Still Distracted!

THE WORLD ITSELF!

what's life like in silthaven? to put it bluntly, silthaven is a city with the technological level of the 1980s or 1990s, the architectural philosophies of the 1500s, and the air quality of the industrial revolution. much like the mire it sits on, it's composed of many layers stacked atop one another, new growing from old, choking it and bearing down on it. over time, the lower levels (and their denizens) are lost to rot and flood. it hasn't stopped raining in seven years. the bronze of the architecture is becoming a crusted green from the bottom up. still, people live their lives. businesses are ample, the economy is ... existent. the main overseer is ... missing. there's a few good pubs.

what is verdigris? taking inspiration from the panspermia hypothesis, as well as the natures of stem cells and superorganisms, verdigris is the common name of a disease composed of microscopic primordial lifeforms known as mirechildren. mirechildren are the cells of an ancient 'god' that arrived to the planet millions of years ago via meteor impact, and which still sleeps below the layers of fossil and sediment the current world (and by extension silthaven) resides upon. all life stems from the original mirechildren, but after millions of years separated by layers of dead tissue and decay, the mirechildren of below (although retaining their ability to affect reality through observation and understanding. see observer effect. that but biological) find their newer forms alien, and respond by taking control of the body in unexpected ways. this follows three main strains: the sprawl (resulting from the intrusion of another infected organism. reproduction of foreign structures - think mould, parasitic flora, growth of organic components that do not belong to the host organism), the spiral (resulting from the physical or mental isolation of an infected organism. reproduction or shedding of host structures - think cancer, or necrosis. or obsessive repetitive behaviors, self doubt on a visceral scale), and the sight (the most psychological of the three, based around the theory of observation bias, and an organism's innate desire to learn and witness. signals, language, lenses).

how did it come to the surface? good question! decades before the story begins, several peat miners on the mires came into contact with mirechildren leakage from below (due to being situated on a weak spot), and became infected with a sort of digging mania. this strain quickly died out with the miners, as it was small and weak, but not before they began construction and usage of a 'borehole', which really was a hastily made pit into the earth in the basement of an old house. a feeble attempt at reaching the god below which they had become so enamored with. seven years before the story begins, a small group of amateur researchers (most notably madeline piper, helped by being the daughter of a respected peat-mining-buisness-owning family, gillian scoby, also quite well-off, already quite eccentric and passionate about her career in biological history, and kip kesler, a younger woman from the streets of lower silthaven roped into it via her own savage curiosity and her closeness with her two elders) take it upon themselves to investigate the borehole, and eventually continue its plight. they break into the deeper mire, and through the void created by the borehole as well as piper and scoby's bodies/equipment, the mirechildren make their way from isolated groundwater repositories into the rain and thus into the flood, meaning that without filtering, the water supply is contaminated with very confused god tissue.

why is it called verdigris compendium? the name verdigris compendium comes from the name of the protagonist's journal, full of stories and observations she has written down in an effort to clear her head. reading it may infect one with the sight strain, and has the capability to drive one to madness.

what is 'harbinging'? harbinging is an achievement of what this world would consider a godlike state, more or less becoming the culmination or ultimate representation of a concept (anything from tv commercials to worms in puddles to rubbish in back alleys to literal animal curiosity itself). harbingers are also often referred to as major or minor gods, though they are more simply deities formed over years of accumulation of matter and ideas.

CHARACTERS!

a 𖣂, 𖦹 or 👁 marking next to a name signified that they are infected with/harbinging the sprawl, spiral or sight strain respectively.

𖦹 madeline piper, obsessed with self-image and terrified at the effects that verdigris has on her, isolates herself (and eventually the house, by driving others out) to become the harbinger of the spiral strain of infection (known as the hollow). she sheds her impure flesh, again and again, multiplying but never truly evolving, eventually resulting in a number of scions.

apart from the hollow, other scions include:

the teeth

the doorkeeper

the homesick (also known as martha - she works retail eventually)

the husk (or the first. long starved to death in her apartment bathroom)

a fleshy and morbidly wrong replica of scoby

a fleshy and morbidly wrong replica of kesler

𖣂 gillian scoby, curious and open-minded to a fault, deeply in love with the soil on which she walks, becomes the harbinger of the sprawl , eventually founding the lower silthaven sedimentary archive, a collection of recordings, documents, and most notably mud-cores further into the city once she is displaced from the house. from there, she digs further down with the help of the team's original archivist newton "newt" morwood, becoming a mass of fractaling tangled roots.

👁 kip kesler, who stayed back on the surface but took it upon herself to sort through the samples returned and watch through the ominously slimy video tapes, begun her transformation into the harbinger of the sight (the broadcaster, otherwise known as the signal god or seeing-glass) but halted it through a) attempting to burn the tapes, b) attempting to eat the tapes, c) fleeing back to the city and d) gouging her own contaminated left eye. she is the protagonist of our story.

trinket is kesler's name for an entity otherwise known as the stranger or whisker. it's the sensory organ of the mire's main mass, uncovered by the borehole, lured to the surface by the prospect of knowledge and stimulation, and severed from its body by the shutting of the basement door. a very wet shapeshifter, of sorts, continuously molding its body like the clay of the lakebeds and shedding its old skins in favour of forms that make more sense to it. it and kesler are a bonded pair, both confused and lost and unsure of their identities, both quite "monstrous" in biology but soft and curious of heart. it often takes the form of a saleswoman, morrigan "dovey" dove, that it saw on television.

𖦹 mortimer [wormwood] is a young man hidden behind an impossibly long mane of hair with nails that never stop growing, who has remarkably gotten his life together. tasked with a camera and a tape recorder, he is fixated on finding a stop to the infection no matter the cost to himself. insecurity personified

𖣂 newton morwood is currently the only staff left at the sedimentary archives. originally a senior archivist, she has since been tasked with the sisyphean task of cleaning the mould and paper pulp of the rotted documents, and also simply tending to scoby as she digs. newt is also the one who feeds scoby, which explains where the rest of the staff went and why newt is the only one left.

𖣂 morrigan "dovey" dove is a tv saleswoman who, after being fired from her job due to a mental breakdown on a live broadcast, became assimilated into the minor god of birds, smog and stringfoot (becoming its lure-tongue). she escaped this, too, and now haunts the city's labyrinth of alleyways all feathery and smug

𖦹 the latten is the 'project' of the hollow, comprised of a plastic/porcelain mannequin shell stuffed full of the 'pureflesh' of a number of missing people, called over by their distress broadcast. originally a lab technician named 👁 jane d'lacey

👁 the stargazer is the nickname for a young astronomy enthusiast who has witnessed another one of the mire's kind through her telescope years before the story begins. her infection is slow-going and she has come to terms with it, despite her apparent obsession

𖣂 dovecote: god of city birds, chimney smoke, and stringfoot

𖣂 worms: god of worms. also a lovely lady who is beautiful if you let her drag you into the water where the she may float and writhe without the hollow weight of the air

𖣂 mirror-face: god of attachment, warm blankets, a lover's hair in your mouth, and proximity. spiral-ish in nature

𖣂 tooth room: god of surgically removed teeth