#coldsun

The Locomotor Itself

The Locomotor resembles a gargantuan snake or locust, hopping and slithering, apt to destroy most anything in its path. Fortunately, these paths are precisely determinate: it is connected to a series of fourteen rings, and will always move in a straight line, or very near so, towards the closest ring which is not one of the last two rings it passed through. If the path is through the air he will fly, if it is through the ground he will burrow. He will always take exactly one day to reah the next ring in his destination; if the destination ring moves, he will adjust his direction and velocity in order to allow this to be true. At each circle, it is possible to load and unload cargo.

The Locomotor requires arcane energy in order to function; if it runs out, he will stop. (Time spent stopped does not count against his calculation of getting to the next circle in one day - if he runs for four hours, stops from exhaustion, and remains idle for several days, he will reach its next destination twenty hours after being refilled.) This fuel comes in the form of blood sacrifice performed at the location of any one of the circles between his passing, or at the site of the Locomotor himself to restart him if he has gone idle.

For its typical needs, these sacrifices amount to one or two persons per day at the next circle, and since each circle is placed at or nor a major urban center, violent criminals as a matter of course suffice to feed it. Sometimes ectoplasm of a different psychic flavoring is required; these needs are communicated through dreams, omens, &c. to druids and warlocks sworn to the Petal. When required to shed the blood of the provably pure of heart, most operating centers employ principled political enemies when possible and trained votaries - religious volunteers, often pledged by upper-caste parents seeking to show their loyalty to the state - when necessary.

The rings, although nigh-indestructible and gargantuan, are of such slight density that a child could lift and run with one. It appears that they were meant to be mobile, though the destruction the Locomotor can cause tells against that theory - and, indeed, their capture of one by the Floating City of Dheb-Eir was intended by the leaders of that pirate metropolis to be used as a weapon, since Dheb-Eir could move and therefore place other locales in the path of the train-behemoth. This was eventually solved by the relocation of the nearest connecting rings to the shore, and, in the usual case, is simply solved by security.

Additionally, because of the Locomotor's routing algorithm, the removal of one or two links sufficiently far from the line can sever it completely, causing him to act as if he has reached the end (that is, when he looks for the closest ring other than the current one and the one before it, he finds the one two previous in the one ahead is further away than that.) It is believed that this has happened in the past, and is why the Southern hemisphere remains inaccessible.

The Custody of the Petal

During the Last Flowering, the organization which operated the Locomotor and its line was a private capitalist firm. In many ways, the Custodians of the Petal, which are its direct organizational successor, remains similar in form - it is a ruthless organization which attempts to leverage the transporation resources of the line in order to distribute the winnings to its owners in aliquot parts. But in the meantime, of course, the context has changed - gone are many alternative sources for investment, as are external sources of political power. The Locomotoral Custody still offers the services of transporting goods and persons themselves, but its transporation choices are more motivated by considrations (or the justification of) keeping civilization going, and its revenues are achieved more through taxation, rent, and tribute than services. Those revenues are still distributed to its principals, but less because these principals would otherwise take their investment elsewhere but because the families and other organizations that have a lock on ownership consider themselves socially obliged to maintain a certain level of conspicuous prosperity.

A complicated organizational chart exists, but fundamentally, the Custody is dominated by its dependence on every one of the circles to remain operative, and its difficulty in ensuring compliance at much detail anywhere. The result is a decentralized structure with promises of coordinated retaliation against anyone who allows the flow of blood to go dry or for the Petal to otherwise wilt. Local elites of whatever form operate the local franchises; the links of culture, people, and economic interdependence fostered by the Savored Petal itself lend them a degree of coherence. Beside this there are the druids and warlocks sworn to the Petal, its priests, and all the rest - a supplementary but essential structure of technical-ideological elites that transcends local loyalties in theory. "Secular" offices of either the global or local variety, and sometimes the less secular ones as well, tend to inheritable conditional on satisfactory service, though some are purchased for the short rather than long term and others are awarded purely on merit.

The Nodes of the Line

The Gleaning, where no one lives for long; those with naught else work to find or land to work come here to gather scraps of coal-dust from the ice fields, and bring them to the staion here. A large gantry stands here: once, it exploited the position close to the equator for launching orbital rockets; now, it still maintains a serviceable (for this age) observatory used by a College of Diviners. The coal is as essential for the Locomotor in its own way as the souls, and so prisoners are brought when labor reserves are weak - another form of sacrifice to keep the thing running.

Nemm.

Tschor Glagan: this malarial taiga is the breadbasket of the whole line. In addition to staples like honey, snow-rice, and timber, it also provides luxury monoculture such as marajuana and dreaming ejm. Like the Gleaning, it is a common destination for slaves.

Bitter Canyon* was once sweet, as fertile as Tschor - much grew here, and the canyons were carved by waters. After the changes to the climate, this is no longer so. Its ring might have been relocated, but it was as if an occult hand had grasped it near the end, and rigor mortis set in, for any attempt to steal the ring results in empowerment of its (whatever It is's) own sworn servants to prevent the theft. Because it is mighty and single-minded but not very clever, its priesthood has engaged in an effective deal with the other local franchises to regularly make attempts on their holy of holies, thus continually renewing the source of their power - which they can then use to repay (in a friendly, non-ironic way) those who have awakened it. Beyond this hoary dungeon and its scheming priests, Bitter Canyon is a blasted expanse of dead forest and half-sacked ruins.

Lath Alar.

The Floating City of Dheb-Eir, mentioned above, and under great threat should it turn to further shenanigans.

Nine Phrases of Respect.

Stonelorn.

The Even More Floating City of Zalle, which rests up in the atmosphere where the air is thin and breath can turn to ice before one's eyes. No one is quite certain why the platform of Zalle remains aloft, but the residents do know that particular minerals can be mined from the clouds themselves, and energy also "mined" by the heavy objects which the Locomotor can bring up, seemingly without effort, to be sent down a great mechanical elevator shaft to...

Undersky, the underdark city. A subterranean resevoir of spoiled milk serves to meet the food needs of most of its residents, although the food chain required for such is complex.

Shardmuck.

Thornreach is a city amidst the largest trunks and branches of the Great Cactaceal Forest. It was fashioned as such about 150 years ago as a new utopian community for some of the surviving elves - a place where they could live not as nobles over servants of other races, but utterly as equals of their own kind, unburdened by even having to think thoughts of mortality - but this collapsed rather quickly.

Old Darn is a great mountain which the Locomotor passes through - as in, literally passes though, as though all of it were a ghost. Moreover, it is just about impervious to anything else. Clearly, there is a ring inside, since the rings at Hellpont and Thornreach have moved, and the Locomotor treats the inside of the mountain as a node. The mountain has become the site of scientific investigations and religious pilgrimage, but, however, lacks the utility of actually being a load/unload station.