You wake up in the (late) morning, have breakfast, read one of the local papers, and get dressed for the day. Leaving your peculiar house, you walk down your peculiar street. A tiny, one-person dirigible flies overhead, narrowly avoiding a woman carried aloft by birds. Another woman walks gracefully from the roof of one building to another on a thin red ribbon.

A large man with a broad smile of tattooed teeth sells you a paper bag filled with hot roasted almonds. Each says your name when you pick it up and pop it into your mouth. A giant octopus aids in the construction of a new building, the previous one having been lost in a sudden violet tornado resulting from some carelessly conducted magical experiment. The other workers appreciate the eight muscular arms of help.

An automobile races by you, leaving tracks of frost and ice behind it. You feel the cold on your toes as you cross the street to the little bookseller’s you frequent. This side of the street is filled with music coming down from a glass-faced woman playing the bagpipes on the fire escape. The musician is a friend of yours, and you know each pipe she plays is also a telescope allowing her to view into another world. Her music serves as her attempt to describe what she sees.

You duck as a pair of eyeballs—the visual representations of someone’s information-gathering spells—zip by, but you spill your bag of nuts, and they scatter across the sidewalk, silently. A thoughtform in the shape of a man with a broom scowls as he approaches to clean up the mess. You mumble an apology and dart into the shop.

The elderbrin bookseller is in. Today he’s taken the form of a squat, grey-faced fellow with a bright plaid shell like a turtle. He’s got that book you wanted on spells that work best in the evening, but as you pay you’re interrupted by a quarrel just outside between what appears to be a hulking demon and a woman with three faces and four arms, each arm drawing a dangerous-looking weapon.

You grab the book, lay your orbs on the counter, and hustle back toward home.

You’re a vislae, and this is Fartown. It’s just another Tuesday.

In Fartown, every building is a story, and every story is surreal. Sprawling mansions sit next to tiny, crooked houses. Twisting towers reach to a sky filled with living hot-air balloons, giant moths, and inexplicably floating people. A 1960s New York Yellow Cab drives down the street past a fish-headed man selling newspapers. This is the most surreal part of a surreal city.

It is autumn.

Fartown gains its name from the fact that it does not lie in the same physical dimension as the rest of the city. This is by design. To have it otherwise would have been much too dangerous. Long before the War, long before the return of the exiles, the people of Satyrine placed the district that would become Fartown in its own half-world, one that was created by the Deathless Triumvirate as a place where the city’s so-called “on-the-cusp” sorcerers, witch-touched, and houngan (or whatever vislae were calling themselves back then) could practice their arts without endangering everyone else. Even today, Fartown is home to many experimenters, concoctors, and summoners, any of whom could bring the reality of Satyrine crashing down around them with their half-finished spells, experimental concoctions, or barely controlled otherworldly menaces.

In other words, Fartown is the vislae district. And it suits them well.

Fartown is reached through a large archway located beside the Narrow Sannyasa River, opposite the Hollows. It’s never locked or guarded, but many people believe that it’s impossible to pass through without it being noted and recorded by the Angular Serpentine. There is no feeling of transition when you pass through this arch.

Fartown exists as a 5-mile (8 km) long mass of solid ground with trees and grass as well as streets and buildings. However, at the edges of its perimeter, beyond sections of Ruined Expanses, space and time become blurry and seep slowly into an unknown elsewhere. This border is called the Bleed, and it’s not safe to go there. Fortunately, the weird runoffs and emissions from the experiments, summonings, and creations in Fartown that eventually flow into the Bleed at least have a place to go where they can (presumably) do no harm. Although most of Fartown has been reclaimed, there are still ruins on the outskirts, before one gets to the Bleed. These are similar to the Ruined Expanses in the rest of the city.

People in other districts sometimes call Fartown “Far Down.” (Kids tend to call it “Fart Town,” but that’s often because of the strange smells.) It’s not a place of the respectable, the wealthy, or the beautiful. It’s dangerous and transitory. Even today, homes, buildings, or entire blocks sometimes explode, fade away, or transform into sentient motes that fly off into the aethyr to find meaning in their own lives.

That said, Fartown has become the domain of artists as much as vislae, although there are no galleries. It’s the home of theater folk, but no theaters. Fartown has little in the way of commerce or culture, other than the activities vislae conduct among themselves. (And seeing as vislae have their own currencies, that is, perhaps, a fair bit.)

There are two stories to explain why Fartown lies forever in the sway of autumn. The first is that a curse from a vengeful warlock grips the district forever in a time of dying, yet never allowing it to reach death. The second says that it was a blessing from a satisfied god seeking to end an oppressively long and terrible summer’s heat with cool breezes and shorter days.

Not all vislae live in Fartown, of course, but virtually all of them are familiar with its streets, its sights, and its smells.

LOCATIONS IN FARTOWN

GATE TO THE HOLLOWS

The gateway is a gathering place in the district, a site for merchants to set up food carts and for other vendors to peddle vislae-oriented wares. It’s the busiest part of the district. The gate itself is a massive stone arch in the middle of an open square.

FALSE ARCH

A large, empty arch stands in an abandoned piazza. It looks identical to the arch that serves as the gateway back to the Hollows (and thus, Satyrine). People speculate that it once went somewhere too, but there’s not even a speck of residual magic about it now. If it did lead somewhere once, no one today seems to know where.

GRYNN’S GRAMARYE

This chained library contains the books required to learn most general spells, at least up to level 8. Grynn was a wealthy vislae from before the War. Today, Tiora, the cousin of his granddaughter’s husband, owns and runs the establishment. She has a staff of six assistants.

As stated, this is a chained library. All the tomes are chained to the shelves to prevent theft. You must study your spells here at the tables provided. Tiora charges 1 crystal per day of study. This has made the place a bit of a vislae hub, and a number of small coffee shops and cafes have opened around it in the last few years to cater to those who use the general location to meet up and spend time.

THE VANCIAN CAMPUS

Vances simply call it “the Campus.” 17 buildings provide the large and bustling order with administrative offices, records offices, lecture halls, laboratories, and more—much more than the headquarters of the other vislae orders. Almost all members spend a great deal of time here. If a Vance isn’t taking a class, they’re probably teaching one.

Classes offered range from introductory courses to very advanced workshops. They include the following:

✦✦ Introduction to Intonation

✦✦ Using Matter

✦✦ Psychology of the Living Spell

✦✦ Opening Doors to Elsewhere

✦✦Words of Power

✦✦ Spellbook Upkeep

✦✦ Advanced Energy Wielding

✦✦ Advanced Spell Mechanics

And that’s only a sampling. There are hundreds of classes, and almost as many instructors. Classes are scheduled in eight-week blocks with a single week in between (9 is the Invisible Sun’s number), and most classes are not offered each time. Only members of the order can attend a class, and—as one might expect—registration is a very formal process. Advanced classes have degree requirements. Some charge fees, which often cover the cost of texts or laboratory materials, if any.

Sometimes the topics discussed in Vancian classes are interesting and applicable enough that members of other orders attempt to infiltrate them. They use disguises (magical and otherwise), forged documents (magical and otherwise), spells of invisibility, remote viewing, and other means. These attempts almost always fail, as the Vances have put up various wards to keep such intrusions out.

The Campus also offers two different libraries—one just for spells, the other for more general esoteric studies. Not surprisingly, all of the spells recorded here are Vancian spells, not general spells.

The Vancian Campus keeps a high standard of lawn and facilities maintenance, and it employs a rather large security force.

THE GOETIC HALL OF RECORDS

The foreboding appearance of the Goetic Hall of Records befits an order that spends more time talking to immortal beings than to mortals. The large gothic structure has five towers (one of them is a clock tower), each decorated with carvings and statuary of leering demons, noble angels, and other spiritual beings.

All the high-ranking members of the Goetic hierarchy maintain offices here, which includes (but is not limited to) every 6th-degree member. Some of these offices are empty all the time because the office holder is elsewhere, but if the member is alive, their office is maintained. Each office is tied to a position rather than a specific individual. Thus, there is an Office of Demonic Names, an Office of Ceremonies, an Office of Initiations, and so on.

Mostly, though, the vast edifice is a library of records. They keep not only an extensive catalog of members, prospective members, and their activities, but also (perhaps more important) a record of all known summoned entities, pacts, and more. The order stores thousands of names of demons, angels, and other beings, as well as their appearance, demeanor, powers, and other details. Some of this information is incomplete, however, and in some cases, it’s entirely wrong. This can create potentially dangerous problems, to say the least. Further, getting access to these records can be difficult, and it is restricted based on degree (non-Goetics are, of course, forbidden).

KRYVEN’S BOOKS

A general bookshop offering the latest in fiction, a smattering of general interest nonfiction, and a large selection of gossip magazines, Kryven’s Books lies between a coffeehouse and a bakery. It serves the (nonmagical) literary needs of many vislae. It’s also notable in that Kryven, the owner, is a vislae himself, and he lives inside one of the books in the shop. That book, Guidon’s Guide to Mapmaking, isn’t for sale, of course, but for reasons unknown, people keep coming into the shop to try to buy it. The bookstore is run most days by Kryven’s aging and cantankerous father, Leonard. On Thursday nights the Fellowship of Glass weaver cell meets at the bookstore.

TARAQAL ARTIST COMMUNE

Fartown isn’t just the domain of vislae. A great many artisans, writers, and actors live there as well—many of them in Taraqal, a large communal apartment complex and workspace. This is a place where artists of all stripes can live and work for free. But it’s not all it’s cracked up to be, at least for some. A few people who have lived there and left describe the place as a totalitarian regime under a charismatic, aging actor named Venna Allaman. Through nothing more than the authority she’s claimed, she decides who can enter the commune and who can’t, who lives and works where, and what duties residents are given (such as cleaning, maintenance, and so on).

CASTLE OF THE LIE

An homage to Shadow, the Castle of the Lie is a huge museum that holds all sorts of objects, books, photographs, and films of what happens in Shadow. For the price of a single crystal, one can find all manner of mementos and nostalgic remembrances of that world. Television shows, music, toys, computers, clothing, kitchen appliances . . . it’s all here.

The owners of the castle, a group of former vislae who like to keep a low profile, have a connection with Markus Taul of Grey Memories in the Celestial Bazaar, and they get first pick of some of the Shadow wares he procures.

Of course, incidents of vislae being drawn back into Shadow in and around the Castle of the Lie are many.

CHANGERIES

There are many changeries, but they are all clustered together in one part of the district. Each is a large building filled with strange devices. Fat smokestacks belch foul-smelling smoke, and thin chimneys release colored mists. Pipes exude strange residues and wastewater that sometimes makes the oddest sounds—the crying of a baby, the screeching of an owl, or the babbling of a madman.

Usually, a front office offers menus of possible changes or consultations with an employee wherein a customer can describe exactly what they want done. These offices are welcoming, quiet, and clean. No one—other than employees and the customer undergoing the procedures—is allowed into the much larger back rooms where the work is actually done.

Most changeries have spells of forgetfulness so that those undergoing alterations don’t remember the horrors required to accomplish the desired changes.

ZERO’S

Fartown has more than its share of bars, restaurants, and cafes. (Vislae, it seems, don’t like to eat or drink at home too often.) None are more popular among vislae than Zero’s. You get a different version of the story depending on who you ask, but it seems that Zero was a powerful, ancient demon who eventually transformed himself into a bar.

Some people say that Zero gained a soul. Others say he just had a change of outlook (a pretty fundamental occurrence, if true). But Zero seems to have no interest in the destructive or corrupting activities that other demons have. At least, not anymore. It’s not possible to summon Zero, and most magic that applies specifically to demons has no effect on him.

Zero’s does not have a standard location. Its entrance appears somewhere different every time, and only at night. It’s impossible to find the place during the day. It very likely doesn’t exist in the daylight. But in the darkness, it’s always easy to find if you’re looking for it, and sometimes even when you’re not. The entrance appears in the back of an alley, or in the side of some other structure. It’s always somewhere different, but the entrance is always the same: a heavy, windowless black door in need of paint with a flickering, buzzing neon sign above it that says “Zero.”

And it gets weirder. Zero’s isn’t just a Fartown establishment. Although it doesn’t appear elsewhere in Satyrine, it does show up throughout the Actuality. It’s possible to stumble into Zero’s in many different spots (very likely many different locations at the same time), but when you leave through the door, you always emerge where you entered. And the patrons are mostly—but not always—from the same general location as you. So if you enter in Fartown, most if not all of the people inside are vislae, but if you enter from the City of Orphans under the Gold Sun, most of the customers are from that location.

Zero’s isn’t always the same. (Demons are, of course, shape-changers—it’s perhaps naive to think that a demon who becomes a bar always remains as the same bar.) One night the inside is that of a dingy, dimly lit, smoke-filled dive with peanut shells on the floor, sticky with spilled drinks. The next night, it’s a brightly lit, well-kept place with comfortable seating, music, and a dance floor. The night after that, it’s a refined, wood-paneled hall with patrons quietly sipping port. And so on.

Two things are always the same, however. First, the restrooms in Zero’s are always filled with graffiti. Second, there’s always an electronic “love tester” machine in the corner. It works—apparently normally—but some people speculate there’s more to the machine than it appears.

The bartender is as much a part of Zero’s as the stools or the light fixtures, although he changes along with the bar from night to night, in both appearance and demeanor, to something appropriate for the scene. It would be wrong to say that the bartender is Zero himself. The whole bar is Zero. The bartender is just a part of him.