The Awakened

"None can remember how we came to the Eternal City. Of the untold millions released from the vaults beneath the City, it seems only one in a thousand possesses even a sliver of memory from before the Eternal City. Only a common language and a scattering of concepts are left to us, the only clues of whatever identity we may have once possessed. We have been placed here, in this City without border or boundary, as plants in a window-box. This world is not ours. I wish therefore to know who placed me here, and why."

Polmel, First Awakened, Memoirs of the First Generation

Civilization and Culture

Naming Traditions

Awakened names consist of two halves, both no more than two syllables apiece, and a title. The first half is a personal choice, often chosen simply to stand out. The second half designates which family the individual is from. The title is meant to identify the individual's place in society, and can be more or less complicated depending on what role they serve in a community. The Awakened do not have gendered names.
e.g. Luel Teller is a member of the family line "el," and a storyteller (or historian, depending on what sort of telling it is that he's pursuing.)

Major Organizations

• The Cartographer's Guild

The most prominent of any organization that isn't a full-on government, the Cartographer's Guild is a loose collection of explorers, scholars, and map-makers whose goal is the complete exploration of the Eternal City. They have a branch in every Sector, providing their services both to the governments and to individual wanderers. They are generally considered indispensable to the Outer Sectors for their ability to find places for human habitation.

• Church of the Eternal City

Out of all the religious cults and practices that have sprung from the collective imagination of the Awakened, the most widespread and accepted is the Church of the Eternal City. It is a pantheistic religion, one that deifies the City's mechanisms and components as part of a divine construct, and its clerics are most interested in discerning the purpose behind their placement. Practically speaking, the Church's role is mostly administrative. They oversee weddings and funerals, keep records of their loyal adherents, provide a limited curriculum of education for children and maintain collections of religious works out of the Library's purview.

• The Library of Polmel

Founded by the scientist and philosopher Polmel, the Library is a formal organization whose purpose is truly twofold. On the surface, the Library's interests are in science and history. They help the Sector governments maintain their archives and registries, collect and disseminate written work to the public, and establish written records of scientific discoveries. Among its senior members however, the Library has a secondary, less immediately obvious goal; mastery of the Eternal City's mechanisms. The Library's technicians are the most skilled at operating the City's many terminals and mechanisms, and it is a commonly-held goal of a senior Librarian to get their hands on a damaged or otherwise inactive Custodian.

Beauty Ideals

The Awakened standard of beauty is far from universal. Denizens of the Inner Sectors, where the arts are more established and depictions of the human form are easiest to come by, have multiple schools of thought centered around the ideal form of men, women, and humanity writ large, with no single idea ever taking precedence. The Outer Sectors are slightly more convergent, generally valuing features that imply ruggedness and strength as marks of beauty, but what features imply that kind of strength vary from territory to territory.

Average Technological Level

The Awakened place a heavy distinction between technology invented by their own members and technology reclaimed from or provided the city. The former category, while a shining example of humanity's ingenuity, is somewhat sparse. Wooden and metal tools are rare and crude, due to the materials not being readily available. With the limited materials provided by the city, most Awakened achievements are limited to the fields of cartography and textiles. Most favoured by travelers and transients is Waystring, a tough and high-tensile string wound into a multi-spooled spindle and used to navigate the seemingly featureless blocks of the Concrete Wastes.
By contrast, the Awakened's ability to wrangle the city's infrastructure is more developed. Through Terminals in the center of the sector, suitably-trained humans can input requests of the Custodians. Thus far their abilities are limited to requesting lots to be cleared for farmland, changing priorities for repairs, and organizing the building of structures from prefabricated blueprints.

Major Language Groups and Dialects

All Awakened language splits off from a common tongue, the speech their ancestors were capable of when they first awoke from their pods. This language, known as City-Tongue, is a common thread connecting all humans, and the language in which all formal, religious, and legal functions are performed in. It is unknown if this was a shared language from before the Awakened arrived in the Eternal City, or if the City somehow taught it to humanity during their slumber.
Further into the city, further from the mainstream, two distinct dialects have arisen among transients and wanderers. The merchant convoys of the Inner Sectors have developed a flashy "trade-tongue" meant to catch the attention of prospective customers while eliding possible shortcomings in the product. Emphasizing strong vowels, and eccentric hand gestures, it is immediately recognizable as City-Tongue but so full of euphemisms that non-speakers can be lead astray. Conversely, the scavengers and traders of the Concrete Wastes have their own trade-tongue, "scrap-tongue." It is a harsh-sounded language of hard consonants, slurred suffixes, and grim allusions, and proper citizens consider it coarse and improper.

Common Customs, Traditions and Rituals

Due to the nature of their experiences and their bizarre current circumstances, the Awakened have a small bevvy of spiritual traditions. Just about every family has some manner of quirk, be it knocking three times on a door before entering a dwelling place or standing in the presence of a Custodian. Chief among these traditions is the Calm Hour. Just about every Awakened sets aside an hour a day for meditation, either alone or with family members, and this hour is treated as sacrosanct. Originally, this hour was meant to pry loose memories of the forgotten past, a purpose that the Church still encourages for the freshly-awakened. For the children who were born into this world, the Calm Hour serves more as an orienting moment.
Beyond the Calm Hour, the Awakened are by-and-large pantheists. Custodian tribute is common in just about every major village, where scrappers and salvagers offer portions of their salvage to Custodian models. This places where the Faith is particularly strong, the bodies of the dead are offered in tribute to the Custodians under the belief that the soul of the deceased will be returned to the City in some way.

Common Taboos

The Awakened have only one major taboo: do not mess with the internal workings of the City. Children are told to avoid the small maintenance tunnels utilized by the Custodians, librarians are forbidden from making major alterations to the Terminals, and scrappers who've acquired Custodian parts are either shunned or outright turned away by most Awakened enclaves.

History

The first generation of humans awoke in a massive antechamber deep under what would become the First Sector. These first Awakened found themselves alone in a world of glass, concrete and metal, a world that seemed at first glance to be built for them. Those first recorded months of history were filled with uncertainty, confusion and fear. While shelter was readily available, food was not a commodity that the City readily provided. The first tribes of the Awakened spent their early existence eking out boundaries and territories for themselves, searching both for resources and for answers. To this day, both are sparse.
Currently, the Awakened are split between thirteen city states, informally known as Sectors on account of the mapping traditions. The First Sector is widely considered the most powerful, both due to its' history as the Awakened's "birthplace" and because of clever mapping on the part of its' chief cartographers, putting it in the center of the Awakened's territory.

Historical Figures

• Polmel, the First Awakened:

the first proper leader of the Awakened, chosen for her force of personality and her quick wit. Technically Polmel was only one of the first 500 Awakened who rose from their slumber, but the title she earned is more symbolic than accurate. It was Polmel who discovered that the City's terminals could be made to direct Custodians, and it was she who first ordered land to be cleared for farming. Polmel's efforts were instrumental to the founding of the first three Sectors, both through her administrative genius and her endless hunger for answers. She died at age 73 of natural causes.

• Dejen, the Arch-Druid:

the founder of the Church of the Eternal City. Dejen was a student of Polmel, who was hopelessly enamoured with the Custodians from a young age. Originally a cartographer, his work rapidly became an encyclopedia of theories, accounts and stories from across the Awakened, at once forming the holy texts of the Church and setting a precedent for Awakened Encyclopedic culture. He is most famous for his refurbishing of Sector 11 via control of the Custodians, years before the sector was properly settled. He died at age 85, handing his role off to his son Mejen and setting one final precedent for the Church's hierarchy.

Scientific Name

Homo Sapiens Sapiens