Floating Ocean City That Stinks Real Bad

The Sea People aren't normally known for urbanism, being nomadic seafarers whose diets consist pretty much entirely of seafood and, every now and then, land-based foods they nab off of islands. Sometimes towns will be built by them on certain islands, but these are normally raided to the ground at some point or other (almost always by fellow Sea People) or destroyed by aquatic wildlife.

One town, however, was able to stand the test of time and expanded so far in every direction from the island it started on that most in the city are unaware that there's an island at its center at all, with over 95% of the city's surface either being atop water or giant corpses which are themselves on the water.

The city's population is around 5 million, making it the second largest non-Hukmesa city in the setting after Lamara's capital.

Made mostly of wood, bone, anything that floats in water. Floating tree islands (the tree's response to being told it can't grow into a floating island and absorb all its minerals from seawater) are often grabbed, attached to the city and turned into reserves for the farming of wood. These wood farms are under constant guard and anyone caught trying to take from them without permission will either be captured so that they can be publicly tortured to death, or simply killed on the spot.

Towards the middle you often find "sunk basements". These are the result of buildings being made taller, the weight of which pushes their lower floors below the water. So long as these floors are kept airtight this isn't an issue, and helps the structure stay afloat. These tall buildings are kept from falling over with poles, ropes and mechanical doohickying (much of it fairly recent and due to contact with Lamarans and Meklasans, who are good with mechanical doohickying) connecting them to other buildings.

The city's water is... don't fall in, especially if you have any open wounds or a compromised immune system. Currents and tides help take the grime away but ehhhh there's many spots where it gets stuck or there is no current. Richer areas of the city make slaves remove the grime, while people in poorer areas walk past plague bombs on the daily.

Soil from the island has been spread across most of the center of the city, rooftop farms galore. Soil is often brought in from the outside. It's also artificially created through a funky process using rocks and feaces. Oh yeah and of course people are farming food in their own poop.

Sea People are somewhat biologically different from baseline humans. One major difference is being able to extract hydration from sea water. They don't drink it, instead having it in their mouths while the water is absorbed through their tongue, gums, the roof of their mouth and their cheeks. Once the concentration of salt in the water is too high, typically when they've yoinked about half the actual water in it, they can't absorb any more and so spit that back out into the sea. This is, however, a time consuming way to get enough water to survive, so collecting rainwater or obtaining filters is preferred. Also the sea water in the city is often loaded with human waste so drinking it, even in that weird water absorby way, is likely to be the reason for you being infected with that horrendous disease you're now dying from.

Rich residents, like the Bekkamons and (before getting slaughtered) the Belgratems, often buy water brought all the way from Lamara, or buy the seeds of Lamaran river plants. Lamaran river water is generally very clean, even when people are putting their waste in it, because the river plants absorbing and munching on that waste purifies the water (the river plants do some other stuff like releasing antibodies and immunity cells directly into the water. Lamarans believe them to be a divine gift).

The Guardian

The reason for this is Leviathan Guardian who, as the name might imply, guards the city and island from danger. Leviathan Guardian is generally able to almost completely wipe out whole fleets with ease, possessing many tentacles with which they'll tear through fleets, and as indicated by the leviathan corpses that the city has expanded onto stands up pretty well against beings of similar power. It asexually produces a single egg a quarter of its own size every few decades, and whenever a new leviathan hatches from that egg it will just lay in the water and do nothing, letting itself starve to death. Despite this, Guardian will still kill anything that approaches its spawn, only letting the inhabitants of the city and local wildlife feast on its child once said child has been dead for several weeks, marked by the Guardian ripping out and eating what most assume to be its child's heart.

The full extent of how Leviathan Guardian sustains itself isn't known. While it does eat the corpses of leviathans it defeats these fights aren't common enough to support it. Some think there may be a food source of some kind at the bottom of the ocean below the city, but attempts to go down and find such a thing have been unsuccessful.

The people of the city believe that the leviathan's offspring don't have souls, and that only when enough sacrifices in the form of both people and animals have been made to the leviathan will one of its offspring be mentally functional enough to not let itself starve to death due to it having a soul, and that then there may be a second City on the Sea.

This leviathan seems generally unbothered by whatever happens in the city, sometimes watching with curiosity. It's often taken as a bad sign if the leviathan is looming over and looking at your area but nothing obviously bad has happened yet, as it usually means something bad is going to happen. Some suggest this means the leviathan has future-seeing abilities, or that it just has very thorough senses and deductive reasoning.

The Bekkamons

The city is currently ruled by the Bekkamon family, although it was co-ruled by the Bekkamons and Belgratems before the Bekkamons did a little murdering. The Bekkamons claim to control the leviathan and have provided receipts for this claim in the form of it consistently responding the same way to them doing certain rituals, but not changing its behaviour in any way when a non-Bekkamon does these rituals. Most of these rituals involve at least one human or animal sacrifice.

Bekkamons are consistently horrifically deformed. Traits are typical for how inbred they are - Bekkamons actively reproducing with fellow Bekkamons - but these traits are exaggerated and then twisted into weapons. They're consistently much stronger than regular humans, having extremely high muscle density. They usually have advanced night vision, multiple rows of large pointed teeth, cannibalistic urges that they satiate during their human sacrifices (there's actually a funny double standard within the society of the city. Cannibalism is wrong unless you're a Bekkamon, basically) and are sometimes a lot larger than normal people, with the largest being 10 meters tall, although most are actually a little smaller than regular people.

They're surprisingly good at staying afloat, most likely due to the freakish degree to which they're able to expand their lungs to reduce their mass to volume ratio to one that lets them float or sink at will. They can even forcefully expand their lungs to create large vacuums inside themselves, so even if they've sunk below the water due to their weight being too much compared to their volume, they can just forcefully increase their volume without increasing their weight and so float again.

They also possess long lifespans, regenerative abilities, higher reproductive capacities (female Bekkamons often having quintuplets, mixed sex Bekkamons being quite common, gestation periods lasting only a few weeks), much more efficient metabolisms than regular humans (letting them eat surprisingly little relative to what they can do), faster growth to adulthood (sometimes in under four years) and the capacity to go into hibernation-comas for years at a time.

People weren't aware of the hibernation part until the Bekkamons did their Belgratem-slaughtering. Most Bekkamons themselves didn't know they were capable of it. Bekkamon children were for a long time separated from their parents, who were left to assume their children were being fed to the Guardian. Turns out they were being brainwashed, trained, and then put into hibernation using funky chemicals by the leader of the Bekkamons and their closest family members. These were then waken up and used as an army to wipe out the Belgratems, as well as any Bekkamons who refused to allow their clan leader total authority over the city (compared to before when there were checks and balances on power).

The Belgratems

The remaining Belgratems, some of whom were already leading roaming raider-navies separate from the city when the purge happened, have almost entirely stopped fighting one another and seem to have put a bigger focus on building up the size of their forces. I sure do wonder why they're doing that.

The Belgratems possess the ability to vibrate parts of or all of themselves at high frequencies and intensities at will, at the same time as having strong bodies resistant to the effects of these vibrations. The result of this is that one of these guys can shatter all the bones in your arm and shoulder by grabbing your wrist, and seriously damage the bones and joints in your hands if they press into you as your weapons clash in a fight (this usually also forces their opponent to drop the weapon they're using). They can also propel themselves through water with this without changing the overall position they're keeping their body in, and can easily tear through the bottoms of ships.

A favoured weapon among them is the trident, firstly so that one can easily twist it into enemy weapons to make them suffer greater vibration effects and secondly because when stabbed into someone the three points can be vibrated to turn an enemy's internal organs into mushy organ soup. The tridents they use are fully bladed, all edge at the stabby end rather than having 3 points but otherwise being rounded.

These blades are often serrated and the tridents themselves complete with attachment to chains, as the trident being serrated isn't much of an issue in terms of pulling a weapon out of someone when you can vibrate all your problems away... vibrate all your problems away. There's a joke of some kind there but my mind is blanking on me.

The Stink

The whole place stinks. I refuse to elaborate futher.

Conquest

WARNING: SPOILERS FOR THE STORY

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Rasmoden Krysa, cousin of Krysala Krysa, Empress of Lamara, uses his personal fleet to team up with some Belgratems and seize the city. This is after the Belgratems made an attempt without him and failed. A large part of the victory is because Rasmoden stole the Lamaran Royal Navy's best warship and used it to keep the Guardian busy while everyone else got into the city and fought the Bekkamons.

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The Bekkamons should've had the advantage but were in the middle of some infighting and largely blindsided. They were so confident in ability of the Guardian and the City Guard, which stayed out of factional politics to guard the city but was really weak and only effective at mopping up the broken remnants of forces that were crushed by the Guardian (and would normally be assisted by glory-chasing Bekkamons and the soldiers they hired), that they kept fighting one another even as they knew the city was under attack. By the time they realised they needed to drop what they were fighting among themselves for in order to fight Rasmoden and the Belgratems, it was too late and they were slaughtered.

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The infighting among the Bekkamons was itself caused by a Bekkamon who was bribed into starting a load of shit by Rasmoden. They forged a few documents to make certain Bekkamons think they were the rightful owners of things held by other Bekkamons, "give it to me or I start civil war", "no fuck off" -> civil war. This Bekkamon was not spared from the slaughter.

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Additionally, by the time of this conquest, the city's population had been reduced by 30%. Human sacrifices were ramped up to feed the growing number of Bekkamons, who weren't able to go into their hibernations anymore because of the Physician. The Physician works for Rasmoden's sister.

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So Rasmoden was basically the MVP of the whole operation. Which is cool and all except 3, 2, 1 AANNNND he was using them. He killed the Guardian. This forced them to use monster-repellent seaweed which also repels all the fish and stuff they would've otherwise been able to eat. So they had to mass-migrate out of the city, totally depopulating it. Rasmoden claimed they'd be welcomed as citizens in his territories within Lamara. Truth is that under Lamaran law they'd be his slaves because of them being foreigners. He pretends it's just on paper and they'd have it just as good as his actual citizens. They did not have it just as good as his actual citizens. He also kept the now almost totally depopulated floating city. And stole most of the luggage and items people migrating out of it wanted to bring with them to Lamara.

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In conclusion; never trust Rasmoden.

Demographics

Bekkamons: 50,000

Belgratems: Less than 200, all in hiding or being held captive

Non-Sea-People Peeps: Around 500,000, not including the Bekkamons. Most of these are Lamaran, however there are also many Hami, people from the Spirit Desert and other places. Most of these are either escaped slaves or the descendants of escaped slaves, primarily having escaped out of Lamara.

Sea People: Everyone else.

Around 80% of the Sea People population are Urun-zie, while the other 20% consists of other Sea People subgroups. Some organisations and gangs among the Urun-zie regularly lynch, harass and otherwise are assholes towards members of the other sub-groups, claiming that as they were the first group in the city it belongs to them. The Urun-zie itself exists mainly due to the merging of several groups. Under mixed Belgratem-Bekkamon rule these crimes were actively tracked and punished to prevent risk of anything exploding into civil war, especially as most Belgratems had a lot of mixed ancestry of the different groups as they engaged in eugenics by actively breeding with those they considered the best partners regardless of ethnicity. Bekkamons care less as their wreath-shaped family trees mean they're less likely to be related to anyone who's likely to be hurt whenever inter-group violence breaks out, and the fact that they generally refuse to socialise with non-Bekkamon people means they're even less likely to care.

Government

Some Bekkamons possess incredible memories and so are very effective at running library-like bureaucratic centers. This seems to be more to do with feeling civilized and flexing one's literacy than actually running things effectively or fairly, as in practice tax collection isn't done according to the written down rates, with soldiers with Bekkamon captains just going into areas and taking what they want before bringing it back to these centers to be hyper-thoroughly sorted. This obsession with literacy is something they adopted from Lamara after some Lamaran nobles visited the city.

While the Bekkamons are pretty ineffective governors simply due to them being detached from reality and apathetic to the suffering of regular humans, it should be noted that before their rise to power things weren't that much better. Human sacrifices were still the norm, Belgratems forced people to fight one another to the death or endure awful conditions as a means to selecting mates who had no say in the matter and to die on mass against them in arenas to hone their abilities, law was and still is openly discriminatory depending on your status - which is itself determined by your birth.

Industry & Trade

Like many cities, it guzzles resources and barfs out manufactured goods. Also lots and lots of fish.

Infrastructure

Vast expanses of floating houses all connected to one another with ropes. Large artificial islands atop floating material, are home to the larger buildings such as the bureaucratic centers, mansions and forts of the Bekkamons. Several float-lands, islands that float in the air (dirt is usually made largely of fungi or bacteria loaded with helium that are constantly making new dirt from resources in the air to make up for any that falls off) have been harpooned and remain attached to the city, and islands that float on the sea have likewise been incorporated into the city and are often guarded as treasured sources of wood and farmland.

Collections of towers linked by beam-bridges also exist, but need one another present to avoid toppling over.

Bone, often taken from dead leviathans, is just as common a building material as wood. Most homes are inhabited by the direct descendants of those who built them. Wood is taken more from ships that are taken apart and made into houses, or the houses are literally just the same ships tied into the city but with some modifications for the new stationary natures of their existences.

Transportation is primarily achieved with small canoes. If the ropes linking houses are in the way go around or if you're feeling very dangerous (and wanna risk a decent chance of someone killing you for it) cut the rope and go past it.

Districts

5 million people. I ain't naming all those districts so to be clear most people live among members of their own ethnicity. In some cases this is due to it being enforced by Bekkamons, either along the same line of logic that's present in their bureaucracy, and the rest of the time it's cos every ethnic group here hates every other ethnic group and so it's safest to live amongsmembers of your own ethnicity. Usually the closer towards the middle of an ethnic district you go the richer things are.

Assets

Big leviathan protecting it. Population of over 5 million. Highly literate leadership who could be very effective if they weren't so good at being ineffective. A huge navy with which to carry out offensive operations. Also lots of fish.

Guilds and Factions

Countless gangs which double as guilds in the classic "you sell the thing we sell in our area we come for you" way. Weapons are supposed to be illegal for regular people to own but in practice are very available.

Tourism

Some Lamaran nobles visit it but otherwise nobody wants to be in the floating slum run by what you get from crossing magic/possibly even anomalous* genes with Alabama family trees.

*not explainable by magic or science.

Architecture

Mostly a big floating slum made of boats tied together.

Geography

Lots of water that way, and that way, and this way, and that way as well, there's some more over there too, and right over there.

Founding Date

At least 800 years before the current setting, as it's around this time that the island's elites got into the whole literacy thing. Unknown length of time beforehand.

Alternative Name(s)

Island of Elite Inbreds, Demon's Isle (although this isn't a unique name), nest of the Guardian

Population

Around 5 million, however there's a lot of "left hand isn't aware of the right" issues within its governance.

Inhabitant Demonym

Sea Lambs (derogatory), the Guarded