Some Occult prisons for those who make the wrong enemies

Maybe you are too squeamish to kill, maybe you’d rather your enemy live on in suffering, maybe you think someone deserves some temporary punishing, more a warning than an ending or maybe you have some high minded delusions like rehabilitation. There are dozens of reasons for a duke to want his enemies locked away rather than dead. To aid these parts of the underground I present a few magickal prisons in which to throw your foes.

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The Salt Mines

Lot Salinger had been cheap hired muscle in the underground before he found the mines. The story of how he found the mines, and how he learned how to survive there are a secret (except possibly to his children), but after he did, he was a changed man. Long considered an unintelligent, unambitious man, Lot suddenly became a shrewd and calculating businessman. With the contacts he had gained from his previous line of work, and a bunch of his friends helping him, Lot opened Salinger’s Pest Storage in the early 1930’s, and although his workhouse/prison had a reasonably slow start (it took time for them to learn how best to deal with the different forms of adepts), within his lifetime it had become a reasonably popular means of retribution. His youngest son runs the prison these days, and they now operate in six countries around the world.

For a modest monthly fee, they will keep your enemy locked away toiling at the worst kind of hard labour and supply you with monthly highlight reels of his suffering. Prisoners are visitable by whoever is paying for them, but only at night, when they have returned from the mine. For an additional (not so modest) fee they carry out death sentences, giving the client the salt statue as memento. Another fee (distinctly immodest) and Salinger’s will even capture the target of your wrath for you. Like many mercenary groups, Salinger’s survived over the years by being ethically neutral in all affairs, working for whomever was paying. This has all changed recently, when Alex Abel discovered their operation. Now although their stated position is still independent, they are practically just the prison wing of TNI. Almost half of the current prison population are TNI’s enemies, and most TNI operatives sent here are quickly freed, either because the monthly fee keeping them inside mysteriously stops being paid, or because the current warden Des Salinger is more than prepared to accept payment from TNI to let someone go.

Salinger’s operation is simple. A heavily guarded and warded cell building, a very thorough knowledge of the taboo’s of the more common types of adepts and avatars, and back and spirit breaking labour, digging out new passages to recover salt and other ores. Since the prison industry isn’t really as popular in the underground as it is in normal society, they have been known to occasionally supplement their prisoner work crews with kidnappings, mostly homeless people. The guards are well trained, well armed and mostly sociopaths. Most of them have green stains on their faces, and very serious tooth decay, as their headgear means their teeth are constantly exposed to the atmosphere in the mines.

The salt mines themselves are a dark forbidding place, a labyrinth of mined pathways and natural caves. The walls, floor and roof of the mines are made of salt crystals of varying sizes, although veins of other materials can be found if one digs far enough. And Salinger’s have dug quite far. Their air is thick with salt, and it doesn’t take long for a visitor’s eye’s to start watering. The salt in the mine leeches the moisture out of everything that enters it- walking through the mine for a short time merely results in a dry, itchy feeling from all the salt in the air, while actually touching the mine with bare skin results in an instant feeling of desiccation. Cave-ins are frequent in the mines, but the real danger lies in the fact that all organic matter taken into the mines is slowly transformed into salt. Every night spent in the mines a character must make a Body check. On a failed check, the character loses the sum of the dice from his Body score. On a success he loses only the lower of the two dice, as his body is inexorably turned to salt. The lost points recover at a rate of 5 for every full 24 hours spent outside the mines. Prisoners are held in the infirmary whenever they show signs of serious degeneration, until such time as they are deemed well enough to return to labour. Those given death sentences are tied up into whatever pose the buyer wanted and left here, to turn to salt. Lot discovered that this crystallization could be countered, by wearing shoes with Zinc soles, and a bridle-like headset made from copper wire, which pulls the lips down and back, giving the wearer the look of a perpetual grimace, and the guards all wear such devices.

The Salinger’s salt needs to be purified after it is mined, as the base product is a strong desiccant and as such quite poisonous. Salinger’s sells a small amount of the purified salts in select health stores, claiming it to be salt altered by some process to make it less unhealthy for you. They also sell a small amount of semi-purified salt as an exotic spice, although it’s something of an acquired taste. More than a few dukes who had tried these products before discovering its origins have nightmares about potential side effects such otherworldly fare could have had on them, but so far no obvious effects have been found (Salinger’s resolutely maintain there is nothing to worry about, but of course they would say that). To the underground they sell the other purification of the salt, both as a poison to the underhanded and as an arcane compound to the foolish (or possibly the wise), as well as a number of other minerals drawn from the mine.

The mine also produces one truly magickal material, although not with enough frequency for it to be sold openly. If a Vampyroteuthis infernalis, a squid-like creature found in the deepest parts of the ocean (and commonly referred to as the vampire squid), is surrounded by 108 live fresh water fish (each weighing more than 5 pounds) and buried deep in the salt (most commonly by collapsing the passage around them), then left for at least 14 years, in the salt where the squid was buried can be found a new ore, Anhydrum, the only truly hydrophobic material known. Anhydrum and water react like the north and south poles of a particularly strong magnet. This makes it exceptionally unpleasant (and difficult) to touch, as the moisture in your body tries to avoid it. Any fluid that does not contain water (pure alcohol, oil, etc) does not react to Anhydrum. Its water repellent property makes it, amongst other things, highly desirable to those obsessed with old world alchemy (and some Narco-alchemists) as it can be used to separate water out of a material. Some people say that it was used to make the shoe soles for “Blizzard” Benson’s infamous water walking trick, and a cabal of mechanomancers are known to be hunting down every available scrap of it, though just what machine they are making is unknown

Entry
The entry ritual for the salt mines is possibly Salinger’s most closely guarded secret. If any others know it, they aren’t talking.

Et Salinae <8 minor charges>
This ritual creates a mystical doorway, a freestanding portal to the salt mines, which anyone appropriately marked can go through. The ritualist must acquire wooden beams that have been used to shore up an old mine shaft while it was in use, and nail them into a vague doorway with at least 5 nails made from metal that was mined but never molten or processed. He must erect this arch inside a building that does or did contain a large number of workers working at a menial job they hated. (Salinger’s traditionally buys up old factory buildings, and converts them into the cell areas of their prison, but office blocks work just as well, and are much easier to find). He must then consecrate the door by gathering every last drop of sweat, from a man working a double shift (it doesn’t really matter what the work or how long the shift, only that it is considered twice the normal workload. Of course if the work is too easy, there won’t be quite enough sweat for the next part) and flick it all over the gateway and ground beneath it using the freshly severed tail of a mule, while reciting an ancient roman mining song. Removing any of the nails will close the doorway but not destroy it, and replacing it will open it again. Anyone wanting to use the gateway need only step through it while wearing or carrying a pair of crossed pick-axes. Salinger’s use a crossed pickaxe as their logo, so all the prisoners and guards have this symbol on them by default, but there are more than enough actual pickaxes lying about for someone to hold up a crossed pair if their clothing is damaged.

Salinger’s have created a number of gateways, and has managed to mine out accurately enough to connect the doors up in the mines, allowing them to transfer prisoners from one gaol to another with relative ease, and they do, rarely keeping a prisoner in the city he was punished in, unless his tormentor makes excessively frequent visits. The doors are traditionally kept closed except for shift change of the prisoners, and Salinger’s keep one private door, hidden far away from the active parts of the mine, where a guard just sits and mans a radio, ready to receive calls for emergency openings. He then steps out to the real world and notifies the people outside the appropriate doors, to open it. The distance between gates inside the mines and outside them is generally shorter than in the real world, and seems to follow a predictable pattern (or at least the people at Salinger’s seem to know where they will be). Since the new administration, Salinger’s have been rumoured to do a little sideline business as a travel company, quickly moving TNI agents across the Atlantic between their European office in Cyprus and their Washington cells.

Rumours – Salinger’s mines draw out a lot of salt, but its only just recently that they have begun selling the stuff. Just what need did old Lot have for such immense quantities of salt? Since his death, and the move to commercial sales, the trend for kidnapping people to work the mines has dropped, so whatever other purpose Lot had for all this salt, its likely Des doesn’t share it. Or doesn’t know of it.
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The Glass House

Even knowledge dies eventually. When the last person who knew something dies, when the last book burns, that knowledge dies with them. So what do you do when the fruits of that knowledge remain? Artefacts of the past we no longer know how to operate. Improvise. Find new uses for old things. Which is what happened in the case of the glasshouse of Arthur Coates.

Arthur Coates was a famous figure in his day. Rumour had him involved in all kinds of things. He was a quirk, who grew plants. Plants that moved, or could see, or made fruit that turned you invisible. There was seemingly no end to the things he could grow. To the underground he was The Green Man. Under his patient gaze and warm hands, his style of magic almost became a fully-fledged school, as from amongst the earth of his followers he managed to cause the seeds of his style to bloom, as a few of them understood his truth. In the end their obsessive attention to plants caused them to ignore the rest of the world too much, and they were destroyed. Now when a small army is silently growing, and powered by their own unique magicks, there are many in the underground liable to take steps to shut them down, and doubtless the other local factions had schemes in the wings, contingencies in case the plant lovers got assertive, but in the end it was out-of-towners, an enormous army of bikers, who slipped in one night leaving no survivors in their wake. Few people ever realised that when his followers called Arthur “The Green Man” they meant it as more than just an honorific. Arthur Coates had been the most unobtrusive godwalker the True King had ever had, and its possible the archetype sponsored the raid, in order to get a godwalker who could keep it more in the public conscious.

They may well have missed the battle, but true to form the local underground were quick to turn up and pick the bones. Some event in the battle had caused the plants of the Green Man’s nursery to whither and die, and no plants have been able to grow or survive in this area since. The only remnant of Arthur Coates’s existence left in the area was a large glasshouse, in the heart of the nursery, which somehow survived the slaughter. Inside, in the sweltering heat of the artificial tropics, lush greenery and the bloom of flowers can still be seen. Of course, its safest if you view them from outside the glass…

The plants grown inside emit pollens that trigger emotional responses in people. Arthur had used it to create perfumes of love, dusts of rage, and many, many more things. Now the only emotion the plants produce is sorrow. Crippling despair and depression are all that can be found within. Seconds after entering most people are overcome, and find themselves unable to do anything but sit still and cry. Like all plants, those in the green house die almost instantly when brought into the area of the former nursery, so they are effectively impossible to remove from the green house.

These days the green house sees use as a prison. Many building have been erected on the former nursery grounds, hiding the green house at the centre of a winding maze of confined alleys and passages. The entire ground is owned by a cabal of Thaumaturges, who seem happy to study the odd effects of their property, and try to devise ways of safely removing a plant from the glasshouse, to transplant elsewhere. Anyone who crosses them will find their future filled with tears, but they are prepared to throw other people’s troubles in their little gaol, for a price. One such imprisonment got them Wilkes, the clockwork guard that cares for the prisoners. Prisoners are taken into the glasshouse in Wilkes vice-like steady grip, and not released until they have succumbed to the depression (before they had Wilkes, the thaumaturges had put on hazmat suits to take prisoners into the cells). Wilkes enters the glasshouse daily, to force a high nutrient gruel down the prisoner’s throats to keep them alive, to wash and change them, to roll them to prevent bed sores (and treat any other wounds they have), and remove their corpses when they finally die (or more rarely remove a still living prisoner who is to be let free). Wilkes attacks anyone who tries to free one of his wards, and being a clockwork, he attacks hard. He is also trained in patching the glass if someone manages to break it, letting the aura of sorrow leak out into the nearby area (and the plant death to leak in).
Anyone who enters (or more likely is dragged into) the glasshouse must make a mind check at –20 each round or succumb to the aura of depression, and take no more actions beyond weeping quietly until someone else pulls him out of the aura (soft-hearted gm’s might allow a character a recheck if something truly important happened right in front of them).

Rumours – Word is Wilkes still secretly works for the clockworker who “sold” him. When he tends the prisoners, he carefully scrapes pollen from the plants into a special cabinet in his chest, made from a pane of glass he replaced from the house. By now he has got to be near full of this concentrated despair, and soon he is going to be sent to release it all. But where?

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Rubik’s Bunker

The cube. The most infamously confusing toy ever. Originally designed as a tool to increase architectural students ability to conceptualise space, it became one of the symbols of an era. Is it any wonder that a mechanomancer named Sykes took the time to track down the first? And in the end he had to do it twice, as it turned out the charge wasn’t in the true original, but in the first one sold. Eventually he got his charge and he supplemented it with two majors of his own (his memories of his wife and son), and used it to build a prison, in which to hold the men who had taken his family from him. When he was finished, he exited his workshop, unsure what he had done for the last five years, and holding a twisted up Rubik’s cube, whose purpose, now fulfilled, he was unsure of. Since then the bunker has passed few a number of hands, some of whom only realised what it was when they inadvertently released its most recent inhabitant.

From the inside this mechanomantic contraption appears to be a large cold war era bomb shelter, with six bunks, a seemingly endless supply of stored rations, basic showering and cleaning facilities and no exits. The walls bear a number of carefully painted portraits of a women and young boy, but are otherwise unadorned. From the outside it looks like any other Rubik’s cube. Unsurprisingly the connection between the two is the puzzle. If even a single side is completed, the device becomes active. If anyone touches it with sufficient force (traditionally done by slamming the cube, face out, into the targets forehead) they disappear and appear within the bunker, sitting on a bunk and wearing a jumpsuit of matching colour to the panel he was hit with. The cube automatically rearranges itself, “locking” the target inside. If the same side is ever reassembled, and struck with force, the prisoner is released back into the world. By matching different sides, up to six people can be trapped in the bunker, completely unable to escape without outside assistance. When an occupied panel is matched up and struck, whichever prisoner is wearing the matching coloured jumpsuit is released, even if this isn’t the prisoner who entered wearing that jumpsuit. If the prisoner in that jumpsuit is dead, his corpse is freed. If a panel is occupied, but no one is wearing its jumpsuit when the face is struck, the walls of the cube all change to match that colour, until someone gets into the suit, and it disappears. Destroying your jumpsuit is a good way to trap yourself inside permanently unless you can steal another prisoner’s jumpsuit. If a jumpsuit is destroyed, the matching panel is considered unoccupied again, and the next time it is struck against someone a new jumpsuit will appear as the new prisoner enters. There are many whispered rumours of what happens to the bunker if it is struck when all six faces are appropriately matched up, but no one can say for sure just what this would do.

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