The Ultragora
# Overview
The Ultragora, also known as The Pilgrimage Exchange, The Boundless Market, and The Eternal Shopping Mall of Infinite Variety, is the largest marketplace in the Weave, a swirling bazaar where the most bizarre and the most desperately sought-after things in existence can be found….for a price.
The businesses of the visible structures in the Ultragora range from well-established storefronts safely located in the prime shopping districts to back-alley shops operating in the dark depths of the Ultragora’s massive foundations whose wares only some beings need ever know. In between are permanent stalls and roaming vendors, layers of markets and levels of bazaars and all permutations in between.
A person could spend a lifetime wandering from shop to shop and only ever scratch the surface of available wares and services. The Ultragora itself is a gargantuan megastructure whose core is built out of spirit-metal, the formless ghost-crystal also known as kheprene with every permission extendable, compact and amorphous capable of self-replicating through a meta-propagation template; however, the billions of traders who have come and gone over the millennium of the Ultragora’s existence have embedded so much of their unique styles, influences and histories into its structure that it has expanded mightily, beyond recognition, into an enormous cyclopean city-maze, a series of starcrapers extending impossibly wide as opposed to infinitely upwards. Words and languages pass from district to district, reformed by the canonic datametrique as the Ultragora expands, depersonalized by the chaos lattices of form its superposition of architects has given it.
Travelling between districts and regions of the Ultragora would be an extraordinarily difficult task if not for the Atmospheric Threadlanes of every circle of influence. Precise arrangements of quantum inertial and hyper-skein engines made in carefully numerical depositions create networks of subtle transitional paths, invisible gravity pockets that connect the different strata of the Ultragora. In addition, it holds a number of threadgates, cosmic string-woven portals to a million million other threads of the Weave.
The Ultragora is home to the famous Gyre, an immense cloud of flying vessels and walkerships that circle the entirety of the market. It consists of the clientele of the Ultragora, people that live in the gyre but are at anchor in no particular place. A mixed multitude of races and types, from humans and their successors to strange constructs and vibrant reconfigured entities travelling from world to world to trade wares and experience. Due to not having any recognizable administrative system, the Gyre is home to the Gyre Genii - travelers, scavengers, psychonauts and explorers who use its nooks and crannies as a launchpad to explore the broader Weave. Nobody truly knows how many people originally left their worlds behind to settle in the ever-changing trading caravanserai of the Ultragora, but they form a wide network of wanderers, slowly but steadily spreading the word of, describing and dreaming the Ultragora in all directions.
The Ultragora itself is also home to over two billion permanent dwellers, of which most are long-time traders, corporeal descendants of a variety of traders, pilgrims, tourists and Gyre Genii who settled down. Due to its nature as the largest market in the Weave, billions of other runners and travellers converge to its docks each cycle, the Ultragora perpetually reinvigorating itself with new customs, practices, and products.
# Notable Sublocales
Onyx Landing Zone, a nexus of arrival, where massive, towering warehouses process and distribute the goods arriving with travellers weekly, guarded by skeletal golems of spirit-metal bristling with meta-propulsive energy and tracking mechanisms.
The Deepdocks: Located along the underside of the cylindrical structure, a ring of everso-slightly-randomized habitats and orbits where the more permanent residents of the Ultragora keep their craft, aloof from the infinitude of newbies and tourists with their shifting styles and fleeting fashions. The deepdocks also include an ecumenopolis of refinery/autofac stations creating new ships and materials for the consistently expanding market, receiving junkorders and waste from the ships in the Gyre to repurpose, one-way ships, and the bizarre constructs of scry-deckers and warpcallers.
The Gyre is the broad brushed lane of orbital maintenence and dockships that circle the market at large, a zone of information processing, data transfer and containment, of travellers, pilgrims, traders and their families both, a band of sorts that circles the gigastructure of the Ultragora.
GZ9-EKPYROMART is a well-known market selling particularly dangerous artifacts. Fringe archeovolians, adventure-family households and adventurers fighting to survive the dangerous outer regions of the Weave frequently come to this sector of the Ultragora to trade in the most valuable and dangerous items, such as the phylacteries of weird psionic liches, guidance systems stolen from artificial moons in complex orbit, and relics once guarded by fire-aztecs and the light-kings of the post-vivisphere.
Vais’ Shrine is an extraterrestrial arcade and bastion to esoteric game creations, the ultimate simulacra park, gamespiration and (un)living-god emporium, maintained with the sacred, ghost-laden, autosyntactic portals of the deceased Nubian computer-shaman Vais. Towers, spires and fractal colonies of hexagonal blocks of mechanical and synthetic life crawl up their sacral glyph wall. Mechanical-spirit overseers govern the operations and guard the place in an atmosphere of racing electrocircuits, fleeting lightsprites and whipping winds of computer-ghost beings.
The Omnimarlaft, a megastructure built around a paradoxical vortex that rapidly delivers impossible-to-store goods, so-called Chaos Goods and ghost-matter. Here, they can converge and be exchanged in automated emporiums and private megastores known as the Portals of Pintorax.
The Unlikaehtnexsun Erosion Mirage-Forge is a memetic megaforge in the less savory underbelly of the Ultragora. The unlikaehtnexsun is a sizable forge of colossal, dripping, molten-organic tanks and cascading rivers of memeplexes, the plasticity of which helps forge hyperstitions, memetic constructs both lethal and harmless. Built inside the ultrarumma ring-theorems, its primary customers are the parafamilial guilds of War Veterans from across the Weave. The forge’s machines are broad, membrane-like structures that latch onto those hapless more high-entropic persons to order and absorb their biostuff, downloading them into lacunar surfaces and imprinting their memes and memories onto foreign wordform-networks.
The Ultrafruit is an incongruous garden in the Ultragora, a peaceful place dislocated from the competitive, mechanoid spirit of the rest of the shipping market encircling it. An ex-goddess made it shimmer with soft, unpredictable light, planting it into the space of the structure and giving it over to machines tending its growth. They tend and grow pages of network-plants that emanate from the flow of electromagnetic and information waves. The plants channel the network’s background chatter and energy into data-vegetables ripe with palatable packets of pixelchunks.
Necronanopolis is an emerging realm of decentralized, extra-market nanotechnology, closer to a technovirus-ecology than a single entity and city as such. Necroware is made of intelligent, tiny little replicators that help build more complex entities, and can recruit living or dead biological tissue to turn it into a necromachine. The tools then alter the bodies until only a part of their previous identity is left and the molds spin around them invisible webs of cyberspace, soaking the protoplasticity in metapheres, secret commands, memodes, and ectomorph sex. Suffice to say, this market district sees a lot of business.
Yilia Unalica is a semiautonomous shipyard outside the Ultragora, but not too far, containing thalamo-assembler gates, processing units made of smartlattice and neuromorph biofeedback processors. It specializes in the production of self-programming DXVs made from cryptic waveform-sense scans of uncommon space objects and graviton meshes, and feeds the Ultragora with intuitive drifterships and shipware at a constant rate. Their dream-based OS is imbued with almost sentient pathways and self-correcting algorithms for intuitive threadnav control.
The Market of Thoughts is where psionophaunts and AI workers exchange hyper-intricate, highly cognitive and innovative ideas, fully explored vertical analyzable streams of concept-entities, and spiralling-hypnagogic dreams salvaged from paradoxical apotropaic rituals, containment paradigms and mind traps.
These are just a few of the many points of interest in and around the Ultragora. More than an occasional high-passage anarchocapitalist township, the mega-market is an essential economic force of the Weave, with a robust services infrastructure, a vast variety of content, and a constant churn of traders, data-cult exchangers, and travellers.