Those who rebelled against the story god. Composed of Black Suits who chose to doff their mask and abandon the life of work and dilligence they were once consigned to, the Red Gentry carved out their own world from the remnants of the stories they spent so much time tending, and so little time enjoying. They chose all their favourites, and they spilled their pages out across the library. Empowered and emboldened by the blood of their Martyr they disassembled and remade an entire block of the library in their own image of paradise. They adorned themselves in garb of their own design, speaking to their own wants and desires, and they made their own faces, their own faces. Faces that represented the people they really wanted to be, the people they would have been if their stories hadn't been written for them. It's too bad that paradises can never be all they seem, and they can certainly never last forever.
The Red Gentry have an incredibly anarchic society, relying mostly on mutual aid and the benevolence of their kin. Their world was built and maintained through collaboration, but it takes very little to disturb so fragile a harmony. The most powerful sect of the Gentry is ruled over by The King, who keeps a court of hand-selected individuals, and who acts toward the goal of making the kingdom of the Red Gentry into his own perfect fairy-tale. He is opposed by the Order of Moretta, a small, but growing cult of individuals who believe not in their own stories, but in the story of the Martyr. The Martyr died so that they may live, and they shall see his unwilling sacrifice undone. Their members walk in secret, wearing a moretta mask beneath their own mask, symbolizing their vow of silence, and marking their dedication to the Martyr's identity over their own.
The landscape of their kingdom is a sore upon the Library it inhabits. A gaping wound in the monotonous halls and shelves of the great library, where a sea of words, a literal ocean composed of the tangled pages of thousands of books, protects them from the advances of the Black Suits beyond. Their land itself is a but a small island in this sea, home to a city of a fair magnitude, that is dwarfed by the surrounding world. The area is composed of the mismatched settings of many different stories, made real by the power of thought, belief, and conviction alone. At its center, that place from which it all originated, a colossal twisting mansion utop a snowy mountain. They built their paradise around the abandoned respite of their fallen Martyr.
Learn more hereThose who follow the story god. Made from wood and paper, implanted with the spark of creativity, and consigned to a life of monotony. The Black Suits work in eternal service to the Goddess of Stories, tending to her shelves, keeping the place clean, keeping it orderly. Their masks do not show off their individuality, they are all given blank featureless masks, and it is only as they grow that the masks become tainted with the mark of their wearer's personality. They follow a strict hierarchy, the young obey the old for fear of their wrath, and the old, whose age has lended them experience and individuality they might otherwise abuse, they follow the will of a goddess who will never stop watching them in particular. The oldest and most trusted Black Suit is blessed to hold communion with their goddess, to carry her vessel with them and be her mouthpiece.
Their rules are strict, and their punishments harsh. Those who disobey, those who fail and are injured in duty, those who grow old and begin to burst at the seams, they are, all of them, cast away, made to work in the darkest and most dangerous corners of the library. Their domain is stalked by that which is unknowable, and that which cannot be known because it never was. The cast-aways work together, watching each others' backs, and they build a society where they can live as best they can so far from the support of their brethren. Some try to keep up the work assigned to them by their goddess, eager to stay beside she who abandoned them, and bringing order to the muddy waters of those far corners one small job at a time. Some succumb to despair, and wander aimlessly and sadly until they are consumed by those remnants of feral stories.
There are also those at the other extreme, who see the cast-aways, how their imperfection, wrought by time, brought them ruin, and they decide to have no part in it. They simply choose to not have a story upon their scripts, to be perfectly still, and to have no ink spill on the canvas of their identity. This task is impossible, but they continue to stand by it, continue to follow the footsteps left behind by the stories they chose to believe.
The domain of the Black Suits is simply the Library at large. Halls that twist endlessly and shelves that stretch out forever.
Learn more hereThe brother of the story god. The domain of the God of Art. Adjacent to and entwined with the idea of story, but not wholly one in the same. His domain presents itself as a massive museum, lined with halls upon halls upon galleries of exhibits displaying everything that was ever made with the intent to be seen as art. From the cover art of books, to the most ornate and pristine suits of armor, to every painting, and anatomical study, and sculpture in the history of humankind. Similarly to the Library, this domain is constantly shifting, but unlike the Library, these shifts tend to make more sense. Wings and exhibits tend to maintain their theme, and only shift positions relative to each other, and always in a way that one could argue still makes sense from an organizational perspective.
The people of the Museum are much different from their cousins over in the Library. While the library folk tend to have relatively similar appearances with their strict uniforms and consistent body traits, the denizens of the museum are each an art piece of their own, and are as varied in appearance and personality as any of their exhibits. However, without the intrinsic magic of Story coursing through them, they are unable to meaningfully develop and change throughout their life. They can still feel the desire to change, and all the emotions and motivations to pursue change, but acting on it is near impossible without the internal narrative that permits such character growth. To sidestep this restriction, many of the Museum folk choose to take pilgrimages into the Library on the occassions where their domains intersect, basking in the magic and allowing their stories to finally advance. Though, this does not always work as planned, as one can never truly control the direction of their story, still, most are ultimately satisfied with their changes. While most simply venture in as far as they can during the overlap period before returning to the Museum, some will occasionally choose to stay for eras at a time, only returning many intersections later as an entirely different person with many new tales to tell.
The enemy of the story god. The domain of the God of Curiosity and Advancement. This place doesn't change so much as it does grow. Shifting some sure, but mostly expanding outward, further and further. It is the vision of the future as it was imagined by inventors, futurists, and visionaries. As the human imagination regarding the future grows increasingly more bleak, so to does this domain. What was once a bright colorful utopia where the attendants of this domain lived alongside machines that trivialized their work and they could all spend their time focusing on personal pursuits, education, and leisure, has over time being made into a lifeless chrome prison. The monolithic towers that fill the cityscape are all empty and hollow if not for the machines that run them, and the sole figurehead who rules this artificial kingdom. A machine-headed man in a chrome business suit who sits at the pinnacle of a grand citadel in this sterile city, conducting the madness from a single monitor and a simple control panel.
The old denizens of the Future still reside there, trapped beneath the city in iron slums cobbled together from the remains of "obsolete" technology. They are outdated automotons ranging from clockwork men to steampunk androids and old movie robots. Forsaken by their god of continuous advancement they live in small communities, helping each other scavenge for the old parts needed to repair each other and keep themselves functioning. The moment one of them finally gives out, it's a mad dash for their brethren to reluctantly harvest their bodies for parts, hoping to push forward just a bit longer, eternally convinced that on the other side of this turmoil is a future they can be a part of.
The Unwritten are those remnants of stories that never came to be. They exist in various stages of tangibility. Some are mere whispers, ideas for stories and characters and events that were thought up, but never written, whilst others are near solid stories that were made solid in some way, be it through rough drafts, outlines, et cetera, but were never finished or released to the public, and are thus forgotten. As a group, they primarily exist in the form of phantoms that wander the further reaches of the library, the ghosts of characters that never were, wandering the shelves in search of their own stories. Many will try to capture Librarians, convinced they can take them to their stories. Protocol is for librarians to take them to a random shelf further into the library and tell them to check there, fleeing whilst the phantom is distracted. Success in these ventures is limited, as more developed characters are often harder to trick, and less developed ones have a more eldritch disposition, with black suits escaping them finding their stories eroded away, as even the time taken to trick them is time spent with your story being sucked into the narrative vacuum of the Unwritten. Some of the characters who are developed enough to have a sense of self, but who aren't developed enough to have a solidified story have begun fighting for power, hoping to organize the Unwritten to strategically hoard books from the edges of the library to bring substance to themselves. However, as lords gain enough power to recover a story of their own, they are often very quickly torn apart by their own courts. The more abstract portions of the Unwritten manifest as a rot spreading through the library, consuming books one at a time as their stories are lost to the sands of time.
The Inbetween are technically distinct, representing the eldritch, the cosmic, the ineffable and indescribable, all those things which cannot be described by words alone, who live as whispers on the wind and monsters who can only be seen in the peripheral. Their likenesses are bordered by tangible concepts, wings and eyes, tentacles, the color yellow, and other symbols often associated with the eldritch. As beings, they live as monsters and mystery men who are never explained and are seen only in brief glimpses, the most tangible of them are indistinct chimeras of symbolism that borders on the eldritch. They exist on a sliding scale with the Unwritten, some eldritch beings are quite indistinguishable from the forgotten, with the only difference being that Inbetweens are left unwritten and forgotten on purpose. The more mundane Inbetweens, mystery men archetypes usually, live in fear of their more cosmically horrifying brethren, the Cthulhu's and Yellow King's of the Unwritten world. Unlike the far away nooks and crannies of the Library where the Unwritten lives, the land of the Inbetween is intentionally sectioned off, consisting of walled off rooms and entire wings of the library hidden behind wooden barricades, accessible only by brute force and through passageways located in distant shadows, beckoning unwary travelers with tantalizing secrets. The effect of black suits or red gentry interacting with these creatures is often the corruption of their own stories with unintelligible data and nonsensical descriptions, resulting in an effect similar to a raving madness.