Welcome to Newport

"Trying to drown the rats in our own blood didn't work. We needed a new plan."

The old world is flooded and gone. The old continents have submerged and new land masses have pushed their way out of the waves. Fragments of the old empires still survive, in the forms of half-drowned cities, clinging to the land and scrabbling for any straw that will keep them afloat. Humans remain the most obviously prominent intelligent species, but whether or not they're still in charge is a dubious argument. There are at least three contenders to the title of apex species:

The Rats

Highly intelligent, sapient rats. They can read, they can speak, they can use tools, their worship of the moon grants them access to flesh magic, allowing them to reanimate the dead and modify the bodies into unimaginable forms. They live in the cities, amongst the humans. They live on the outskirts of the cities, trading with or raiding the humans and being predated in return. They live far away from the cities, creating bizarre cultures, speaking bizarre languages, so alien that they can hardly be considered hostile or friendly to human societies. Whether or not they even consider humans sapient is umknown. They live in the seas. Most of the larger sealife is dead, but they are not gone. Whales, octopodes, squids, all reanimated and modified by rat necromancy into living, swimming colonies and weapons of war. It is not known what happened to the old rats, the speechless kind, if there is any relation to the new rats, if any other intelligent animal forms exist or if it is even possible for such a thing to ever exist.

The Graffini

Intelligence from Beyond. What they originally are is entirely unknowable. The Graffini have never been directly encountered. They can only enter the human universe by transforming themselves into manifestations of art. They range from the most corporeal forms, such as sculptures through to animated pictorial forms, illustrations and paintings slipping from frame to frame, along the walls and surfaces, to theoretical constructs such as sound-based forms or even word-forms. The more corporeal the manifestation, the more intelligible they are to humans, the more likely to be able to seem to communicate.

The Illustrated

Hybrids of Grafini technology and native life forms. Graffini technology also (loosely) takes the form of human art as does the ways in which they modify our world and our bodies. Human bodies modified by Graffini technology start to look like art. The very first Illustrated human, Edith Trundle, was known as The Girl with the Illustrated Eyes, for her replacement eyes which seemed to have been painted into existence. Replaced and modified human flesh may look like any pictorial artform, paint, ink, pencil, anything. These modifications are all collectively known as illustrations. Illustrations may take the place of internal organs, may provide new limbs, new organs, may modify the brain. A common modification is to have the digestive system illustrated, allowing for the ability to digest illustrated food, which might take the form of actual three dimensional Grafini created food, or even a human created depiction of food, although very few human depictions of food can manage to serve as nutrition.

Rats and other creatures may also be Illustrated.

The Gods of Memory

Gods of Memory, at first blush, appear to be a highly abstracted form of Illustrated human. They exist as intelligences that can manifest physically, but can also exist in human and Graffini minds, dreams, nightmares. They predate Graffini contact with our world. They are living fixations with concepts, with groups of concepts. One of the most well known God of Memory in Newport is Jenny Hub, who manifests as a fixation with locked doors and libraries. Jenny usually manifests in human women, remaining with the same body for as long as the body remains alive. Another is Stan in the Hat, who fixates on streets and the homeless. Stan manifests through hats. Wear on of his hats, become Stan. Unlike Jenny, there are often many Stans at any given point in time.

The Humans

Still around. At odds with everything, Rats, the Graffini, the Gods of Memory, themselves, the old world they killed and the new world they're trying to live in. Without them, none of the other life forms could even exist. Now that those forms are here, humans fear that they're no longer required.