Hlo-Aghu'u

Demographics

The majority of this village's inhabitants tend to be Viridians, as indicated by the sheer profusion of housegourds. There are but a mere spattering of humans here, who are rangers and hunters who patrol the village's borders.

Government

There is an autocratic chieftain, whose word is law, and he listens to a shaman who communicates with spirits. While the chieftain governs domestic concerns, he is known as one who only dictates the matters of the earth. All spiritual needs are contended to by the shaman, who congregates and converses with his fellow shamans hailing from the local villages and hamlets, who constitute the local government known as the Corax Conclave. The shaman owns no land, enforces no laws, but he is regarded with great respect and dignity.
The chieftain must answer to a lord, who protects and manages the laws territory as well as others, and decides who may hold what authority on his land. He must also uphold the lord's laws upon his own people - however, because of the village's remoteness, he tends to let them off with most minor offenses. That lord in turn swears fealty to a Count, which in this case hails from Zalmais, where he rules a similarly-sized feudal state.

Defences

Outside the fields there are triangular walls of packed earth, surrounded by the remains of sharpened stakes. These are antiquated relics from a barbarous period when many petty skirmishes occurred around this region. Otherwise there is nothing more than several lookout posts where mercenaries with rifles stand guard, and native defenders are there, armed with blowpipes and longbows are stationed there on a rotational schedule. Offroad there are pits containing punji sticks smeared in shit, which is why people are warned not to go there. Empty trenches suggest old moats. Lookout posts stocked with ammo and rations are obscured in thickets.

Industry & Trade

The greatest export of this village is Inkroot, which grows in many sodden fields outside the village proper. These are shipped downstream to be dried and fermented into activated inkroot, where they will be used by monks and scriveners and the like, or more recently, the printing companies which require vast quantities of it, and thus in recent years after the arrival of foreign mercantile corporations the demand for it has risen steeply. Inkroot is the village's cash crop, because they require none of it. They have no need for writing implements. Modest-quality tea leaves are grown in limited amounts, in a few plots of land here and there.
They also quarry a bit of limestone from the surrounding country where it is ground into quicklime downstream. Herbs are also collected from the local vicinities where they are processed into various potions and ointments, and a spattering of stark raw meat and hides from local game are shipped downriver to be cured and tanned. Not much else is traded by this village, but they have no metal so they must acquire their equipment from foreigners - they spend very little on imports, being mostly self-sufficient, but they make their contributions. These buy glass lenses for religious purposes, cow tallow, parasaults, and many things for aesthetic value.

Infrastructure

There is a network of irrigation channels which funnel the muddy, tepid waters of the River Grawsko into the town, and it is cut in crumbly soil and lined with thirsty roots that must be pruned daily. They are maintained with wooden floodgates that are opened and closed at the command of the shaman to prevent floods and droughts. Every field in the village's vicinity is threaded through with the irrigation canals, but the same goes with the village proper, where they replace gutters so that they might water the ravenous housegourds' need for nutrient. Low bridges made from woven flax skip over the canals for easy access - they are usually meter-wide at most. Occasionally the canals dry up, and thus the waters must occasionally be stored in reservoirs when it's hot.
Overlooking the fields are feathered totems dedicated to the local fertility-goddess.

Assets

If Hlo-Aghu'u were to be burned down the homegourds would be replanted in a day and the village would grow back in a month. In hidden caches they keep repositories of homegourd seeds, enough to grow a whole city. These are kept secret and their existence is known only by the shaman and his most ardent trusted disciples. They are contained in shelves, in airtight ceramic jars that have been glued shut in a cold and robust room.
Also they have an excess of inkroot and cassava flour, which is used for bread.
People hang from the vines between homegourds polished ivory and lacquered palm wood talismans against disease and misfortune, and some of these talismans signify friendship and brotherhood.
There is a repository of soaps, used for religious purposes.
The chief hoards his jewellery crafted from amber and bronze, worn only on special occasions.
They have a decent supply of hoes and shovels, and bags of bone meal and ashes for fertilizing crops. Sometimes they use manure, and they spread compost upon their fallow fields, which rot quick in the hot clime.

Architecture

Being a Viridian settlement, almost every building is constituted from a specific breed of thick-hided blue-green Homegourd, and here they are carved into girthy three-storey towers which narrow a little bit around the middle. In this particular municipality the Homegourds are often draped with flowering vines, who spread out to other houses, eliminating the need for a washing line - but during spring, one's own clothes are powdered with pollen as the flower bulbs erupt in manifold explosions of bright indigo and magenta popping up all over those vines. Older streets find themselves completely obscured by bowers of said vines dangling down here and there. Looking up, the skyline is completely engulfed by a network of vines stretching from one building to another.
Windows are very tiny, slanting and arched, so that the most of the heat is conserved within the Homegourds. Some parts, especially the very antiquated buildings, find themselves overlapping with each other, forming structurally complicated agglomerations of vegetable flesh that must be heavily maintained with many rooms. There are no corridors, only irregular doorways and hatches leading in awry directions, rarely ever horizontally. The roots become woody and tangled and extend far below, some even needing to be pruned at regular times.
Some have even managed to carve them into little cellars. Roofs are usually flat or even concave and people sleep on them. Sleeping indoors is considered a deviant new custom introduced by foreign traders, and edgy, xenophilic youths instinctively imitate this because it's held taboo. It is usually their loss when they wake up pallid, gasping and deprived of the glorious morning sunlight - an ailment masked by a coat of green paint.

Geography

Hlo-Aghu'u is connected to the Grawsko river, and is at a great distance from it - its surroundings are semi-arid. It is based in a mountainous valley in a shallow, sandy basin situated amid what would usually be hill-country. The hill-country is very lightly forested, with the occasional copse of beech and kapok scattered here and there. There are thickets of ground hugging fern trees and many other types of large-leafed, broad shrubs which indicate the presence of a jungle destroyed long ago by slash-and-burn agriculture. There are mats of moss.

Type

Village

Population

459

Inhabitant Demonym

Hloddi