Okay so no Caed Nua as an abandoned haunted house, but would you write about Neketaka as a not at all abandoned but still haunted AF city?
I would!!! Especially as it’s got a lot of overlap, given both Caed Nua and Neketaka just..... plastered over the Remains of What Came Before, and everyone just sort of forgot about it, but the House City Did Not Forget.
(A note: I’m on much much shakier ground as far as the real life cultures that inspired the devs with this one, so like, if you’ve got more info let me know if I’m wildly off base or like, rude, because all I’ve got is two years of Polynesian art and a thorough grounding in modern American, nebulously European, and fairly specifically 17th c Japanese haunted house archetypes.)
So Neketaka, canonically, is built on top of several centuries worth of Other Cities, not all of which are holding up that well. (I suspect most of the, uh, old empire(?) construction actually was built into the caves under the current city on purpose, given the Gullet hasn’t been swallowed up yet; despite all the shaky platforms there’s solid rock somewhere under all that, and that buildings for the living were repurposed for the dead at some point when they decided to start building on top of the mountain as well. All of that was more or less sealed off by Engwith, to my understanding, in an attempt to hide the God Battery Ukaizo, likely with people still living there, given the sheer number of corpses you see both below the Gullet and in Berath’s temple, which, again to my understanding, leads into the same complex, deep enough down. So you’ve got a whole city under the city, plus whatever layers of construction ended up in between (and there’s at least a couple of places that have two or three of those, given where we’re allowed to go), and that city did not go quietly.
(To circle back around to the Caed Nua essay nobody gets to read yet, it’s fairly canon that anything that exists long enough gets pretty damn haunted, for whatever definition of haunted applies. Places and things involved with death do this more quickly, obviously, but even sufficiently strong emotion will do, based on all the soul bound objects. Caed Nua is explicitly canonically odd because it Went Haunted almost before it was finished being built, not because it *is* haunted, and Haunted Hill scares people because that shit happened literally overnight, not because it happened at all; nobody cares about the equally (but much more gradually) haunted sewers, after all. Neketaka was essentially buried alive, as far as I know, and history swallowed that fact up whole, so the highly reasonably fact the city is haunted is not well remembered, and it’s real sad about that.)
A small part of the reason Neketaka is such a mess (99% of it is absolutely outside politics But) is that I doubt the Huana are as a general rule used to living in haunted spaces; some tribes certainly are, and all the Watershapers are probably at least a little Concerned by non-haunted places, considering, but anybody whose tribe used to live outside the city is probably not having a great time with that bit, on top of, y’know, living in a city at all. Neketaka seems fairly inclined to leave the surface city to itself, though in addition to being at least partially built on solid rock, the reason the Gullet is still standing is definitely because the city wants it to be, and it’s definitely more ‘active’ about Berath’s temple, and probably Delver’s Row as well. It also probably doesn’t help that p much nobody can recognize the haunting for what it is, for various reasons, and anyone who should is very throughly ignoring the situation, mostly for political and/or health reasons. (The Watcher is special, and the city loves them, for better or worse; not everyone can say the same!) Digging too far into the City’s city-ness just means you get it’s attention, and then it probably tries to help you, and it’s idea of helpful is not exactly a good time.
Speaking of, I suspect that to Neketaka the City, killing anyone who ends up in the Old City quickly looks like a kindness; the original people who died there either died fast or suffered for a long time, and the City as an Entity is definitely influenced by that drawn out despair, the way the city as a city is, even if they don’t recognize that about themselves. It certainly doesn’t look like a kindness to anyone else, but I really do think that’s the City’s idea of trying to help.
There’s definitely a lot more to unpack here, like why the City is sad and how that affects things like, oh, the Vailian and Rautai presence, but I haven’t felt it out yet, and I need to do some work with the map but yeah! Neketaka is Real Damn Haunted and nobody wants to acknowledge that, and it’s very sad about everything. Tune in next time for why my gut feeling says the priest dude in Berath’s temple and also Dereo in Delver’s Row are having the best luck with the thing, while Her Majesty is accidentally fighting a war on an extra front.
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