the blackness behind your eyes

  

Leonora Carrington

 

This game was, at one point, to be called Invisible Powers, though that no longer feels quite correct. The city is called Diomira, after the first of Calvino's invisible cities.

Diomira snares sleepers. When you dream of this place the dream goes on forever, and you're alone on a subway car that's just pulling into the station.

You emerge into the station (also empty), and then out onto the street (could be empty, could be full). The sky is black but it ripples with orange-purple-green aurorae that give off a bit of light, and the rest of the illumination is provided by streetlights and neon signs and other such things. It might be raining, in which case the rain is black, like ink, but it fizzes and if you touch it it soaks into you skin.

Here are some facts about the place, in no particular order:

IMAGO

1. Nobody sleeps. If you dream you wander places stranger than Diomira, and who's to say you'll come back? Use these eyedrops instead, they're almost as good.
2. If someone does sleep, then to an outside observer their body will appear to transform into rose petals/a skeleton/shards of ice/etc and back several times over the course of the night.
3. You don't need to eat, though if you're sick or injured it might be necessary in order to heal. Nobody ages normally, because...
4. There are people with rows of shark teeth, people who stand seven feet tall, people with their pupils swollen large enough to fill their eyes. Everyone changes if they stay here long enough, and where else is there to go?
5. The city also warps and twists and grows over time. Very little of it was built. The buildings are not usually laid out in a way sensible to humans.
6. Diomira has a boundary, a bank of black phosphene fog the same color as the sky. You can walk into it, but out there are the blind places where you can't perceive anything, not even your own thoughts.

PHOSPHENE

1. Lots of weird technology, guns that burrow into your stomach and motorcycles that run on liquid light.
2. The aurorae never go out and are never all that bright, but they have periods of intensity and dimness which are colloquially referred to as 'day' and 'night'.
3. Sometimes the they form rings or blobs or little flickering dots.
4. Occasionally the aurorae reach down from the sky and touch something, leaving it blackened and burnt. Unlike lightning this happens in slow motion and makes no sound.
5. More diffuse traces come down with the rain, and this is what tends to be refined into fuel, neon gas, etc.

TIMECHANGER

1. Much of the tech is made in hell-realms, which are...
2. Nested places inside Diomira, where time runs faster like in Inception. Unlike in Inception they exist outside anyone's head. You might get into one by walking an odd number of circles around a cracked fountain, or by descending into a building's many consecutive basements.
3. Hell-realms can be nested inside other hell-realms. As the layers of recursion accumulate, time runs ever-faster and escape becomes ever-more-difficult. Go deep enough and sleep is safe (albeit dreamless), but you can't leave even by dying, you just wake up the next morning with your slit throat still gushing blood.
4. Hell-realm populations are eclectic. Some are humans changed beyond recognition by accelerated time, or living products of neon tech.
5. There are also gallwasps - sapient wasps/centipedes/etc, often coiled up inside fleshy puppet bodies, supposed to be immigrants from elsewhere.

FEVER

1. Drugs are widespread. At minimum everyone takes something to stay up, even if it's just eyedrops made of distilled rain. 
2. These're magic Diomiran drugs and most of them play into the 'change you over time' dynamic rather than the 'addiction overdose and death' dynamic, which doesn't mean they're safe.
3. They do things like, letting you see in the dark, rendering your bones cartilaginous and flexible, making it possible to remember everything you've ever experienced.
4. Hallucinogens are more dangerous than sleep. If you took LSD you'd probably turn into dust and dry leaves and never return.

SCRIMSHAW

1. All the wildlife is really really strange.
2. Mammals ('furred beasts') have 6+ legs and lots of teeth and mostly appear in dreams.
3. Tar octopi live in the black fog outside the city where nothing else can think.
4. Lots of big insects, likely associated with the gallwasps.
5. Giant lizards. Not dinosaurs or crocodiles, more... frilled geckos grown to prodigious size, gargoyle-dragon-ish things, knotted snakes.
6. What people refer to as 'crows' are actually wingéd little blobs of darkness with a sharp metallic bit for a beak. They are not kind.

WORMKIN

1. The plants are all greyish viney things, with fruit or nodules that glow the same colors as the sky. They're all edible, though not necessarily palatable.
2. There are worms from out in the blind places that are compatible with everything.
3. (such as the city. if you pull a telephone off the wall, the cord will be a long long worm)
4. (such as your digestive system. you can eat one if you kill it thoroughly enough, even though its biology is like nothing on earth. this is the only convenient source of meat. well, not exactly meat. protein).
5. (such as your brain, if you didn't kill it thoroughly enough. or if they get in your body by other means).

SHIVERGLASS

1. there are magicians, who are intensely secretive and distrustful even (especially) of each other. they dream without sleeping and know a little bit about how to navigate the blind places (which is where dreams are, and where the dead go).
2. a cabal of magicians is supposed to have created or maybe found Diomira, shortly before they all succumbed to paranoia and killed each other or went into hiding.
3. The founders' symbol is a moth bounded in a circle, which is a thing that sometimes appears on old buildings or in dreams.

EIGENGRAU

1. Dreaming is not well-understood, but is feared for good reason. You can dream of hunting or being hunted and be grievously wounded when you wake up. You can dream of worms and carry them back with you.
2. Unusual ways of making art or staring into mirrors are also not very safe.
3. Not everyone who came here, came from Earth.
4. (Most people are second-gen or third-gen or sometimes time-dilated-hell-realm-hundredth-gen residents, so this may not immediately be obvious).
5. It's impossible to use the subway. The trains don't depart when anyone is looking.