The City does not have a name, it is only “The City”, it is the only thing that exists, it encompasses all, and giving it a name would be kind of weird, to be honest. The City is a gigantic magically infinite metropolis with approximately a lot of inhabitants spread across a ton of districts, at least that’s how the City’s census officially defines the situation. Regarding the population, it is noteworthy that every time someone tries to calculate the total number of inhabitants in the City, regardless of the methods and formulas used, the answer is always 1.2. The City is governed by a king, aided by a council of district representatives. There is no uniform method for the consecration of a district representative; some districts use violent games that end in multiple deaths, others use forbidden arcane rituals to choose the best-prepared individual, and some even use something called “voting” but further studies are required to accurately define what that entails.
When asking a resident about the City, what follows is a confusing and intense stream of consciousness in which said citizen typically spends 13 to 20 minutes talking about the City. They commonly start with adjectives like “wonderful” and “enchanted” and end up using words like “monstrosity” and “schizophrenia.” The term “public transportation” tends to be mentioned around twelve times during the speech. There are at least 38 ancestries with full citizenship rights in the City and another 16 are on probation. The average citizen has 2.78 eyes, 3.7 legs, and is absolutely against the recently approved unionization of the City’s clowns. Despite the existence of a penal code and a tome called “Rules & Customs,” the chances of a given individual being in the act of currently committing a crime are very high, the average citizen commits about three infractions per day, slightly more on. weekends. What governs the lives of people in the City is a confusing series of implicit social contracts and behavior rules that can best be described using the word “arcane” In a total act of rebellion against the disciplines of sociology and anthropology, day by day, the City continues to function.
The official sport of Antares is ReceptacleBall, and it is practiced professionally, semi-professionally, or in an amateur capacity by approximately 36% of the population; no one knows the real number this 36% represents, much less how the previous census employee arrived at this figure. At any given moment the City is currently facing at least 5 existential-level threats in the form of demon armies, evil wizards, or sentient oozes with impossibly huge philosophical thoughts etc. The City’s subdivisions for better administrative control also resulted in uniform group-thinking and “local” cultures being established across the districts, a phenomenon that is responsible for at least 8 daily secession attempts. But for that to make metaphysical sense we would have to be able to define the City, a task that has eluded to the wizards of the Ontocultism department at the University for many centuries. As it stands, the City is everything and everything is the City, to leave the City, even in a strictly political way, would entail ceasing to exist, although, to be fair, this hypothesis has not yet been tested.
The ruins “below” the City are themselves the subject of intense debate. Commonly referred to as “the other city”, they are technically part of the City — that’s where it gets confusing, you see — but whatever forgotten civilization left them there seems to have vanished without leaving a note, and while the many technological marvels found there integrate themselves seamlessly with the City, no one knows where they came from. The myth states that the king found a robot building a house on these ruins and gave the place a name, but names only work in reference, so whatever that name was, it never stuck. The story also mentions something about a sword being pulled out of or stuck into a stone, there’s also a faerie, some mermaids, and a dragon or two, the story gets confusing after the sword bit and nothing close to a consensus among mythistorians has ever been established. In practice, these ruins result in an astonishing number of homes equipped with a magical basement, automatons patrolling the City as guards, and people getting a piece of their clothing stuck to some weird metal contraption that then starts to emit bright purple lights, a heavy droning noise, and the person is never seen again.