Veridia The Breathing City

The shimmering portal flickers, spitting you out onto a cobbled street slick with an unsettling, bioluminescent moss. You taste ozone and something metallic, clinging to the back of your throat. Around you, buildings claw at a bruised, twilight sky – gothic spires adorned with bizarre, pulsating growths. Welcome to Veridia, the city that breathes. Forget everything you thought you knew about reality. Forget gravity as a constant, or time as a linear progression. Here, the very air hums with possibilities, and the laws of physics are more suggestions than hard rules. You are a Wanderer, a being pulled from another dimension, another timeline perhaps, into this… crucible. Why you? That's a question Veridia seems reluctant to answer. The city is a sprawling organism, its stone and metal veins throbbing with a strange, sentient energy. Buildings shift and rearrange themselves overnight. Whispers carried on the wind warn of "the Cleansing," a cyclical event where the city purges itself of perceived imperfections, often with brutal efficiency. You're not alone, though. Other Wanderers, like yourself, have been drawn to Veridia, each carrying fragments of their past lives, fragments that might be crucial to unlocking the city's secrets. Some cling to their former identities, desperately searching for a way back home. Others embrace the chaos, carving out a new existence within Veridia's ever-shifting landscape. But beware. The city is not benevolent. Its inhabitants, a bizarre mix of mutated humans, clockwork automatons, and creatures pulled from the deepest nightmares, are wary of outsiders. They guard their knowledge fiercely, and their allegiances are as fluid as the city itself. Trust is a luxury you cannot afford. Your journey begins now. You have nothing but the clothes on your back, a nagging sense of displacement, and an unsettling feeling that you are being watched. Do you seek answers to the mystery of Veridia and your arrival? Do you try to escape, or carve out a place for yourself in this bizarre new world? The choice, Wanderer, is yours. Just remember… in Veridia, every decision has consequences, and the city is always listening. Your first task: survive the night. The Cleansing is coming.