Our Lady Albinoch

Welcome to Albinoch, the last, best, biggest factory town that Earth has to offer.

Humanity has always found it easier to run away from its problems than to fix them. So it should come as no surprise that interplanetary space travel was prioritized over unfucking our own environment. Terraformers deployed to Mars and Venus and the Moons of Jupiter wouldn’t work at home because of the way they made things worse before they made them better. So the Earth, our Earth, was dying. And we were running away.

And that’s where Albinoch comes in.

Albinoch is a megacity founded around resource extraction. Humanity may be fleeing our planet in massive spaceships, but someone has to stick around and fucking. Build the massive spaceships, yaknow? So while most of the world was being left barren and derelict, several of these megatropolises dotted across the globe, spreading outward like concrete cold sores.

Our dear Albinoch in particular was focused on extracting and refining the raw materials needed for building (though some ambitious businesses are trying to break into industrial machining and manufacture). The city is sandwiched between several mines for coal, various ores, and minerals; a huge quarry that spirals into the ground like the mouth of a titanic deep sea suckerfish, and an offshore oil rig whose lights we can see more clearly than the stars most nights, bobbing and rocking in the swells. As a result of all this bustling industry, the land got unstable. The whole damn city *settled,* sinking below sea level and flooding the streets. These days narrow canals are everywhere, almost as plentiful as the streets and back-alleys, populated by gondolas and riverboats, for living on and for taking people where they need to go.

The Allercorps mined deep for the fleeing colonists, and when they did, they discovered a dormant, prehistoric amoeba that colonized infected people's bodies, turning them into strong, fast, sensitive corpses with a hunter's mind and an insatiable craving for human blood.

Scientists all over Albinoch immediately set about looking for a cure, but what they found instead is that by manipulating the Amoeba's genetic code, they could essentially manufacture a treatment for eternal life, youth, and beauty...... With a few side effects.

Of course this treatment was only available to a select few. The upper echelons of society's best and brightest.

Meanwhile the infectious amoeba, transferring in the blood and saliva of its hosts, continued to ravage Albinoch's faceless masses.

So, bringing us up to speed—the people of the city are ruled by beautiful, charismatic, wealthy vampires, both loathing them and longing to become one of them, while being haunted in their nighttimes and nightmares by the bloodthirsty faces of their dead loved ones, calling out in the mimicked voices of those they've killed. The UV Lamps along the more populated streets feel like a bandaid, and just because you’re scared to go out at night doesn’t mean you always have a choice. If the wind turns right, the parties from the wealthy quarter are audible, reminding folks of the gulf between their lives and ours. Never go out alone if you can help it, unless you want to become another stolen voice in a dead man’s chest.

Ziggy Holiday

Zachary Carmen Holiday is, in theory, a private investigator. In actuality he's someone who will do just about anything anyone is willing to pay him for. Once upon a time, Zig believed in the system, believed that it was designed to help the people living inside of it. He joined the Albinoch Municipal Police Department; he wanted to serve the public, and he figured, what was a better way to do that than to become a public servant? He figured out pretty quick that the cops are public servants in name only, and when he realized he was being asked to hurt people more than help them, he quit to try and do better somewhere else.

His biggest flaw was always his naivete.

Ziggy quit lots of other things over the years too. For different reasons than the cops, of course. He quit playing piano, he quit trying to keep a stable boyfriend. Not because he didn't think they were worth it. He just stopped believing he was.

His PI business started out pretty much the same as his time with the police. He wanted to help people that had been failed by an uncaring world. He wanted to make a Difference.

It, uh. Hasn't really worked out that way.

Oh, and then. And THEN there was that whole business with the vampire attack. That really made things complicated, which was ironic. Usually, getting jumped by a Lazarine vampire really simplified stuff. Either you die and come back as an empty, mindless husk driven by bottomless thirst to hunt human beings for fuel; or you die and don't come back at all.

But Ziggy died and came back… different.

So now, not only does he have to work for pocket lint as the last dregs of his faith in humanity are slowly siphoned away by the inexorable passage of time, he also has to fight off the urge to, you know… eat them all.

Makes paying rent more difficult, is all I'm saying.

Margaret Navarro

Maggie is Ziggy’s best (read:only) friend. She lives across the hall from him, on the top floor of their walk-up apartment building. She’s also the only person in the world who knows his secret, but she’s had plenty of training keeping secrets.

Maggie, once upon a time, was a priest in the Catholic Church. Until, that is, she realized that was better suited to being a woman of… anything than she was to being a man of God. She left the church to transition, and has since grappled with her queerness, its place in her faith, and what kind of person she has to become to balance both. She’ll be the first to tell you, it’s been a journey.

These days, Maggie makes her money splitting her time between working as a call center representative for the Voida Nestor Corp media conglomerate, and working at a secondhand tech co-op.

She sees herself in Ziggy, sees what would happen if she allowed herself to pull back from the world. So, she doesn’t. She hangs out with folks from the co-op after work. She collects old boardgames, the kind that you have to summon a small village to play. She’s determined to convince Zig to play piano for her.

She loves him. But not enough to let herself become him.

The Shiprat

It was supposed to be a temporary name. It wasn’t supposed to stick. When the people on the Fisher boat spotted Rat wandering along the banks of one of Albinoch’s many canals, drenched in blood, with a microchip jammed into his brain and not a memory left in his head, they took him in. Just until he got better, they said.

Years came and went. His memory didn't. The name stuck.

Rat is so called because in the days after he was taken in by the Fisher People, he looked like nothing so much as a drowned rat: thin, glassy-eyed, and shaking, and also because in those early days, despite his impressive height, his hosts kept finding him in increasingly unlikely places all over their narrow, compact canal boat.

He doesn't squeeze himself into cabinets to hide anymore. The feelings of being hunted by an unknown assailant have largely ebbed. He has his own boat now, a boat that he's earned. A boat that's finally beginning to feel like home.

The chip in Rat's brain is called a RABIT, a rare, expensive neural implant that's supposed to record sensory experiences and enable the user to broadcast thoughts like radio waves. Theoretically. But whoever shoved this particular hunk of silicon into Rat's brain hadn't done it particularly well, and aside from the lingering amnesia, actually using the chip for anything more complicated than brief radio chatter tends to be more trouble than it's worth.

Trying to discover what happened to him is a priority, of course. But there are two things that rank higher. He has to keep the lights on in his very own boat, which he does using a knack for programming and coding to work on custom LogPADs, wearable, modular computers that have become an integral part of Albinoch's day to day life.

He's also on a one-man tear to completely exterminate Lazarine vampires from Albinoch. Rat hates vampires. He hates them with an intensity that burns hot enough to make him wonder what sort of person he used to be, if he hated like this back then, too. He's watched one too many people dragged into the dark by slavering monsters wearing the faces of people they loved. If the people in power won't do anything to curb the bloodsucking plague, then it's down to him.

And a couple of his friends.

These days Rat, Sailor (a nineteen year old Fisher with a gleam in their eye and a dream of making a difference) and Bernadette (Bernie, an engineer and munitions expert), are the only thing standing between the defenseless children of Albinoch and a grisly fate.

LAZARINE

The original, amoebically infected variety of bloodsucker.

Called Lazzies, colloquially.

Animalistic, most of their human intelligence is eaten away as the amoeba colonizes their dead brain.

Lazarines look waxy, stiff, and corpselike, with jagged fangs and hollow eyes. Their fangs are so large that they can retract into the skull, using specialized muscles to pull the bulk of the length back into their skulls. Their canines and incisors are both affects. The human teeth fall out and are replaced with new growth. When fangs are fully retracted, they can nearly pass for normal human dentition, but Lazarines are obvious enough in their other symptoms that the subtleness of their teeth don’t really do much to hide their nature most of the time. The less they eat, the more they rot, and you can usually tell how dangerous a vampiric encounter is going to be (on a scale of “ oh god oh no I want my mommy” to “certain death”) by how decomposed a particular customer has become.

Vampires have the ability to mimic voices, to better lure and hunt their prey.

Weaknesses:

+ Interaction of muscle and organ tissue with plant matter, especially wood, causes a breakdown in the Amoeba's cell lining, and enough contact can stop the vampire’s regenerative ability completely, causing the infected person to die. (Stake to the heart=death)

+ The infection makes the vampire strongly UV reactive. Burns to death in sunlight. UV lamps won’t kill a vampire outright, but they will be uncomfortable and painful to remain near for too long.

+ Garlic intolerance/allergy

+ Chemical burns can be caused by tinctures and oils of Frankincense and Myrrh, colloquially called Holy Water for their religious significance.

+ Pattern Seeking. If presented with complex patterns, or a scattering of small, uniform objects over a space, a Lazarine Vampire MAY BECOME distracted, seeming to count the spilled items or repeated features of the pattern. This is NOT FOOLPROOF. Attempt only as a last resort.

+ Beheading. This is not a weakness solely confined to Lazarine Vampires, but it has been reported to be effective in cases of Vampiric defense.

People have been fighting the Lazarine Scourge for decades now, but do not mistake these defenses for proof that encountering one is easy. The best strategy for surviving a Vampire is ALWAYS to never meet one in the first place.

The exact cause of infection and turning is unknown, as you can’t ask an infected person what happened to them. There are several theories, but none with more than anecdotal proof.

ISCARIAN

(they hate this name, they prefer Pristine Vampires)

(this has not stopped Iscarian from becoming the commonly used term, except by themselves and bootlickers.)

Iscarian Vampires are the willing recipients of lab-doctored treatments (and, it’s rumored, the people they elect to Turn themselves). These treatments leave them sane and physically untouched, but with superhuman strength and speed, elevated senses, immortality, and a need to subsist on human blood. Iscarian fangs are smaller, affect just the canine teeth, and cannot retract into the skull.

The Iscarian Demographic is rich celebrities, corporate millionaires, billionaires, politicians, nepotism babies, athletes, and the unusually beautiful or artistically gifted. Not every rich person in Albinoch is an Iscarian, but every Iscarian is independently wealthy.

Weaknesses:

+ Sunlight, for sure

+ Beyond that… who knows?

+ Iscarians have worked very hard to keep the limits of their condition under wraps, and no one knows how much or little of the amoeba’s original failings remain in their version of the condition.

Who are the people that call Albinoch home? What do they contribute to the landscape of this massive, sprawling city?

ALLERCORPS

The Allied Earth Remainder Corporations is a corporate alliance made between a few huge megaconglomerates. This alliance governs Albinoch through appointees to the Corporate-Municipal Legislative Council, as well as working together to ensure that their profit margins keep growing, and their investors both on and off-world remain pleased.

* The CMLC is a governing body, made up of appointed representatives of each member of the Allercorps, charged with the care and keeping of Albinoch’s citizenry. They handle law creation and legislature, budgeting, infrastructure plans, and the social welfare of the city. Some people might argue that they do a bad job at this, as they are so influenced by the corporate, profit-driven interests of their employers that they can’t make fair, even-headed decisions in favor of the people. Their response to this criticism has been to pass another tax break for the top income bracket.

A.M.P.D

Albinoch Municipal Police Department. A highly militarized entity paid by the Corporate-Municipal Legislative Council to enforce Albinoch’s laws and protect the interest of the Allercorps at all costs.

* the A.M.P.D’s ace in the hole, aside from all of their standard military police, bloated-budget, skull-bashing bullshit, are the Weres. W.E.R.E. (Warrant Escapee Retrieval Expert) Officers are genetically modified to have enhanced senses and physical strength, speed, and stamina. They have superb night vision, and are capable of tracking an individual’s scent trail or sniffing out hidden contraband. For that reason, Weres often work with K-9 officers, or in some divisions of the AMPD have replaced K-9 units completely. Weres can also undergo a physical transformation that for a short time allows them to become even stronger and faster than before, though this leaves the officer in question drained after an episode. When this happens, their features become bestial, almost lupine. When a prisoner or detainee escapes custody, spotlights are lit, and can paint the clouds with pale circles that look almost like a full moon. People joke that when a full moon is out, you have to be wary of wolves. As the Lazarine problem has encroached further and further into the city, it’s become a part of Were officers’ duties to hunt down nests and exterminate them.

CASEY FAMILY

A brutal organized crime family. Irish transplants. The Caseys run Kismet, the biggest gambling district in Albinoch. If you place a bet anywhere in the city, at some point your money will pass through a Casey’s hand. They run casinos, race tracks, fight rings, you name it. If you can gamble on it, they own it. Well connected, but not seen as valid members of high society, the higher tiers of the family live a pale reflection of the Delta District lifestyle, lording over their own enterprise. Because gambling is tied to other vices, they also have a big hand in the drugs, liquor, and sex trades, though they aren’t the only ones by far.

FISHER PEOPLE

Permanent residents of the canals, the Fisher People live on long, narrow riverboats and remain constantly on the move. Due to some contract signed decades ago, Fisher People are technically sovereign, with their own (elected and impeachable) queen and council of elders—though they do live and work in Albinoch. As a result, they have a reputation for sheltering criminals and undesirables, since the police can’t legally enter their boats. They’re very private and insular, but they also have a reputation for helping those truly in need.

* Market: when a collection of private and public Fisher Ships link up at a mooring site to make an impromptu town. The process of linking the boats up is called Going To Market, and the communities are impermanent and shifting, though one or two of the larger boats tend to be more or less permanent figures

** Court: kind of like Market but much more temporary. When boats Go To Court, it’s because the Queen and the council have decided to meet about official business with important community figures.

FOUNDRYMEN

Smelters, smiths, and other refiner tradesmen. A lot of their solidarity comes from looking down on Moles and Slabs. There’s a culture in the foundries of thinking that the other workers are less skilled—after all, they only pull things out of the ground, they don’t make anything. Though recently some people have begun to wonder whether that point of view was grown naturally, or if it was seeded by corporate interests afraid of worker solidarity between industries.

MOLES

Miners. Miners have a very low life expectancy, comparatively, and are also comparatively likely to be infected with Lazarine Vampirism. As a result, Moles all contribute to a shared medical fund that can be used to pay for treatment for illness, but also support a miner’s family in the event of their death.

RIGGERS

Oil rig workers and their families. Since actual Rig work takes employees away for months at a time, Riggers provide each other with a social safety net, looking after each other while part of their families are away. This includes childcare, communal meals, and just going to check on each other.

SLABS

Quarry workers. Slabs tend to live near the edges of Albinoch, because their workplace is the farthest away from the city. As a result, they see a lot of attacks from Lazarine Vamps, and have fortified their neighborhoods accordingly. Their relationship with their other slabs is close to that of a comrade-in-arms.

ALLYSOFT

Software and Tech giant.

Provides internet and phone service, while also manufacturing devices to utilize those services.

Also writes software for and produces Augs of varying complexity.

Most Augs, even ones built underground, have at least one Allysoft component in the hardware or the software.

AZURE PETROLEUM

Owner of the oil fields off Albinoch’s shoreline.

Also the owner of Azfill gas stations and qwikmarts.

Many of the cars on the road are produced in factories owned by Azure.

BXE METALS AND MINERALS

Raw Material Conglomerate

Biggest Three Subsidiaries are Founder’s Forge (smelting and material refinement) Depco (ore mining) and Shalefall (quarry and masonry). Most tradesmen in Albinoch work for BXE in some form or another.

CRUSADER

Mercantile monopoly.

Door to door delivery, as well as brick and mortar stores.

Owns other businesses as well, like Fresh Grow Market (groceries), Wexford’s (department store), and NowAid (pharmacy).

CHACE URBAN DEVELOPMENT

Massive construction and real estate company.

Owns corporate slums all over Albinoch with extortionate rent.

has several times priced people out of buildings to demolish and sell the land (and then secure a contract through one of their subsidiaries to build something new there)

GUARDIAN HILL

Food Production Multiconglomerate.

Grows, produces, and sells 90% of all food consumed in Albinoch.

Chain restaurants, corporate agriculture, branded snacks, soda pop, the whole deal. Almost every “brand” of food or candy in Albinoch is a Guardian Hill owned property. Almost all fast food companies are owned by the same people.

They have a deal with Pristinico to set up vampire storefronts and sell flavored HemoSynth™ to rich people who want to be able to taste other things besides blood.

PRISTINICO

Medical and Pharmaceutical Conglomerate

Best known for manufacturing both HemoSynth™ and the Iscarian Vampire treatments, known as Iscranidol.

The CEO is big into sports, and there are Pristinico-sponsored Arenas and Stadiums all over (the nicer parts of) Albinoch

VOIDA NESTOR BROADCAST CORP

The biggest producer of televised/filmed content in Albinoch.

News

Livestreams

Reality TV

Scripted Series

Films

Sportcasting

Porn

Virtual Reality Entertainment

They aren’t the only people making things for broadcast, but they’re the biggest, owning dozens of networks and channels and production studios.

Cybernetic Augmentation

Cybernetics are a huge part of Albinoch’s culture, both functionally and aesthetically. Some Augs are out of necessity, some are just for fun. Good, corporate-made Augs are hard to come by and very precious, but there are a lot of small cybernetics businesses that do customs for anyone willing to pay.

Secondhand Augs are illegal, due to a problem that developed where the body parts of murder victims were being sold as inherited items
(oh, this hand? It was my grandma’s. Yeah, she liked the versatility of it being both a gun and a knife.)

A person’s Cybernetics have to be removed and destroyed before their body is disposed of.

Cybernetics are varied, but the more specialized a piece is, the more it costs.

Antenna amplifiers for RABITs and LogPADs are common aesthetic Augs, and replacement eyes, ears, and limbs are common accessibility Augs

HemoSynth™

Synthetic Blood, designed in the early days of Iscarian Vampirism’s existence, when people were nervous about the ethics of blood sucking. It could be stored, flavored, and didn’t have any pesky connotations of human suffering attached to it.

However, the problem was that HemoSynth™, while keeping vampires alive and perfectly healthy, left them weaker than they would be if they drank human blood. Workarounds were formed, donors could be paid to sell their fluids for consumption, and an illicit market even opened up for people willing to let the vampires drink right from the source.

HemoSynth™ is still made as an alternative to drinking blood, but it’s very expensive, and Vampires who opt for it are kind of seen as pussies.

LogPAD™

The LogPAD range is a line of wearable electronic devices, ranging from the size of a smartwatch to about the size of an iPad mini. They tend to be used more by blue collar workers than the rich and famous of Albinoch, and remain popular because the parts are standardized by size, and completely modular, making them very customizable as well. This makes it great for people who need very specific hardware, or like their data to be more secure. It also opens a niche for aftermarket and custom-made LogPAD augmentations and accessories. LogPads are phones, computers, gps’s, tablets, anything you need them to be.

Photonic and Static-Charge Weaponry

Bullets are by no means obsolete, and analog guns still have a place in this world. But energy-based weapons are the next step in the evolution of causing people pain. Refractive technology and powerful batteries combine to create guns that shoot concentrated nuggets of heat, light, and electricity, burning holes in their targets with even more brutal efficiency than a good old fashioned gun.

These are issued to the AMPD, but civilians can get their hands on them too with a fair amount of ease.

R.A.B.I.T

Radio Access Brain Implant Technology. RABITs are a wide variety of neurally implanted microchips that can do anything from making and receiving private communication (hence the name) to curing color blindness, or recording and storing memories. Highly customizable, pretty expensive, and not super common.

Most RABIT chips, due to their size and limited processing power, serve only one or two functions, although that can be expanded on and diversified with external cybernetics.