Dessur City

> "No trip to the Sun Frontier Territory was complete without a visit to its unofficial capitol, Dessur City. It was both the geographic and economic center of the SFT jespin farming operations, which covered the entire territory outside its southwestern quarter, where the Nomarem still lived."
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## History

The city began as a depot for travelers passing north to south through Linder Forge, a small patch of the Cross River where Thin Creek joined it, and where it was free of the West and East Cross Lorests. Prior to the jespin boom, Nomarem controlled it, but shortly after they withdrew to the west of Thin Creek, abandoning the forge to the new settlers.

Thin Creek would quickly become the borderline between the Nomarem Fields and the new SFT, and the settlement at Linder Forge would serve as a depot for the jespin harvested from the southeastern fields. It took the name of the largest landowner, Charles Dessur, and became a supply center for the greater farming operations. The settlement quickly spread south and east to include the abandoned Nomarem town of Wrensville.

The city grew in shambles, without zoning laws or civil planning. People built wherever there was room, and were soon erecting new flimsy structures on top of ruins. The structures collapsed under the heavy load of winter snow, were heaved by the frost or blown away by the windstorms triggered by the three nearby Lorests, which also brought howls to quake the land.

The city's residents helped with fires, theft, and simple violence. Flooding into a lawless land, humanity presented its darker half, and the slums grew along with the jespin export. All was chaos, until Charles Dessur died.

His successor, Neville Darvine, took the title of Mayor without bothering with an election, and then used his contacts within the Core nations to borrow heavily. He bought out the majority of the jespin farmers, and those refusing to sell were pressured to join farming collectives that Darvine controlled. Once he had control of the jespin market, he made a fortune manipulating the imperial stock market.

After repaying his investors and driving the remaining independent jespin farmers out of business, Darvine began turning DC and the greater SFT into his personal realm. He formed the DC Guard, a militia to enforce order within DC and defend against the increasingly hostile Nomarem. Once order was established, Darvine began remodeling the slums alongside Thin Creek.

## DC Down

DC Down was his greatest work, an old world city centre surrounded by an outer wall and equipped with plumbing and rails for transport, plus a canal system that could only function during the short summer, which soon became the city's tourist season. It took decades to form, but the end result was a sprawling ancient downtown with cobblestone streets, castles, bridges and towers, all set at the edge of the new world and filled with postcard views of the cityscape, jespin fields and the towering Lorests.

DC Down was family friendly, offering all the amenities fitting a modern tourist destination, while nearby in the Maze, there was everything else. After forty plus years, Darvine was still the ruler of DC, half a showcase monument as grand as any city of the Core, and the other half still a frontier boom town, as lawless as a place filled with people could be.

## Rat Nest

The Rat Nest was an engineered urban fortress built on the pattern of Nanjeto castles, which instead of walled fortifications used walls to frame and force attackers to fight within a confusing mess of false walls, dead ends, trapdoors, tunnels and snares, where ignorance put them at a severe and lethal disadvantage in relation to the defenders.

Chaotic as it was, there were still major transit points between the Old Maze and the Rat Nest. With the DC Reservoir protecting the Nest's southern border, its five main gateways were spread from west to east and were named by their compass point followed by the word tunnel, which accurately described each of the varied passageways.

The Rat Nest had designated defenders working eight hour shifts at each tunnel, and many of them lived in the five small outposts of Nity owned stores, hotels, clubs, casinos, apartments, laundromats and bars that had grown up within the Old Maze outside the tunnels.

Inside the Rat Nest itself, there were more defenses and homes for the inner guards. Some Nityz stationed inside the Nest were locals, but most were professional criminals wanted in the UER. Thanks to the killers amongst them, Rat Nest Nityz were feared throughout DC.

## Wrensville and Haven

Without the resources to erect a secure fortress like the Rat Nest, I instead melded into the existing landscape to acquire a place nearly as impenetrable. Before the jespin boom the Nomarem clergy serving Wrensville lived in a Templex in what became Crazytown. After the Nomarem abandoned the city of Wrensville, the Templex continued to serve as a missionary outpost until it was destroyed in a fire.

Before its destruction the church was impressive; second only to the temple in Smits Crossing. After its loss, the Nomarem wrote at least one song to memorialize it, and after hearing the song in Smits Crossing I went to their library to investigate. Finding a blueprint, I also found an attached note written by the clerics who survived the fire. After reading the note, I destroyed it and then promptly erased all knowledge of the note from the memories of the librarians.

What I discovered in the note was that the catacombs underneath the basement of the church were intact because prior to leaving the Nomarem clerics filled in the catacombs and buried its access tunnel, hoping to deny the jespin selters the catacomb's stones.

Returning to DC, I began excavating and soon had my room. No one knew where it was, it was deep enough to survive a moderate dragon strike and for guards I had the insane, sadistic and drugged citizens of Crazytown, which were scarier than the average Nity.

The only way into it was through a tunnel system engineered to confuse, frustrate and force anyone trying to enter my room to solve a series of puzzle in a maze under the Maze where I felt every whisper.

The visible seals between passages required tremendous force to move and the other passages led to dead ends or to hidden doors that appeared to be rock and dirt because I withdrew and replaced the rock and dirt before and after each use, so no one could find my room even if I weren't there to defend it. A few had tried but they all gave up.

I took no chances because the room was dearest treasure. It was my haven from the world, the only place I felt safe enough to fully relax, and I intended to take the secret of its existence into death.

## Gnat Fest

On the day before Jeday, after a busy summer serving tourists, many locals attended the Gnat Fest, a late-season event that was among the roughest on DC's calendar. The Gnat Fest featured slingshots and inkballs of two colors, red and blue, one for each side of DC March, the Down's centerpiece street.

Anyone could attempt to run through an obstacle course placed between two canals to win prizes while everyone else shot inkballs at with slingshots from both sides. Eye protection was provided by men in suits of armor, inkballs filled baskets everywhere, and slingshots were sold, but most locals brought their own more expensive models.