'The Sub-Basements' and 'The Trans-Attic Layer'

“Yea, we did end up skipping that part didn't we?” I stated and diverged back to what was intended to be a previous part of the description. “As you know the majority of the world occupies 4 distinct zones, from top to bottom, 'Attics', 'Upper Stories', 'Ground Floor', and 'Basements': However, there are two other types of area which though documented and known to exist are very rarely visited because they are so incredibly terrifying and dangerous” I begin, showing them the world again to illustrate what I am talking about.

In the 50 or more years BDA (Before the Dawn of the Internet), the last two zones of the world were considered mythological, a folktale, a story to frighten the young and incredulous or pass off blame for the **** of rivals: but within a few years of 0:00:00 0-00-0000 DA ample video documentation emerged of the truth of these two locations.

The first we will discuss because it is the less thoroughly explored of the two and therefore there is less to say about it is the 'Trans-Attic' region. As one might imagine from living indoors for generations the majority of people 'Xipiteckatic: the world of rooms.' are intensely agoraphobic, anytime they are not inside a 'proper space' where they can see four walls and a ceiling they freak right the hell out, and nothing causes this situation more than the 'Trans-Attic' level.

The trans attic is an immense, infinite as far as anyone has been able to determine in fact, pitched and angled plane of roofs and steeples of every description, over which rush storms of furious intensity and violent aspect, which can and will kill anyone who stays 'above the rooms' too long. Lightning, hail the size of baseballs, cyclones that will suck you into the 'sky', debris flying through the air at 200 mph, all of these and more will threaten your life from the storms in the 'Trans-Attic' area, and they aren't the only thing. Unnatural abominations which match the morphology of the normal rooms only loosely live here somehow and they all are hungry, generally attacking both visitors and each other on sight.

The other reason that this area is both rarely and poorly explored is that there is not much here which is salvageable: other than the occasional 'windmill' that can be dismantled for steel, weather-veins that you can take for brass, very rare wrought iron or steel railings, a few 'garden roofs' which have supplies of living edible plants that can be sold for immense sums to well established colonies which have reached the point that they are 'gardening' for a more reliable food supply than their salvagers can bring in, and the pelts and meat of the strange and universally hostile beasts that live here there is nothing on this level worth having, just a constant scramble up and down the pitched surfaces and over the occasional wall around the flat roofs.

Rumors of tribes of men and women living here as nomads hunting the beasts and eating vegetables from the gardens have been documented only rarely and many of those have later been exposed as hoaxes, but the occasional person who develops a strong degree of claustrophobia often pays immense sums to have an experienced team of salvagers bring them up here, where the vast majority die within a few days at best, more often mere hours. When in an area of the attics and one finds a trap door in the ceiling or flight of stairs leading further up: one would be well advised to leave it alone: the 'rooftops' 'room under sky' or 'storm lands' among other epithets and euphemisms is not worth the trouble to anyone but the natives, if they exist, and rare teams of specialists, all of whom have a 'Type 3' silver card for the place.

The Sub-Basements: aka 'the caverns' aka 'the mines' aka 'the bad-lands' aka 'the sump' aka 'the dark-rooms' aka 'the steam tunnels' and a dozen dozen other overlapping epithets, euphemisms, code phrases, and technical terms: are the areas which lie below the normal basements.

Down there the lights, plugs, faucets, toilets, and network jacks rarely work, if they exist at all, and THINGS lurk in the dark: things that right thinking people don't even want to know exist let alone meet.

'The Deep-Levels' have much more thorough documentation than the Trans-Attic area, largely because in a certain sense they are safer, there are no storms of flying debris and cyclonic wind or lighting bolts to slay the unwary in these regions, though flash flooding is still known: and despite their inhuman strength and unnatural physiological structures most of the abominations down there still die if you hit the right part with a 9mm slug, (Most...) and unlike the levels above the walls there tend to be fairly resistant to being 'popped' by misplaced gunfire. (Tend...)

Individual rooms down there often are immense compared to the areas above, larger sometimes than those of a starting colony, whole networks of interconnected chambers and passages, often with 'rivers' of flowing clean, salt, or stinking but organic compound rich water, (Which never have been known to 'run soft' or 'foul up' if they started out pure, or go the other way if either of the other types, unlike in colonies), one of the things that people come down here to salvage. There also are dozens of other things worth salvaging down here, in some places you have high tech items, 'The World Beneath' is the chief source of server decks for 'hosting' content for the internet and 'cloud farming', while in others are the deposits from which are extracted about 20% or more of the world's supplies of coal, metals, raw gemstones, and minerals that the largest of colonies use for manufacturing.

Though 'The Bowels of the World' are as variable in their content as any of the layers above, and far more so than the 'Trans-Attic' plane, it is generally agreed by those that study them that there are five distinct broad classifications of types of room down there, which in each area found beneath the rooms 'near' a specific colony will be arranged in a specific but variable sequence one on top of the other, though there is a 'typical' order.

'First' one comes to what are called 'the laundry rooms', 'housekeeping', 'the cream layer', or simply 'the sub-basements', where vast rooms full of frozen foods, high tech clean rooms with server decks in them, warehouses full of boxed appliances or raw materials, and vast armories full of guns and ammo can be found. This is the layer that most salvagers are shooting for when they come down into 'The Danger Zones' and the only one where the fixtures and power are likely to be both present and working.

'Second' one generally has what are called 'the bad-lands', 'the dark-rooms', or 'the dead-zones'. These basically are just basement rooms with more dangerous adversaries, bigger payoffs, and better salvage, and in which the fixtures don't work or work erraticly.

'Third' one comes upon what is called 'the sump', 'the sewers', 'the steam tunnels', 'the subways' or 'the fouls': this layer is full of dungeons, sewer systems, abandoned subway tunnels and the like, where there is little worth salvaging and hoards of rats, zombies, demonic carnivorous cockroaches, and worse that will try to kill and eat you.

'Fourth' one reaches what is known as 'the mines', 'the delving', or 'the excavation layer'. It is here that mining of gems and other mineral wealth can be done 'safely' without 'popping' the walls, as long as you stop as soon as the deposit peters out. Most people don't go any deeper than this, and the kind of people who work down here as miners are crazy, tough, and skilled at both their profession and fighting off the abominations that lurk in the dark.

'Fifth' and almost always finally one gets to what is known as 'the caves', 'the lava tubes', 'the deeps', 'the world beneath', 'the fossil layer', or 'Avernus'. This layer is made up of vast arrangements of what we would call 'natural' caves and chambers, connected to each other by big doors of rusted steel. This layer is insanely dangerous, with swarms of nearly indestructible biting insects, Parana like fish in the rivers, random flooding of chambers with boiling or freezing water, live steam, or lava, and monsters that have no names because no one has ever survived to tell about them. This layer is also the 'thickest' of the five, with the caverns and networks of lava tubes stretching for as much as 1000 vertical feet.

Though this is the 'typical' order of layers it actually is rather 'atypical' to have ALL of them appear in that order, in the case of the vast majority of colonies which discover an access to the Sub-Basements two or three of these layers will be switched around in their order, normally two of the top four. Those where 'The Underdark' layer is moved it almost always goes from the bottom to the top while two others move around as well and that colony will never be able to make good use of The Sub-Basements because that top most layer remains insanely dangerous.

Some people have come back from the depths of the 'fifth layer' under their region with video 'proving' that there are stairs or ramps leading to doors opening into areas still FURTHER down, but no one has ever made a video of what happens if the door at the bottom of one of them is opened, and those setting out to 'get proof' of their pet theory often vanish without a trace. The presently prevailing theories on the internet are as follows:

1: The 'sixth' layer is even more dangerous than the 5th and anyone who enters it dies. This is argued against because many who have set out to 'get proof' said they would open the door at the bottom of the stairs and then slam it shut again, not giving anything time to converge and attack them.

2: when the door to the sixth layer is opened it releases a burst of live steam, plasma, lava, electricity, or similar lethal substance that kills the people on contact. This is argued against because some of those going to 'get proof' have been wearing ultra-tech power armor which should have been proof against any such hazard.

3: when the door to the sixth layer opens the 'room' with the stairs in it 'pops' releasing the unimaginably lethal hazards known to occur during such events. This is argued against because there are no incursions of demons and energy beasts immediately following such events, which there would be if the room had 'popped'.

4: This last is the most difficult to argue against of all the prevailing theories because so little is known about the second aspect of it. When the door to the 'sixth' layer opens the room with the stairs vanishes, but doesn’t 'pop'. Instead it deposits the person who went to get 'proof' and everyone else in it into the middle of one of the storms at the top of the 'Trans-Attic' layer, where they are pummeled to **** by shards of ice, fried by lightning, and then fall to the 'roof tops' bellow. The argument against this is that no such fallen bodies have ever been found: but this has a simple answer: the native creatures there ate them. Though this theory is the hardest to argue against it has declined in popularity when a flaw was pointed out: if this is what happens: where are their cameras, or at least what is left of them, and why, since there IS cellphone reception on the Trans-Attic layer, did the videos not auto-upload from some of the rigs set up to pull this stunt to the websites where they were supposed to be posted? No satisfactory answers have emerged to these questions.

“Ok, now that that's been explained I have another question: you keep talking about 'cellphones' and 'server decks' and 'the internet': if each room is a bubble of reality how does that work?” My dad asked, to which my sister chimed in.

“And if the Trans-Attic Layer is infinite how does it work, all these others are small and self contained even cave systems relatively speaking, why is it so huge?”

“Second one first, because that's easier. It's not actually really part of the same dimension.” I explained. “It's a world I inserted into one of my already functional universes which serves as a gateway to 'Xipiteckatic: the world of rooms.' an earth like dessert planet which was wholly covered in nanotechnology self regenerating roofs that turned the planet into a gateway to Xipiteckatic for an alien race, which brought human slaves in as cat's paws to explore this alternate dimension, and then lost control of them, since it was so easy to escape inside Xipiteckatic, and after the escaped humans started organizing and 'rescuing' their 'comrades' they just set the weather control satellites to whip up horrendous storms every time someone wandered 'outside' for more than a few days, or sooner if feasible, plopped down a few million genetically engineered non-sapient omnivorous 'monsters' and left.” I finished explaining and held up hand to forestall further questions.

“Now on to the 'Internet' question.” I stated. “The bubbles of reality create and destroy matter as it enters and leaves them through faucets and drains, using the the raw sea of primal energy in which they float as a source and receptacle for the power required, as well as converting it into electricity and back again as it is needed to power appliances inside the bubbles: however that is not the only thing they do. When the alien's connected the planet to Xipiteckatic they altered both profoundly: the inside of the planet, everything under the roofs, became part of Xipiteckatic, as did the technological innovations the aliens had placed into those areas, including cellphones and the Internet. There are places where there are no 'phone', 'cable', or 'fiber-optic' jacks in the walls, mostly the oldest of colonies which have not been abandoned but also not expanded in centuries, and in these places the 'internet' and cell-phones don’t work. However as 'Xipiteckatic' has accepted and adopted their alterations it has interfaced more and more fully with the 'outer world' and the sea of energy between the bubbles has served as a resonant connection from the rooms and colonies to both the world above and each other, allowing the traffic of the internet to pass throughout most of the dimension, along with 'cell-phone reception' and other things we in the modern world take for granted.” I said, giving them a rundown of the world and it's method for allowing the Internet to function.

“OK, so this is a full late TL7 / Early TL8 society, internet, cell-phones, laptops, cloud farming, the works?” Marcus asked.

“More than that: imagine that the world has been stalled at around the technological sophistication of the mid 2010's for about 500 years: they can't really manufacture things in most places, just salvage them, so they cannot really follow Moor's Law to increase their base computing power and nor much in the way of creating better hardware of any other type, but on the flip side they have had 500 years to program, reprogram, tighten the code, rebuild from the base programming language, rebuild the base programming language up from binary, and so forth to squeeze every single bit, byte, and femto-cycle of performance out of that same base hardware...” I elaborated.

“That's, kind of hard to imagine.” Sarah stated.

“Trust me, you'll get the hang of it.” I said. “Now, what aspect would you all like to hear about next?” I asked...