"The Foyer is, in essence, a maze. It simply wears the skin of contemporary office space. But in truth, it is a labyrinthine system of rooms, with no known end. Each is even more bizarre than the last. No part in any of these places ever repeats. You’d think that’d be useful right? That it would stop us from getting as lost? But, there are only so many ways you can design a mostly normal room before things have to become… strange…"
— Jonah M. Peterson, wanderer.
Limspace Threat Grade: E
(Safe/Sub-optimal)
| Category | Rating | Summary |
|---|---|---|
| Environmental Hazards | 1/10 | Scattered chairs, desks, filing cabinets, and desk nicknacks can be found strewn on the ground in some of the rooms. This poses a risk when running but can be mitigated with caution. (Appended score for far-reaches, 7/10. Avoid travelling too far into this limspace. |
| Resource Scarcity | 6/10 | The main hazard in this limspace comes from a lack of consistent food and water. Food sources and water sources both follow the sui-generis effect. This means that the objects in the rooms are randomly placed, and many rooms don't contain either resource. |
| Entity Presence | 1/10 | Several known non-human lifeforms inhabit this space. Class 2/3 artifices, and class 1 enigmas (Limspace-specific lifeforms, expanded below). |
| Spatial Instability | 1/10 | Rooms will rarely change position but it can happen, think of each room as one cell that is part of a larger system. Those cells can change position as long as a different cell fills the remaining space. |
| Overview (AVERAGE) | 2.25/10 | This limspace is generally safe to traverse but requires preparation and will involve periods of extended hunger and thirst. 3.75+/10 when considering the far-off reaches of this space |
DESCRIPTION
fig 1.0 A typical room within the Foyer.
This limspace is a complex system of connected, unique rooms. This makes giving a set description difficult. Since you are unlikely to encounter any location I can detail. As such, I will give a brief overview that can broadly apply to the rooms as a whole: the Foyer consists of many carpeted office spaces that conform to late 20th-century design norms, typically the rooms will feature cubicles, desks, and computer terminals (rarely operable). These are usually fully furnished: there are many chairs, writing utensils, filing cabinets, printers, and fax machines. These tend towards being non-functional, but some do seem to work normally.
The offices also feature windows that let in natural light, though there is nothing but a white void visible beyond them and all attempts to exit the limspace through these windows have proven futile. The carpet will vary in color from room to room and is a good way to keep track of where you are if you have the knack for it, though it is often simply different shades of grey or blue. Green and even red carpets have been seen though, and it is likely in the far reaches of this space that more bizarre aesthetic choices can be found.
Speaking of which, due to the sui-generis effect, rooms further from the “center” of this limspace change massively. The exact central point, if one indeed exists, is indeterminable. But it is speculated that one of the more “normal” configurations of a room is perhaps the starting point for this limspace. With the others branching out from it and varying slightly at each stage until things become warped beyond recognition.
fig 2.0 A look at one of the computer terminals, note that the box in this photo was apparently empty.
fig 3.0 A far off room, lacking in much of anything.
The effect makes every single room of the space unique, but it also has a secondary effect. Distance correlates with how extreme the increments of the changes become. This is an exponential trend, meaning that once obviously bizarre and inhuman changes appear they will continue to do so more and more frequently beyond that point. There is no rhyme or reason to the rooms in the far reaches of the Foyer.
The rest of the limspace is accurate to the rating system, but there is no reliable way to measure the far reaches or the limspace's outermost reaches because they are simply too unpredictable. The far reaches are an incoherent and chaotic mess without a logical through line: objects are strewn about randomly, colors and patterns on the walls and floor clash massively, and bizarre furniture placement everywhere. Or simply nothing at all, walls stripped bare and lighting fixtures entirely gutted. There are thousand of miles of entropy in action, rooms shifting through constantly more chaotic combinations. Until, contrary to expectations, order emerges once more. In its own way.
In the outer rooms, the furthest frontier of this limspace, things go from incomprehensibly random to unfathomably massive: oceans made of moving filing cabinets that ebb and flow with metallic groans, a cold, dark, carpeted desert, where the ceiling of the room is so far above that it is not visible to the naked eye. Beyond that is a megastructure - a colossal mimicry of the previous rooms that seems never-ending. A fractal; an office within an office, within an office still. Forever.
Those are the confirmed reports from the only direction any living humans have managed to explore - south. It took months to cross the ocean in search of an exodus from this system, and years to cross the desert beyond it, it’s doubtful any can ever cross the fractal expanse. The other directions pose similar challenges nearly certainly, our best option is to use this limspace as a simple transit route. A path between other locations in the system. Though there are presumably some who stubbornly refuse to cower from the goal of finding a way out in some far-off room out there. All I can say is good luck, whoever and wherever you are.
ENTITIES
fig 4.0 A maw, marked as such. They operate like a simulacrum of a stomach and a mouth. The doors, notably snapping when opening and closing, act as a lure. Those unfortunate enough to pass by will find the doors open and an inviting, well-maintained interior to the elevator. Entrants will not immediately be trapped, there is a mechanism in the body of the creature akin to a button. Pressing it as one would with a real elevator will cause the doors to close. No aggression, nothing suspicious on the outside. By the time the doors close, the victim’s fate is sealed. Paralytic spines will pierce the victim from multiple sides to keep them immobile. A strong chemical will flood the interior, slowly drowning and breaking down the nutrient-rich bodies of its victims. This chemical odour is your best bet for spotting this creature, it is otherwise indistinguishable from the real elevators one would use to leave the limspace. This makes it perhaps the most effective predator both for those wanderers unaware of how to exit and those who know a little. We know precious little about these perfect predators, our only knowledge of their existence came from speculation, extremely rare photographic or video evidence, and reports of close encounters from survivors of group attacks. |
fig 5.0 A group of destroyed printers and photocopiers, for what it’s worth I sympathise. Mind snatchers don’t hunt in the traditional sense; they don’t require much food, they can afford to be patient. They’ll wait months upon months for their prey, indistinguishable from any of the inert photocopiers they tend to be surrounded by. Wanderers may often unknowingly pass by a mind snatcher, or even use a regular machine close by. Any wanderers who do approach, however, will find the machine acts on its own; turning on unprompted. The best window most people have to escape is before it has a chance to strike. The mind snatcher will daze its victim with a blinding flash of light, at this point leaving becomes impossible. The creature will, for lack of a better word, transfer the consciousness of its victim (or perhaps the soul if you believe in that sort of thing) into itself. It will then print out a photo of its victim, typically in an endless dark void. It’s… best to avoid photocopiers in general. But especially those with photographs of wanderers nearby. Once the victim is rendered braindead, the creature takes their remains in via unknown means and processes the entire corpse. Leaving no trace. If you find a photograph of a person in this place. Burn it. Rip it. Just… destroy it. It’s for the best. |
fig 6.0 A document covered in paper worms, hungry for knowledge. Paper worms are not visible to the naked eye. They can only be perceived by other hosts of paper worms. These creatures have a parasitic relationship with other forms of life, integrating themselves into the brains of humans and other entities alike. This enables paper worms to feed on knowledge and reproduce. Paper worms require large amounts of information which they will process more efficiently than even most baseline computers. This makes them capable of sorting through the documents stored in the many filing cabinets of the Foyer, which are incomprehensible to human minds. Paper worms compel hosts to consume information at a noticeably higher rate. Failure to do this will cause the worm to feed faster on the only other information it can; the memories and knowledge of the host. Not that eventually they won’t consume every scrap of information from the host regardless, these creatures are excessively greedy. Their victims wander the Foyer aimlessly, hardly even alive. Don’t touch any paper. Burn anything you are going to be forced to touch. |
ACCESS
Entrances
Quiet, decrepit areas of baseline reality. Elevators, particularly alone or at night. Sleeping in offices, especially ones you don’t work at. Urban exploration.
Exits
Certain elevators lead to other limspaces in this system, however the system itself has no known exit.