Gormenghastly

This world was catalogued by PAIN, responding to missing persons in upstate New York, accompanied by aberrant signals on the nearest Breach Shield. Evidence led them to a ruined stone cabin with a crumbling wooden roof... which was not actually part of Baseline's reality, despite showing none of the usual signs of an incursion. The team entered, and found the place was much "bigger on the inside". Much, much, bigger. The "cabin" had doors not visible from Baseline, and when they went through, the found themselves looking down and over a sprawling, ruined, building, whose ultimate dimensions were unclear. They also found their equipment, from radios to guns, did not work.

The castle-city was a maze of towers, walls, courtyards, and larger structures that formed the unbalanced and chaotic centers of the sprawl, stretching through a dense and dark forest that overgrew most of the lower structures and the once-empty courts and squares. A mountain range did break the forest on the far western horizon, while roiling mist prevented seeing more than 1-2 miles in other directions, even with the best binoculars. Every building and room was long-abandoned, falling into rot and ruin, making exploration slow. There were rooms that could have been feast halls, or ballrooms, or libraries, all with nothing in them but the crumbling remains of furniture, beyond meaningful identification. Rusted weapons and armor were sometimes found, in a variety of styles. Some seemed to have likely once contained corpses, now crumbled to dust.

They did, by sheer dumb luck, find one of the four missing people: A gibbering wreck of a person, unable to communicate what he'd experienced, dressed in shredded rags. It was at this point the team noted their own equipment was showing signs of decay and corrosion, looking as if it had been left in the wilderness for a year or more. This prompted the team leader to make the harsh decision to list the other three as 'unrecoverable', with the hope they'd return to baseline when this reality destabilized. No other survivors, or bodies, were ever recovered.

The cabin, and its connected world (named "Gormenghastly" by a PAIN agent with a bent towards literary puns), did finally detabilize, after longer than most other intrusions (especially post-shielding) -- just one of many as yet unsolved mysteries. The world's frequency was recorded, and BREACH did attempt a second expedition, this time accompanied by one of its handful of nascent mages. (If technology beyond early TL4 didn't work, BREACH reasoned, this might be a mana-rich world.) There was indeed a strong (that is, normal, as opposed to Baseline's low) mana field, but the caster found even their simplest spells twisted aberrantly and didn't dare try anything more complex. Since portkeys did not work, it was necessary to carefully track time using sand clocks (mechanical watches failed far too quickly to be trusted). This limited the scope of exploration.

There have been several recordings of this frequency manifesting in similar environments around the world, including Scotland and Russia. Whether these were brief natural incursions, or unlicensed (and foolish) explorers who had somehow learned the frequency is unknown.

World Type

Alternate Physics

Divergence

Unknown

Current Year

Unknown