1407 — The Molars Of Leviathan

An ocean-borne fortress of dull metal sits in the water just off a sandy peninsula, spewing forth a haze of smoke in which the scent of industrial grease and ritual incense mingles. This is a Grand Warship of Riccamino, the only so far to make landfall. Other Occult-Futurist vessels and troops scurry around it like ants, keeping the menacing hulk of metal functional and maintaining their war camp on the shore. The air is thick with low-hanging balloons, and the shapes of more warships dot the horizon.

The ship consists of a bulbous main body, with a long counterweight extending off of it. The counterweight can be filled with water to stand the ship on its end, causing the ship to become a tower from which the Occult-Futurists can survey, work magic, and fire artillery magical and mundane onto their enemies. As a result, the deck and every room in the vessel must be walkable from two different orientations.

To help visualize this, here is the real-world vessel that inspired this idea.

Command of the vessel, fleet, and surroundings is in the hands of Admiral Elisha Sala (he/him), a prominent figure in the Riccaminoan expansion effort. He is a man in his 50s, popular among the rank and file for his gentle humor, which helps puts them at ease with his orders of violence. His time is divided between negotiations with Catagean diplomats (flown in via a luxury airship, so that they need not sully themselves by traversing their own prison colony on foot), delegating the tasks of mundane management to the officers that make up his War Table, and weaving more esoteric and long term plans with his Recondite Table.

The Recondite Table has an ambitious scheme in motion. The Catagean prison colony efforts struck them as a quaint effort unsuited to actually bringing an age of prosperous law. As the Occult-Futurists see it, the damaged society of Catage will continue to produce Evil-Doers (a favored term of disgust) because it has not yet arrived at the conclusion that Evil-Doers need not to be sequestered into their appropriate place, but rather their appropriate time. The Recondite Table has noted what they take as the artificial timelessness of the wilds, with old cities reborn and the fingers of ancient kings still shaping the world, and have come to the conclusion that the geography and chronology of imprisonment can be combined here: with the right effort, every Evil-Doer of history and the potential future could be sequestered to this time and place, leaving the world clear for the Occult-Futurist’s inevitable global utopia, able to forge forward with a rightness of purpose untainted that will need no further input to uphold their own values. It won’t be so simple of course, but the Admiral and Recondite Table will act to seize resources and locations that they deem useful to this plan, when they become aware of them.

The Molars of Leviathan and surrounding camp and fleet act as a city by TNU’s economic standards. The Molars itself has a crew of 300, and when the rest of the fleet is accounted for the Occult-Futurists number near 2000. Most never touch the shore at all. The fleet’s current political ascendancy has given it a privileged position with regards to supply lines, and if you have them money and a willingness to spend time in and around a fascist military, almost any mundane good can be acquired from someone somewhere in the fleet. Machinery and industrial parts are a specialty, and soldiers confined to their vessels are often willing to make clandestine trades for less common oddities, favors, and furnishings.

Some notable denizens and locations:

Marion Carre (she/her) is the Merchant-Industrialist diplomat currently aboard the ship. She is primarily concerned with keeping the Occult-Futurist aggression towards the released prisoners mollified. A humanist through and through, she firmly holds that their exile will impart the right lessons to mold a majority of them into worthwhile citizenry. She debates with the Occult-Futurists around her, arguing against their philosophical contempt for this idea. A small number of converts have seen her reason through rhetoric, and some more have seen it valuable to humor her requests until they know that Catage has no secret weapon of retaliation it could bring to bear on the fleet for ignoring her words.

Anton (he/him) is easy to find in the camps on the shoreline. He knows the whens and wheres of any valuables that drop off the back of a boat on their way through the huge and messy supply lines, and will point anyone to where they can get illicit goods going in or out of the fleet. He hasn’t been disciplined for this yet mostly because the people responsible for doing so rely on him. His more serious crime is harboring Aerialist-Egalitarian sympathies, and breaking the Occult-Futurist rule about encroaching on the seafloor by secretly storing sunken caches of valuables.

A small encampment of wizards and scrap collectors has formed on the margins of the camp, stealing Occult-Futurist trash and trying to extract its powers or flip it for coins. In turn, glass thieves from the firmament steal from them at night without their knowledge. There is much mistrust between the various scavengers, whose tenuous alliances are often shaken by thefts real and imagined. The Occult-Futurists assign a small force to make sure they don’t cause trouble for the war effort, but it is not a job that is taken seriously — they drink and take bets on the ensuing brawls.

One of the less accessible munitions storerooms of the Molars of Leviathan is the hiding place of 23 stowaway devils. They yearn to escape but have not found an opportunity.

I named the Molars of Leviathan after a painting by Wayne Barlowe, whos work I like a lot. Seeing his art in various media as well as browsing his site where a lot of it is collected is a big inspiration for me.