Entry tags:
Random Travelogue
So, I feel the need to be creative, more to distract me than for any other reason. Unfortunately, I don't have much to be creative with right now. So here's some background reading for your perusal, an overview of some parts of Tempest, a city I created for a very...peculiar...science fantasy I am usually working on. It's not very well written because I don't have practice with these sorts of things, but it is what it is.
(It's also not done, but that's because I'm lazy)
What is Tempest? Tempest is the spectacle of the mundane. Tempest is a juxtaposition of contradictions. Tempest is the greatest, worst, most beautiful, ugliest, grandest, and most base city in the world. Tempest is a city of ten thousand storms, locked in a very tiny teapot that is perpetually on the boil.
Tempest owes its existence to geography. It is the fluke of geography that puts Tempest at the isthmus that keeps the Oren peninsula from becoming an island. The Oren itself is a fluke of geography, a piece of wreckage left over from the violent collision of the Shin and Salum continent with the Secris sub-continent, sticking out like a sore thumb from the eastern shore of the planet’s largest land mass. During the age of sail a sailor could cut weeks off of his voyage simply docking at one side of Tempest and moving the goods overland to the other side of the city, avoiding prevailing winds.
Geography has kept Tempest alone and isolated. The eastern shore of the Shin-Salum megacontinent is separated from the rest of the continent by thick mountain ranges. The Oren peninsula is distant from everywhere, on the fringes of the spheres of influence of the Inazawan, Northmen, Nakezi, and Rapanthan civilizations. Over its long years Tempest has been a colony, an escape, a refuge, and a dozen times a conquered province of other empires, but always far enough and distant enough to never fall too far under the sway of any one of them.
Tempest has a reputation as the least racist city on the face of the world. This reputation is false - if anything Tempest is the most racist city on the planet. Nowhere else is such a combination of races crammed into such proximity with each other. Racism in Tempest is not an abstract hatred for the distant foreigner, it is an immediate thing, grounded in the smell of your neighbor’s cooking, the sound of your coworker’s music, and sometimes even the color of your spouse’s clothes. Racism is so prevalent and all encompassing that it has over-boiled, and is now only a faded whisper of what it once was.
For hundreds of years the first families of Tempest have lived in competition with each other, but in terror of themselves. An Inazawan family made their fortune through trading what they could get in Tempest with faraway Inazawa. They might get undercut or outbid by foreign merchants, but it was only another Inazawan who could take their homeland contacts away from them. This attitude of self-paranoia has engulfed the entire rank and file of Tempest, your neighbor may be crude, obnoxious, outlandish and attempting to stab you in the face, but it was your brother who was likely to stab you in the back.
Tempest is home to Inazawans, Northmen, Rapanthans, and Nakezi, from four main cultures, a hundred subcultures, and ten thousand sub-subcultures, micro-cultures, tribal cultures, traditions, and ingrained habits. It is home to traders, salesmen, factory workers, dockhands, sailors, truck drivers, teachers, engineers, scientists, artists, actors, musicians, lawyers, and homemakers. Graffiti at Central Station is written in forty-six languages, city documents are printed in twelve, and street maps are often in three or four. The city is a riot waiting to happen, a brawl in the making, always on the edge. It has become routine. If Tempest has taught its citizens anything, it is how to get along without making a scene of things.
What is Tempest culture? Confused. Complicated. Twisted. Perhaps best described by these five commandments:
1) Speak bluntly: People of Tempest are known for being blunt. There are reasons. In a city where you regularly rub shoulders with people from so many different cultures, the intricacies of subtlety are a recipe for disaster. Subtle hints mean different things to people from different cultures. When you have to say something, say it clearly and say it loud. Innuendo is acceptable behind the scenes with people you know, but for the most part make sure you’re clear or you might get what you don’t expect.
2) Give People Their Space: Strange in a city so cramped and crowded, but space is a fundamental issue of Tempestian society. You cannot understand what everyone else does, so the only thing that you can do is give them space. Tempestians will not hesitate to mock, deride, insult, or make fun of rites and practices that they do not understand, but even the most belligerent among them rarely think of trying to stop them openly. Such things are not done. One may sabotage something quietly, but not publicly.
3) Keep to Yourself: In a reverse of the second point, people try to keep to themselves. Too often nosiness is interpreted in the worst possible way. People have enough of their own problems without trying to deal with yours. Keep your hands to yourself, keep your affairs locked away behind a door, and don’t go around bothering others. There just isn’t enough space for everyone to spread out into public, so stay private.
4) Stay out of Other People’s Problems...: This commandment probably emerged out of pure necessity. With so many people from so many places crammed so close together, misinterpretations are easy. It is hard to tell whether your neighbors dislike each other because one of them borrowed an appliance they never returned, or because of a blood feud centuries old. Stepping into the middle of a situation that you don’t understand usually only makes things worse. It isn’t done. It isn’t polite. It’s the sort of thing you do to children who don’t know any better. Given even the faintest hint of an excuse, Tempestians will ignore everything from bad cooking to a fall in status, adultery, unplanned pregnancy, or domestic violence. Well, unless-
5)...Unless They’re Yours Too: Somewhere very ill-defined lies a line beyond which a problem can no longer be kept private. At that point it becomes a community problem - everyone’s problem. One day the faint gauze of concealment may fall off, the problem may explode into public. Then it becomes public. Then it’s trouble.
Family doesn’t have a large role in Tempest, even though most people come from cultures where family was very important. Most Tempestians are descended from immigrants who left their families behind. What they have is their local community. The community gives people their space, but once something crosses that line from private to public, once someone asks for help, reaction is swift and often fierce. Even crime bosses hesitate to do something that might provoke the wrath of one of the communities nominally under their protection.
What about the people? The largest ethnic group in Tempest are the Inazawans, but the Northmen are right behind, with the Rapanthan making up some ground, and the Nakezi trailing in the rear. They come from a bewildering array of educational, religious, and social backgrounds. They have all manner of outlooks on life, all sorts of ideas about their place in the world, but they all agree that, love it or hate it, they are Tempestians.
Every Tempestian, it seems, know some things in common:
1) Where they come from: Tempest is too large to be described as a single city. It is a city of cities. Originally Tempest was divided into fourteen wards. Now it has more than forty. A Tempestian usually has a ward that they call home, one that they are proud of no matter how much they grumble about it. The vast differences between many of the wards mean that Tempestians have very different ideas of what home is, but they each know that they have one, and they know where it is, warts and all.
2) How to get where they’re going: Getting some place is a task in Tempest, not because the difficulty in finding a path, but the difficulty in choosing the one you want. People can go by surface street, underground expressway, raised expressway, bicycle, bus, subway, rail, monorail, water ferry, sidewalk, pedestrian skyway, or cable car. Although any idiot can read a subway map, Tempestians pride themselves on their knowledge of the various ways between where they are and where they usually go. In the old days shortcuts through the city’s twisted streets and confusing structures were handed down from father to son and mother to daughter. Now they are the subject of entire internet discussion forums, social apps, and long discussions over coffee, tea, or alcohol. It is a subject on which every citizen has an individual opinion, and whose secrets are often shared as a marker of the different stages through which a friendship progresses.
3) Where to get the best _____: In a city crammed with stores and shops, people develop favorites very rapidly. With its high population densities, Tempest crams thousands of people into small spaces with hundreds of restaurants, boutiques, shops, marketplaces, salons, parks, bars, and pubs. It is no wonder that people develop highly provincial and firmly held convictions about where the absolutely best place is for anything that you want to find. Brawls have been held when people disagree.
4) How much Tempest sucks this year: Tempest has sports teams in nine different leagues, but the “Tempest curse” continues, and none of them ever seem to do very well. This despite the fanatic devotion of legions of fans. Almost every Tempestian seems to have taken sides and picked one team or the other, but none of them are ever very enthusiastic about the possibilities of the season. In fact, the curse is so ingrained among the population that among the superstitious the act of one of Tempest’s teams getting to the playoffs is considered an extraordinarily bad sign.
5) How bad the weather is going to be: For most of the year Tempest’s weather is very moderate, rarely drop more than a few degrees below freezing or much above body temperature, but Tempest is the city of storms. Ever since the first storm blew out of the ocean and gave the city its name by extinguishing the fires of Tempest’s first civil war, Tempest has gotten used to getting hit by a big storm every few years. Even if you haven’t gotten one yet, people muse, one’s undoubtedly on the way. And it’ll be big. Just you wait. The sense of relief once the storm is predicted and on its way is almost palpable after all the anticipation.
6) Who’s really in charge: Tempest has an elected mayor and a ward council of representatives elected from the wards in numbers based on the ward’s population. It also has school boards, park districts, cabals of lawyers, powerful chief executives, foreign diplomats, the national parliament, community organisers, religious leaders, gang bosses, shady mafia dons, celebrities, media moguls, and anyone else you can blame things on. Tempestians while away the hours arguing about who might be in charge of the city, behind the scenes. Guesses range from the powerful Corporate Cooperative Council, a monthly meeting of the who’s who of corporate Tempest, to the absurdly weak Garrison Ward School Board, which once took two months of debate to figure out whether to turn on the light in the back of the room. Currently an increasingly popular theory is that Dancing Dan, a well known itinerant homeless man who is often seen near the City Complex, is the power behind the city. This theory has the advantage of being no less correct than any other.
7) What happened during “The Big One”: It’s been over thirty years since the “Big One”, the massive typhoon that swept across Tempest in the wake of a heat wave that sparked the largest riots in Tempest history. While the Big One was tremendously destructive, loss of human life was minimal, and it quickly put an end to what might have been thousands of deaths in a city-wide war. The fortunate timing of the storm, the suddenness with which it arose, the failure of meteorologists to predict it, and its quick dissipation afterwards have given rise to dozens of theories, and it is not uncommon for a Tempestian to have several contradictory conspiracy theories about the event.
(It's also not done, but that's because I'm lazy)
What is Tempest? Tempest is the spectacle of the mundane. Tempest is a juxtaposition of contradictions. Tempest is the greatest, worst, most beautiful, ugliest, grandest, and most base city in the world. Tempest is a city of ten thousand storms, locked in a very tiny teapot that is perpetually on the boil.
Tempest owes its existence to geography. It is the fluke of geography that puts Tempest at the isthmus that keeps the Oren peninsula from becoming an island. The Oren itself is a fluke of geography, a piece of wreckage left over from the violent collision of the Shin and Salum continent with the Secris sub-continent, sticking out like a sore thumb from the eastern shore of the planet’s largest land mass. During the age of sail a sailor could cut weeks off of his voyage simply docking at one side of Tempest and moving the goods overland to the other side of the city, avoiding prevailing winds.
Geography has kept Tempest alone and isolated. The eastern shore of the Shin-Salum megacontinent is separated from the rest of the continent by thick mountain ranges. The Oren peninsula is distant from everywhere, on the fringes of the spheres of influence of the Inazawan, Northmen, Nakezi, and Rapanthan civilizations. Over its long years Tempest has been a colony, an escape, a refuge, and a dozen times a conquered province of other empires, but always far enough and distant enough to never fall too far under the sway of any one of them.
Tempest has a reputation as the least racist city on the face of the world. This reputation is false - if anything Tempest is the most racist city on the planet. Nowhere else is such a combination of races crammed into such proximity with each other. Racism in Tempest is not an abstract hatred for the distant foreigner, it is an immediate thing, grounded in the smell of your neighbor’s cooking, the sound of your coworker’s music, and sometimes even the color of your spouse’s clothes. Racism is so prevalent and all encompassing that it has over-boiled, and is now only a faded whisper of what it once was.
For hundreds of years the first families of Tempest have lived in competition with each other, but in terror of themselves. An Inazawan family made their fortune through trading what they could get in Tempest with faraway Inazawa. They might get undercut or outbid by foreign merchants, but it was only another Inazawan who could take their homeland contacts away from them. This attitude of self-paranoia has engulfed the entire rank and file of Tempest, your neighbor may be crude, obnoxious, outlandish and attempting to stab you in the face, but it was your brother who was likely to stab you in the back.
Tempest is home to Inazawans, Northmen, Rapanthans, and Nakezi, from four main cultures, a hundred subcultures, and ten thousand sub-subcultures, micro-cultures, tribal cultures, traditions, and ingrained habits. It is home to traders, salesmen, factory workers, dockhands, sailors, truck drivers, teachers, engineers, scientists, artists, actors, musicians, lawyers, and homemakers. Graffiti at Central Station is written in forty-six languages, city documents are printed in twelve, and street maps are often in three or four. The city is a riot waiting to happen, a brawl in the making, always on the edge. It has become routine. If Tempest has taught its citizens anything, it is how to get along without making a scene of things.
What is Tempest culture? Confused. Complicated. Twisted. Perhaps best described by these five commandments:
1) Speak bluntly: People of Tempest are known for being blunt. There are reasons. In a city where you regularly rub shoulders with people from so many different cultures, the intricacies of subtlety are a recipe for disaster. Subtle hints mean different things to people from different cultures. When you have to say something, say it clearly and say it loud. Innuendo is acceptable behind the scenes with people you know, but for the most part make sure you’re clear or you might get what you don’t expect.
2) Give People Their Space: Strange in a city so cramped and crowded, but space is a fundamental issue of Tempestian society. You cannot understand what everyone else does, so the only thing that you can do is give them space. Tempestians will not hesitate to mock, deride, insult, or make fun of rites and practices that they do not understand, but even the most belligerent among them rarely think of trying to stop them openly. Such things are not done. One may sabotage something quietly, but not publicly.
3) Keep to Yourself: In a reverse of the second point, people try to keep to themselves. Too often nosiness is interpreted in the worst possible way. People have enough of their own problems without trying to deal with yours. Keep your hands to yourself, keep your affairs locked away behind a door, and don’t go around bothering others. There just isn’t enough space for everyone to spread out into public, so stay private.
4) Stay out of Other People’s Problems...: This commandment probably emerged out of pure necessity. With so many people from so many places crammed so close together, misinterpretations are easy. It is hard to tell whether your neighbors dislike each other because one of them borrowed an appliance they never returned, or because of a blood feud centuries old. Stepping into the middle of a situation that you don’t understand usually only makes things worse. It isn’t done. It isn’t polite. It’s the sort of thing you do to children who don’t know any better. Given even the faintest hint of an excuse, Tempestians will ignore everything from bad cooking to a fall in status, adultery, unplanned pregnancy, or domestic violence. Well, unless-
5)...Unless They’re Yours Too: Somewhere very ill-defined lies a line beyond which a problem can no longer be kept private. At that point it becomes a community problem - everyone’s problem. One day the faint gauze of concealment may fall off, the problem may explode into public. Then it becomes public. Then it’s trouble.
Family doesn’t have a large role in Tempest, even though most people come from cultures where family was very important. Most Tempestians are descended from immigrants who left their families behind. What they have is their local community. The community gives people their space, but once something crosses that line from private to public, once someone asks for help, reaction is swift and often fierce. Even crime bosses hesitate to do something that might provoke the wrath of one of the communities nominally under their protection.
What about the people? The largest ethnic group in Tempest are the Inazawans, but the Northmen are right behind, with the Rapanthan making up some ground, and the Nakezi trailing in the rear. They come from a bewildering array of educational, religious, and social backgrounds. They have all manner of outlooks on life, all sorts of ideas about their place in the world, but they all agree that, love it or hate it, they are Tempestians.
Every Tempestian, it seems, know some things in common:
1) Where they come from: Tempest is too large to be described as a single city. It is a city of cities. Originally Tempest was divided into fourteen wards. Now it has more than forty. A Tempestian usually has a ward that they call home, one that they are proud of no matter how much they grumble about it. The vast differences between many of the wards mean that Tempestians have very different ideas of what home is, but they each know that they have one, and they know where it is, warts and all.
2) How to get where they’re going: Getting some place is a task in Tempest, not because the difficulty in finding a path, but the difficulty in choosing the one you want. People can go by surface street, underground expressway, raised expressway, bicycle, bus, subway, rail, monorail, water ferry, sidewalk, pedestrian skyway, or cable car. Although any idiot can read a subway map, Tempestians pride themselves on their knowledge of the various ways between where they are and where they usually go. In the old days shortcuts through the city’s twisted streets and confusing structures were handed down from father to son and mother to daughter. Now they are the subject of entire internet discussion forums, social apps, and long discussions over coffee, tea, or alcohol. It is a subject on which every citizen has an individual opinion, and whose secrets are often shared as a marker of the different stages through which a friendship progresses.
3) Where to get the best _____: In a city crammed with stores and shops, people develop favorites very rapidly. With its high population densities, Tempest crams thousands of people into small spaces with hundreds of restaurants, boutiques, shops, marketplaces, salons, parks, bars, and pubs. It is no wonder that people develop highly provincial and firmly held convictions about where the absolutely best place is for anything that you want to find. Brawls have been held when people disagree.
4) How much Tempest sucks this year: Tempest has sports teams in nine different leagues, but the “Tempest curse” continues, and none of them ever seem to do very well. This despite the fanatic devotion of legions of fans. Almost every Tempestian seems to have taken sides and picked one team or the other, but none of them are ever very enthusiastic about the possibilities of the season. In fact, the curse is so ingrained among the population that among the superstitious the act of one of Tempest’s teams getting to the playoffs is considered an extraordinarily bad sign.
5) How bad the weather is going to be: For most of the year Tempest’s weather is very moderate, rarely drop more than a few degrees below freezing or much above body temperature, but Tempest is the city of storms. Ever since the first storm blew out of the ocean and gave the city its name by extinguishing the fires of Tempest’s first civil war, Tempest has gotten used to getting hit by a big storm every few years. Even if you haven’t gotten one yet, people muse, one’s undoubtedly on the way. And it’ll be big. Just you wait. The sense of relief once the storm is predicted and on its way is almost palpable after all the anticipation.
6) Who’s really in charge: Tempest has an elected mayor and a ward council of representatives elected from the wards in numbers based on the ward’s population. It also has school boards, park districts, cabals of lawyers, powerful chief executives, foreign diplomats, the national parliament, community organisers, religious leaders, gang bosses, shady mafia dons, celebrities, media moguls, and anyone else you can blame things on. Tempestians while away the hours arguing about who might be in charge of the city, behind the scenes. Guesses range from the powerful Corporate Cooperative Council, a monthly meeting of the who’s who of corporate Tempest, to the absurdly weak Garrison Ward School Board, which once took two months of debate to figure out whether to turn on the light in the back of the room. Currently an increasingly popular theory is that Dancing Dan, a well known itinerant homeless man who is often seen near the City Complex, is the power behind the city. This theory has the advantage of being no less correct than any other.
7) What happened during “The Big One”: It’s been over thirty years since the “Big One”, the massive typhoon that swept across Tempest in the wake of a heat wave that sparked the largest riots in Tempest history. While the Big One was tremendously destructive, loss of human life was minimal, and it quickly put an end to what might have been thousands of deaths in a city-wide war. The fortunate timing of the storm, the suddenness with which it arose, the failure of meteorologists to predict it, and its quick dissipation afterwards have given rise to dozens of theories, and it is not uncommon for a Tempestian to have several contradictory conspiracy theories about the event.