#unindexed

Grimm

Ravagers, the bat version of Nevermores. Instead of shooting feathers, they attack with piercing shrieks. Known to hide from the sun during the hottest parts of the day.

Dromedoms, camel monsters with acidic spit.

Ziraphs, giraffe monsters with three heads, each with its own long neck.

Jackalopes, small rabbit beasts that leap to stab you with their deadly-sharp antlers.

Blind Worms, the most unique of all Vacuan Grimm, and "maybe the nastiest [thing] in a desert of nasty things":

Worm-like monsters with one eye located over their large, circular, toothy mouths.

They burrow through sand without swallowing it, they jump absurdly high even when breaching out of sand, and they move fast over the top of sand.

Their "digestive tracks" contain pools of acid. If they're so large they they can swallow you whole without killing you with their teeth or crushing you with their throats, you could be dissolved instead.

It grows armor along its front half, but not along the back half.

Its simple biology makes it more resilient than most Grimm; when cut, it does bleed -- but the blood is high-pressure and extremely acidic. What's more, if cut in half, both halves can survive and grow into complete Blind Worms.

Wilderness and Natural Beasts

The sands of the desert move on their own, independent of the wind, such that the landscape sometimes changes completely "from one hour to the next". No one knows why, but no one seems curious, either. (After the Fall, pages 1, 23)

Mole Crabs are territorial and aggressive crabs that can grow three times larger than humans, gather in "pod" social units, seek out oases, burrow under the sand to avoid dehydration and detection, and respond to vibrations felt through the sand. Vacuans consider their meat a delicacy, because most people who hunt them end up getting eaten instead. (After the Fall, pages 2, 23)

Flatback Sliders are sand-swimming turtles, which can grow large enough that their flat-topped shells can reach roughly 100 feet into the sky. They can be dangerous, of course, but they have terrible vision and usually ignore what they don't notice. A large enough one can't feel an entire caravan of humans climbing up its body and huddling on its shell. "Some people camp on them for days or weeks. There's no better way to travel through the desert, if you're lucky enough to find one. Just seeing one is considered a good omen." (After the Fall, Chapter 12)

The Drylands (Before the Dawn, page 100)

The ruins of Paradise Oasis, former seat of Ancient Vacuan civilization.

Mistral and/or Mantle drained the water away to expedite the process of mining for Dust under the former water table.

Currently a region of bare rock, pockmarked with holes.

Velvet didn't see much sand there. Without reason to suppose the shifting sand tends to avoid the area, then one has to assume the sand had currently moved elsewhere.

Unnamed City Ruins (Before the Dawn, page 100)

Close to the Drylands, and would have been a neighbor to any city (or cities) built in Paradise Oasis.

Must have had its own oasis for water and food, not that Velvet saw any sign.

The shifting sands can completely hide the ruins of the entire city, and within a minute can move fast enough to uncover at least half of it. If the sand were water, that kind of speed would flatten any ruins into rubble; did Meyers not consider that, or is the sand flowing around the walls and pillars instead of blindly smashing into them?

Unnamed Chasm Quarry

Relatively close to the Drylands, being only "miles" away. (Before the Dawn, page 102)

Plunges "hundreds of feet" below the surface of the desert, with the wind blowing small amounts of sand over the cliffs to drift down like snow. (Before the Dawn, page 103)

Velvet thinks the crevasse delves so deep into the earth that even the sands hadn't managed to fill it. (Before the Dawn, page 100)

But, given that the sands above shift on their own, and the wind is responsible for what does spill over the edge, it would seem the sand actively avoids moving in currents that would take it over the cliffs. Furthermore, if the shifting sands can move uphill and out either end of the artificial valley, the chasm's depth may not be responsible for its emptiness.

The floor of the chasm is covered in sand, but also sports scrub growth, tall but dry grass, green plants, and even "a scraggly acacia tree", revealing that parts of the chasm reach close to the new level of the region's water table. (Before the Dawn, page 103, 104)

The shadows cast by the high walls keep the quarry cool even during the hottest part of the day, but people seeking shelter from the sun or a sandstorm can run into Grimm that had the same idea ("nests" of Blind Worms or Ravagers), and can find themselves trapped with no way out. (Before the Dawn, page 103)

The foreign kingdom responsible for this particular chasm left behind as trash any mining equipment deemed too troublesome to take home, after extracting all of the Dust. Anything from broken personal gear to large mining machines, even what looked like a large transport vessel. (Before the Dawn, pages 104)

Not the only such quarry around the Drylands. Octavia says that her clan once sought shelter in "one of these quarries" rather than that specific one. (page 103)

Something powerful but unknown shook the earth as Velvet and Octavia began to leave, triggering an avalanche. That chasm buried itself in stone and swirling sand. Others still remain. (page 105)

The Wastelands

Distinct from the Drylands; the ruins of a different, unnamed oasis.

Named such because a foreign kingdom "literally wasted the land". (Before the Dawn, page 212)

Apparently nothing but sand dunes; you need to dig to get to the stone ground beneath. No mention of how deep.

No one mentions any city once built around this lost oasis. (Before the Dawn, pages 159, 212)

No mention of its distance from Paradise Oasis.

Explicitly located "far" from Vacuo City. (Before the Dawn, pages 160)

At the very least, "miles" away from Vacuo City. (Before the Dawn, pages 168)

Student Huntsmen walking from Vacuo City to the Wastelands takes something like 30 minutes; roughly more than an hour round-trip. Velvet walks there from Shade Academy, fights someone, and then that someone flees and travels to Shade Academy, arriving at the Battle of Shade a little over an hour after the battle began.

Located to the west of Vacuo City. (Before the Dawn, pages 212)

Located to the north of Vacuo City; guess Meyers forgot. (Before the Dawn, pages 266)

The foreign kingdom left behind the metal skeleton of a Dust mining rig. Most of it was buried deep in the sand, along with the entrance to the old mine, leaving only the short tower atop the rig exposed, where it can give some protection from attacking Grimm. (Before the Dawn, page 206)

Even that short tower can be completely buried in sand without it appearing like a conspicuously tall dune? (Before the Dawn, page 266)

The caverns of the mine below suffered a cave-in at one point, and one can still find the skeletons of the miners trapped there and left to die. Velvet doesn't stop to examine the skeletons, but she's convinced they were very likely faunus. (Before the Dawn, page 270)

They were likely native Vacuans enslaved by foreign kingdoms. (Before the Dawn, page 307)

Vacuan settlements in general

"The only quiet time was midday, when the sun was highest and hottest and all the shops shut down for a couple of hours." (Before the Dawn, page 40)

"...guns and swords and knives. Bows and arrows. Maces. They weren't Huntsman weapons, but this was Vacuo, and everyone was armed – even in the city." (Before the Dawn, page 310)

"Simple buildings were more practical, cost-effective, easier to build, and easier to rebuild when a storm took them out or you were forced to move on. Bricks and portable homes were the predominant architectural features – along with industrial decay, the old refineries and factories and warehouses abandoned by Dust companies from other kingdoms." (Before The Dawn, Page 149)

Clothing and Skincare "Most Vacuans wore simple, light-colored tunics and linen cloaks and head coverings for crossing the desert." (After the Fall, page 15)

"The Beacon students had been slow to adopt more practical clothes... but Coco had been messing around with new outfit designs for Team CFVY." (Before The Dawn, Page 132)

Aura might protect against sunburn, windburn, and sand abrasion, but offers limited protection against heat, and does nothing for dehydration. Or tanning.

While Coco's preferred, Vale-style clothes breathe more than they seem, she needs to specially treat them with UV protection and lather her skin in sunscreen to preserve her fair complexion. "Even so, after a year in Vacuo, she was more tan than ever before in her life."

Carmine, who left Atlas to train at Shade and remained in Vacuo professionally, either started with an olive complexion or developed a deep tan despite her own skincare. "...aloe, a common sunscreen cream in Vacuo." (After the Fall, page 173)

Rumpole is likewise deeply tanned, though no one knows if she's actually Vacuan or foreign by birth.

No mention of Theodore's complexion.

Feldspar Village

Feldspar Village was apparently close enough to Vacuo City for Team CFVY to walk there, and for its CCT support tower to get a signal to Shade Tower.

Feldspar was also close to a former Dust quarry dug up by a foreign kingdom. (After the Fall, Chapter 4, page 20)

Feldspar could somehow support itself hunting for local pests and vermin, like bats, bugs, and worms, without depleting the local populations of such creatures?

A local vendor could produce and sell candied, caramelized breadfruit... a fruit with nothing to do with grain, and that grows from a tree that shouldn't survive in the desert. Maybe Meyers meant dates, apricots, or something else? Even so, the vendor would need to harvest and process sugarcane to candy and caramelize it, and sugarcane and sugar beet also don't seem to be desert-viable plants? (After the Fall, page 79)

Gossan Village

Never actually seen.

Like Feldspar, had its own CCT support tower. However, after Beacon Tower fell, the CCT network became so weak that Gossan's support tower could no longer communicate with Shade Tower, even without sandstorm interference. Someone managed to boost the support tower's strength to send an emergency message, but no one knows who or how. (After the Fall, page 19)

Schist and Tuff Villages

Never actually seen or described.

Both Tribes left their village to escape an unusual and growing number of Grimm attacks, rather than because their water sources dried up or their food sources became lost. If these villages had any support towers, those might even still be intact.

Coquina

The closest settlement to Vacuo City. Close enough for Teams CFVY and SSSN to walk from there to Vacuo City, under the sun.

Never called a village, town, or city, just a "settlement".

One of the few settlements in Vacuo, other than Vacuo City, to have enough formal government to keep a jail. (Before the Dawn, page 12)

Big enough to have at least one combat school, Oscuro.

Also has at least one oasis that it seems to reserve for a public park where citizens and visitors can relax and have fun, without getting chased off by angry farmers and ranchers who are busy trying to grow food for their people. (After the Fall, page 293)

Their CCT support tower isn't large enough for people to physically enter; Velvet seems to perform repairs on its most critical components out in the open, at ground level.

The metal surfaces shine from constant sand-blasting.

Coquina built that tower in some nearby mountains, presumably so the elevation would allow clearer communication with Shade and other towers. But as the mountains stand outside their city limits, they tend to swarm with Grimm. (Before the Dawn, page 131)

The book doesn't mention or suggest Grimm damaged the tower; Velvet seems to suspect the shifting sand, which she blames for most mechanical failures in Vacuo, even in the best-shielded Scrolls. She does note that the panel she open featured some dents in the center, and wonders if something tried to break in, but still does not suspect the Grimm. (Before the Dawn, page 133, 136)

Naturally, the people built Oscuro Combat Academy between those mountains and the city, obviously to protect the citizens and provide the students with plenty of practical experience against the Grimm while providing protectors for the non-combatant technicians who maintain the tower.