Pinecone Village

Pinecone Village is a borough of Fulfwotz, containing the districts Arbor, Pinesky, and Underbridge. Densely-forested and tranquil, many consider the borough to be a getaway from the commonplace glamour and superficiality of Fulfwotz. The borough has strong ties with the supernatural, rated #2 Most Paranormal Destination in 2013 by the magazine Mystic Moon. These stories are mainly fueled by a large number of sinister occurrences that dot the borough's history. Apart from Fulfwotz Proper, Pinecone Village is the oldest borough in the city, originally being established in the early 1300's.

History

Pinecone Village's early history is mostly lost, however ancient illuminations suggest it was a leper colony for those suffering from Yersinia pulex, more commonly known as the First Plague. Infected Fulfwotzians were sent to the colony, which in Ancient Sammichian was called Ommuxa, or in English, Death Village. Hastily-constructed housing was provided for the sick, but at the plague's height in 1350, Ommuxa had become overcrowded and incredibly unsanitary. When the greater Fulfwotzian population became infected, prompting mass hysteria, communication with the colony was cut off until around 1360, when the sickness subsided. Scouts had discovered that everyone in Ommuxa had died; not a single person out of the estimated 200,000 sent there were living, and many bodies had begun to decompose in the streets. It took upwards of 20 years to completely empty the colony of bodies.

Ommuxa was overlooked by the Kingdom for centuries, deemed to be "cursed land" due to the mass death that occurred there. The empty homes were prone to takeover by traveling gypsies and bandits, and Ommuxa was shortly incorporated into the Kingdom of Aboreal by the Arbor Gypsy Caravan, before they were driven out in an incident that is still debated by scholars today; a journal was discovered in one of the houses, dated to around the time the Kingdom of Arboreal fell, describing an "unimaginable and vile wickedness which forages through the trees, searching for untenable souls to inflict its otherworldly scourge upon". There has been no other mention of this mysterious entity described in the journal.

Ommuxa only came back to the rule of the Kingdom in the early 1700's, when space in the congested heart of Fulfwotz was becoming rare. For the first time since the plague, and against the warnings of the Orthodox Sammichian Trinity, the Kingdom expanded beyond the Alturas-Santos mountains into the Demmatrodine. Fulfwotzian forces drove squatters from the decaying infrastructure of Ommuxa, and rebuilt most homes. To encourage people to leave the city center and live in Ommuxa, the Kingdom renamed it to a purer Pinecone Village, named for the towering Athitican Pines that dominate the landscape. Despite now being deemed one of the more pleasant places in Fulfwotz, the borough still has a very strong connection with the paranormal and preternatural.

Arbor

Arbor, also known as the Village Center, is deemed the "downtown" of Pinecone Village. It is clustered around Leper's Tower, one of the oldest bell towers in Fulfwotz.