and unkempt place can be said to have borders) know all too well that the Beyond is no such thing. It is merely the next step in a long series of steps that wind around the world and back.
Note: No, that won’t work. I cannot talk about the Beyond only in terms of the Steadfast; it employs the very concept that I am berating. Come back to this at a later date and find a way to focus on the true strangeness that the Beyond encompasses.
~Naind Oreni, notes, possibly for Chapter 27 in “The Wonders of Our World: The Steadfast and Beyond.”
Like the Steadfast, the Beyond is already described and detailed in the Numenera corebook. Yet the area has so much territory and so many strange, interesting, wonderful, and terrifying locations to describe. This chapter presents just a few of them.
THE VIOLET VALE
(CERDYN’S PASS)
The Violet Vale is a location in the Black Riage, just north of Cerdyn’s Pass. The entire Violet Vale region is one where actions of the distant past have rendered the walls between this universe and others very thin. Long ago, seed pods from another
THE BEYOND
universe made their way to this region and found purchase in the soil in an otherwise innocuous valley. They grew into plants called reglae. The reglae are the bright—almost glowing— violet flowers that give the vale its name, and they hail from some other world, bringing weird ultraterrestrial properties with them.
Moving through (or past, or even near) the reglae may cause one to be transported or transitioned to another place. Those moving through the reglae always find themselves amid more reglae, just not necessarily in the same location as they once were. In a way that surpasses understanding, the reglae bend space and time, growing in multiple places (and times) at once. This causes “glitches” in the universe so that a creature or object standing next to a spot where a reglae flower grows might suddenly find itself in another location (spatially and/or temporally) where that same plant also grows, perhaps even miles (or minutes or hours) distant.
Although the Violet Vale is a physical
location in the Black Riage, all locations where the reglae bloom are also considered part of the vale. Because the nature of the plants bends time and space, if a plant were to be uprooted, preserved, moved, and successfully replanted (or if seeds were taken and planted elsewhere), that spot would technically become a part of the Violet Vale. Thus, being transported by the reglae is known as “going into the Violet Vale.”
biological monstrosities. These experiments incorporate both organic and inorganic parts, usually in unintuitive ways.
LADY WEISS
Lady Weiss is almost as brilliant as she believes herself to be, but that still makes her one of the greatest experts in the numenera in the region. Unfortunately, she is a sociopath who does not recognize the vast majority of other living beings as having any value or even sapience. Thus, she is utterly without morals or conscience in her treatment of others.
Regal in her bearing, Lady Weiss is tall, thin, and almost distractingly angular in her features. She usually wears an elegant gown, even when working in her lab, and somehow never gets it dirty, works up a sweat, or musses her hair. Lady Weiss never looks anyone in the eye and often seems bored, as if everything that happens has already happened before.
Lady Weiss controls the easiest means to leave the Violet Vale and won’t hesitate to say so. Getting access to it, however, is difficult. She would never just do a kindness or favor for people of lesser bearing. Travelers will have to give her something in return, and there’s little she desires other than raw materials to work with—potent numenera devices or living creatures. Bargaining with Lady Weiss is difficult because she doesn’t recognize most people as being worthy of her attention. She’ll talk to her children (see below) about visitors as if the visitors are not there, referring to them as new test subjects for her experiments. If she can somehow be reasoned with, she can take outsiders to a room high in the tower that holds a very large device with dozens of glass panes of various sizes. If activated, these panes shift and move, allowing the device to take advantage of the reglae’s spatial warping. If used correctly, the device produces a glass pane the size of a small door that allows instantaneous travel to any location at the edge of the Violet Vale, clear of the effects of the reglae.
Moving Through the Reglae: There is no sensation of movement or transition when one is transported by the spatial warping of the reglae. Creatures are just suddenly somewhere else. A character can attempt to reorient herself with distant landmarks and the position of the sun (or stars at night) to get a general idea of where her new location lies. This is a difficulty 4 task.
Generally, standing still means that no transition occurs, but there’s no guarantee. The GM is free to be capricious with the flower’s ability to transport those in the vale. And because the transition is very subtle, creatures don’t always know they are moving.
Allied creatures that try to stay together will stay together. Why this occurs remains a mystery. Perhaps reglae are empathic and are motivated by the sense of affiliation.
Because the shifts can move creatures through time as well as space, most travelers notice that obvious time-based signs change—the sun is in one place in the sky one minute, and another the next. Suddenly, it becomes evening or even night. However, creatures are never transported more than a few hours at once.
It’s possible that creatures moving through the reglae may spot another group in the distance also making their way through the valley. This group, in fact, is them, displaced in time. They catch only brief glimpses before one or the other group disappears, transported again in location or in time. Whether the creatures are seeing a past or future version of themselves is impossible to know.