The Warehouses

“‘Do you have one out back?’, customers ask after perusing the shelves, disappointed they can’t find what they were looking for. No. We have everything out back.”

Anonymous, Stock Management Team, Emporium.

How do you stock the shelves of an infinite supermarket? Where do you find the hearts’ desires of a myriad of deities, genii loci, and artificial intelligences? What kind of containment facility could house an apocalypse, the colour of the pre-dawn sky, and a selection of luxury jams?

The answer, of course, is the Warehouses.

An endless labyrinth of towering shipping containers, sealed vaults, and ominously creaking stacks of crates, the Warehouses contain all the produce and goods that make it to display at the supermarket itself. Quite where these items come from is unclear, but they never seem to deplete, and, somewhere in those endless depths, every thing you can imagine - and quite a few you can’t - can be found. Stock is brought up from the Warehouses, and made accessible on the shelves, and in the aisles, but behind this, the seething chaos of logistics and supply is barely contained.

The Warehouses are fractal, unmappable, and ever-shifting - you could lose yourself with a single step - but veteran workers at Emporium have figured out a knack to get around them. The trick is to navigate from department to department, concept-surfing and free-associating between related aisles until you find what you want.

Say you wanted to lay hands on a T-87 battle tank, to barge into a supervisor’s office and steal xir papers. I’m speaking theoretically, of course. Just giving a possible example. Not saying you do this. When you first enter the Warehouses, you find yourself in the flowers section. Now, one potential route would be

flowers ➢ edible arrangements ➢ pre-packaged meals ➢ disposable cutlery ➢ knives ➢ ancient weapons ➢ modern weapons ➢ cannons ➢ tanks.

But say you didn’t want to go that way, because there’s been rumours of Coo-coo raids in the disposable cutlery aisle! Instead, you could go

flowers ➢ symbols of love ➢ chintzy heart lockets ➢ containers for precious objects ➢ containers for humans ➢ tanks.

The trick is to find links, even abstract ones, between where you are, or where you want to go - and if you can’t do that, find a way to what you want.

Simon Seer, assistant to Amanda Marker, head of stocktaking

By following a route laid out by someone else, it’s usually possible to find one’s way back to a particular location in the Warehouses. Some of the more well-trodden thoroughfares and paths have been stabilised and made more-or-less reliable, especially to employees and others carrying Emporium’s blessing. Even so, travellers report sudden changes and transformations of the world around them - paths that become unexpected dead ends, shortcuts that open without warning, and unseen creatures that shepherd the unwitting in inexplicable directions. It’s almost always possible to find what you want in the Warehouses, with time and effort, but they will almost always make it interesting to do so.

In the infinite reaches of the Warehouses, strange ecologies and cultures have developed and emerged. Some are friendly to travellers, some hostile, some inexplicable, but very few of them are meant to be here.

• The Coo-coos are a secretive group of bandits, partisans, and highwaymen who roam the aisles, demanding tolls and conducting low-intensity warfare against store security. Clad head-to-toe in armour scavenged and repurposed from the detritus of the store, they remain a mystery to customers and employees alike, something rendered still more confusing by the fact that their demands include ‘light conversation’ and ‘small talk’.
• The ‘kin (short for 'Potemkin AI') are a population of non-sapient store automata made from scrap, damaged merchandise, and other detritus found around the Store. The quasi-feral remnants of an attempt to automate Emporium’s workforce, they were abandoned for being more bother than they were worth. Still, they keep their numbers up by building new ‘kin from goods filched from the shelves, and gather round visitors to the Warehouses, waiting for instructions.
• Cryptids is a catch-all term for the monsters, mutant flora and fauna, and less-identifiable things that lurk in the Store and its Warehouses. Some are recognisably Glories, Chimerae, or Implements gone rogue, changed by their time here; others, like the False Friend or the Were-House, seem to be emergent beings evolved, uplifted, or created from Emporium’s own stock (life finds a way, after all).
• The Drilling is a mystery. You hear it sometimes - never twice in the same place, coming from a direction you can’t quite put your finger on - but no one in Emporium’s hierarchy seems to know who authorised major excavation work in the depths of the Warehouse. The Drilling doesn’t seem to care, though. Someone is blasting, and tunnelling, and hammering, out there. Old hands say it’s getting louder.

Entities spending long enough in the Warehouses quickly realise that, while ‘distance’ is an elastic concept in there, it is possible to go ‘further in’. The Deep Stockrooms, as these are sometimes referred to, house strange conceptual goods, abstract principles, and tightly coiled spools of time. Few venture down here - visitors sometimes come back changed, or don’t come back at all - but rumours abound of treasures and secret wisdom to be found, and there are always the brave and foolhardy willing to risk it all in pursuit of their dreams.