The Animalia Underworld

This article is an entry in the citizen-edited encyclopedia Animalopedia. Years follow TMA-Timeline. Many of this article's sources are anonymous submissions (see Talk:The Animalia Underworld §"Isn't it a bit much to demand signed sources on an article about the Shadow Layer?").

The Animalia Underworld is the collective term for the two-layered space extending beneath the surface of the city of Animalia—the shallow subterranean Shadow Layer and the deep subterranean Roots Catacombs—together with the society, economy, and trades that took root there. Surface dwellers refer to the whole underground simply as "the Below."

1. The Two-Layer Structure

The two layers are joined by the Underground Network—a labyrinth of abandoned old Metro lines, underground waterways, and maintenance shafts, used by the Five Families and their subsidiary crews as trade routes and escape routes. The submerged channels of the Veil Waterway connect here too, and it is said that "Animalia has two maps. Only one of them is for sale" 〔citation needed〕.

It is held that no one settles in the Catacombs deeper than the Shadow Layer, yet each year a handful of testimonies report lights seen inside the excavation-ban line (the City Police answer, in every case, that these are "reflections off a light valve").

2. Society of the Shadow Layer

2.1 Lamp Wards and Layer-Lords

The city's administration has no presence in the Shadow Layer. In its place, the lamp is the unit of governance.

• Lamp ward: The area lit by a single generator and a single wiring grid becomes, in itself, one "neighborhood." At present there are said to be a little over twenty major lamp wards 〔citation needed〕.
• Layer-lord: The boss of each lamp ward. Neither hereditary nor elected—"the one who never let the lamp go out" simply comes to be called the layer-lord. The work is procuring fuel, judging disputes, and serving as the ward's window onto the surface. The layer-lords' council, the "Lamp-Gathering," decides matters affecting the whole Shadow Layer, but its venue changes every time, and there is no record of a surface dweller ever being invited.

The Ecosystem Council holds no seat for the Shadow Layer. Since AE 78, proposals to establish a "Shadow Layer representative seat" have been submitted four times, and four times fizzled out amid the Shadow Layer's own non-response (→ TMA-Politics).

2.2 Economy — Where AMT Does Not Reach

No AMT payment terminals have been installed in the Shadow Layer, which has a history of deliberately refusing them. The details are left to TMA-Economy-AMT §2.3; only the key points are noted here.

• Shinogi: Phosphorescent, wax-sealed shell fragments—the Shadow Layer's reserve currency, whose sealing-stamp is administered by the money-changers' guild, the "Dark-Market Changers' Guild." "The star of the Shadow Layer."
• The three hard goods: salt, batteries, bullets. "The things that don't rot in the shadow, and are always needed in the shadow."
• The dark rate: The money-changers stationed on the boundary stairs to the surface set the day's AMT⇄glowshell rate. It swings with how heavily the City Police are patrolling that day.

At the deepest point stands the illegal fighting pit Blood Arena, whose promoter, it is said, not even the lamp wards' layer-lords can identify 〔by whom?〕.

2.3 Entrances and Checkpoints

• The Hundred-Step Gates: The officially recognized entrances known to the city. There are a dozen or so within the city, each with a City Police sentry posted—though officers almost never descend the stairs. "The City Police's jurisdiction ends at the last step" is the tacit understanding between the two sides 〔citation needed〕.
• The Stray Gates: Unofficial entrances—abandoned platforms, dried-up channels, the false bottoms of shops' cellars. The location itself is a commodity, and to reveal a gate's whereabouts without leave is held to be the gravest betrayal in the Shadow Layer.
• Checkpoints: There is no formal checkpoint on the Shadow Layer's side, but the money-changers on the boundary stairs and the lamp wards' lookouts serve as de facto immigration control. Passage is said to be decided by three things: "face, purpose, and a gift."

3. Register of Subsidiary Crews — "the Sixteen Slots"

The "Register of Crews Outside the Families," maintained by the Tribunal (established AE 55; → TMA-Justice), is traditionally organized into sixteen slots. At present, twelve organizations can be publicly confirmed as active, listed below; the remaining four slots "continue to be updated as blanks" on the register. As to the origin of the blanks, theories abound—a missing number left by a defunct crew, or the existence of a crew that is real but refuses to register 〔citation needed〕 (occult magazines often tie them to the Grand Alliance's "two vacant seats" of the Fifty Seats (AE 115), though no basis is offered. → TheMafiaAnimals-Origin).

設計原則（アニマロペディア編集部注ではなく研究者の指摘）: 下部組織は五家の「性格の延長」である——ロッソは美学の外注、ツンドラは規律の裾野、ニンキョウは耳目、華龍會は薬箱、ゴールドフィストは契約書（『系列外のアニマリア』AE 116、著者匿名）。

4. A Catalogue of the Underground Trades

• Information brokers: The very information gap between the Shadow Layer and the surface is the commodity. The "going rates" of Shadow-Paw, Undercover Owls, and the Mirror-Moon Pavilion form the three great markets, and there are even information arbitrageurs who work the spread between them (→ TMA-Economy-AMT §3.3). The White Noise Café and the Midnight Café Noir are said to be the contact points on the surface side.
• Smuggling: The fog of Fog Port, the waterways of the Aqua Fin Alliance, and the Midnight Metro Line 13—which runs only between midnight and 3 a.m.—are the three great routes. In the cant they are called "fog, water, and the last train" 〔citation needed〕.
• Forgery: The abandoned Phantom Factory is rumored to be a secret production base for weapons and counterfeits. Within the Shadow Layer, forging a glowshell's seal is the gravest crime of all, said to draw a sanction "heavier than a severed finger" (→ TMA-Economy-AMT).
• "Erasure": The trade of making people disappear. Unlike open bounty hunters such as the Nightfall Hunters, whether dedicated "erasers" truly exist is disputed even in the underworld. The recurring appearance of an entry reading "contractor unknown" in the Tribunal's ruling records is the main basis for the theory that they do (Tribunal Ruling Record No. 107, among others).
• The memory rackets: The newest and most abhorred trade in the Shadow Layer. Operators who claim to "hold" or "shave away" memories are known in the cant as blank-sheet men. Many commentators link them to the surge in reports of "memory discrepancies" since AE 119 and the rise in "voluntary admissions" to the Lunatic Sanatorium (TMA-Timeline), yet no official record confirms that blank-sheet men exist. Of the Sanatorium itself there is an old rumor that "you go in one person and come out another," but the hospital declines all interviews 〔citation needed〕.

5. Laws Beneath the Lamp — the Unwritten Code of the Shadow Layer

The Shadow Layer has no written law, but there is a code kept beneath the lamp. Because the layer-lords pass it down by word of mouth, the wording wavers from ward to ward, though the core is shared.

1. Don't pry — Never ask a name, a past, or a face worn on the surface. "Below, everyone is a second self."
2. Don't bring down the quarrels from above — Leave the Five Families' feuds at the top of the stairs. Whoever brings them down is shut out by the whole ward.
3. Don't put out the lamp — Pilfering fuel from the shared lamp is the gravest of all thefts.
4. Don't foul the water — The underground waterways are the lifeline of every lamp ward.
5. See children to the stairs — A cub that has wandered in, whosever child it may be, is sent back to the surface. Those of the Shadow Layer claim this code is older than the Five-Family Accord's inviolability of cubs (TMA-Lore-Deep §2.3) 〔citation needed〕.

Punishment for breaking the code is likewise uncodified. It is only that, around that one alone, the lamps begin to recede—in the Shadow Layer, "to go dark" is a verb that means excommunication.

6. Legends of the Underground

• The Ghost of the Red-Eyed White Rabbit: A white rabbit said to appear in the Underground Network. Accounts of sightings run unbroken from the construction era to the present; it is said to "appear only before those who have lost their way, and lead them either to the right way out or to a path from which there is no return." Those of the Shadow Layer do not chase the rabbit when they see it, nor speak to it. That is held to be good manners.
• The Midnight Metro Line 13: A phantom line absent from the official route map. It settled into urban legend around AE 103, yet it is real (Animalia-Map). No fare table exists, and a further rumor holds that "what you pay when you board is not money" 〔citation needed〕.
• Echo Station's "Waiting Room": In the old Central Station, shut down in AE 71 (→ TMA-History-Animalia §12), a resistance group is said to have settled from the AE 100s onward. They call themselves the "Waiting Room"—meaning, it is said, "waiting for a train that hasn't come yet." Among the graffiti covering the walls is imagery seen nowhere in the city above, and reproductions of it fetch high prices from the occult magazine Monthly Moonside.
• The Lamp Funeral: When a layer-lord dies, it is said that every lamp ward, with no word passed among them, dims its lamps for exactly one minute. Who spreads the word is not known 〔citation needed〕.
• The Murals of the Great Forgetting: The murals of the Roots Catacombs are held to be the sole record of how the old civilization fell, but since the excavation ban (AE 64) no legitimate study exists. It is said there are those called "wall-readers" who secretly take rubbings 〔by whom?〕.
• "Reception is bad below": A stock phrase for the fact that comm devices and AMT terminals never work properly in the Shadow Layer. Engineers explain it by aging wiring and the shielding of bedrock, but the Shadow Layer's old-timers prefer to put it differently—"Below, it's quiet, though no one has called."