Hellsborough Exposed — nascenti-denizen

Rarely seen but vast in number, The Nascenti are a race of langoustine-like overlords who quietly own Hellsborough from strongholds sunk beneath the reservoirs at Damflask and Ladybower, while the humans toiling above have no notion they are slaves under constant observation. A field note worth memorising: these creatures read averted eyes as guilt, and since you are almost certainly guilty of something, you would do well to choose your expression accordingly.

Exacids — biologically engineered crabs with armoured shells and industrial-grade pincers, capable of bipedal form — serve as the enforcers of The Dark Peak, with licence to use deadly force and a notable tendency to appear in large numbers wherever crosslanders are expected. Created by and loyal to the nascenti, they are described by residents as "not unusual," which is the kind of statement that tells you everything you need to know about what counts as unusual.

Rarely glimpsed but theoretically everywhere, the nascenti run Hellsborough the way a landlord runs a property portfolio: through surrogates, through the infrastructure, and through a story so well-rehearsed that most tenants believe they're free. According to their preferred lore, they forged humans in their own image — revisionist biology that requires considerable faith in both their aesthetic standards and their capacity for modesty. Their strongholds lie beneath the reservoirs; their eyes are the organic network itself.

Nascenti longevity — nine or ten times the human lifespan — is, according to N'Sogoth, the basis of their right to govern. A creature with a millennium to think about things ought, in theory, to produce wisdom. What it appears to have produced, at this particular historical moment, is a detailed and specific operational plan to eliminate me. Perhaps longevity and good judgement are not as correlated as the theory suggests.

Every reservoir in the Eastern Dark Peak sits above a nascenti stronghold — Damflask, Ladybower, all of them. Humans in Hellsborough work, trade, and operate as slaves with no knowledge of it, which is, by any operational metric, a highly successful arrangement. They are mind readers in the ambient-signal sense: negotiation is theoretically possible, but they will interpret whatever you're thinking as confirmation of whatever they already believe.