The Invisible Scripts of Hieronymous Hodge

**Admin** Sun Nov 30, 2008 6:31 pm

Part The First: In Which The City Beautiful's Beginnings Get A Good Going Over

Before this city was called Orlando, it was called Orlando's Grave and, before THAT, Jernigan, after the first settler in the area, Aaron Jernigan. The settlers who traveled here were abysmally dull, and lacked any sort of creativity and so, upon their arrival, renamed Jernigan to 'Orlando's Grave' because they found the name ‘Orlando’ carved into a tree and assumed it was a marker for his final resting place. Later, they shortened it simply to 'Orlando' and thus it has remained.

The legend has it that the marker was for Orlando Reeves, a soldier who was supposedly killed in a Seminole skirmish in the mid 1800’s. The grave marker was allegedly made by his comrades-in-arms, whom he alerted of the Indian danger with a warning shot just before he was taken down.

In actuality, the carving on the tree by Lake Eola was made by one Orlando Rees, who owned and operated a plantation and sugar mill a few dozen miles north. He wasn’t a soldier, but he was a willworker. There is some dispute about the relationship between Rees and Jernigan, but it is speculated that Jernigan was some sort of creature who had taken on the guise of humanity and traveled to the as-yet-unsettled land of Central Florida to live as a cattleman in relative hermitage.

Upon his arrival, Orlando Rees was alerted to Jernigan’s less-than-human biology and determined to put a stop to it. Rees’ reasoning is as yet undiscovered – perhaps his kind simply didn’t care for Jernigan’s kind. What is known presents the knowledge that Rees, being rich and powerful as well as a completely nasty man, left his plantation and went hunting for the peaceful Jernigan, who was traveling about his lands roping cows and minding his own, supernatural business. Orlando killed Aaron, and the carving of his name he inscribed on the tree was not a grave maker, but a magical script intended to preserve his influence over the area. It worked – the city was renamed Orlando. Jernigan was relegated to ‘Orlando’s First Settler’ and given little more recognition than that designation carved on his gravestone in Orlo Vista.

If this were any usual city, such a tale would end here. However, the effects of these two early denizens began a chain of events and an undercurrent of the unnatural that would bleed into the future and color the entire metropolis’ makeup.

**Admin** Tue Dec 02, 2008 5:20 pm

Part The Second: In Which We Learn Orlando Is Far From Normal

Scholars of the supernal have addressed Orlando as being a crossroads and a haven for the unwanted or nomadic. Like a great deal of Florida, the city seems to have invited the transient, rather than the native. Establishing a real culture under these circumstances is a difficult proposition. In fact, there has been comment that Orlando HAS no real culture. It has been nicknamed ‘The City Plastic’ in lieu of its official title ‘The City Beautiful’ because of its lack of character and/or depth. This is a common assertion made by the unaware public. It is also entirely false.

Orlando is rife with character, culture and depth, but it is of a kind unavailable to general citizens. There is an entire subculture which exists parallel to the mundane city; I say ‘parallel’, but the word ‘underneath’ would be more appropriate. The people invited, dragged or stumbling into this subculture do so irrevocably. Upon entering, an immediate trade-off is made: they are gifted with knowledge such as would rock the foundations of world society and, in exchange, they typically lead very dangerous, short-lived and ostensibly exhausting lives. If they find this unacceptable, it is simply too bad. They’re in it for good.

These people call this subculture the Mad World or, sometimes, the Underground. It has its own system of currency, government and judiciaries. It has its own unique celebrities and history, as well as its own businesses, theaters and restaurants…all existing and thriving in the shadows and under the covers of Orlando’s visible activity.

The Mad World is a great secret, largely because there is almost no one in it who has any desire to be revealed or to reveal it to others. The rare instances where someone comes into it and is insane enough to think it would be prudent to blab are dealt with swiftly and with absolute finality.

**Admin** Tue Dec 09, 2008 11:55 am

Part The Third: In Which We Discuss The Mad World's Mystery

It is common knowledge, to those of us in the Mad World, that there are strange and bizarre things and creatures populating the world all over the place. Some have made a study of these things, but a greater percentage of the Underground's populace are far too busy surviving and seeing that the city itself continues to survive to devote much time into the pursuit of occult research. The general consensus is that we all have too much on our plate already to drag in more supernatural errata.

This is not, ultimately, a bad attitude, because knowledge is a reciprocatory business. In other words – we poke at them and, eventually, they’ll start poking back. Nobody wants that. Again, the Underground is wild enough without outside influence. Right now, there’s a distinct advantage we have over other groups, that they cannot see the Mad World.

There is all sorts of speculation as to why and how the Mad World came into being and its selective secrecy. Some say the Blue Lady’s ancestors had a hand in it, but since we have no idea what the Blue Lady is, that postulation falls to the wayside. The cold facts are these: that only mortal humans have ever been granted entrance into the Underground; that the denizens of the Mad World (non-humans who don’t appear or exist outside it) need these humans to accomplish beneficiary goals and to keep the Underground safe; and that Destiny is thickly woven into the humans’ roles in the Mad World.

**Admin** Sun Dec 28, 2008 9:28 pm

Part the Fourth: In Which We Discuss The Blue Lady and the One Word Massacre

While records of the extreme past in Orlando are somewhat fuzzy, we do know that, after the kafuffle with Rees and Jernigan, the Mad World came into existence. However, since its denizens and locations couldn’t be seen by the general public and there were no visitors crossing into it, it remained undetected for a good long while. In the early twentieth century, the Blue Lady appeared and began tagging people to come into the Underground. For almost a hundred years, the Mad World was a place of wonder, an alternate reality with a thriving populace. The exact population during the Azure Age of the Underground is unknown – estimates range from two-hundred to a thousand humans who were able to interact with the Mad World at that time.

Legend says that the One Word Massacre was instigated by a descendant of Orlando Rees. However, there has been no evidence to support that assumption. The story also goes that one of the visitors to the Mad World decided to reveal it to the rest of the populace, and almost succeeded…by uttering just one word. The word itself is unknown, as are the circumstances surrounding the event. What we do know is that it caused the Blue Lady to go into hiding and cut off all contact with the Underground and its people. The exact date is October 24^th, 2004. It also caused an entity, a denizen of the Mad World, to begin killing all the humans in the Underground. Those who weren’t killed were driven to The Pines. Within three weeks, there was not one human left walking freely in the Mad World.

Unless, of course, you believe the stories told by Bristol, who claims he not only survived the One Word Massacre, but escaped from The Pines single-handedly.

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The Invisible Scripts of Hieronymous Hodge