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Salen's Chirp-Net
🕑 Added 2025-10-12 05:30:31 +0000 UTCBeen a while since I've done a codex entry for my setting, here's a new one!
The Vampire-run city of Salen is the center of many dark magic experiments and practices, due to its unique position as a sovereign state within the greater domain of the Goldenpike Dominion. After the lines around it were drawn, the laws of the outside land ceased to apply, and the vampires within, trapped as they were, quickly took to figuring out ways to elevate their standards of living. Rather quickly, they turned to classical necromancy and the more nascent field of 'Biomancy'.
A biomancer's job within the city is to experiment and develop on the tissue and mental conditioning of a living subject. This field produces a great many specimens that see use in the streets of the city. The most commonly known product is the Chirp-Net. A living telegraph relay system comprised of hundreds of units spread around the city, establishing long range communication, free of any spell casting.
Each Chirp-Net unit consists of a heavily modified vampire, of Gnomish origin for easier packaging into their stations, and a sort of typewriter the vampire can use to transcribe the messages they receive. Each message is delivered from unit to unit by a vampire's series of chirps and chitters that each one is programmed to receive and immediately transcribe with the typewriter. Even though the sounds they send are already well outside of the range of hearing of most vampires within the city, they're still programmed to automatically switch their codes in use regularly, to avoid spying. Vestigial wings don't enable flight, but do provide a way of gliding safely to the ground if they're ever knocked from their position.
