and those whose bodies have been tainted by time spent as the undead should all be segregated or denied return to the pools, for fear of corrupting future generations.   Since many believe that those whose bodies are not returned to the pool are lost forever, it's not uncommon for families to wish their loved ones returned to the pools despite one or more of these circumstances. Sometimes the adjudicatory body (known as the Council of Waters) feels a case is borderline, typically because the evidence of the corruption is very weak or because someone of great influence manages to pressure the right people into overlooking factors that would obviously disqualify anyone else. In these cases, the Council will sometimes compromise by assigning a body to pool 13.   The initial intent was to quarantine problem cases, trying to ensure that the broader community wasn't corrupted by inheriting memories that could mentally or even physically twist the recipient. The cumulative effect of this practice, however, has led pool 13 to a kind of infamy. Stories abound of children "blessed" there receiving odd abilities or struggling with lifelong nightmares or mental abnormalities. Some children even develop small physical changes.   While most parents avoid the pool, and some will even forfeit their entitlement to baptism rather than risk their child there, other parents hope that the pool's unique origins will allow their children to inherit higher quality skills and memories than would otherwise be accessible to them. After all, even the greatest of Evergrace's citizens are (usually) placed in the pool if they or their bodies were corrupted in some fashion, so who knows what's floating around down there? A few parents go even further, actively seeking the pool's blessing in the hopes that their child inherits some type of power from the pool's more "enhanced" donors. They see any mental or physical abnormality as a small price to pay for potential magical talent, enormous physical strength or one of the other strange abilities that are rumored to sometimes manifest in the children of Pool 13.   These children live a strange existence, spending much of their lives as social outcasts and the victims of rumor and discrimination. Even an apparently normal or even gifted 13 will spend their lives being treated differently, with few friends at school, more difficulty finding employment and a serious uphill battle in convincing someone of a higher tier to marry them. 13s are the most likely of Evergrace citizens to leave the city or turn to crime to make a living, their frosty relationship with their home facilitating a kind of self-imposed isolation.   Some 13s even buy into the idea that they are tainted, particularly if they struggle with any kind of mental instability or strange ability. Others take a kind of pride in being different, some going so far as to publicly argue that 13s are superior to "higher" tiers, and that the melting pot of mutations and abnormalities in the pool actually results in a higher quality of legacy. Because isolating themselves or associating only with other 13s seems the easiest way to avoid the pain of rejection, small communities of 13s have sprung up both within and outside the city. Some 13s turn to adventuring or traveling abroad as a way to establish identities away from the hated tier system altogether.