so. null is an absence of information. while looking at fun facts about mountains in the bay area, i learned that because of the topography of the region, we have a lot of dead zones for radio/cell service. looking at a map of complaints, the two most dead areas are along the berkeley hills, and in silicon valley. Also, most of the complaints in the entire area are along the waterline.
Null hates information and presumably the spread of information, so it’s probably strongest in these dead zones. It’s a fantastic piece of flavor/coincidence that Silicon Valley has such bad service apparently, since that’s where Gladiator, in canon, set up shop and channeled Null. (Silicon Valley also being a place of a major class divide and homelessness problem is another unfortunate but lines-up-in-canon flavor.) The idea that Null comes through into the waking world as these dead zones would be cool enough if it was just Silicon Valley, but there’s more.
While listening to TUC2 today, I was reminded of the fact that Nod is much, much closer to NYC than other monarchs and their realms are to their corresponding places. Inspired, I decided that it would be cool if the Bay of Slumber, while still stretching out across the whole region, was represented mainly by a sort of floating market/city on the Bay itself, with offshoots climbing up rivers, canals, and creeks to extend inland, as well as spilling out some into the ocean. I was initially super excited about the fact that this ties Nuria much more with the earth and nature in the Bay Area, a concept I’ve wanted to pull off but struggled to express correctly, but after looking at the maps of dead zones it’s better.
So in my tuc!sfba, Nuria is mostly confined to the Bay. In canon, Null was able to completely cut off Nuria from the waking world and absorb it. Null can, in tuc!sfba, be “mapped” through dead zones, which are, with the exception of the mermaid’s head, extremely common along the waterline - the boundary between dreaming and waking.
What I’m saying is, Null surrounded Nuria from all sides and then moved in until there was nothing Nuria could do but disappear. Quite literally, the nothingness of Null swallowed Nuria (almost completely) whole. There’s some ideas I have about the fact that the Bay’s head isn’t in this dead zone, something to do with droughts and miscommunication and animosity between people and communities and lowering water levels, but that’s for later.
Radio and calls are never reliable over the bay, if you’re taking the bridges. Internet has never worked in the BART tunnels, assuming you can even focus over the subway’s screeching enough to take in your information. In-universe, the dead zone has completely, literally, swallowed the bay, and that’s why Nuria is gone, and only vestiges of them (the rivers and creeks and canals) remain, dying faster than they can sustain themselves.
