GLOSSARY

  Anchor: A small, personalized object used to wake a spelunker out of a manse and into their actual body.

  Auxiliary Space (or aux/AUX space): A small dimension located adjacent to the world, but accessible through special equipment from inside of it. Useful for storage. Don't let a pedant hear you call one of these a pocket dimension.

  Blood: The primary store of a person’s unique innate Law. Lost or transfused blood carries its unique Law with it, producing many strange effects. Reacts with seawater to clot into a gelatinous pink substance that aids with healing.

  Chit: Small bits of impure crystal; the default currency on the seafloor. Measured by weight in civilized areas, measured by eye in undeveloped ones (though barter and favor-trading are equally as common).

  Crystal: A hard, shiny substance, usually white or clear, and a physical manifestation of reality. Anything exposed to crystal will become temporarily realer. In its purest form, it can store and amplify Law.

  Drowning: The process of a human being submerged in, and inhaling, significant amounts of seawater. Appears to stop aging, enhance healing, remove buoyancy and make most biological functions unnecessary; may also cause unspecified psychological changes. Probably not the same as being dead.

  Eidolon: An unreal doppelganger generated from a split in the psyche. Resides in a person’s head and speaks to them through thought; may also be able to borrow and pilot a person’s body. While eidolons are unusual, they are not necessarily malignant.

  Flood: Sometimes the "Great Flood." The sudden and apocalyptic rising of the sea level after the gods died simultaneously 200 years ago.

  Glass: A hard, reflective shard of extrareality, first produced from a failed attempt to manufacture crystal. Not to be confused with the kind of glass you make from sand, which has no special effects, but is inexplicably named the same.

  Glorb (or “glowbe”): Colloquial; a contraction of “glow-orb” or “glow-globe.” A sphere that contains bioluminescent algae or plankton, activated by shaking or squeezing. Variations on glorbs serve as the seafloor’s primary light source.

  God: A being with immense native control of reality. Can create or destroy Laws at will.

  Handsign: A simple sign language spoken by most people underwater. Verbal communication is difficult in the first days or weeks after drowning, as a person gets used to breathing water; handsign was developed as a workaround.

  Law: The substance of the universe; defines the who, what, when, where and how of everything that exists. Can be used as a plural, to refer to Law as an ambient force, or in the singular, to refer to an individual Law. Individual Laws take the form of basic one-word concepts, like [OPEN], but even simple objects are created from the interplay of many, many individual Laws.

  Legerdemain: The act of pulling a small object out of thin air, made possible by weaker states of reality. Works when your belief that the object should be there is stronger than the fact that it isn’t. Efficacy is improved when you have a lot of pockets and little idea what’s in them.

  Manses: Pockets of unreality, usually located inside a person’s mind. Their look and contents wildly vary depending on their owner. Logic becomes more dreamlike inside of them, which intensifies as you descend downward.

  Metaphysics: The dedicated study of Law and reality. Also known as “skiens” (pronounced sky-ens). Its practitioners are “metaphysicists” or “skientists.”

  Pagan: To Charlotte or other monotheists, this describes anything having to do with the Eight, the long-dead sea gods. Worship of the Eight is associated with the poor and drug-addicted, and is now confined to the fringes of society, if not outright prohibited.

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  Pocket Dimension: A small dimension located inside of the world. Also useful for storage. The same thing as an AUX space if you're not a pedant.

  Reality: Colloquially, everything that exists. Skientifically, a metaphysical state defined by the strength of Law in a given location.

  Seawater: The substance the ocean is made from. Abovewater, injecting it into one’s bloodstream produces a cheap high.

  Shadie

  ATLAS

  The World: Smaller than Earth. Is shaped like a flattened cylinder, far wider than it is tall. Orbited by a small and nearby moon and sun. Covered entirely by water, except for the Pillars.

  The Pillars: 16 vertical islandish city-states, built around massive bonelike spires. They contain the only remaining (artificial) land and the last known post-Flood human population. Everybody underwater used to live on one of these.

  The Ocean: Different after the Flood. It’s impossible to sail for any distance across it, and drowning in it renders a person ageless, resistant to injury, immune to hunger or thirst, water-breathing, and unable to swim back up.

  The Seafloor: The bottom of the ocean. After the Flood, this is largely former dry land, though most remnants of antediluvian civilization have been covered by two centuries of sand and muck. Nevertheless, it's still host to a variety of strange abovewater-like ecosystems. Every drowned person lives down here, whether they like it or not.

  The Corcass: The broadly swampy region located in the southeast of the seafloor.

  The Mud Flats: An open region of the Corcass. Self-descriptive. Home to old bones and a thriving camp of “skimmers,” people who dig and sluice through the mud to find chit, salvage, and pre-Flood artifacts.

  Hell: A region of the Corcass full of hydrothermal vents and salt caverns. Scaldingly hot, steamy, and often poisonous; typically avoided.

  Hellsbells A hamlet in the (cooler, less poisonous) caverns underneath Hell.

  Fenpelok (“The Fen”): A region of the Corcass, and a tangle of mud, trees, and alligators. Formerly a swamp before the Great Flood, it’s remained pretty much the same since. Known for housing smugglers and fish-people, who populated the whole region before the Flood but now keep to themselves.

  Lindew’s Landing: A small town on the outskirts of the Fen. Along with housing, it contains a bar (The Better Than Nothing), and an unnamed general store.

  Base Camp: Also known as “Camp.” The gaggle of tents where Charlotte and many of the other characters live. In theory mobile, it’s been stationed about 10 minutes away from Lindew’s Landing for the past couple years.

  The Better Than Nothing: Lindew’s Landing’s sole bar and (frankly) main attraction. Quite a few of its residents spend all day here. Charlotte also spent many days here before the quest started.

  The General Store: Lindew’s Landing’s only store, stocked mainly from infrequent shipments sourced out West. Takes chit or barter. Run by a grouchy local who’s been drowned for 15 years and still looks like a teenager. (This may be why he's grouchy?)

  Tom's Cave: The alligator-infested and bone-filled cave near Lindew's Landing. Guarded by Margo Lindew.

  The Lea: A grassland-like area of the seafloor, centrally located. Base Camp was located here before picking up sticks a few years ago.

  The West: The generally more civilized and populated half of the seafloor, owing to the complete collapse of a Pillar and the subsequent drowning of thousands and thousands of people. Home to Wind City, a Wind Court-controlled bastion of safety and "normality," and the Eyrie, the seat of their government.

  The Edge(s): The edges of the world, where the ocean drops off infinitely into nothingness. People who live near here are generally kooky; whether they live there because they're kooky or whether living there makes them kooky is a topic under hot debate.