Stratum Floors

Purpose / Function

The floors are a labyrinthine complex, so named for the differing layers of tissues, architectural foundation and atmosphere arranged one atop another.

Design

Stable Levels

The top 10 levels closest to the lower half of Silver Key where permanent and semi-permanent habitats were founded.

Abode
Pipeworks
Powerhouse
Chancery
Auberge
Dark World
Depth Pools
Caves
Suburbs
Wheatfields

Unstable Levels

There are an estimated 1000 other levels below the stable areas where everything there is vivisected and dispersed throughout the lower floors.

Curiously, all floors display a monochromatic fixture, being completely devoid of other naturally occurring colours.

Entries

Purgatories

These are moving illusions that appear flat against the mockery's walls like a projection on a screen.

— extract from a brochure

While most are impossible to pass through, a few act as labyrinthine gates that can be opened and closed via an elaborate lock and key.

Random Phasing

One moment, just working on the surface, then nothing. People just disappear.

— warning against traversing the skin

Magnetic distortions would manifest across Hothaaz's surface that would destroy most things caught in it. Such things, whatever is left, could also fall into the maze during these events.

Sensory & Appearance

Liminal Space

Liminal Spaces are the unknowable or unspeakable places that seem to only belong in our dreams. These empty places give off a strange aura that make things seem fictitious. Some have reported feeling nauseous and disoriented from adsorbing the visual and audio anomalies.

— cautions from the tour guides to enraptured crowds

The broken familiarity provides a common connectiveness that draws a high number of people to its exploration.

Hazards & Traps

Monsters

An ecology of creatures with extra-dimensional qualities, like with the Laplwyds, include specimens of macrobacteria, goliath crustaceans and spectral-like insects transported from other places.

Special Properties

Wave Functions

This is where the space between two point would suddenly become farther or closer to each. It is imperceptible to anyone actually in the middle of the event, and is the common reason people get lost.

Time Skip

Time works differently in the maze. In an instant, someone can be moved forward months or years into the future at random.

Alterations

Multi-plane Zone

A primordial mass of flesh that exists in every dimensional plane that has ever, or will ever, exist.

— description of Hothtaaz

It is hypothesized that the top ten floors are the safest to explore. These layers somehow remain stable throughout, inspite of the turning layers, and coincidently transpose those environments into the respective stratum floors.

Architecture

Weird Geometry

It is composed from an innumerable amount of randomly arranged and differently sized rectangular prisms sandwiched between a high ceiling and floor in a seemingly endless void made of soft whites and sharp blacks. There are plenty of computer-esque moments textured onto the walls that appear angled like paintings.

They seem violently inhuman despite being recognizable as belonging to humanity's distance past.

— comments of a traveler

Tourism

Prisoners

Penal colonies, known and unknown, were historically established at different levels as safe points to rest and resupply.

Adventurers

Transmigrants were the ones to discover the entrance through the mockery and seek to be the first to fully explore its many floors.

Silver Key Staff

Iodex crews come and go through the first floor to fulfill their obligations.

Alternative Names

The Mansion

Mansion of Madness

The Mazes

Type

Dungeon

Parent Location

Mockery

Connected Rooms

• Lurker Threshold
• Silver Key