Aug 5, 2017 12:26 am
One of the great difficulties of surviving in the sky is a lack of arable soil and a tragic absence of grazing room for herds. How does one persevere in a world so utterly devoid of resources?
Hunger makes a thief of any man...
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Aug 5, 2017 12:07 pm
Assuming this is a character specific question, Twilight makes his way doing odd jobs for the most part helping out different groups when they need an extra gun or someone to run through the streets. Some days he's keeping lookout over some scavengers safety line while they head down below, making sure the news that Armstrong puts out gets to all the people of the city or just taking packages between the settlements. He exists on a fine line between everyone keeping him at arms length thanks to his habit of making sure anyone who tries to lay claim to him or control his movement doesn't stick around to become a long term problem and the fact that in a city full of different gangs and competing factions hes one of very few with a specific set of features including
-As far as anyone can tell a lack of long term plans or machinations in the city
-Capable of surviving and dealing out any violence necessary
-willing to travel around the city
-Open to freelance for whoever will pay him or keep him fed
When people aren't paying though he makes do with picking clean what others leave behind or anyone he finds who didn't make it out of the mists in time when the tide gets low.
If we're talking larger scale the main sources of food in the city would be the sparse produce output by the old rooftop and indoor gardens of the taller buildings-now converted to small farmlands, the traders from across the acrid sea- bringing food from foreign harbors some with land enough above the mist to grow an excess of food but only willing to trade for the valuable salvage of the city and whos location is kept private among those who travel between them and finally for the desperate masses the lower reaches of the city prove fertile land for toxic fungi and some small mutated creatures harvested from below much like fish from the sea of the golden age.
-As far as anyone can tell a lack of long term plans or machinations in the city
-Capable of surviving and dealing out any violence necessary
-willing to travel around the city
-Open to freelance for whoever will pay him or keep him fed
When people aren't paying though he makes do with picking clean what others leave behind or anyone he finds who didn't make it out of the mists in time when the tide gets low.
If we're talking larger scale the main sources of food in the city would be the sparse produce output by the old rooftop and indoor gardens of the taller buildings-now converted to small farmlands, the traders from across the acrid sea- bringing food from foreign harbors some with land enough above the mist to grow an excess of food but only willing to trade for the valuable salvage of the city and whos location is kept private among those who travel between them and finally for the desperate masses the lower reaches of the city prove fertile land for toxic fungi and some small mutated creatures harvested from below much like fish from the sea of the golden age.
Last edited August 5, 2017 12:14 pm
Aug 5, 2017 8:55 pm
The city is overcrowded, sure, but it's nowhere near the population this place was in the Golden Age. There's a few less mouths to feed, so there's some time to recover.
The first major boon we have are the farms. The farms take up a huge chunk of the city but not in the way you expect. Upper stories of skyscrapers with decent south facing balconies, or walls ripped clean out from them, are given over to vertical farms. They're kept alive using hydroponics or the little bits of fertile soil left from the Great Northern Park Dig two years back (ask Lattice about it sometime if you really want more info than you ever wanted to hear about digging up topsoil).
Recycling is the name of the game up here, and people have been lucky in the fact that some of the smarter folk up here when it all went wrong knew a little about sanitation and agriculture. Sewage pasteurisers boil everyone's detritus and turns it back into safe fertiliser, windmills sticking out of the side of buildings grind whatever grain is farmed into flour for bread, and some folk breed pigeons and rats for the few people powerful enough to demand real eggs and meat (most of us eat Tofu for protein). And yeah, there're mushroom farms and... whatever "fishing" brings up.
It's quite an achievement; and every warlord has a savvyhead "on retainer" (enslaved, or at least watched over constantly so that they can never leave) to fix anything that goes wrong with these vital systems.
That being said, with no raw materials or serious manufacturing, everything that gets broken needs replacing; either by sending one of the Scavs down to try and find something like it, or putting an order in from one of the traders and waiting a month; either way you'll be paying out the nose for it.
And so this is where the folk-hero scavs come in. Decked out in dark protective clothes over whatever sealed suit they can wrangle together, scavs drop down in pairs or small groups to street level, silently try to find some score based on old surviving maps, and winch it back up to the surface before it gets too dark or the things that can hear your heartbeat emerge and pull you kicking and screaming down to Maelstrom knows where.
With so many things likely to go wrong for them, scavs as a whole don't live very long, and Lattice is currently the only major outlier, beating the life expectancy of that career by six or seven years and counting. People getting close to a Scav are just setting themselves up for inevitable news of them being lost to a suit rupture, or being crushed by falling debris, or being claimed by whatever live down there in the mist.
The first major boon we have are the farms. The farms take up a huge chunk of the city but not in the way you expect. Upper stories of skyscrapers with decent south facing balconies, or walls ripped clean out from them, are given over to vertical farms. They're kept alive using hydroponics or the little bits of fertile soil left from the Great Northern Park Dig two years back (ask Lattice about it sometime if you really want more info than you ever wanted to hear about digging up topsoil).
Recycling is the name of the game up here, and people have been lucky in the fact that some of the smarter folk up here when it all went wrong knew a little about sanitation and agriculture. Sewage pasteurisers boil everyone's detritus and turns it back into safe fertiliser, windmills sticking out of the side of buildings grind whatever grain is farmed into flour for bread, and some folk breed pigeons and rats for the few people powerful enough to demand real eggs and meat (most of us eat Tofu for protein). And yeah, there're mushroom farms and... whatever "fishing" brings up.
It's quite an achievement; and every warlord has a savvyhead "on retainer" (enslaved, or at least watched over constantly so that they can never leave) to fix anything that goes wrong with these vital systems.
That being said, with no raw materials or serious manufacturing, everything that gets broken needs replacing; either by sending one of the Scavs down to try and find something like it, or putting an order in from one of the traders and waiting a month; either way you'll be paying out the nose for it.
And so this is where the folk-hero scavs come in. Decked out in dark protective clothes over whatever sealed suit they can wrangle together, scavs drop down in pairs or small groups to street level, silently try to find some score based on old surviving maps, and winch it back up to the surface before it gets too dark or the things that can hear your heartbeat emerge and pull you kicking and screaming down to Maelstrom knows where.
With so many things likely to go wrong for them, scavs as a whole don't live very long, and Lattice is currently the only major outlier, beating the life expectancy of that career by six or seven years and counting. People getting close to a Scav are just setting themselves up for inevitable news of them being lost to a suit rupture, or being crushed by falling debris, or being claimed by whatever live down there in the mist.
Last edited August 5, 2017 9:09 pm
Aug 8, 2017 3:29 am
Atlus Terminal has somewhere between 75-150 souls at any given time. There are scavs, farmers, and merchants that work closely with the Blood-Sparrows for protection. Everyone gets a slice of the pie in some way or another.
The scavs, called "groundlings" by the gang, venture to the surface and bring back raw materials. They sometimes bring... extra problems, which are dealt with. Their either sell their goods themselves at the market, trade for other things, or they bring them to the Blood-Sparrow's manufactory in exchange for a place to sleep and some food.
The farmers are actually pretty wealthy, compared to everyone else. Space is limited in the tower, but they usually have a whole balcony for themselves. Oddly shaped fruits, vegetables, and small animals are grown and sold by the farmers. Sometimes a farmer gets a little too cocky, makes a little too much jingle, and ends up breeding something dangerous. Sometimes the farmers outright fight each other for better territory. As long as the food production continues, the Blood-Sparrows let them sort themselves out.
The merchants have the easiest and most cutthroat occupation within Atlas Terminal. Anyone with a little hots and charisma can make a quick bit of jingle. There are always new suckers arriving to trade, so some merchants survive just by cheating people. Any disputes are dealt with by the Blood-Sparrows, and punishments range from "severe" to "deadly". However, the bustling market is relatively safe for the most part. Goods exchanged at the terminal come from all over the city, and you can almost always find what you are looking for. There might be some sub-gangs, cults, and other groups, but they usually fall if shit hits the fan.
The scavs, called "groundlings" by the gang, venture to the surface and bring back raw materials. They sometimes bring... extra problems, which are dealt with. Their either sell their goods themselves at the market, trade for other things, or they bring them to the Blood-Sparrow's manufactory in exchange for a place to sleep and some food.
The farmers are actually pretty wealthy, compared to everyone else. Space is limited in the tower, but they usually have a whole balcony for themselves. Oddly shaped fruits, vegetables, and small animals are grown and sold by the farmers. Sometimes a farmer gets a little too cocky, makes a little too much jingle, and ends up breeding something dangerous. Sometimes the farmers outright fight each other for better territory. As long as the food production continues, the Blood-Sparrows let them sort themselves out.
The merchants have the easiest and most cutthroat occupation within Atlas Terminal. Anyone with a little hots and charisma can make a quick bit of jingle. There are always new suckers arriving to trade, so some merchants survive just by cheating people. Any disputes are dealt with by the Blood-Sparrows, and punishments range from "severe" to "deadly". However, the bustling market is relatively safe for the most part. Goods exchanged at the terminal come from all over the city, and you can almost always find what you are looking for. There might be some sub-gangs, cults, and other groups, but they usually fall if shit hits the fan.
Aug 8, 2017 12:48 pm
Deep within her den, Goldaline pulls back a dirty sheet to reveal a shelf of canned goods from before the mists came. With her chopper, it's easy enough to get to the food inside. She grabs a can of spaghetti and meatballs - her favorite both for its taste and the silly man with the puffy hat and mustache on the label. She eats slowly, she doesn't have many of these left. Soon she will switch to the canned and pickled vegetables to hold her over until another scavenging run. Good cans are getting harder to find, and her trips keep going deeper down. Maybe going up is the answer. Goldaline thinks maybe she could join the world around her, if only for a bite of fresh food.
Aug 10, 2017 9:44 pm
I'm keen to play up the air travel component. Hot air balloonists are revered and reviled traders. Many resources come from far away lands and are brought to our home via the balloons. The skyline is littered with them and these traders(pirates) bring much needed grain, meat, booze and news from these distant lands. The journeys are long and dangerous and the returns are meager, but somewhere out in the great unknown are oasis' from the destructive mist. The stories about what's out their vary wildly and everyone knows not to trust a pirate, but they must be getting this stuff from somewhere.