094 - The Endless Alleyway

Otherspace: The Endless Alleyway

Alleys are liminal spaces and the service organs of their public-facing brethren. They provide access. They collect our waste and clear it away. They can be dark and menacing. Secretive. If you know how to find it they connect to a sub-layer that is to them what they are to their cities. That holds the things we’ve long lost and might get back. If you can afford it.

Entering the Endless Alleyway

The prerequisite for gaining entry is that you need to have lost something material and it must have had a negative impact on you that you still feel (although you may not realize or admit it). Your grandma’s ashes, your house, a limb, these all count. Your boyfriend, your job or your innocence do not. You also need to be in an urban area and be running late for something. I hope it isn’t important because you won’t be getting there soon.

Take a shortcut down any alley while you’re unobserved. Don’t look behind you yet. Eventually you’ll pass the Tollkeeper, a beggar (description varies) who looks incongruously well-off for someone lying in an alleyway. Lace their palm (or paper cup or hat or whatever) with two coins (with a minimum silver content of 40%) of (now or past) legal tender. Take five more steps, then look behind you and look back ahead of you.

The street and the Tollkeeper are gone, instead the endless alleyway stretches into the vanishing distance.

The Landscape of the Endless Alleyway

An infinite, occasionally twisting and dividing, slog of back alleys populated with dumpsters, short-lived shantytowns and the back stoops of buildings. Indistinct city sounds are always audible as though the street were just a block over but you never seem to reach it. None of the doorways or windows are accessible, if you force one it’s bricked up (it’s brick all the way through, people have tried digging. The deepest tunnel extends 176 meters into the space under the loading dock behind a PetSmart). Some brave souls have scaled the buildings to look for a way out from above, none of them have come back.

There are people in the alleyway, sparsely clustered in groups by purpose or instinct. Those lost, those treating the alleyway like a religious pilgrimage or curiousity, those looking for something and those selling it. Those selling are demons, given flesh but trapped in the otherspace. They have the thing that you have lost and everyone else’s. Each of them will make three offers: the first thing belongs to a person who you will never meet (synchronicity will scramble attempts to subvert this, fatally if you’re stubborn), the second to someone you know (skipped if there is nothing that qualifies) and the last is your own (or if you’ve refused it, nothing).

The price for your own object is always something you can conceivably pay but it is an incredibly painful ask, beyond any reasonable justification. If you refuse the sale then it can start being offered to other people who venture into the alleyway, that’s where the other objects offered to you come from. The asking price for other people’s things is far more reasonable, each time an object is offered to someone the price drops until the demon-vendor is practically begging for someone to take it. If you refuse an object it will never be offered to you again. If someone ever buys your object you may never re-enter the alleyway again.

Don’t get caught in the alleyway on your municipalities’ trash collection day. The Clean-up Crew, with their opaque-visored hazmat suits, flamethrowers and monstrous garbage trucks (that should be too large to fit down the alleys), are the one thing that terrifies all inhabitants. If they catch you then they’ll dispose of you and it isn’t pretty. This happens weekly for the demonic salespeople of the alley, who cannot escape and are hopelessly mired in a cycle of destruction and rebirth, forever.

Leaving the Endless Alleyway

Leaving the alleyway is pretty simple if you can get some privacy and squash your self-preservation instinct. Find one of the intersections or corners of the alleyway (where it turns or splits so you’d hit a wall if you just kept walking), close your eyes and lower your head then run full pelt at it. If you succeed, you’ll feel the fresh, open air hitting your face and the sounds of the city will come into focus as you emerge from the same alley you entered through. Hopefully you can skid to a halt before you run into anyone or out into the street.

You might fail to exit for two reasons, either because you didn’t fully commit or someone was watching you try to leave. I get it, running blind at a wall is scary. Take 1d10 wounds if you half-ass the exit plan. If you went full-tilt but someone was eyeballing you it’s 2d10 wounds (plus 3 if the dice come up doubles). Sometimes alleyway inhabitants or visitors will bridge troll exit-capable real estate and make demands to let you use it unobstructed.