Meza

The original town was built atop a pillar of basalt for defensive purposes, over 2000 years ago. Since its founding by the 16 families, the population has grown from 1500 to 14,000. Has spilled off the plateau and onto the canyon floor. Gardens and orchards fill the canyon from the defensive bank and ditch to the scarps nearly a mile away. Beyond the cliffs are the scab lands, a rough and tumble landscape of volcanic rock thin soil and almost no surface water. Atop the pillar, houses are built a volcanic basalt and roofed with clay tiles. Below the mesa, important buildings are constructed of adobe brick. While many family homes, stretch woven cane plastered with clay between timber posts to form their walls. Roofs in the lower quarters of the town are mostly thatched with tulies. Houses above and below are built around communal courtyards The Moat is a collapsed lava tube approximately 5 miles wide and greater than 100 miles long stretching from Shasta in the north to the Joaquin fens in the south. the Moat has one river flowing from the north fed by three smaller rivers flowing down from the scab lands in the east and west as well as hundreds of underground streams and small springs. South of Night's ferry another river flows down for the Pax plains in through a break in the western scarp. There exist numerous villages within the Moat and a very few in the Scab lands. The human people are copper skinned and dark haired. Blonds are rare and blue eyes almost non existent. Nonhuman people tend to be lighter in complexion. Individual Feral and Earthborn people regularly marry into human families living on the edges of the Moat where available hands are too few and an uncivilized skill-set may put food on the table. Meza on the other hand is jealous of its bloodlines, and recalls in myth a time when humans were the dominant species. Other large towns in the Moat include Pacheco controlling a ford on the Sacre river. They control the salt trade from villages near the north edge of the Fens. Tehama town on the Feather river trades obsidian to other towns. That mineral is quarried from Mount Tehama and Lassen.

Type

Large town