Goocaves of Slimea
The Goocaves of Slimea is the largest man-made structure of Earth. It is a massive network of caves with more space than smaller nations and many levels deep underground. The modern Building-Goo of the Googirl allows this structure to function and to be inhabited by millions of souls of many species. It is the economic, political, and demographic center of the Queendom of Slimea.
This article describes the general purpose, idea, and function of a goocave system, but also the most significant goocave system, the one under the Slimean Lands. There are way smaller goocave systems under many cities.
Purpose / Function
The Goocaves were built to increase the available space for multiple purposes. The first and major reason was to house more people and give everyone at least a small room that they could call their own and have privacy without the fear of being thrown out by loan sharks. Most caves in the Goocaves are Apartment Hubs.
The second purpose was soon found as the problem occurred many new immigrants required jobs, products, and food. Many new Cave Hubs were built under the Slimean Lands to construct farms, office areas, factories, and everything that a thriving economy requires. Most of the Slimean economy is found underground. The last two purposes appeared as the goocave system under Slimea became too big for the surface to support it with its infrastructure and amenities. The Goocave Transport System and many parks and other free time experiences, shopping malls, entertainment areas, schools, governmental areas, and many more were built in their own Hubs or integrated into the available space. The final goal was a system that is self-sustaining and offers a good life for all inhabitants.
Design
The goocaves are made out of stone combined with Building-Goo, which results in a very colorful and bright environment that looks almost alien to the normal human eye. The walls, floors, and ceilings are mostly smooth and partly soft to the touch. The goo is warm due to the heat generated by the organic processes that the goocaves do to operate. Being inside the goocaves is in the end being inside a giant organism that is alive.
Most of the walls of the goocaves are interactive and can be used as screens to show information to visitors, or in case of emergencies, warn people and lead them to safe places or away from dangerous areas. The monotonous environment is broken by well-placed decorations and plants to avoid psychological problems for the inhabitants. Each hallway and each hub tries to look at least a little bit different from the others to give visitors a memorability of the places.
Entries
You can find entries at many locations in the Slimean Lands. Each village has normally one entrance, while cities have multiple ones spread through the urban area. While the central hub areas have bigger entrances that are able to let in many people at once and are very well visible from afar, the smaller entrances in villages or in the rural areas of the country are most often built into the environment and less openly visible. Bigger buildings often have access to the goocaves in their cellars as well. This thick network of entrances allows visitors and inhabitants to quickly enter and leave the goocaves at nearly any location.
Denizens
The goocaves of Slimea are an absolute hotspot of multi-species exchange. The majority of the inhabitants are Humans or are part of one of their many subspecies like Bunny Humans, Fox-Humans, Sheep-Humans or Cat-Humans. After the human species comes to the Googirl species in number. Inside the park areas, you can find plant-based species like Alraunes or Dryads.
Due to the very unnatural environment inside the hallways and between the hub areas, you can rarely find animals inside the caves. The one exception is the bigger park areas inside the caves, which are big enough to house smaller animals like small birds, insects, and smaller mammals.
Alterations
While the goocaves began as only a small secret cave for the first Googirls in 2017, it quickly grew over the following years.
Due to the development of new technologies, especially the Building-Goo, the Goocave Transport System as well as the Sagi system, the caves were updated and improved with each iteration. In the beginning, only small holes and cracks in stone allowed access to the cave system to prevent Humans from finding the hideout. In the modern days, there are open entries to the cave in each village and city of the Slimean Lands.
Architecture
The goocaves are separated into hubs with transport systems between these hubs. Each hub is unique and was built with the goal that the inhabitants could recognize the hub by identifiers like a large, famous tree in the center or a special painting on a wall. The idea was that no hub should be 100% identical to another hub to avoid psychological problems for visitors and inhabitants. Between the hubs, several transport and logistic infrastructure exists. The most famous one is the Goocave Transport System, which is used to transport passengers and goods between the different hubs and the surface. There are also pipelines for water, heat, waste products, and more.
The hubs themselves are giant caves deep underground that differ heavily in size and can be loosely grouped into several categories. There exists hybrid hubs that could be put into two or more of these categories. Often these hybrid hubs have multiple purposes in areas where highly specialized hubs are not worth the costs.
Appartment Hub
Apartment Hubs are the living quarters of the goocaves. The majority of the population lives in pure apartment hubs. Such a hub is typically built around a small park in the center with living apartments around it. The central area is a big room with enough space for bigger trees or a small pond. The goal is that every apartment can open a window towards the central park area in the center and see some nature. The exact size of the park depends on the size of the Apartment Hub itself. Around the park are the apartments on several levels. Each apartment is an Goocave Room that is connected to a hallway on the outer shell of the hub. Such hubs vary in size and available rooms between these smaller villagers up to small towns. Most apartment hubs have a permanent population, while some work as pure hotels or short-time living apartments for guests or tourists.Entertainment Hub
Every citizen requires amenities and entertainment. The Entertainment Hubs are purely focused on reducing stress and bringing joy to all guests. They are most often mixed into hybrid hubs, as smaller areas in other hub areas like their centers. There is a huge variety of them. The most common one is a park with some trees and often a small water area in the form of a river or a smaller lake or pond. Rollercoaster parks and other adrenaline entertainment offers are rarer but often the biggest entertainment hubs in a wide area. Smaller hubs of this kind are often cinemas, libraries, massage centers, brothels, and similar activities in limited space. Most entertainment hubs are owned by the government and free, or rather cheap, for citizens of the nation.Mall Hub
While smaller businesses and food chains often operate little branch offices in the other hubs, there are also hubs that purely focus on shopping. Companies can rent space in these hubs to sell their goods. These hubs are located very centrally and most often have excellent access to infrastructure and other amenities. It is not uncommon that smaller entertainment hubs are built into the mall hubs to let customers rest and stay longer. While smaller mall hubs often have only a dozen different shops, the bigger ones easily extend to the size of bigger villages with dozens or even hundreds of shops and restaurants of all kinds, from supermarkets to candy shops ran by Sugar Kittens, over special Slimean Goods shops that sell playfully traps like unpoppable Bubbles and Balloons, over electronics shops till luxury restaurants and more.Governmental Hub
Hubs that are fully occupied by government offices are called Governmental Hubs. If a citizen requires to deal with the government or the bureaucracy, then they head to one of the many governmental hubs. In these, you can find the different branches of the government, from local parliaments to bigger police offices or revenue authorities. Bigger banks and security facilities outside the military are also often located in these hubs. Mostly Googirls are working there, running most of the bureaucracy required for the country to work. The diplomatic meeting spaces and the queen area of the goocaves are also categorized as Governmental Hubs. Some of these hubs are restricted access. Hospitals and many kinds of healthcare facilities are under the direct control of the government and are also classified as Governmental Hubs.Military Hub
While most hubs are often visited by not only citizens but also tourists, the military hubs are restricted areas of the goocaves. These are the barracks and the storage facilities as well as the training grounds and schooling areas for the soldiers and the support units of the military. While the bigger ones are known locations, most of them are not findable on maps. Soldiers often reach their military hub only by traveling with the Goocave Transport System, making it even for them impossible to say where exactly their hub is located. It is unknown how many of these hubs exist or how far they are spread. What is known is that each branch of the military has at least one bigger hub of its own and it is known that there is one central hub where all militaries cooperate and coordinate their actions.Research Hub
The power of the Queendom of Slimea mostly comes from their advances in genetics and other technologies that surpass most other nations of Earth. To uphold this advantage and to discover new technologies, there exist many smaller and bigger research hubs throughout the goocaves. Researchers from around the world are invited to work in them with only the best available resources and materials. The government of Slimea spends significant resources each year for these hubs and lures specialists and experts in their fields into the nations with the promise to support their research in trade for their cooperation to share them with the nation. Many of these research hubs are specialized in certain fields like botany, genetics, robotics, or physics, while some are shared between different disciplines to support the transfer of knowledge and cooperation between different organizations and researchers. While most of these hubs are public spaces, the facilities where the researchers work are often off-limits for visitors and only accessible during special days in the year or during presentations.Farming Hub
The Goocaves themselves and the citizens both require nutrition. While most plants are not suitable to let them grow in underground caves, the researchers of Slimea have developed genetically enhanced plants that grow well in hydroponic gardens and vertical gardening. That allows the farmers to grow huge amounts of food plants and other useful plants in small spaces. Most of the processes in these Farming hubs are automatized and require only little input from the farmers working there. All waste is recycled and the food is transported by the Goocave Transport System to the many restaurants and storages that are spread through the cave system. The efficiency of these farms is unrivaled on Earth and allows Slimea to support its growing population in their limited space. While most of these hubs are only accessible to the farmers, some are constructed to allow the citizens to see how their food is grown. In the biggest farming hubs, there are often orchards with fruit-producing trees. While this method is in no way efficient compared to the other farming hubs, they are built to invite the citizens to pick some fruits themselves under the supervision of the farmers to give them a feeling for the food they consume.Manufactory Hub
While big production lines or factories are often a cause for dissatisfaction on the surface due to the increased traffic and noise pollution, the manufactory hubs of the goocaves are placed to ensure that no citizen is annoyed by them. In these manufactory hubs, most products that are sold in Slimea or exported to other nations are produced. Most of these hubs are rented to private companies to produce their products. While smaller hubs are often rented by a single company or a conglomerate, the bigger ones are only rented for certain capacities as no single company in Slimea is allowed to be big enough to dominate the market with their output. The rest of the manufactory hubs is in the hands of the government and are used to produce basic consumer goods for the population. Some bigger ones can have production lines of several kilometers with their own rivers of the Goocave Transport System to ensure that the input and output products are transported in time. Most of the time, the caves are specially designed for the machines and require only little maintenance by workers.Office Hub
While many workers of Slimea prefer to work from home due to the Hunter culture, there exists also the requirement to house many workers at one central location for meetings and cooperation. Office hubs offer companies rooms and the most modern Building-Goo devices to help them run their affairs. The typical office hub is either rented by a single big company or is split into several areas for different smaller and medium-sized companies. In the center of these office hubs is most often a restaurant or a park area to give each worker the chance to enjoy their breaks.Defenses
Due to the fact that the goocaves are a giant underground cave system, it has a high natural defense against attacks from the surface. But the architects of the cave system were not satisfied with this defense alone and over the years, they developed multiple levels of defense structures and systems to ensure the safety of the inhabitants and the nation's most worthy assets.
Entries
Each public entry of the goocaves is built in the same way. The visitor must go through a thin layer of special Building-Goo that looks like a liquid veil. While passing through, the Sagi system identifies the person by their DNA as well as their face, fingerprint, and other identifiers. If the person is wanted or in any way not welcomed in the goocaves, the veil will instantly melt their bodies and transport them to the next Police station in the caves, most often directly into a prison cell till a police officer can check the person. In the case that a person can't be identified, Sagi will appear with an avatar and checks the identity with a little chat while the visitor enters the caves. After the veil was passed, there are up to three ways to enter the cave system. For smaller entries, there is a simple staircase that leads to the hub directly under the entry. If there is no hub close, there may be a Goocave Transport System access built into the entry hall or behind a small staircase. In the case of high-security entries, the veil will always melt down the visitor and brings them to the deeper levels of the goocaves. Naturally, the latest one is only for military access or the way for diplomats to enter high-security areas.Hallways and Transport System
To move through the goocaves, everyone is depending on either the Goocave Transport System or for smaller distances, hallways that connect the different hub areas. Both of these can be filled with Building-Goo in the case of an emergency. By doing this, the passage is denied and it becomes extremely time-consuming to try to get through the thick goo. During accidents or dangerous situations, the Sagi system will use this system to not only ensure the safety of all citizens in close proximity but also to get control over most situations.Googirls
The goocaves are filled with Googirls of many kinds. Due to the Loyalty Gene, they instinctively protect the caves and operate as a soft form of police officers next to the official ones. This alone makes it hard for most lower crimes to happen, as nobody can be sure that a Googirl is not around the next corner or may hear the scream of a victim. It also helps in the case of medical emergencies, as most googirls have at least a very basic first aid training or can simply absorb injured people and bring them to the next hospital.Sagi itself
Sagi is not only taking care that the goocaves keep working, but also controls the safety of the caves. As the Ai is in direct control of the Building-Goo material used for most hallways, hubs, and devices in the goocaves, it also means that she has her eyes everywhere and at any time. Due to the friendly and open way of the AI, she often uses this to help lost citizens or to give advice. In the case of criminal activities, she can also directly prevent further crimes by creating either avatars of herself out of the goo of the goocaves or by simply absorbing criminals on spot into the ground.History
The history of the goocaves is short, but also has a huge impact on the nation of Slimea. In 2017, with the creation of the first Googirls under the leadership of the goo queen Suchiru Eisenstein, the first small caves were constructed. They were far from what we know today under the term goocaves. There was no Building-Goo nor any air filtering or helpful Sagi AI. It was a hideout to hide from the humans.
Over the coming months, the growing number of googirl workers slowly extended the system with new caves, new tunnels, and new entries hidden through in Neueisen.
With the creation of the Queendom of Slimea in the end of 2017, the goocaves had already some smaller hubs and the first permanent inhabitants. The research of Building-Goo allowed the cave to become a place that was worth living in due to its amazing properties and universal applicability. The cold, wet, and humid cave soon became a well-heated and well-decorated system of hubs, each more amazing than the one before. Soon the first visitors began comparing the goocaves with the internals of spaceships from famous science-fiction series. After the Gooputers spread through the caves and were installed in nearly any wall and any room, it became possible to access information everywhere.
Over the years of 2018 and 2019, tunnels were dug to every city and village of the Slimean Lands and under each of them, a small first hub area was constructed. After these tunnels were finished at the end of 2019, the Goocave Transport System was introduced and began replacing most other public transport in the nation. Many citizens sold their cars and began using this system to travel everywhere in the nation.
During this time, the population underground slowly increased and soon began surpassing the surface population. The modern entertainment hubs and the given free time activities, as well as the many jobs that were created in the cave, pulled migration from around Earth into the cave system. With the Goocave Rooms, inhabitants often lived more comfortably than the ones on the surface or than in most other nations of the planet. Big halls were decorated with natural light created by specially created glowing goo. This gave a simulation of a sky and improved living qualities.
All the new tunnels and caves that were dug over the years produced not only a huge amount of valuable minerals that fueled the new factories of the nation but also resulted in massive amounts of stones and dirt. The Resteberge Mountain Area was created in the north-west of the Slimean Lands to reuse all these materials and creating a mountain area. It is designed to be well suited for walk trips while having access to the goocaves every some hundred meters to avoid accidents and to achieve quick response in times of accidents.
The creation of Sagi was another huge milestone for the goocaves, as the new biological AI allowed a way more efficient use and organization of the system as a whole as well as offering many more amenities for the inhabitants and visitors. The goocaves also became known as a new world wonder on Earth and began pulling tourism into the goocaves.
Today, the goocaves hold many times the number of people than the surface of Slimea. The main economic power of Slimea comes from the goocaves and the security system became so well that the crime rate is near zero.
Googirls care for any need of the inhabitants while the goocats care for security. Many may say that living in the goocaves is like living at your parent's house again. The cave and the googirls take care of nearly everything while you only need to behave and do your little part to support Slimea.
Tourism
Each year, millions of tourists from around the globe visit the famous goocaves under the Slimean Lands. They want to see the underground parks and enjoy the many entertainment and welfare offers that this place has to offer. The appeal to wandering through a science fiction cave full of googirls and filled with unique places to discover are a huge factor and a whole industry has formed around goocave tourism.
To create space for all the visitors and allow them a very cheap but also comfortable stay, the googirl engineers created the Gootels. Most tourists use them to rest while using their days to travel through the caves. The relative safety of the goocaves compared to the surface where Hunters roam freely is another point for many to prefer the caves over the surface.
It is not uncommon for tourists to let themselves be transformed into a demi-human like a Sheep-Human or a Cat-Human by one of the many Googirls, while some even try out becoming a googirl. It is also not rare that tourists only leave the caves to return later as an immigrant to stay forever.
Founding Date
2017
Alternative Names
Goocaves, Slimy Caves, The Underground City
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