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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tristissima" data-source="post: 8097398" data-attributes="member: 6162">Pangolais, as stated, is a city of sophisticated, gracious pain, pain savored in all of its details and transmogrifications over time and the beauty it allows and the beauty of it. This is not the place where tortured screams rip the gloom, but instead where the exquisite food of the bistro is accompanied by a chain-dancer hanging from the ceiling from hooks in their skin as their spiked chain rhythmically undulates around them, directed by deft and tiny motions of their hands. Pangolaise jewelry and glasswork is renowned across Avistan for its quality.Though the city’s beauty might be a quiet monochrome and its sophistication jaded, nonetheless those two qualities mark anyone’s impression of the place. Well, anyone rich, that is. Like any good center of elegance, Pangolais has some serious class differences, which are exacerbated by Zon-Kuthon’s claiming of the Nidalese people. I’ve complained throughout this thread of the cartoonish sordidness of Nidal’s EVULness, but this is a good place and a good use for that over-the-topness, as it is an interweaving of a fantastic evil (the Hellraiser-like religion of Nidal) with one that is all too realistic (the horrors of institutional classism, which is a topic close to my li’l ol’ couch-homeless heart and nearer to my formerly street-homeless sweeties). The grandiosity of the combination makes much more sense than the just “I did it for the evulz” that has shown up earlier.Pangolais, when seen with poor eyes, is full of predators without even the trap-hiding illusion of refuge. And you are the prey. Servants are essentially slaves, with the loss of their tongue as a common punishment and silver sculptures above the market squares artfully adorned with their silent, agonized bodies. No law claims them but the bare whims of their masters. Who, mind you, worship cruelty.The Black Triune is rumored to live in Pangolais, but are rarely seen outside of the most major religious ceremonies. High Mistress Feylanthe of the Shadowmoor, a LE half-elf cleric 5/wizard 5/mystic theurge 3 who is obviously a member of the Umbral Court, instead finds herself dealing with most of the city’s governance. She’s a glorious goth girl whose black-and-white hair, grand gray gowns, and raven-feather capes being described as lovely and severe. Her life and personality are strictly compartmentalized, with a dispassionate discipline when it comes to Pangolais’s administration and a libidinous excess that, the book says, has earned her the enmity of the families that grieve her lovers. Her position and great societal power protects her yet.Limris Kiritane, a LN fetchling/kayal expert 3 runs a shop selling the fashion accessories she constructs from the bits of velstrac skin and bone that the totally-not-Cenobites litter around them as they seek the enlightenment of pain and transcendence of their form. Hooked into flesh with pierced rings, her jewelry adorns a loyal and eager clientele of pious fashionistas, even extending across the border into Cheliax. She even works with a network of mage-merchants to fulfill requests for magical versions of her wares. Limris’s work has gotten popular enough that some of her biggest fans look down at the hoi polloi who pierce their pieces into the outer layers of their clothing instead of directly into their flesh as intended. Reasoning that this amounts to blasphemous disrespect to the velstracs’ gifts and possibly the Midnight Lord himself, many of these fanatics steal pieces they could not otherwise afford from Limris’s less reverent but wealthier patrons.The orphans and children of Pangolais were once housed and taught religion in a three-story building owned by one Satriel Bezin. Until his apostasy was discovered and he was “broken in the public square.” Oops. Lights have begun to float in the abandoned building’s upper windows, accompanied by the groaning of chains and weak cries, presumably of the orphans and beggars who’ve been disappearing in the neighborhood. A lampadarius velstrac (the name comes from the slave who carried lamps before ancient Roman consuls, which became a role in the Christian church) who calls himself Mordain lives here now. Mordain struggles with the qlippoth-blighted appendage he recently grafted to his body, the qlippoth being nigh-Lovecraftian horrors who resent demons for gentrifying their natural home of the Abyss. The ability of this appendage to corrupt the velstrac is literally called “sin consumption.” He knows that he is losing his mind, both in terms of sanity and in terms of brainpower, but he doesn’t know why. Only the desperate and continual grafting he performs allows him to remain himself in the face of this blight. His victims are beginning to move up the socioeconomic ladder, prompting community leaders to ask themselves if the Umbral Court will consider the velstrac or them to be the problem, should they seek help.Many millennia ago, when Nidal’s allegiance to pain was new, the velstrac gifted unto the new realm memory chains. These artifacts recorded the experience of being tortured so that it could be enjoyed by others. The Nidalese quickly built the wonderfully-named Cathedral of Embodied Wisdom to hold them, achieving its obsidian-to-ivory ombré façade by making its walls out of bones lashed together with spiked steel chain. After ten millennia, the ones at the bottom have begun to look like dark stones. Inside, the walls are lined with shelves made of human skulls, held together by spiked chains snaking in and out of their eye sockets. Its geometric regularity has a sterile, eerie beauty. This is intentional, meant to communicate that no individual experience of suffering is nonessential to the whole history and society of Nidal.Upon these shelves are innumerable implements of torture in sich variety that most sadists’ mind would be greatly expanded just by their mere sight. It is, after all, the result of thousands of years of sadistic inventiveness and spiteful rivalry. The culminating goal of many a Nidalese’s life is to suffer uniquely enough for the experience to be recorded in these chains.Of course, many other memories lurk in these chains among all the torture, including:<ul> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The location of an original copy of Secrets of the Dreaming Dark</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Forgotten Runelord rites</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">The passphrase into the tomb of Sarkorin warlord of Uhorik the Witch-Painted</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ul">Much lore of ancient Thassilon and Azlant, and maybe even of the aboleths</li> </ul>One popular conspiracy theory is that all of these secrets are not held in the chains by accident, but rather to serve as lures for souls who might resist their teachings. After all, you can’t experience the collection if you don’t add something new and unique to it.</blockquote>

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