Capecia, the City of Clocks, is a Heart's Realm in the Dreaming.
Overview[]
The Glamour of Capecia is about the victory of artifice over nature. Here, in the City of Clocks, enslaved changelings and their human allies have created a realm ruled by tin toys and automata, puppets and paper dolls. The skills of the craftsmen have conquered time by building not in flesh, but in more durable materials: bronze and plastic, wire and leather, heartwood and rubber. Everything in this bustling city is not only artificial but automated. It is a world where meat changelings drift like bewildered ghosts. The mannequins fill the moving sidewalks and hurry along on their stiff-jointed legs as they dance their dance that never ends. Above, the puppet people stare with their glass eyes through office windows, while others chatter on about whatever comes into their newspaper-stuffed heads. The tin dog chases the tin cat which chases the tin mouse endlessly.
Capecia is the Glamour Machine and the Machinery of Glamour, the great neon Factory whence the living dolls come as they struggle to become (or simply replace) flesh. From its earliest origins as the holding of a family of orphan toys, Capecia has grown into a thriving, if unnerving, metropolis, the center of the Inanimate Empire.
Naturally (unnaturally), there are some who claim that the Inanimae have gone mad. The living dolls are clearly engaged in some sort of war with one another, fighting mercilessly over obscure doctrines that they reassure flesh-and-blood observers from other realms, "You meat would not understand."
The Clockwork City Untethered by Gravity Even[]
Whatever natural terrain was once dominant in Capecia has long since been vacuumed, painted over, paved, and otherwise effaced by the burgeoning automaton population. In its place, the realm is now filled with metal, concrete, the foursquare, and the geometric figure of the squared circle.
The realm itself is dreamed in the shape of a gigantic city that floats unsupported in the upper sky, like a ship in an invisible sea. Various "suburbs" are connected to the city by means of rigid corridors and walkways, some of which are motorized to simulate the movement of the stars in the sky. Of course, in Capecia itself, the true sky is not visible; instead, a canopy of pale blue paper has been stapled over the city to keep out the rain and weather.
Within Capecia, districts filled with narrow, twisting alleyways alternate with wide boulevards and straight-angled arcologies. In the current internecine struggle, various of these districts have been claimed by different factions and bear evocative names like "The Rotwang Corridor," "Hoffmannstraße," and "ix-subfigura B." Although the Inanimae take care to mark several of these "active districts" with flags and colorful ideographic banners, the marking system is still confusing to most flesh creatures and subject to last-minute change. Caution is advised if the traveler wishes to avoid becoming a statistic of terrorist attack.
Factions in the Making War[]
In theory, the most important denizens of Capecia are the Dreamers who have been captured by the inanimic raiding parties to ensure a fresh supply of new chimerical bodies ("husks") for automated "children." These hapless prisoners are actually treated comparatively well by most of the inanimic factions, although the strict routine is harmful to most captured changelings: uniforms and long hours with few rest periods and little reward quickly causes them death by Banality. With the exception of hard-line anti-meat groups, most of the inanimate supervisors indulge their hostages' biological "weaknesses" (the need for food and elimination, emotional exhaustion) with a fond but uncomprehending precision. In practice, naturally, the flesh inhabitants of Capecia are peripheral citizens at best. Even those "lucky" enough to have gained special status through creativity or efficiency are alienated from daily Capecian affairs, forced to live and socialize in special districts, and kept on an early curfew "for their own protection."
The true masters of the Clockwork Sky are the various warring strains of inanimate life that the crafters have made. These include the mannequins, the puppet people, the rotwangs, the copelli, the alberti, and other esoteric breeds of chimerical doll.
The Colored Mannequins[]
One rare among chimera, these constructs have prospered and multiplied on Earth since the Sundering and today make up a thriving civilization of their own, separate from and unintelligibly alien to changeling society. The mannequins are unparalleled masters of disguise and can easily mask themselves to look like any humanoid race, age, or gender, but their true form is that of a jointed dummy made from some rigid material that resembles hard plastic. This plastic comes in at least eleven known colors, hence the common name for these beings.
The mannequins do not have faces. In their natural state, their heads are smooth, featureless ovals, which the mannequins often adorn with geometrical figures for unknown reasons, perhaps out of vanity or as caste markings. They do not breathe and do not have voices; when forced to communicate vocally in disguise, they use clever tape recordings bartered from other chimeric races to simulate a human voice.
The mannequins have come to enjoy a monopoly over most of the major department stores throughout the world, which they rule like fortress city states. Members of other chimerical races who choose to live in department stores are allowed to coexist peacefully, but the mannequins demand at least token tribute from all within their realm and also demand to be kept informed about any goings-on within the store.
Within their domains, the mannequins apparently perform rigidly choreographed ritual magic and art (their favored form seems to be an eerily slow communal dance that takes days or months to complete, moving from set tableau to tableau). Otherwise, the various department stores are engaged in an eternal war of assassination and sabotage of all rival factions.
There are hints in faerie lore of entities called "Dressmakers" which rule over the mannequins in some unspecified capacity. Perhaps it is an honorific title or office bestowed on mannequin leaders; perhaps it indicates a second species of chimera. The most disturbing hypothesis, though, is also the one that textual evidence seems to support best: The "Dressmakers" who rule the mannequins may not even be sentient beings at all, but simple inanimate objects that the mannequins have "liberated" from human manufactures and now venerate as mute and uncaring gods.
- See also Mannequin, which may or may not be the same thing.
The Clockwork Court[]
Composed of representatives from all the countless types of machinery with complex moving parts, this court is dominated by robots and intricate robotic toys. There is a split with this court between the older clockworks (who tend to be bulky automata made form actual clockworks between 1600 and 1900) and the younger robots (who tend to be made with much more sophisticated technology in the past century) that mirrors the larger split within the inanimate world between Craft and Factory. However, many prominent clockworks are very active within the Factory, and, in fact, it was a cabal of clockwork engineers who built and still maintain the infamous People Factories. The robots, for their part, tend to have been built wholly within Factory environments, and so do not fully comprehend what their elders mean when they talk about "soul" or "Dreamers," although a few famous individuals have found Craft along the way.
Many members of both courts of the Automata do not have humaniform bodies, nor do they feel the need for same. Ones who do possess human forms are generally stronger and more resistant to damage than human beings, although many are made vulnerable by extremely fragile internal workings. Despite appearances to the contrary, even robots cannot be constructed to be identical to other clockworks; every member of this faerie court begins as a unique entity, even though more radical Factory adherents try to erase this uniqueness (by "removing their faces") in the name of the movement. Many incorporate human parts or likenesses for additional Glamour and longevity. Such gestures can be as simple as taking on the likeness of the crafter's dead child or as sinister as using dead humans as host bodies for computerized brains.
Quickmadness & Dumbmadness[]
As the Making War continues to grow more desperate and the quality of artificial bodies grows poorer, the entire realm of Capecia undergoes increasingly severe spasms: power failures, resource crises, or destruction of irreplaceable machinery. Increasing numbers of the Inanimae suffer from the declining condition of their husks, which either wear down and can no longer be repaired or else are mass-produced with such poor quality that they must be changed almost constantly. The former condition results in a gradual but inexorable slowing of inanimate consciousness and activity: Dumbmadness. The latter causes irrational elation and shortened attention span: Quickmadness.
In recent years, the great floating city has lurched and drooped ominously closer to the ground, and at current rates of decay, it will fall to earth sometime soon.
References[]
- CTD: Dreams and Nightmares, p. 78-81
