Being an Australian Otherspace

If you’re after a hideout that’s quiet, comfortable and temporary, you could do a lot worse than finding your way into the Archipelago of Light. It’s hidden drug stashes, freshly used weapons and bodies in its time – and that just in recent memory. The only reason it doesn’t see more traffic from the Occult Underground is that one can never be sure that a visit to the Archipelago won’t end in vanishing, without a trace or a scream, from existence.

There’s no formalised ritual to enter the Archipelago – it seems to be a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a place reached by force of magickal will. Any finished, human-built space (a room in a building, for example) with at least three doors between it and any source of natural light can become an entrance. What’s more, once the Archipelago has been reached once through a particular place, it seems to become more likely that it will be reached again – as if the Otherspace were ‘fixing’ itself to a particular location. Of course, it can work the other way as well. A particular sub-basement in Coffs Harbour’s Park Beach shopping centre used to be notorious for sending people to the Archipelago, before abruptly stopping and becoming just another dank storage room for no reason that anyone’s been able to puzzle out.

To get to the Archipelago through a suitable space, all a person needs to do is go there, shutting every door between the space and the outside world as they go. When they reach the space and shut themselves in, it should be lit only by electric light – the dimmer the better, it seems. Then they just need to shut off the light and wait in the darkness. This can take a little while – Isolation stress checks may be in order for particularly long waits.

If the space is ‘active’, the first indication they’ll get is the flickering of a yellowish light overhead – way higher than the ceiling of the space they were in. The light will illuminate the floor of the space, but the walls will have disappeared. Instead the floor will continue to the edge of the light – usually about five to six metres away. Beyond that there is darkness, broken occasionally by another light and another patch of visible ground. The ground, by the way, usually won’t bear any resemblance to what’s beneath their feet. Past visitors to the Archipelago have reported vast slabs of slate, wooden floors still sticky with pine sap and rubbery surfaces that felt like walking on a giant waterbed. A constant thin drizzle is visible in the yellowish light, and every light will be suspended from an elaborately etched lamp-post. The posts are uniformly tall and curved, so that the light illuminates the ground, but not the post itself.

The posts and the rain seem to be the only exceptions to the cardinal rule of the Archipelago: if it’s not illuminated, it ceases to exist. Between the islands of light is a sea of nothingness which annihilates anything left to it. Thrown rocks, exploratory pieces of string, even people have vanished silently after leaving the safety of the light. Seeing this happen, by the way, is worth a rank-4 Unnatural stress check.

Fortunately, light sources brought in from outside the Archipelago work fine (although anything requiring an open flame tends to suffer a bit in the drizzle). Thus, throwing a stone from one island to another is possible if you shine a torch on it as it flies through the air. Many visitors have gone exploring by the simple method of leaping between islands that are close enough to each other that part of the leaper is always in the light. One thing that has never worked is shining an external light on the space between two islands, hoping to create a third one as a bridge. For some reason, only the Archipelago’s own lamps can create and maintain a stable surface.

Sometimes islands are spaced so close together that their circles of light overlap like some bizarre Venn diagram. Clusters of two islands are quite common, and up to five islands in a string is not unknown. These clusters are highly sought after, both for the ease of movement and for their stability.

The issue of stability becomes apparent the very first time a visitor watches a lamp flicker and go out, taking its island (and anything on it) along with it into the darkness. The lifespan of lamps isn’t known with any degree of certainty, though some appear to predate white settlement, if the aboriginal rock art found on some lamp-posts is anything to go by. From time to time, though, a lamp will give a warning flicker and, within seconds, disappear. Within five to ten minutes a new one usually flickers into existence nearby, island and all, but the contents of the original lamp are gone for good.

To leave the Archipelago, a visitor simply has to find the island they appeared in. They then locate the lamp-post sustaining that island (never more than thirty centimetres outside the radius of the light), hold on to it and slide down into the darkness. The poles are constantly slick with moisture, and holding on can require a Body roll in stressful situations, like combat.

Visitors sliding down their pole seem to move incredibly fast. The sensation of being out of control requires a rank-1 Helplessness stress check the first time it’s attempted. If the visitor has watched an island vanish, the rank of the check jumps to 5. After a brief period of terror, the pole seems to vanish, there’s a brief sensation of uncontrolled plummeting and the character lands (heavily, though rarely hard enough to do lasting damage) in the space from which they entered the Archipelago.

What You Hear:
The Lanh Thuc Demons can attest to the fact that dying lamps are bad news, having lost Angry Dave and Jimmy the Brick when the second island of their pair vanished while they were hiding out after a bank robbery. It is one of only two times an island connected to another is known to have vanished.