Level 1 (Liminal Archives)
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▸⠀Level 1 - The Halls
Difficulty: 1/5 | A comparatively safe level, yet the lack of sustenance and resources makes survival here a gruelling experience.
Entity Count: 1/5 |While sparse, a variety of stray creatures and anomalous entities do wander these halls, just as lost as humans.
Chaos Gradient: 1/5 | Level 1 is prone to splicing, with individuals falling into this reality against their will either from Baseline or other Limspaces.
Basset-Frazier Index: | 1/5 Expect the most common dangers to be simple exhaustion or starvation, but be always prepared for other acute or undocumented hazards.
Contents |
Foreword
A destination for lost souls. The terminal endpoint of glitches in reality. The first zone of the parallel dimension we call The Backrooms.
This is Level 1, also known as the Halls. It is sometimes claimed that Level 1 was the first discovered Limspace, but it is still far from the most understood. We know the Halls are vast, incomprehensibly so. We know Level 1 has a rich history of human settlement and is sparsely dotted by countless colonies despite its inhospitable nature. We know that Level 1 twists into itself with non-Euclidean knots and leads to many branching limspace chains. But, due to the simply inconceivable size of this sprawling reality, we are dreadfully aware of just how little we do know about the Halls and the mysteries it holds.
Paralogy
The Halls largely consists of a single biome: a flat plane filled with the stink of moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, and endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz. It is an expansive empty desert that swallows everything. The halls distribute all they encompass across infinity, making life here solitary in a way impossible to imagine. It is immeasurable cosmic loneliness; your every waking moment akin to floating adrift in the space between galaxies.
There is no wind in the Halls. No sunlight. The air is still and the walls are suffocating. They are interspersed only rarely with landmarks that instead of adding reason, purpose, or explanation, only perplex and mystify this reality further. It is a wallpapered world, lit with fluorescent lights and reminiscent of a 1990’s office left to atrophy and rot without upkeep and stretching outwards forever.
"It's nothing but endless rooms, driving you to a state of stupefaction like saying a word over and over and over until it loses all meaning. Have you walked for a day, or three? You cannot tell since nothing seems to have changed. The lights stay on forever and sleep only comes in a state of exhaustion rather than a comfortable rest.
Where are you going? You might be going in circles. Humans do that, you know. Blindfold someone and tell them to walk straight and you'll watch them spin around and around forever. Hungry and insignificant and so terribly, awfully alone with your own thoughts. Your own flesh, going feral, exposed to slow decay, and remaining to feel every lucid second of it with no distraction.
That is the terror of the Halls."
— Nowhere Man, on 'Solitary Limspaces.'
Some take to calling it Limbo. It is a fitting name for a reality that seems to exist solely to challenge reason and stretches for so far in repetitive monotony. But, there are paralogic features of this Limspace that stand out against the wallpaper labyrinth, and we detail them within the records of the Sub-Layers of Level 1.
It is known that there are great scarlet oceans of toxic carpet fluid which extend across the horizon as far as the eye can see. There are sometimes deep eroded caverns hidden underneath the carpet, and people have found large swaths of pitch-black zones where the lights have no power. Some rooms have been found with massive cylindrical shafts with steel-plated walls that reach impossibly high and burrow to unknown depths through the ceiling and floor. There are rooms that are damp and covered in mushrooms and unique flora. These areas add a strange feeling of ecology to the otherwise featureless rooms, known only to those who wander far enough into the lost, deep sections of the Halls.
▸⠀ Parology is an important endeavour for a plethora of reasons. The UNCB supports research and exploration into the unmapped depths of the Halls.
The more we know about this Limspace the better we can survive in it. Exploration into these unknown biomes can be dangerous, but the future of the UNCB may rely on the knowledge of what lies beyond our understanding. Knowing that the cure to limrot or an exit to baseline may be lurking just behind the next corner is what drives us to search ever further into Level 1. It is a noble pursuit that runs deep in our blood to explore and answer these questions about new environments we encounter; to the new well-established communities under the UNCB, the Halls are simply the newest frontier.
Cartesian Valleys
The chances of two individuals meeting in infinity are nil. Yet within the Halls humans coalesce into pockets of society incredibly often despite the circumstances. How is this possible?
There are many theories as to how these communities manage to come to pass — how people stumble into one another in the face of astronomical mathematical improbability. The understanding of this may fall into the nature of non-Euclidean geometry; a fascinating feature of this Limspace.
Two likely potentials exist. That space within the Halls is warped, like bending the lines of a Cartesian plane — or that space inside the Halls is overlapped, fitting more space into one area than is logically possible. By either potential, non-Euclidean geometry within the Halls creates areas of higher and lower density space. Areas where there are more rooms in one area than is normally possible, dense zones of space that are easy to enter and difficult to get out of. Cartesian 'valleys' that act not unlike a curvature of space-time or the gravitational pull of a large body of mass.
Wanderers are naturally drawn into these areas by higher probability, and, therefore, settlements naturally develop at the centers of these spaces. And so while societies by no means thrive in this vast limbo nor would the Halls ever be called densely populated, diminutive groups of humanity litter this Limspace at the bottom of non-Euclidean wells like tiny needles lost within an oppressively immense haystack.
▸⠀ The terrible reality of these valleys is that, just as stray lost humans find their way into the bottoms of these non-Euclidean wells, so too do Level 1's wandering entities. Some entities can be hunted into extinction around a settlement. Other entities pose more danger than others, and simply make a valley uninhabitable.
The Rare Settlements of Level 1
Life will always find a way. Despite the Halls having scarce resources to sustain human life, the hardiest survivors manage. Over time and through the efforts of unification under the UNCB, other factions, and just a little luck, a certain degree of societal presence has been created in the halls.
“Nothing was discarded since we had little of anything. The carpet was torn up around our little plot to reveal only more carpet layered underneath it, but it was at least fresher and less rancid. We hung up the old carpet to dry and layered it for bedding. We peeled back the wallpaper in the nearby rooms to mark where we lived and offer some visual variety. Tearing down some of the walls gave us planks of wood which were old and splintered and sometimes weak from moisture, but it was enough for us to make some basic furniture. A number of rooms over we would collect our waste and use it as manure for a fowl, putrid experiment to grow mushrooms in.
We moved that experiment further out from the faucet once it started attracting pests in the way of small, strange creatures we called skitters. The skitters were quick and jittery — but we made snares, and they were better food than the mushrooms.
For a time, it felt like we were finally living again.”
— Saffron K, the 'Founding of Alpha Point.'
It is important to remember that this Limspace is larger than any nation on Earth. It stretches farther than the continental United States, is vaster than the Eurasian Plate, and continues to sprawl even further for endless miles beyond. Even if the Halls stretched to the extents of our known solar system they would be incomprehensible, but infinity is even larger than that. Even the largest cities within the Halls are mere drops in an ocean of space. This makes the human society of Level 1 distant and stretched apart, most people fated to never meet.
Regardless of the UNCB's presence in the Backrooms, there are many more outposts that are unaligned and independent. Settlements are extremely rare; it is far more common for people stranded in the Halls to never meet another human being and to live savage solitary lifestyles, or for small families to form strange and xenophobic communities that are better to be avoided.
Outside of the influence of the UNCB lie cults, insane hermits, starving nomads, and countless other types of unfortunate destitute scraping a living off of what little they can find. No matter how much society thrives under the unity of the UNCB, there still is so much wild and untamed Limspace that lost souls wander through. Be fearful of the unknown and do not easily trust those you meet in the deep madness of the Halls.
▸⠀ Some of those who wander are old… unnaturally so. The Backrooms System, through whatever means, does not let us die of old age. There are some who have survived many hundreds of years, their humanity questionable after so long in Limspace.
With Level 1 being as uncaringly inhospitable as it is, UNCB settlements often thrive better in neighbouring levels. There is evidence littered across Level 1 of failed dead civilization and the bones of wanderers who simply did not make it. The relics of crumbled society are strewn throughout this Limbo telling fractured tales of people long forgotten. Many UNCB colonies reside on directly connected levels, using Level 1 as a means of travel, disposal, or storage. To survive, people who do choose to live within the Halls take to bartering objects and resources from connecting levels. In this way some surprisingly robust residences have been constructed among the unfeeling wallpaper and carpets of Level 1.
Conjunctions
"It is easy to assume the size of the Backrooms is measurable – quantifiable. Finite. Understandable. But there is evidence to suggest the opposite.
If you begin to think of the Backrooms as Superclusters, great Attractors, and unfathomable Voids… then you may be closer to the madness of reality."
— UNCB Archive; the 'Promethean Account'
The Halls are simply the first of many levels within the Backrooms. It is a vast and branching reality of nested infinities within one another known as levels. Levels lead to other levels in chains and clusters of connected limspaces which make up the tangled network of the Backrooms System.
Neighboring Levels
There are countless exits out of Level 1 which lead deeper into the system. They manifest in three common ways: gradients, gateways, and rifts, and they are littered across the mono-yellow labyrinth in mysterious corners and swathing open land borders. Understanding the nature of how levels connect is paramount to understanding how to navigate neighbouring levels and find one's way around the Backrooms. Recognizing that points of egress may lie nearly anywhere to the keen eye may be the difference between life and death for a wanderer low on resources.
The ways levels commonly intersect are below:
⤷ Across expansive 'Gradients': Neighbouring levels can blend into one another over time, gradually transitioning across subtle changes in geography. These gradients lie on the blurry borders between levels, creating large bridges between realities as the features of both levels mix.
⤷ Through stable 'Gateways': Some levels are connected at singular points, like a common doorway but leading to a new reality behind the door. Gateways are often stable and reliable single points of access from one level to another but can be easily mistaken for any other feature of the landscape.
⤷ Connected by unstable 'Rifts': The less commonly encountered method of travel between levels is through natural rifts between reality, similar to what causes people to splice into Level 1 in the first place. Unstable areas of Limspace can sometimes create rifts between levels, which may be permanent or fleeting, one way or reliable back and forth.
In these ways do parallel realities physically collide within the Backrooms System.
But do not be mistaken: exits, although numerous, are still distributed across an infinity. Some wander for years — or even lifetimes — across the desert of the Halls who never encounter an egress into a neighbouring space. The chances of stumbling across a gradient or gateway are terrifyingly slim. Happening across a rift is even more astronomically unlikely.
▸⠀ Logically, it is impossible for there to be a "neighbouring" reality of infinite size connected to the Halls, which themselves may be infinite as well. But; much like how cartesian valleys use the features of non-Euclidean geometry to twist, bend, and overlap space, so to do levels adjacent to Level 1 make do.
Level Chains and Travel
See: the Levels List.
One level may lead to another, which in turn leads to another, deeper and deeper into the system, nesting infinities within one another ad infinitum like a Menger sponge or Mandelbrot set.
A series of levels that connect in sequence can be known as a 'level chain', and commonly travelled roads between levels can be rudimentarily mapped to connect the pockets of society between levels. The first road, known as the 'Quantum Stable Chain', leads through twelve levels to the scorched metropolis of the late Eye of God. Other level chains branch out in their own directions, sometimes intersecting neighbouring chains along the way, sometimes not. There are neighbouring levels which, at their current time of discovery, act as dead-ends with no known further exits into deeper levels beyond. Some chains loop back to the Halls in time, making reliable travel between two points of Level 1.
For some, a nomadic lifestyle is more agreeable to staying put in one place. There is trade between levels made possible by the hardy and well-travelled Porters who choose a more solitary, on-the-move way of living. Limspace is a large and expansive place, but it is communication that maintains our humanity. Porters keep the spirit of connectivity alive by visiting settlements across levels for the trade of both materials and stories. In many ways, the wandering Porters are responsible for evolving the cultures of the UNCB's far-flung settlements.
Entering The Backrooms
No one comes here by choice.
The Backrooms Limspace System is a cosmic prison that fills its confines with lost material and unsuspecting and careless people through an unsettling and unstoppable force known as 'splicing'. It is a one-way ticket to purgatory, a funnelling siphon that makes people disappear from Baseline and brings them here, to the Halls. Every 15 seconds in Baseline, a person goes missing. One in ten are never found or identified again. How many of those people simply fell through reality, spliced into the Backrooms?
"What we are trying to discover is the cause: what funnels information into limspace from reality? Why are the Backrooms drawing baseline things into it? And, what is preventing that energy from reaching both ways?
If we can understand the cause of splicing it may lead to us finding a way back home. Or, even beyond that, mastery of instantaneous travel through and between all realities. That is a prospect beyond worth."
— From the UNCB Research Headquarters, 'Lifting the Veil Between Realities'
In a more clinical description: splicing is the event in which something is instantaneously transferred from one reality to another. Save for extremely rare exceptions it occurs by random chance or against an individual's will. Despite being unexplainable, splicing is an event that befalls everyone in the Backrooms who was not naturally born in them, and as such has developed many colloquial names due to its strange familiarity: no-clipping, phasing, rift hopping, deliverance, and a plethora of other terms try to explain the phenomena.
The cause of splicing is still unknown. Theories have suggested its causation to be a host of different things; from the result of a simulated universe to temporary wormholes to everything else in-between. But, there are a few things we know for certain. Firstly: that Level 1 is a special limspace in the way it entangles with Baseline. Every single known occasion of splicing into the Backrooms System was into the Halls. And secondly: that splicing has a direct, observable effect on living things that undergo the process.
▸⠀ 'Splicing sickness' is an acute series of symptoms that affect individuals who experience splicing. To most, the process of bridging from one reality to another is an unpleasant one. What specifically occurs to matter during the transit between Baseline to Limspace is still unknown, but it can encourage dizziness, vomiting, and a host of other unpleasant reactions to humans.
Once you have spliced into Limspace, there is no return to Baseline. The only known escapes are to venture deeper into the Backrooms, or death.
