Xxere
Xxere (formerly pronounced [ˈʖ̃ʗ̃ɛɾe] but in English usually pronounced /tʃɪˈtʃɪri/ or /ʃɪˈʃɪri/; often shortened to simply /ˈtʃɪri/ or /ˈʃɪri/) is an independent city of Jhembaz not beholden to any nation. One of the largest cities of the worlddisk, Xxere is known for its unusual method of construction: most of the buildings in the city are gravitationally reversed, essentially resting upside-down on the surface above them—said surface being the bottom of Lake Nkoge. Bridges extend between the buildings, but below the city is a large clear space in the immense forests that cover the disk, meaning that anything that veers off the bridge may be in for a long fall. Because of its cybastic structure, Xxere is sometimes called the Inverted City.
The unusual spelling of Xxere's name is an accident of sloppiness in transliteration... some of the earliest attempts to write in a modern alphabet the Quxumba language in which the name originated failed to distinguish between the many click phonemes the language possessed and simply and rather uselessly transcribed them all as "X", leading to a double X in words which, like the name of Xxere, included two click sounds in succession. While most people of Jhembaz today pronounce the name of Xxere without clicks, the odd spelling stuck—and if anything is even more inappropriate for most modern pronunciations.
Population
Xxere is a highly cosmopolitan city, where beings of all races and ethnicities meet and mingle. As in most areas of Jhembaz, humans are the most populous race, though in Xxere they make up merely a plurality rather than an outright majority. Of humans, the most common ethnicity in Xxere are the dark-skinned, small-statured ndambasa, though, again, they are only a plurality and not a majority, and only barely a plurality. They coexist with gunai, aacin, thoromas, and many other ethnicities.
As for the nonhuman inhabitants, Xxere's population includes not only such once-human, near-human, and humanoid beings as sitches, llerelis, and gurens but even creatures as alien as dasfeddasi, quirians, and tiaias. Various paques dwell in the city, braving the obvious distrust with which their human neighbors regard them. Quers of various sorts teem in the city as well, often indistinguishable from beasts of the wild. A handful of undead have been accepted as citizens in Xxere, while they're by no means common, and the average Xxeran may not know of their existence. An easad named Olino has a seat on the Building Commission.
Even beings from worlddisks of other orientations make their way to Xxere. Xxeran communities exist of lobens from Mriddiom, codmen from Gaden, even the weird grazraith from Heqhesta. Many of these exotic inhabitants have had the directions of their weights adjusted, like the buildings of the cities (though in the opposite direction), the better to fit in among the native Qabedean populace. Others, however, retain their original orientations, either confining themselves to ghettos appropriately oriented or scrambling awkwardly about structures intended for beings with quite a different definition of "down". Not only do Xxere's inhabitants include beings from other worlddisks, but perhaps even from other planes; there are whispers that mares, bengorres, and other extrachorials call the city home.
Surroundings
Xxere's location under Lake Nkoge gives it a number of advantages. Pipes attached to holes drilled into the lake's understructure, and fitted with cunning arrangements of joints and valves, give the Inverted City an amenity shared by very few other cities of Jhembaz: running water. While the poorer inhabitants must do without this luxury, the more well to do can with a twist of a crank get water from the lake flowing directly into basins in their homes. (This ready availability of water has given Xxere a reputation as one of the cleanest cities in Jhembaz, and certainly the cleanest for its size—though this is by no means to say that it doesn't still have its share of filthy alleys that nobody bothers to wash.)
Not only is the water of Lake Nkoge brought into the city of Xxere, but Xxerans go into the waters of Lake Nkoge as well. In places, shafts have been opened in the lakebed large enough for humans to fit through, or even larger. Enchantments are put in place at these apertures to prevent the lake's water from cascading through, creating instead a naroplastic surface where the airy shaft meets the lake bottom above. Xxerans traditionally refer to these shafts as wells, though they may be called "upwells" to distinguish them from traditional wells dug into the earth (a distinction not usually necessary in Xxere itself where no such "downwells" exist.) Most of these wells are fitted at least with handholds, and more often with ladders or stairs for easy ascent. Not only do citydwellers use these wells recreationally as topsy-turvy swimming holes, but they make an important contribution to the city's economy, as Xxerans harvest the lakebottom for goods saleable elsewhere.
Politically, Xxere is surrounded by three nations, one of which happens to pertain to each of Jhembaz's three major alliances. To the northeast is Ztaxi, a member of Gaishese. In the opposite direction is Dubina, which pertains to the Silver Coalition. Below the Inverted City is Mbenexa, sworn to the Sixty. This position between representatives of three vying alliances makes Xxere a strategic location that each alliance longs to sway in its favor, but Xxere has so far resisted the blandishments of any alliance to formally favor it, and has largely by its magical prowess withstood several attempts to take the city over by force.
History
Though other settlements may have existed earlier in its location, Xxere as it is now known—with its gravitationally inverted facture—had its germ when it was on the fringe of the Ozambi Empire. A group of powerful mages congregated in this out-of-the-way place to conduct magical experiments, selecting the location because it was a part of the Empire and therefore enjoyed some measure of protection from bandits and troublemakers, but was isolated enough on the Empire's outskirts to avoid attracting too much attention from the capital. And so, relatively free of interference, they developed new and efficient manners of magically altering objects' weights, and used it to build an entirely new type of city.
Once word of the mages' work spread, however, they didn't remain free of interference for long. The capital did take notice, and Emperor Xo sent emissaries to claim the fruits of their research in his name. Settlers flocked to the wonderful buildings as well, and the scholarly mages found themselves the center of plenty of unwelcome location and the unwitting founders of an inchoate city. Though they put up some resistance at first, they eventually had to bow to the emperor's demands and those of the newcome populace, and they focused on erecting (abrecting?) more inverted buildings and constructing a city, largely using this activity as an excuse to avoid having to send all their secrets to the emperor.
Xxere was already a burgeoning city when the Empire fell, and in the free-for-all among warring city-states that succeeded, it managed to hold its own. Though the original founders may have been long dead by then (or may not have been; rumors persist that, either through undeath or through macrobiotic magics, at least some of them remain in the city even now), apprentices had learned at their feet, and mages from elsewhere had immigrated to the city, so that it had by now arrived at something of a reputation as a magical mecca. Xxere persisted as a free and independent city until the rise of Phen Kam. Du Jak Neng, the ambitious instaurator of the incipient empire, promised Xxere that if it accepted his rule he would grant it money and protection in exchange only for trade concessions and for the honor of having the city included in its realm. The leaders of Xxere agreed to his honeyed terms, but came to regret their accedence later when the "flowered kingdom" of Phen Kam turned into a bloodthirsty empire. Xxere suffered under the tyranny of Phen Kam's despotic rulers for centuries along with the rest of the empire, and it was finally Xxere with its arcane magics that was instrumental in overthrowing those rulers and bringing the empire to an end. From that day, the people of Xxere swore that they would never again be subject to any sovereign outside the city. And so far, they never again have.
As much of a cynosure as Xxere has become, it is inevitable that talk has arisen about duplicating its success and creating another "upside-down city". The mages of the Building Commission are loath to share their secrets, however, and many citizens of Xxere take pride in their city's singlure. A scandal arose just over a century ago when a small group of mages allegedly stole some of the city's magical secrets and used them to try to create an "inverted nation", but they were apparently not able to apply the magics in quite the same way. While the nation they founded, Ruqon, does utilize gravity-altering magics, it does so quite differently from Xxere, and for the most part Xxere has forgotten the trespass (though there are elements that still hold a grudge against Ruqon over it). Ruqon notwithstanding, for the most part Xxere remains a unicum—though it may not always.
Layout
Not without reason is Xxere called the Inverted City; many its buildings would look relatively normal if turned over, but in their current orientation resemble perhaps so many angular stalactites. The fact that the buildings rest on the "ceiling" rather than the ground means that there can be no conventional streets between the buildings, no yards or curbs; beyond the buildings' walls is a drop of several hundred meters to the foliage far below. To get between the buildings, therefore, the city's creators have constructed a complex series of bridges, some leading directly between doorways in the buildings and some wider bridges crossing and connecting them to compose major thoroughfares. The bridges exist at numerous altitudes, with some of them slanting up and down to connect other bridges at different levels. They vary in width, from those narrow enough that only a single person can safely traverse them at a time to those wide enough to accommodate two broad carts, side by side. Like much construction on Jhembaz, they are made mostly of wood and fiber, but they are well built and magically strengthened, and as rickety as some of them may look, the bridges built by the city government are all quite safe and sturdy. (The same cannot necessarily be said of homemade bridges some residents throw together themselves to make shortcuts between frequented locations.) While almost anywhere in Xxere the maze of bridges may look confusing to a stranger to the city, it's especially bewildering in those few parts of the city built to convenience residents from other orientations. Here escherian networks of bridges aligned with all the canonical axes interlace, and various beings blithely wander down the bridges at right angles to each other.
There is much variation over the area of the city, but one thing that is common is that generally the upper floors—that is, those nearer the lake, those near what would be the base of the buildings were they "right-side-up"—are the domain of the relatively well-to-do, while the poor are relegated to the lower. There are certainly exceptions to this rule of thumb, but it holds more often than not. Several reasons exist for this arrangement. For one, the upper floors give easier access to the wells, and are more readily supplied with running water. For another, however, the lower floors often have to see the detritus of the other. Garbage dropped carelessly off the upper bridges may end up on the lower, and the lower floors may even have to see the sullage that's discarded from the upper—for though Xxere may have running water, it has no need of a sewer system when waste can simply be dropped from the buildings' bottoms and so disposed of. Yet another advantage of the upper floors is that they're marginally safer, in the sense that if one should somehow fall off one of the upper bridges one has a good chance of catching oneself on a lower bridge—but if one falls off a lower bridge, there's no such option.
To counter the unavailability of a flat substrate for conventional parks and plazas, the builders of Xxere have made do by in places creating huge flat platforms resting on the bottoms of several close-by buildings. To reduce the strain on the buildings, the platforms themselves are magically reduced in weight, though their fixture to the buildings ensures that they'll remain safely in place. These platforms can then be planted with vegetation, paved and decorated and made into public squares, or otherwise put to use. They're more common in some parts of the city than others, being particularly common in the part of Xxere aptly known as the Parks. The Old City, which as its name implies was the first part of the building to be constructed, has now been completely covered up with platforms and surrounded with buildings to the extent that it's basically one enormous closed structure. The undersides of some of the platforms boast inverted buildings of their own, but these, so far from the top of the city and from the wells and the water, tend to be the domain of the poorest of the poor. These ramshackle slums are collectively called the Bottoms.
The Old City's monotectic nature certainly differentiates it from the rest of the city, but many of the surrounding areas have their own distinct characters as well. From the Alchemy District that is the source of many potions and reagents to Goldtown that holds the city's banking center, from the creeper-choked Vine District to the open and airy Arches, Xxere has grown over the centuries into a collection of diverse areas. Well known are the enclaves where particular races, ethnicities, and cultures tend to congregate, often given names starting with Little, such as Little Balloch, where most of Xxere's Breag live, and Little Gaden, home of many of the city's codmen. Some of the edges of the town start to impinge on nearby trees, and here there are broad tree limbs that can be built on—as in other Jhembac cities—as well as building in the usual upside-down Xxeran way. The neighborhoods built here, collectively called the Branches, tend to be somewhat disparaged by the rest of the city, though they are known for their thriving (if eclectic) markets. Perhaps the most notable such area, not generally considered a part of the Branches, is Whitewick, built at the edge of a small whitewood called the Bleakshaw; many of Whitewick's inhabitants make a perilous living by harvesting some of the rare substances that can be found in the wood.
Government
The nominal leader of Xxere is the mayor, an elected position held for a three year term. There are no term limits, and the current mayor, Sadabe Ohadd, is in his fourth term. The mayor, however, is really mostly a figurehead; they represent the public face of the city, but have little or no real political power.
The real power, in principle, is vested in the five Great Councils that run the city. Each of these councils is made up of people of a particular profession, or group of related professions; the principle behind this formulation is to ensure that the government is never controlled by professional politicians (though there are ways of getting around the spirit of the laws). Each council has its own purview (with one exception), and affairs that fall under the specific purview of none of the councils are decided on jointly by all of them. The Merchants' Council oversees economic matters. The Warriors' Council deals with the city's defense. The Scholars' Council makes decisions regarding education. The Clerics' Council addresses religious questions. The final council, the Workers' Council, has no specific purview of its own, but does have an equal say with the other councils on general matters.
It may be, however, that even the Great Councils are not the true powers in the city. That distinction, some say, belongs to the city's Building Commission. In theory a public agency responsible for maintaining and, when necessary, expanding the city's structures, in practice the Building Commission includes some of the city's most powerful mages, and it is the Commission that guards the details of the gravitational magics that made the city what it is. The fact that it almost alone possesses the power to further the city's growth—or even to preserve what the city already has—gives the Building Commission an imparalleled bargaining chip. None of the Commissioners are so gauche as to openly threaten to reverse the gravitational magics that hold any of Xxere's buildings in place, but every Councilor knows the Commission could do just that if it wanted to, so they tend to give in quickly to any Commission demands. This isn't to say that all the Councilors are necessarily happy with that state of affairs, and plots against the Building Commission have been hatched, but none have come close to success.
Economy
A single city surrounded by foreign nations, Xxere may not have abundant natural resources, but it does have access to some that it can export. Through Xxere's wells, Xxerans can forage Lake Nyoka, able to exploit it even better than those lands that lie on the lakes' edge, thanks to Xxeran's more direct access to the water's depths. Indeed, not only do they gather goods that grow naturally, but some Xxerans actually maintain underwater farms where they can grow valuable algae, shellfish, and other commodities. The Bleakshaw, too, provides some valuable goods, though they make up a much smaller percentage of Xxere's GDP than do the fruits of Lake Nyoka.
Still, while lucrative, the products of Lake Nyoka would not by themselves be enough to sustain a city of Xxere's size. They are, however, supplemented by other sources of income. Xxere's reputation as a center of magical learning is important to its economic strength, as it helps the city earn a sizable return from its sale of talismans, the hire of its celemologists as consultants and its mages as mercenaries and retainers, and books and other works detailing some of its inhabitants' discoveries (but never its deepest secrets). Xxere is home to a major center of learning, Underlake University, that attracts students from all over Jhembaz (and perhaps beyond), and that also brings in money to the city.
Trade, too, is an important source of income for the city. Its position between three somewhat mutually antagonistic states may be problematic for Xxere's defense, but works to its advantage economically, as Xxeran merchants can make a tidy profit brokering exchanges between the three nations. There are even tales of Xxerans engaging in trade with aquatic races living in the profundities of Lake Nyoka, though they're not open about the details of these transactions.
A relatively minor but not insignificant contribution to Xxere's income stems from its racial and cultural diversity. Many Xxeran inhabitants, whether or not they live in its more homogeneous enclaves, keep much of their original culture and traditions, which may include art and craftwork. The pieces they produce in accordance with their traditional ways can fetch quite a bit of money from collectors with a taste for the exotic.