The Underground
Historical context
The ancients were miners. They had been settled there for over 3000 years, and yet, no more than three generations had passed due to their longevity. Their way of life was closely tied to the limited space they shared and had been so since the beginning of time. However, what did change over time was the technology they used and the adornments they utilized.
Initially, they only used granite and blue quartz, with which they crafted sharp tools for stone mining (hammers and mallets). Later on, they began using pink quartz to improve the lighting in leisure spaces, and finally, during an excavation, they discovered how to harness natural gas to power complex mechanisms.
These advancements led to a certain industrial revolution, resulting in the creation of robots from the smelting of all the materials they handled. These robots became the solution for many families to cease seeking offspring for labor, causing them, due to their individualism, to even stop coming together for that purpose and instead focus on creating robots. The ancients found themselves in this situation of revolution and complete isolation, when death came knocking at their doors.
World features
Location
The Underground is a big network of maze-like caves without an exit.
Inhabitants
Nowadays there’s no one in the underground. But a hundred years ago, the inhabitants were referred to as the ancients.
They were beings similar to humans, but extremely long-lived. Their skin was very pale, and their hair was very blond due to the lack of light they received. They also had grayish eyes, due to the lack of pigmentation, although some of them had rosy spots in their irises from spending a lot of time among pink quartz.
They were very closed-off and greedy individuals, so they only interacted to barter and show off their possessions.
Biosphere
The underground it’s a mineral-rich place, but there’s no living creatures besides the life created by the ancients: The Tree, K, Swallow and The Entity.
Their principal minerals are quartz, granite and clay.
Technology
The ancients were used to working with robots powered by gas and pink quartz. But they were always more focused on art.
Religion
They do not have religions but they do have beliefs: they consider it a bad omen to dig upwards and believe in opulence over all virtues.
Economy
Families usually tried to acquire materials through their own labor in the mines, but they often lacked the physical capabilities to do so. That’s when bartering started to play a significant role.
Bartering typically took two forms: services or materials. Usually, when two people were trading, they would arrive to an agreement on their exchange, but there were also family businesses that had fixed prices for their products. The most successful families were those who were capable of working in the mines, since they had access to larger quantities of minerals.
Their lack of a proper system to establish a hierarchy among families meant chaos reigned when it came to measuring the value of things, making their economy unsustainable.
Setting
Dark
Caves with low, rugged ceilings where complete darkness predominates, illuminated by K’s lights or by the entity’s lights. Bodies consumed by the entity will also be found within them.
Agony
Areas of granite primarily characterized by having particularly narrow zones, slightly more illuminated than the previous level, but only faintly and illuminated by blue quartz.
Hope
An area bathed in pink and blue lights with high ceilings where the ancients gathered to enjoy theater performances and other social events. Despite being an abandoned area, it hasn’t lost the life and light it once held.
Frustration
Characterized by a greater quantity of quartz and more objects strewn about, defining the state of the population at that time. As one progresses through this phase, more cobwebs and more corrupted roots of the tree are encountered, causing the space to darken and making progress difficult.
Before the game
The ancients continued their relentless search for new materials. Excavations had reached previously unexplored depths, yet they still found nothing. Among those excavating was an elderly widowed man, more obsessed than anyone else with surpassing others, as they all laughed at him for having only his daughter, who in human terms would only be 6 years old. He dug on his own, perfecting his robots to supplement the workforce. He always sought to reach the deepest depths, achieving it by living for nothing else.
Meanwhile, his daughter couldn’t understand why everyone in the city looked downward. She began to believe that they were so focused on their own feet that they forgot to look at the things much higher above them. But she wasn’t afraid to lift her head, and since her father was never home, she began to dig upward on her own.
Making her way with basic mining tools, she carved through the walls of the mine without anyone noticing until she reached so high that she created a crack that led her to a world she and all the ancients were unaware of: the surface.
It was an empty place made of extremely bright white quartz, so pure and clear that the girl took some time to adjust to its brightness. In this empty world, there were only her and some rectangular blocks of white quartz. Seeing this canvas, the girl let her imagination soar, and with the tools she had, she began to carve the figures that only she could see on those neutral canvases. At first, she failed, and her figures broke, but whenever her father went to mine, she went up to practice. She ended up carving a tree on the largest block, the first and only tree in the world, turning it into her safe place, her playground, and her friend because, even though it couldn’t respond, she carved messages on all its leaves to reach the depths of her being. And she succeeded, but she didn’t know it.
Meanwhile, her father dug deeper and deeper, and in his desperation, even though supposedly he was not old enough to do so exhaustively, he took his daughter to the deepest depths of the underground. The rest of the ancients were still two layers above, but that man didn’t want anyone to catch up with him, feeling like he was being chased.
After seven months of excavation, the father reached a zone where neither he, nor his robots, nor his daughter could dig any further. Excited and desperate, he began clearing the area, getting closer and closer to the material. The tiny cavity they were in began to light up, and when he finished clearing, he couldn’t believe his eyes. It was a material similar to the quartz he knew, but white and very bright. Laughter of greedy delight filled the air until the girl approached her father’s discovery.
Upon analyzing it, the girl recognized her work in what she thought was a branch. What the girl didn’t understand was that the tree had come to life, and its roots had penetrated deep into her world to shed light on those who, according to the girl, lacked the direction. The tree no longer wanted the girl to be alone in the darkness.
Naively, she told her father that the piece of quartz was her creation. The old man, astonished, demanded an explanation of what had happened. The girl, now 8 years old, very excited that her work had reached such heights, told her father everything about the surface. Her father’s eyes followed the story attentively. But the more they opened, the more the light disappeared from them.
At the end of the story, the father couldn’t take it anymore: he couldn’t believe how she had stolen HIS discovery, how she had made him look like a fool, and what others would think when she told them what she had discovered. Anger began to flow from him like a fountain, with all kinds of curses and reproaches. How had he not found out about the activities she was doing before? How dared she hide it from him!? His words kept flowing as his mind was eaten away: What if she says something? What if she claims what she discovered? How dare she! His eyes grew darker and darker, and he began to lose his sanity. With increasingly aggressive movements, he approached his daughter, wrapped his hands around her neck, and began to squeeze… and squeeze… and squeeze… The girl’s sobs turned into desperate attempts to gasp for air until the silence was absolute.
That old madman had ended his daughter’s life, but he felt nothing. His movements were becoming clumsier by the moment; it was as if he lacked bones. With the girl’s body beside him, lying on the root, he searched for a pickaxe to continue his work, but he couldn’t hold it anymore. He felt himself shrinking and losing sensation. Instinct, like an animal, made him move the corpse aside and try to tear the quartz with his bare hands. He couldn’t. He couldn’t do anything. His breathing accelerated, his screams became less human, his eyes had no hint of white left, and his body seemed more like a mass than a human body.
For not knowing how to control himself, for looking at others, for doubting everyone, for his ignorance, for his hatred and his anger… That was no longer an ancient, it was a heap of rage and resentment. It was an entity.
This entity, now turned into a shapeless black mass, began to grow amid terribly sharp screams and make its way upward, snuffing out the life of everything that passed its path. It ended the miners, even though they tried to defend themselves with their robots. It ended the people who enjoyed the theater, causing great damage to its infrastructure. It devastated the entire city, without any door or hiding place able to stand against it. And finally, it found the girl’s tunnels and surfaced.
Upon reaching the surface, it went straight to the tree, as its hatred (now turned instinct) made it want to seize it. It began to cover it entirely, along with everything around it, but when it seemed it had consumed everything it sought, the tree reacted, shining brighter than ever, breaking through the entity. The entity, in pain, screamed, but it didn’t give up. Although the fight had a clear winner.
The entity was not powerful enough to destroy all the light, nor did it know what it was up against. In a last attempt to save its light, the tree gathered all the energy it had and illuminated the outside like it had never been illuminated before, causing even the entity to turn white, tearing it from the tree trunk, which caused its leaves to be torn off with it. The blinded entity began a desperate escape to the deepest underground, leaving everything it had absorbed along the way and taking refuge where the light couldn’t reach to heal.
The tree managed to stop the advance of darkness on the outside, but it could do nothing about what happened underground, not without all its power. Meanwhile, the entity left the leaves scattered throughout the underground in its haste to escape and left a robot outside, one of the many that had fought against it.