Northwick

The city of Northwick

History
The lands of and around Northwick were first inhabited by the Nords, who came from the eastern sea and spent many decades living in Albion before being pushed out by the Angles, but were not particularly notable in history until the third group of invaders, the Polisian Empire, arrived. The City of Northwick began its recorded history late in the Third Era as The Northfort, the central fortress in the Polisian Wall. When Albion’s people, the Angles and the Hobbits, rebelled against direct Polisian rule in the Second War of Albionic Subjugation/Second War of Albionic Freedom, the fortress was, like most of the other forts on the Wall, taken over by Angle soldiers after supplies from the south were cut off. When the Peace of Suzerainty was reached several years later, great autonomy was given to the people of northern Albion, but the Wall fortresses were deemed to still be sovereign Polisian territory, for the sake of mutual security. However, the years of war had seen the mass resettlement of many refugees from the war-torn south into the accommodating liberated fortresses of the Wall, most especially the Northfort, and so when war weary Polisian forces returned, they were driven away by entrenched Angle peasants, and their return to the fortresses was stalled. Eventually, it was agreed that the Polisians would actively help the Angles turn a few of the major fortresses into the first established townships in northern Albion, of which Northwick would become the largest.

After several decades of uneasy cohabitation, the authority of the Polisians across Albion decayed, and eventually only the guard towers of the Wall gate in Northwick were managed by Polisian forces. After the Great War, the Decimation, and the Years of Conquest at the end of the Third Era imperial authority increased again for a time, but operations changed focus from imperial administration to follow the interests of the Altmer, which in Northwick simply meant continued protection of the realms of men as a buffer for the realms of elves. As such, little change actually came about, except for the arrival of a mysterious blind folded wood elf in the town who is thought to have taken over all Polisian military affairs. Nothing of particular note happened until the first year of the Fifth Era, when a group of adventurers arrived in the town from Camelot, and were allowed through the Wall gate, purportedly to track down a noble who had gone missing while hunting, only to disappear after another venture and never be heard from again.

Later that same year, a far more notable event occurred, when Brandonbrais Heartgold, legendary leader of the Hobbits from the Second Era who defeated the Horned God in a great war for control of Albion, arrived at the Wall from the north. After a tense confrontation with the blindfolded wood elf, a group of Hobbit warriors, assembled into the first such army seen in early modern times, surrounded the city from the south, and blockaded the town. Eventually, Bradonbrais ended up glitter-dusting the Wall guards, and went unopposed by the wood elf in lifting the gate. He left the town, and the army with him, to return to the Shirelands.

During the Altmeri Cold War that followed Brandobrais’ return, in which the Polisian Empire threw off the yolk of Altmer control and the human races threw off Polisian Imperial control, Northwick would experience several major changes. After the Altmer “advisors” were disassociated from Imperial forces and the Treaty of Peace was permanently renegotiated, the remaining wall guards were recalled to southern Albion, and the gate was accidentally left shut. As such, an architect by the name of Hatham Roseblood was hired in 5E 12 to rebuild the area of Wall in the town’s limits. He would eventually assist in the total restructuring of the town into a city, and the building of a new double gate, built around the immovable iron block, which was left permanently open.

In 5E 34 the first to arrive through the Roseblood Gates were a group of half-orcs, members of the House of Darin, who were attempting to attend a diplomatic meeting with Brandobrais Heartgold. The rangers and ex-soldiers of the city went to meet them and not only prevented any sort of miscommunication but eventually negotiated normalized relations between Darinstown and the Earl of Manchest, the technical Royal liege of the area under Angle law. This would begin the flow of trade through the Roseblood Gates from Hyperborea into Albion that would over the next three centuries come to make Northwick famous across Thera.

Over the next century, the Polisian Empire decayed as it resisted control by the Altmer Magocracy. Albion was the first province to gain full independence, something contrived actively by the Polisians in order to protect Albion from the Altmer, even if it meant shrinking the empire. This event was hugely important in the south, but in Northwick and across the northern lands it had little immediate effect. By the fall of the Polisian Empire in 5E 126, though, the Northiwckish not only found themselves the major node in the aforementioned trade system, but also living in a new, more magical Albion.

In the Shirelands, remade after Brandobrais had ruled directly for a century into a constitutional republican dictatorship by his own decree, magic had, at his teaching and by those he trained thereafter, been brought back into a small echelon of the population. With Altmer control removed, the human beings of Albion would eventually come to the Shrielands to learn their magic. The first to make this arcane pilgrimage was Godrick Elderwood, the seventh son of the seventh son of the son of the son of undertaker of the town of Red Hook (whose father had taken up the position as a part time job due the disappearance of the elderly undertaker who had worked there before.) Elderwood found Hobbit magic to be largely an activity of recreation and entertainment, which could lift small objects, create images, and perform other parlor tricks, but he, an intelligent and cunning young man, would push the magic he was learning far further than any Hobbit had. He returned to the Earldom of Susewix, home to both Red Hook and Camelot, to teach what he had learned, but found few takers, and thus migrated instead of Northwick. Years later, a Jewish mathematician named Yazmud Kribjin, whose family, like many from the once small Jewish “colony” in Malachard-upon-Mayfield, had integrated into southern Albionic life, would travel himself to the Shirelands, and return to Susewix to teach his own magic, which strangely proved more well received there.

Eventually, the Elderwood and Kribjin schools would prove to become the major, though far from the only interpretations of human used magic. Kribjin’s school was referred to often as “arcane magic,” which used strange words and movements to produce effects, not unlike the magic of the Hobbits, but with more powerful effects achieved through the mathematical study of spells. Elderwood’s, meanwhile, was called “applied magic,” which used magic to create devices usable by all people, referred to by him as Magechines, which relied on the Magenetic force. A third branch, known as “divination,” also grew up among some, but proved dangerous and was ultimately banned, as were any attempts to move objects instantaneously through magic, which similarly proved almost always lethal.

Northwick, meanwhile, benefited from the installation of the first magical devices by Elderwood and his followers. First aid devices, water purification systems, and various medicines improved health, and returned in that city and eventually to all of Albion the lost field of alchemy, which for years became the leading part of Elderwood School magic and soon the major export of Northwick, whose alchemists used ingredients brought from faraway lands to make magical potions to sell back to all people, including those who originally provided the raw materials so far away. As was bound to happen, black powder was eventually rediscovered by alchemists named James Cartwright and Oswald Croll. Cartwright-Croll Powder would eventually become known as canon-powder as it was used in large iron canons mounted on the ships of the Anglish merchant navy, which grew up around protecting trade in alchemical ingredients, and then finally as gunpowder once several generations of magechinists re-invented firearms.

Land trade in Albion, as well as regulation of growing populations, and defense from potential outside invasion, soon demanded a reform of the military. The Anglish rejected most of the principles of armor and blades used by the Polisians in favor of the new firearms, and trained their defensive militaries in the use of modern warfare tactics, such as musketeer formations and cavalry skirmishing. They also took great pride in the aforementioned navy, the explorations of which eventually brought into contact with the Anglish peoples from as far north as Jorvikhold and as far south as the upper Kizoreal, where many strange new races were discovered who made their first formal contacts with humanity in centuries.

In Northwick, a special branch of the Anglish military was centered known as the Survey Corps, who were responsible for “civilizing” the roads and paths on land between Northwick and Darinstown, so as to protect land trade routes and prevent the city from losing agency in its own trade. The legendary rangers of Northwick, who refused to use the new-fangled, loud, and dangerous firearms, but instead the old woods-blades, formed the core of this new Corps, who became the pride of the city, especially as secrets of alchemy began to leak out into the south or be confiscated by royal action, leaving the old Wall trade route as the main source of income for the city.

Two centuries past as Albion grew to become the most powerful and influential of the human states. By the end of the 5th Era, the lands of men had changed dramatically, and so had Northwick. The town was now a bustling city, the largest in the north, in a kingdom at the head of an oncoming magical revolution. But as always, the situation was bound to change even more dramatically, and so it did in 5E 263, the last year of the fifth era.

On the eve of the Harvest Feast, which in Sudra is the height of the Season of Ice and Milk, agents of Lernaeax, a secret order of Sudran Heresiarchs, revealed their infiltration of the Shield of Unity, using their powers of unlimited inter-planar teleportation to assassinate the entire leadership of the Shield, and attacking major cities across Sudra, Thera, and other planes. All of this, however, was quickly discovered by a group of newly recruited Shield agents to be distraction used to cover the release of their leader, a Sudran Whisper-man known as the Shadow, whom they tracked to the Upper Heavens. There they assisted the great Nordic heroes Baldr, Log, Thorlad, and Avigail, who arrived with an army of Asgardian Dwarves, in defeating the armies of the Shadow and in banishing the Shadow himself into the extra-planar void. These events, known as the Revelation, would change the entire universe, as the mortal races became acutely aware of the existence of the Forces, and looked to a new version of the Shield of Unity, rebranded as SHIELD and placed by Nikita Sandbred under the command of the aforementioned adventurers, to protect the mortal races from supernatural threats of all kinds under the watch of a Universal Council. SHIELD was reformed over the next few decades into an inter-planar government, no longer centered in Isdania but in a new base in orbit over Yuggoth. An age of exploration and discovery followed in the new Sixth Era, which still persists today.

For Northwick, which was not attacked directly by Lernaeax forces, this conflict meant an increase in their primacy in Anglish affairs, as Camelot did come under heavy assault during the Revalation. Poor refugees from the south, their farms destroyed by the Sudranizing weapons of the Lernaeax, came to Northwick and attempted to re-employ themselves. By the end of the war, the city had grown exponentially, and the people there, unable to be fed any other way, began to work the land on the north side of the wall. Soon, new gates were opened along the entire length of the Wall so refugees in other now booming northern cities could expand their agricultural base. Soon, Angland was believed to have increased in land area by over thirty percent. When the war ended, the lands of the south were restored by Kribjin Mages, but the populations of the south did not return, and thus the populations of Camelot and other southern cities swelled as well. This growth was accelerated by the development of new agricultural technologies by Elderwood magechinists, which greatly increased agricultural productivity, but also increased efficiency such that the new populations were soon compacted onto the old populations of in the cities across Angland.

Then, in 6E 64, an Elderwood magechinist named Kelton Kay created a machine that could produce matter in a certain shape and size from smaller amounts of that matter. This device, known as the Kay Minor Creator, or KMC, was quickly reproduced and installed in a factory under Kay’s ownership, where pieces of cloth were used to mass produce textiles and finished clothing products. This same process was quickly applied to arms materials and other substances, as well as simple finished products. The secrets of magical multiplication, an ultimate secret of alchemy, had been revealed, but were still kept closely guarded by Kay and other artificers with the assistance of the Anglish government. However, when goods production across Angland skyrocketed, the rest of the universe quickly took note. Surprising many, a contingent of Druids from the island of Hibernia appeared in the court of the Anglish monarch, King Arcturus XII Pendragon, to warn about the potential dangers of magical technology, but the incident turned violent, and concerns of an invasion of Hibernia, once thought an impenetrable place of weird nature magic, were discussed openly, as one of the Druids was seemingly killed. This led to talk of rebellion by the populace which was already being subjected to terrible conditions in the new factories and who worried a royally approved magocracy may soon take over society and lead them into a suicidal war. After several months of internal and international tension, revolutionaries assassinated King Arcturus, but found their actions disapproved of by the people, who still respected the monarchy as an institution. When this shift began to thaw public disapproval of war under now King Uther VI, and Brandonbrais Heartgold threatened to align himself with the Druids should war occur, Agents of SHIELD intervened to prevent conflict. They negotiated a restructuring of Albionic politics, and the construction of the United Kingdoms of Albion under the joint rule of Heartgold, the Pendragon King, and a parliament based off of the Hobbit republican system. In this new system, all regions of Albion received equal say in matters, including the northern cities. Northwick was, naturally, elected to be the administrative center of the Manchest parliamentary region.

By 6E 100, several other inventions began to make magical technology available directly to all citizens. Telecommunication devices, magically powered ships, or theurgemes, and carts, magical ever-burning lamps, cleaning machines, and industrial systems far more capable of producing finished goods than any before, even the Kay machines. Then, in 6E 102 came the first modern Magechine, invented by Dasserabian artificer Nikolaus Tesseract, who had no formal training, in his lab in the basement of the Borderwall Bar and Inn in Northwick. This Magechine allowed for the production of a magechine device, what is today simply called a magic item, by untrained laborers as opposed to skilled artificers. Specifically, the first Magechine was actually designed to help produce KMCs, which Tesseract hoped to proliferate across the human world, but the device was never used for this purpose and in fact was never installed in any major factory. Instead, other Magechines were made to mass produce the healing devices, water purifiers, and even parts of the theurgemes and telecoms devices invented before them. Soon the benefits of these technologies became easily accessible to most of Albion’s citizens, greatly increasing public health and quality of life.

Northwick has grown to its greatest size in the last three decades, becoming the center of this second magical revolution. It is the largest city in the north, though the others grow rapidly, and is second only in most aspects to Camelot across the continent. Trade, industry, and also art, intellectual thought, entertainment, and the Anglish army are all centered there. Not only is it home to Kay Industries, Cannith House Publishing, Roseblood Masonry and Rail, and Tesseract Incorporated, but also the main base of the land branch of the United Empire Company, the Glass Pyramid Museum of Magical Artefacts and Arts (relocated from the south many centuries ago after a mysterious break-in,) the prestigious Elderwood school Oxgren University and mysterious and selective Kribjin school Arkwind College, whose Tower of Knowledge is regularly rebuilt to keep it the tallest in the city, and also Wadio Machest News and Wadio Hertz-Coni Entertainment, and of course the Fort, the modern military installation built on the ruins of the Northfort that is the central base of army intelligence and operations and the location of the Survey Corps barracks, whose military police run law enforcement in the city, and whose rangers, now equipped with modern omni-directional maneuver gear, still protect and civilize the realms beyond the Wall. The first lightning rail line was built between Northwick and the port of Tyne-upon-Teed, and the second between Northwick and Camelot itself. Lighting rails, in fact, have recently become a topic of some discussion in the city, as plans to build new lines into the woodlands of southern Hyperborea have called into question the need for a large Survey Corps, which is soon to be debated by the City Council, Northwick’s governing body which represents each of the cities many districts, and the Chancellor of which is also always the Prime Minister to the Earl of Manchest and lead representative to both the UKA and SHIELD parliaments.

Districts
Modern Northwick is, as aforementioned, divided into several districts. The area around Gate Roseblood is home to the Fort, which is large enough to act as its own district of the city. Also containing parts of the wall are, to the east, the Guildhall District, home to the various trade companies, administrative offices, and warehouses of the traders and industrialists of the city, and which also sees most local market trading in the shadow of both the Wall and Fort in the Forum Arcturus, and which also contains Gate Heartgold, through which the rail line to the north is proposed to be built. To the west of the Fort is the Elderwood District, location of all the factories, apothecaries, and other industrial buildings of the city, as well as Gates Elderwood and Gate Newick, the gate opened second, as well as Oxgren University to the southeast and the other artificers’ schools. Further south of Elderwood is the Hive District, the lower class tenement, apartment, and rookery areas of the city home to the industrial workers of the Elderwood District, as well as the now famous Borderwall Bar and Inn, the headquarters of Tesseract Inc., and the sub-district of Therala Minor, home to most of the non-Albionic (non-Anglish and non-hobbit) expatriates in the city, most of whom are Polisian immigrants, but some of whom include Bosmer and even kobolds, and where also the city’s SHIELD offices are stationed. This part of the Hive also borders another district, the Clerk’s Ward, the location of most governmental administrative buildings, as well as centers for services such as public health, sanitation, and fire protection. It is also, logically, the location of the domed, Polisian style capitol building, Wick Hall, as well as, on the northwest edge comfortably close to the city’s SHEILD base, the city’s prison, the Rock, a giant piece of rock levitated by magic and which holds the cities criminals in two zones, the lower for common criminals and the higher for magical and/or insane deviants (execution is not practiced in most modern states, but extreme criminal elements are often handed over to SHEILD to be held in an undisclosed location in the outer realms.)

Across the city’s main rail line from Oxgren University is rival Arkwind College. South of Arkwind is the small University District, home to schools of all sorts. Southeast of that opens the Estate District, the area of the most affluent and “cultured” members of the city. Few denizens of the Estate District are actual Anglish nobles, but instead mostly capitalists, artificers, and other self-made persons putting on noble airs, with most of the actual nobility still residing on country estates well outside the city limits. The Earl of Manchest, however, does live in this part of the city, in a modern castle, Castle Man, on the border between the Clerk’s Ward, Estate District, and a third district, Pendragon Park. This park was built at the request of and by the personal funds of King Uther VI after a visit to the city by the Royal Family, and it is a major beautifying force that creates a buffer between the Estate and Hive Districts. East of the Estate and Guildhall Districts lies the Globe District, home to the entertainments, services, and higher end shops of the city, and named after its central landmark, the Manchest Globe Hall. Encasing all of the outer three eastern Districts is the Nest District, often referred to as the “Town of Northwick,” where stand the less densely packed houses of middle class clerks, service workers, and other more well to do, but still less than wealthy citizens.

The Hive and Nest districts fade off at the edges of the city proper into the less dense areas of Manchest landowners and other secondary cities, towns and suburbs. The Greater Manchest Metropolitan Area is roughly 100 square miles in size and home to roughly three million humanoids, roughly 85% of which are Anglish humans. Beyond it are the farmlands of northern Albion, largely owned by aristocratic landowners but still worked in many areas by peasant farmers and laborers. The Wall to the North still blocks the growth of most of the districts of the city, which have instead spread along it, further south, or somewhere in between, but some areas, most notably the Elderwood District, do exist on both sides of it, and farmland stretches for several miles up to the modern tree-line of the southern Hyperborean forests.

Notable People

 * Current Mayor Archibald “Archie” Galloway, seven years through his second of three potential eight year terms.
 * Lancel Redwyrm the Earl of Manchest
 * The elderly but still active Nikolaus Tesseract, founder and chief artificer of Tesseract Inc.
 * Kelton John Jacob Kay III, known as J. J. Kay, the young grandson of now deceased Kelton Kay and son of the retired Kelton Kay II, and head of Kay Industries.
 * General Nelson Major of the Anglish Army
 * Commander Jackson Ares of the Survey Corps
 * Commissioner Oliver “Ollie” Orwell of the Northwick Constabulary Corps
 * Warden Amadeus Blackgate of the Rock.
 * Red Ron, the most successful arsonist in the city’s history, who used alchemist’s fire to burn down several blocks of the Hive, but intentionally burnt off most of his face in the process. He is kept in the “Penthouse” at the top of the Rock, a solitary confinement cell with small bared windows that keep the room chilled and buffeted by high altitude wind, which has proven extremely uncomfortable for Red Ron’s counter-intuitively sensitive remains of a face.
 * Headmage Allister B. Mordenkainen of Arkwind College, one of the few true wizards in the lands of men, and arguably the most powerful.
 * Executive President Bartleby Geass of Oxgren University, a professor of artification and also expert alchemist.
 * Caliban, Barry, and Hester Quinn, suspected leaders of the so called “Man’s Chest Thieves’ Guild”.
 * “Lady” Idgrod Icecrane, de facto leader of the Witchway, a faith devoted to a small pantheon of northern gods, including the Horned God and the Earth Mother, which sees Brandonbrais Heartgold as an apocalyptic incarnation of the Blue Devil.
 * Samuel Lightfoot, a hobbit and the nation-wide leader of the radical anti-monarchical, potentially socialist Yellow Party
 * Redmond Moses, city leader of the left-center, pro-constitutional Union Party
 * Jethro Firestone, city leader of the right-center, industrialist/magocratic Progress Party
 * Aldo Cannith, disgraced son of publishing tycoon Lord Nergal Cannith, and city leader of the far right, anti-constitutional, anti-immigration Racist Party (this word carries a slightly different connotation in Thera in that it refers to the need for proactive and mutually protective distinctions between identifiably different races, and is not an entirely negative term.)
 * Tir Jakton Kalk, a kobold civil protections advocator.
 * Shrek, a seven foot tall “human” who insists on living in and acting as the “protector” of Pendragon Park. Has not his several years of residence proved dangerous in any way, and has rescued countless cats from trees, and more notably a few young Northwickers from the park’s large artificial pond. He has, however, been known to protest the expansion of any part of the city into the park.
 * The Hornet, a vaguely bee-themed “super-hero” who protects the people of the Hive from oppression, and has worked before with Shrek.
 * “Lord Elderwood,” an urban legendary figure that is supposedly the undead form of the long deceased Godrick Elderwood, said to be the arch-enemy of the Hornet.
 * Mr. Manchest, the voice of Wadio Hertz-Coni Entertainment, who has never been seen in person.
 * Sally the Slasher, a semi-mythical, semi-real “phenomenon” that has violently prevented the continued existence of any male prostitutes in the city of Northwick for wholly unknown reasons and for well over a human lifetime.
 * Antonious Romarum, the owner of the popular mini-chain of Restaurants Romarum, high quality Polisian food restaurants that operate not in the Estate District but Therala Minor, where they give meals for free to the poor and charge exorbitant prices for the rich. Attempting to fake poverty to gain free food is considered one of the most grievous faux paus in Northwick society, and many liberal councilors have discussed criminalizing it.
 * Wendy Walters, a burlesque performer notable for appearing in some of the first repeatable silent images recently developed by artificer and businessman Eddy Thompson.
 * Mister Tarrasque, a boxer from the Hive who became a major figure in the probably staged “wizard wrestling” that has grown popular among the middle classes.