City of Masques

A small shard, marked by rows of wind shorn monolithic slabs of white marble. Any former connection it has had to the natural world has long been severed. It is ruled by it's mysterious founders, a species of shapeshifters who wear masks to solidify their identities.

Although they detest interacting to unpersons who live in the trash below their city blocks, the Formless live in a preternaturally privaleged position above other life forms.

The cosmopolitan shard of Masque is a sprawling field of megaliths. Like rows of smooth alabaster teeth jutting from the stained plazas, they reach their highest in the center of the city at fourteen stories tall and taper out as you approach the edges of the shard. On many dreary days these buildings pierce the sky, bleeding the clouds of their contents onto the broken cobblestone streets and squares. Unscalable and indestructable, these megaliths are strong like granite and yet retain the smoothness and luster of shell. The grey haze of daytime is banished at the conclusion of a day, when the dying light of the sun hits the skyline just right, irridescent streaks and pink hues radiate forth luxuriously from their ivory towers.

The heights above betray the horrors of the lower floors of the city. Grey concretions once passing as bricks tile the ground, when they are not slowly tumbling into the tunneling beneath the ground. Roads are disrupted by trenches, geysers and rotting cisterns full of trash. Bones litter many streets, camoflagued by the sun bleached flagstones of the place once they have been picked clean by the dogs and birds.

Surrounded by milky grey sea water, nature has long remained a husk of its former self. Toxic, no life can survive in the limewater surrounding the city. Though free of brine the water is bitter to the taste and will quickly accumulate stones in those that drink it without treatment. Through the nature of this the Masquerade has benefited extensively from using Masque as a port. Iron barges of impossible make and size remain docked without rusting and float like lillies on a pond in the sea- supposedly to bring tonnes of wares from all over Nebula. Trade that comes through these ports are far and few between now and it largely remains abandoned.

Beneath the streets survive large networks of tunnels, sprawling cisterns and sewers where the unchanging exist. Unpersons to the Masquerade, they are mostly free to search for scraps and scavenge what they can from what cargo crates float ashore or food waste drops from above. Built of wooden palletes, rusty plates and chunks these shelters and markets form arcades of sorts in the plazas and cisterns that the masquerade has abandoned. Home to thousands of people, most scrabble together for safety rather than spread in the vacous streets and ground floors around them. Improvised the street floor buildings rarely survive a year before needing major rennovations and repairs- despite this many travel to the city for secondhand luxury goods and trinkets so the varied resident unpeople try to maintain the roads, plumbing and sewers that they can.

Bare of vegetation and diverse fauna, there is slim to talk about the natural world in the heart of Masque. Few plants exist in the drained earth of the shard and even fewer animals migrate to the city save scavengers like gulls, dogs and rats. Plentiful enough are creatures that exist divorced from the natural cycle however. Leylines scurry and weave across the frames of the monoliths and in the rain gutters, occaisionally contaminating the place with bits of elemental essence. It is not a rare occurence that in the abandoned causeways that arcane abominations, slimes, marauding undead and elementals wander without purpose and reason- sometimes finding a victim amongst themselves or the various unpeople who inhabit the city.

Gardens, lumberyards and feedlots are sometimes improvised from artefacts dropped onto the city floor from above and abroad. Plazas often become named after such magic items and frequently earn an appropriate reputation such as the Plaza of the Evergurgling Canteen or the Square of the Unfueled Flame. As such survivors can hope to live out a meager life in the confines of the city's relative safety should they prove resourceful.

Travelers who come to Masque must know that there is an immutable wall that separates the city between the Natives and The Other. The Masquerade is the remains of an ancient imperial state that many magisters claim had influence over much of the Nebula during it's peak. Inscrutable, secular and insular, these people belong to an ancestry of shapechangers whose cultural customs remain aggressively maladaptive and maintain an exclusionary ethnostate within the city's extensive upper boundaries. Using a series of levitating barges, teleportation circles and astral corridors the Formless that make up the Masquerade never touch the ground and live in a network of high ivory towers in the center of the city, many of which are sealed from the ground floors.

Named aptly, their ancestry is materially Formless in that it can shift easily. Likened to a primordial ancestor of the Doppleganger or a cousin of the Mimic the Formless can nascently change their shape at will. Younger formless often pick the form of their favorite heroes or a favored pet or beast when it suits their fancy. Elder formless frequently shift and undulate beneath fashionable attire and bindings, an abstract dance of their material of preference reflecting a more refined pallette unbound by the aesthetic limitations of flesh. The Masquerade distinguishes it's chaotic Formlessness from itself with the invention of permanent identity. Each member of the Masquerade wears it's namesake literally upon it in the form of a Mask or artificial face. Advanced arcanery lost to time has rendered the art of creating them impossible, each individually has been handcrafted to perfection. It is with these that one Formless can easily name another and establish relationships and reputation.

It is within this framework at the intersection of society and identity that those within the Masquerade simply view the inconvienent outsider as persona non grata, unpersons, and unmasked. Despite being outnumbered in their own city at an estimated 100-1000 to 1, the average member of the Masquerade will treat the average Unmasked with silent scorn at best and if cornered they have been to retaliate violently with arcane magic and armaments. Rogue formless have in centuries past also have taken to looting and murdering unpersoned individuals on the ground floors of the city with great prejudice and no recourse on the part of their society.

Among Unmasked, a resilient solidarity persists in the bowels of the city. Some families have remained on the grounds of Masque for generations, all meanwhile never earning the respect of the Masquerade. More of the population still consists of first to second generation immigrants taking refuge along the Gray Path and sometimes stowing away in Masquerade trade vessels. Masque finds itself to be the home of opportunists, rogue scholars, exiles and downtrodden refugees offering a strange opportunity for many such folks.

In a time long past, Masque was a port city for the largest Formless Empire the Nebula had ever known. Living in the shadow of it's former glory, the Masquerade has presented itself in present times as a decentralized oligarchy, with certain personas identifying at a particular position in a hierarchy. Beyond which not much is understood within the machinations of the Masquerade to the Unmasked. Dissociated from centuries of sovereignty and forgotten history, the original purpose of the city can only be guessed- it is highly irregular for a singular, atomized shard to have such strong prominence in the Nebula.

Among the Unmasked, many Underkings have tried to rise to prominence in junk city below. Forming gangs and offering protection from monsters there have been many attempts at government in the abandoned quarters of the city. Small dictatorships lasting a decade, sometimes two appear in a sweep of strong words and strong actions. The current promised gang, the Feathered Crooks, have a unique strategy of finding abandoned upper floors that have long fell to Formless Neglect. Creating a unique opportunity to create strongholds and sniping roosts, they have kept the streets safe under the guidance of Lavigna Flangesteak.

The Feathered Crooks have achieved prominence on the ground floor levels of Masque after the destruction of their rivals, The Rouge Legion by the hands of a Masquerade Serial Killer. Proving to be a massive hazard to the safety of the realm, Lavigna Flangesteak conspires to the impossible task of assassinating them in an ambush. Meanwhile, one of her stakeouts on the fourth floor of the Whalebone Spire appears to have a mysterious device nestled in the corner, left behind after the Formless who lived here departed more than a century ago. Renamed by the Unmasked as the "Tower of Delusion" the limits of hubris are tested by those williing to prove themselves.

The City of Masque is home to the Forsaken Quarter, an abandoned plaza located in off the coast of Masque. It is governed by a rogue Formless named Gilded Promises. Jutting out of the sea on a singular ivory peak, it has several balconies, chambers and halls within the structure as well.

A blank slate of real estate, it is a remote place to set up a shop, office or residence- although it does not offer much in terms of resources of its own.