"A tree reaches ever upward, becoming the bridge between men and gods.
We are thy root in the earth and thou art our flower in the sky, and together we grow before the face of the sun."
Let us go together and take a piece of heavens. On the concept of Trees, Sun and Family. Painted for FROMSOFT CREATORS' GUILD ZINE, VOL III
I'm absolutely brain rotting over your setting, and have way too many questions. The big one is: how deep has Ladder managed to go? What have they found so far? What were the consequences???
I am honored! Sorry about the Rot.
Okay! So yeah, the Ladder has the monopoly on a majority of information about Hellmouth, as well as the technology to traverse further down to the lower ‘levels”.
Aside from occasional leaks of information, the common man knows as much about Hellmouth as we do about the afterlife. It’s mostly speculations, folklore and fear.
And since I like drawing leviathan creatures, you guys know more about whats in Hellmouth than my characters, of course :p they’re just some guys I throw in there from time to time.
So at the first couple levels of Hellmouth, there’s Hyades, a city belonging to the aquatic Myce descended from Abaton, similar to how the other Myce are descended from Yvishnir (I haven’t really talked about them because they’re still in development). They are NOT the same as the ‘mermaids’ that Kraw and other courters hunt. They call themselves “Hyads”.
So for a while they had a contract where the Ladder was allowed to have expeditions, gain new resources and build trench stations along the edge of Hellmouth as long as they share their technologies and findings with the Hyads. This is where the Drifting Lights were born and a power grid developed from the unique tides over Hellmouth that the merfolk were already utilizing in a more prototypical way underwater.
The Ladder also made *Necracorps that specialized in traversing the depths, able to withstand intense pressure changes to a certain degree.
*The Necracorps were essentially Myce prisoners/volunteers who were liquified and put into crux powered bioengineered bodies, completely controlled by the Ladder under a Network (a mycelium network so to speak heheh, and THAT gets into Myce afterlife beliefs etc). I haven’t really said much about them yet aside from introducing Noxia.
Alongside these, the Ladder started sending scout subs out to see what was down Hellmouth’s throat.
The Hyads scoffed at their attempts, but they definitely weren’t going to venture down there to meets their own saints and gods anytime soon.
The Ladder found the levels of different ecosystems, and named those levels (like we do with the ocean zones) Depth Charges. So far the Ladder knows of at least 8 Depth Charges, and has a name for each one based on their major landmarks.
They go as follows:
Depth charge 1: The Teeth, Starfall Mountains
Depth charge 2: Great Coral Basin/ Hyades Sanctum
Depth charge 3: Coral Labyrinth/Undercity (sunken remains of part the Old World)
Depth charge 4: The Swaying Crimson (Giant Blood Kelp Forests)
Depth Charge 5: Cathedral of WVRM
depth charge 6: The Spectral Drifts
depth Charge 7: The Benthic Lillies (Abaton’s Lotus)
Depth Charge 8: Trench Mother
Depth Charge 9: Abaton’s Cradle aka No Man’s Land
While the average depths of Mors Astra’s oceans are at least 5-6 km, Hellmouth reaches far, far past any ocean trenches from the old world. Hellmouth itself isn’t even considered a trench but an entire isolated world from the oceans surrounding it.
It is recorded that each Depth Charge is at least 5-8 km deep, with widths in the levels unknown. Most explorers forget that they have even entered a supposedly closed off area of the ocean, feeding into the ideas of Hellmouth being inter-dimensional.
I’ve also considered putting little way stations in between the first 4 or 5 Depth Charges, either made by the Ladder or other types of Hyads that live outside of the city. They would have supplies, decompression chambers, etc!
There were at least four expedition subs that made it back to the surface, with 21 others that went missing.
First was the HM-SC 1 Union, which they named in celebration of “Yvishnir and Abaton’s reunion” this sub made it down to about Depth Charges 3 before it was famously attacked by Grimghast and her entourage of Selachii kin.
The second sub, L-SSLP 5 Dante, was sent as a retriever of the information of Union, (very on-the-nose name thanks to the humans working with the Ladder at the time). they succeeded in retrieving the information from Union’s modules, and made it back. (It was the proud innovation of a group of researchers obsessed with their discovery of the Manta-folk, incorporating their anatomy into the design).
Third was the L-SC 13 Slumber, who made it all the way to Depth Charge 6-7, discovering the Colony Leviathans; Motley and The Procession.
Fourth expedition sub was the L-SSN 17 Inanna, who was the only weaponized expedition sub to return from Depth Charge 8, discovering the two largest colony leviathan saints recorded; the Sleipnir Cloak Drifter and the Festive Hellmouth Viper.
A handful of submarines were sent after that to venture deeper, but none of them returned.
After this, The Ladder declared the exploration of Hellmouth as heresy against Yvishnir, as well as a waste of time and resources and promptly cut funding from the project. The trench stations were seemingly abandoned in a panic, with a rather large amount of equipment left behind. The Hyads smugly believed that their gods and leviathan saints were proven to be more powerful than this so called ‘Yvishnir’ and their land dwelling cousins.
As far as consequences go, the sailors and scientists who came back from the expeditions that went as far as Depth Charges 6 and downward definitely did not come back the same. There are a few side effects that were recordable.
Even after doing the proper decompression chamber routine, they would have severe headaches, vomiting fits, claiming to hear a humming in their ears that would grow so loud at times it would block out everything else. For the Myce aboard, a deep thrum would reverberate through their bodies until all their faculties ran on the same rhythm, the same pulse. Some humans would claim that the Depths were so quiet that it muffled the sounds of the submarine and they would hear their organs shifting around inside of them, adjusting to this rhythm as well. The logs would give enough information until they eventually became mad ramblings. The Myce were not mentally affected as badly but the humans aboard Inanna were so taken aback by the sheer size of the creatures they witnessed, floating in complete darkness for so long, they were sure that lifetimes had passed since they had seen the surface. They were sure that they had returned from some form of afterlife and felt dissociated from their lives, as though they were still in a dream. They wouldn’t eat, wouldn’t sleep for fear of their dreams. They would succumb to severe self harm, in order to feel something, anything to ground them. The only information the Ladder could fully trust was the camera logs on the outside of the subs and the radar readings as well as physical samples taken by the Necracorps.
The Ladder called their affliction the Changling Complex.
Some of the Myce tried to chalk it up as some sort of advanced form of the bends that addled their brains. The Hyrads claimed that it was Abaton speaking to them from the Depths, they simply did not have the means to process it.
The leaks of info I was talking about earlier are mostly from those that returned. A few departed from the Ladder under mysterious means, while others were ‘taken care of’ to avoid further problems.
“It isn’t really like entering a hellmouth, so to speak, but more like falling, through the stages of sleep, only to surface back, into a dream, or nightmare.” - Dr. Paragrim Stalis of the Ninth Weeping Pool.
Also here are some little concept drawings of subs, I’m not the best at machinery but I think my fav is the manta one, which is Dante
Another thing that I really appreciated much more on my latest E03 rewatch is Franklin's flashback for the excellent character study that it is.
It really tells you everything you need to know about the man and about the way his mind works.
Firstly and fittingly, it begins with him on the outside looking in at the Admiralty shindig, and it can't be overstated how important that is to Franklin's character in both reality and fiction. He's not in the in-crowd and his desire to be, his yearning for respect and admiration, is a huge driving force behind his poor decision making.
There's also the fact that while his focus begins with Gore, who he ostensibly loved like a son, it very quickly moves on. Franklin's benevolence doesn't run all that deep, and his concern with his own affairs and errors yet again overshadows everything else, just as his death will soon do.
Once it shifts, the focus of his conversations with John Ross and then Lady Jane is super interesting with a real sense of narrative.
With Ross, it's all about mistakes and their consequences - the weight of what he's done and what he's failed to do laid out, overwhelmingly, before him.
But immediately, Lady Jane chimes in to absolve him of all his shortcomings past and present. It's all excuses - John Ross is just jealous and they've always been misunderstood, boo hoo poor widdle innocent Franklins.
Those two conversations represent so well the progression in Franklin's mind - acknowledging his own shortcomings to an extent but always justifying himself in the end, shifting bit by bit back to his old delusions of grandeur and competence. That's him! That's exactly who he is!
I could just as readily believe Ross and Lady Jane as mouthpieces for Franklin's own subconscious as I could believe those conversations happened in real life in-universe.
