Waters Gather

Imagine a place surrounded by intolerance and rigidity, a refuge founded in the place that the overculture has written off as 'too unwholesome' or just 'not worth it'. A place where connection to each other, and to the land itself, builds a strength that makes it possible to resist those forces, and thrive vibrantly in spite of them. One hopes there are many such places across the metacosm, but Waters Gather is one of them.

To those who live there, Waters Gather is a vibrant and lively city, built in harmony with the high desert that surrounds it and the rivers that flow through it, where everyone works together to keep each other happy and well, in collaboration with the spirits of land, city, and myth. Without these connections, without the help of the massive water-plumed-serpents who run through the arroyos, the thunder-hawks who watch over the skies, life would be impossible there.

To most of those looking in from the outside, it's a bizarre place founded on superstition and folly, in the middle of an arid wasteland. The Regime would say that the only reason it hasn't taken it over is because the land just isn't worth it. Other reasons under that are just as important though: those who are aware of the city's relationship with the land see it as terrifying, both on a moral level ("pacts with demons!") and likely a strategic one ("How do you fight people who have pacts with demons?"), and just on a practical level, it can be useful to have a despised place to use as a scapegoat, and to ship folks off to if they don't tow the traditional lines.

Inhabitants

The folk of Waters Gather are diverse in many ways; they've come there from countless other cultures, sometimes even other worlds, and many of them came because they felt they didn't fit in somewhere else. Not all of them are traditionally organic; construct-craft has been a tradition in the city for generation, and of course there are also the spiritfolk.

Animism is a fact of life in the city (as it would be in the rest of the world it's in, for those who would be wiling to look and listen). Encouraged by the willingness of other inhabitants to interact with them, the spirits of houses, trees, computers, songs, and more often manifest, sometimes taking up physical residence with those they are close to. Others live more in the wild, like the water-spirits that flow through the arroyos and the wind-spirits that dance through the city in the spring and fall.

Social Organization

The city is organized by bottom-up consensus government, with communities managing their own affairs and sometimes appointing individuals to larger-scale groups to handle larger-scale issues. These too are helped along by the city's metaphysical structure; members of any organization are always aware that its formation has formed a 'spirit' along with it, one that can directly communicate its own health to concerned parties both inside and outside the group. How this manifests varies from one community or another but it often feels like a sort of group conscience, a low level empathic connection that gives everyone in a community a 'gut-feeling' about whether what they're doing is healthy or not. Since metaphysical connections here are social as well, it's often hard to tell the difference between a social community and a spiritual one, and indeed the same neighborhood 'circles' are sometimes used for both logistic meetings and seasonal rites.