Nuncio

From The Fifth City Wiki

"DO NOT RETURN, SENDER."[1]

Nuncio is the final destination of the Neath's undelivered mail - and a fair few of its postal workers, too.

Ratmas for All![edit | edit source]

"Taciturn functionaries walk the docks, in the uniforms of postmen. An enormous crowned statue casts a chilling shadow. The shadows gleam with rats' eyes. Their ceaseless chittering rolls like the tide."[1]

Dating back to the First City,[2] the island of Nuncio is a place where all undelivered mail ends up eventually; its shores are constantly swarmed with washed-up letters and parcels, attracted by a mysterious magnetic pull[3][4] (called simply "the Pull").[5] Nuncio's primary establishment is the Dead Letter Office, where dead mail is cleaned, sorted, and catalogued in the hope of one day allowing its delivery.[6] In the back rooms, an industrious Postal Rat makes endless improvements to the office's sorting machine, allowing it to more efficiently get through the great backlog of mail.[6][7]

Thanks to the presence of the Dead Letter Office, Nuncio also serves as a home to disillusioned postmen who have managed to acquire dead letters during their careers. The letters' attraction to Nuncio eventually takes their owners there, so that the postmen can gather and catalog the dead mail in hope of one day allowing its delivery.[8][9] Such a gathering of postal workers has created a culture of bureaucracy, painstaking attention to detail, and patience to a fault.[10] The island is additionally infested with hordes of rats, and Nuncio's inhabitants use their corpses as currency.[11]

The Pull is not the only strange phenomenon on the island; Nuncio's mail is almost indestructible, and able to reforge itself even after it has exploded.[12] Additionally, Nuncio is not comprised of fully solid ground; a fierce enough blow temporarily strengthens the Pull and causes the ground to ripple slightly.[13]

Nuncio's giant statue can be interpreted as a representation of its many postmen; its appearance changes over time to best represent the people living on the island.[14]

NO WORD LOST[edit | edit source]

Spoilers ahead: May include midgame or minor Fate-locked content.

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"They say that's been there since before we came. Before there were Londoners in the Neath. Before there was a Dead Letter Office, there was someone else, and they built the last layer on top of what was there before, and so on."[15]

Deep under the island lies a giant spiral cavern,[16] whose walls are lined with undelivered mail from all the previous Fallen Cities.[17][18] At its very bottom is a needle of black stone, whose surface is inscribed with sigils of the Correspondence.[19] This needle is the source of the island's supernatural happenings, as the words written upon it are a powerful commandment: no message may ever go undelivered.[20] It is also rimed with ice, implying that it originated in the High Wilderness.[19][21]

The ice on the needle and the meaning of its sigils ("NO WORD LOST") could lead to the impression that these are Discordance sigils. However, it is made clear that reading the sigils causes burning and searing,[22] while Discordance generally freezes its reader or their surroundings.[23][24]

Historical and Cultural Inspirations[edit | edit source]

The term "Nuncio" is not a real-world place, but it is a title. Nuncio (officially known as an Apostolic nuncio and also known as a papal nuncio) is the title for an ecclesiastical diplomat, being an envoy or permanent diplomatic representative of the Holy See to a state or international organization. A nuncio is appointed by and represents the Holy See, and is the head of the diplomatic mission, called an Apostolic Nunciature, which is the equivalent of an embassy.

Perhaps the name more directly references the giant statue in the center of the island. Nuncio is sanctuary for all those who must deliver messages and packages, and thus the statue represents the ultimate messenger of the Unterzee. Thus, it is only natural that the island is named after one of the most important messengers in the Christian world.

The basic idea for Nuncio was created by Spacemarine9, creator of the lore blogs Saint-Arthur and Saint-Beau, who later spent some time working for Failbetter.[25]

References[edit | edit source]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Nuncio, Sunless Sea
  2. ↑ Feed your undeliverable letters into the sorting machine, Sunless Sea "One stamped bronze tablet that drops with a clang into a bin marked 'First City'. "
  3. ↑ Study the odd currents here, Sunless Sea "It's more as though the whole Unterzee were draining into Nuncio. Except, of course, that force did not affect your ship, when you came this way. It does not stop ships leaving. Evidently it works only on the post."
  4. ↑ Watch the tide come in, Sunless Sea "There's a new day's wash of post. Some is recently mailed, and some has been in the water a very long time. If it cannot be delivered, then at least it can be categorised and archived against the day when a recipient arrives - even if it seems that no recipient will ever come, because one can never be quite certain. "
  5. ↑ Ask why letters wash ashore here, Sunless Sea "It's the Pull, they tell you. Dead letters are like so many iron filings, drawn to Nuncio. "
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 Try a shift at the Dead Letter Office, Sunless Sea "[...] the office: a small collection room where those retrieving letters may state their business. A much larger set of back offices where newly arrived letters and parcels are collected and sorted. A dank, briny smell that never goes away, presumably because so many of the parcels spent time in the water [...] In the back room is a machine [...] [It] shovels sludge-damp letters into the machine's hopper and they come out dried, cleaned, pressed, and sorted into slots by size and quality of paper."
  7. ↑ Make a study of what goes on in the back room, Sunless Sea "The Postal Rat is forever making improvements to the machine: making it more able to distinguish between similar types of package, more sensitive to the age and significance of the contents."
  8. ↑ Ask why the postmen came here, Sunless Sea "Their stories have different beginnings - boredom, frustration, a fellow who was overwhelmed by guilt after a misdelivery - but they always end the same way. Undeliverable letters and parcels accumulating over months and years. Attempts to ignore the undeliverable, to shove it into a desk or carry it in the bottom of the bag. An increasing preoccupation with these items. Finally, a decision: to meet the compulsion, to go to Nuncio and be rid at last of the remnants. The postmen do not bring the dead letters to Nuncio. The letters bring the postmen."
  9. ↑ Converse with the Postal Rat, Sunless Sea "The longer you serve in the Post Office, the worse it feels. Delivering a letter correctly is good, so not delivering it is bad. The unclean feeling gets too strong and they come here."
  10. ↑ Assemble a Port Report, Sunless Sea "The Admiralty won't understand... But you can do your best to explain it all anyway. The theology of postal work, the Pull, the scarred obedience of postmen. The attention to detail that is both petty and sacred. The anguish. The camaraderie among the sufferers. The willingness to endure visitors, even visitors who do not understand their tribulations and ask foolish, ill-informed questions."
  11. ↑ Ask why the local currency consists of rats, Sunless Sea "Two strings of rats for a pint of ale. Three strings for wine. Five for the tolerable brandy under the bar."
  12. ↑ Throw your undeliverable post into the fire, Sunless Sea "[...] Blunt Thomas storms in, waving over arms and shouting at you. "Stop, stop stop! You're swamping the reassembly room!" An hour later you're standing in front of a glass dome in one of the Dead Letter Office's back rooms. In the pure air under the dome, the letters are reassembling themselves, burning in reverse until they are whole again. "You think we didn't try that?" says the postman on shift, staring gloomily at the pile. "It always turns up again. Whatever you do, don't ever bomb the post." "
  13. ↑ Take soundings, Sunless Sea "Striking the ground causes the stones to shift and rattle. It is hard at first to hear anything more than that. But if you try long enough, and strike hard enough, the whole beach shivers like the surface of a drum. The flotsam letters quiver and align themselves in concentric circles around the point of impact. The next wave brings ashore three or four times the usual freight. "
  14. ↑ Ask about the big statue in the center of the island, Sunless Sea ""Oh, that. It's all of us, isn't it? Sort of the spirit of the island." Most of them don't seem troubled for more of an explanation than that. Though the Hairless Postwoman tells you it didn't always look like a Fallen London postman at all: that it used to have a different face, and a more old-fashioned outfit. "
  15. ↑ Tell the Postal Rat about your basement findings, Sunless Sea
  16. ↑ Open the back rooms, Sunless Sea "No. It is a pit, so deep that lantern light does not show the bottom. A spiral walkway descends along its wall, and that spiral opens wider as it goes, as if you were looking through the narrow end of a very large shell. "
  17. ↑ Open the back rooms, Sunless Sea "Lining this wall are shelves and nooks, unevenly sized. Some are a few inches square and contain single scrolls of papyrus. Others support crates bigger than coffins. They're made of a woody fungus, grown to meet requirements. There are no marks of carpentry or any of the Postal Rat's handiwork. "
  18. ↑ Tell the Postal Rat about your basement findings, Sunless Sea "They say that's been there since before we came. Before there were Londoners in the Neath. Before there was a Dead Letter Office, there was someone else, and they built the last layer on top of what was there before, and so on."
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 Descend into the basement with flame, Sunless Sea "At the centre of this space is a needle of deep black rock, glossy as resin, glittering with ice, inscribed with three arcane sigils that hurt to look at."
  20. ↑ Descend into the basement with flame, Sunless Sea "You feel a meaning in their presence [... t]hat all things must come to their destined place. That what cannot be delivered immediately must be saved against a future date. That a message that goes unheard is a tragedy. That the signal must be carried, no matter how far, no matter through what darkness, no matter whether the sender still lives nor whether the recipient can even read the language of the writing- [...] NO WORD LOST. "
  21. ↑ The Bloodied Travelling-Coat of Mr Cups, Fallen London "The coat is made for a huger frame than yours, and drags heavily behind you. It is rimed with old, eternal frost from some high wilderness, creaking and cracking with every step. "
  22. ↑ Tell the Postal Rat about your basement findings, Sunless Sea "There's letters down there that set your hair on fire if you so much as look at them. See the bald patch on my left leg? That wasn't a machine accident, oh no! That singed right off as soon as I put my nose into one of them letters."
  23. ↑ Read the language on the stones (Victorious Second Circle), Fallen London "Your skull is chilled inside, as though you've just eaten a very cold sorbet. A sorbet that grows colder and colder, refusing to melt, refusing to relinquish its frigid grip on your brain. Blood trickles from your nose, flash-frozen instantly."
  24. ↑ Read the stone, Fallen London "And then you're staggering backward, dazed, appalled, because the mud has turned to ice around your feet..."
  25. ↑ https://saint-arthur.tumblr.com/post/139459043849/were-you-by-any-chance-aware-of-the-bazaars-role
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