The Quarantine Zone
-Region of major anomalous phenomena; nature of the source of these anomalies remains undetermined, as approaching the nexus comes with great risks. Note that these effects can apparently be suppressed with a Voiddelver exclusion field.
-Some anomalous architecture within the Zone bears hallmarks of Asterii radially symmetric design. Thus far, these locations have been associated with the presence or activities of the Cult of Silence. One such outpost—a strangely circular version of an imperial chapel—that we encountered proved oddly resistant to the physical alterations caused by the Zone's unique nature; this location was later destroyed by Ruber Sutonis.
-Some experience an unsettling sense of space being "diagonal" to its usual orientation. The pervasive lighting we experienced (nearer the edge of the zone, so perhaps cannot be extrapolated to the far interior) was green scale and oddly lit, with no distinct source of illumination despite the conditions of high visibility. Sound echoes strongly in many regions, appearing to barely degrade with time, and perhaps bearing some psychic element; in other areas, sound is instead dampened significantly more than expected.
-Some qualities of the Zone appear to have more in common with the immaterium than the physical world; the nature of causation, entropy, randomness, time, and distance all appear to behave differently. Though we did not personally observe it, it has been reported that there is a formation called the Chasm that allows one to "descend to horizontal locations." Other throughways include Decimal Street (which Lazarus described as being psychically "narrow and confined") and the Tertiary Warehouse ("where things end"). Kelle reported that navigating via sensing other Asterii presence was both difficult and nauseating, indicating that the layout of space time is not intuitive to the human mind.
-Our party did traverse the aforementioned Tertiary Warehouse during our exploration; the location was filled with massive hillocks of refuse and debris, including an afterburner that had apparently been running for months with no sign of reduced output. Major disruptions, such as shouting, in this location caused pieces of trash to rise into the air, through no mechanism or energy field detectable by technological or psychic means. At one point, our group descended through a pit and found ourselves moving along what can best be described as an inversion or mirroring shadow of the terrain, an "upside down" of the trash heaps, though orientation as established by gravity does not entirely explain how we understood this to be the case. Elsewhere, we also observed, but did not approach, a heat haze distortion, and finally had to jump across pieces of floating cookware to reach an exit (through which we observed a painfully bright light before crossing the threshold).
-The Zone also has instances of sentient servitors and natural fusion of technology into biological organisms. In addition, at a location previously containing a corpse, we observed fungal growths emitting an odd form of syncopated square-waveform beta radiation.
-Large, hostile, insectoid creatures equipped with Vigil Devices attacked our group during our exploration, apparently on instruction from members of the Cult of Silence. These entities were highly robust, with decapitation and severing of limbs was alone being insufficient to kill them, though enough physical trauma eventually rendered them inert. It may be hypothesized that these insects are another subject species of the Asterii, similar to the the Cutters. Their internal structure does not indicate direct kinship, however, as the milky fluids within their carapace is dissimilar liquid in the Cutters.
-Movement through the Zone requires experience with its distorted logic; Archivist Ruber Sutonis Sutonis provided aid and advice in this regard during our explorations. This included:
--Passing through a threshold only during seconds that ended in the number 4; passing through most threshold also involved holding one's breath. Notably, many such instances of traversal bring one to entirely different locations than what might be seen through a door or other aperture, apparently connected by dimension warping.
--Defaulting to the decision of a single individual when pathfinding (may be necessitated to avoid too many choice based splits in the timeline; at one point, members of the party reported seeing alternate versions of ourselves traveling the alternate path).
--Making decisions by flipping a coin (which landed on its edge, despite being on an incline)
--Moving through the same location multiple times, with apparently different outcomes.