Curiosities (1)

Junk, trash, waste, and rot abound in the Garbage Zone, alongside crates and crates of new, unopened merchandise discarded at the end of a season or to ensure that demand stayed high. All of this is easy to find, and easy to understand. But some of the sights, artifacts, and personalities a traveler might encounter in the Zone are just too bizarre to comprehend:

• Raining Cats and Dogs: and fish and frogs and pigs and Klingons and Cybermen. New-Fetched greenhorns usually appear in a (relatively) calm, safe place, but sometimes they rain from the sky instead.
• Cult of the Risen One: These sad folks worship a god who, the legend says, cast himself into a black hole millennia ago, promising to defeat the power of death and rise to grant his followers eternal life and lead them Outside. If he has been successful, he has not made it known.
• The Big Brain: this planet-sized sphere, apparently made of glass, appeared a few years ago with no warning in a heavily populated asteroid belt. The glass sphere encases an enormous humanoid brain. Expeditions to the glass surface have all been turned back by Fetches, but telepaths report that the brain is alive, and asleep.

Inhabitants (1)

• Humans. Lots of these.
• Elves, 'tis said, can walk in memory as vividly as humans walk in waking. But if an elf lives in memory at the expense of the present, that elf is ripe to be Fetched. Whole Elven forests, protected from the ravages of time by the Art of their ancient rulers, have been forgotten by the modernizing worlds around them and swept off to the Zone. These are places of ethereal beauty, in stark contrast to the junk heaps that comprise most of the landscapes.
• Liches will often spend a decade or two in motionless thought on a single difficult question of arcane theory. They are apt to be forgotten, and return from their reveries to find themselves in the Zone. Once they discover the wealth of magical refuse to be had here, and the super-science of a million worlds, they usually prefer it to the places they left.
• Vampires, on the other hand, are always in command of their surroundings. Few are Fetched. But once here, they find cities where no sun rises, where they can hunt and rule for a long, long time.
• The Fetches --- see main page
• ...

Cosmology

[ Draft ]

Greenhorns from universes where general relativity works will tell you that the Garbage Zone is a region of space-time with very weird curves. Those of different background might talk about Styx-flotsam or bubbles of Faerie in the negative energy plane.

All of which is bunk, but gets the point across: space and time are different in the Zone. It's the drain-trap in the bunghole of ten thousand universes, and it's so cross-plumbed that you if you run too fast in some parts, you might bump into yourself from behind.

...

The Dead Quarter

Once Fetched to the Zone, you can never leave. This law is absolute, even in death. When you die in the Zone, your soul is taken (some say by the Fetches) to a part of the Zone where no star ever shines, where forgotten gods rule dismal kingdoms. This is the Dead Quarter: not the worst place in the Zone, by all accounts.

The scrounger's spirit is as strong in the Dead Quarter as anywhere else, and the dead souls rarely stay that way for long. Most are gathered by the gods and re-forged or re-planted or whatever imagery is appropriate --- reincarnated to live new lives. The less fortunate are bound by necromancers or captured by demons for fell purposes.

The Dead Quarter is linked to the rest of the Zone in subtle ways. You can fly there in a spaceship, of course, but many underground portals lead to it, and spacer legends claim that ships sometimes slip between the points of the compass and wind up in the Sunless Sector. 

Many Zoners believe that a soul cannot be reincarnated while the old body exists, so cremation is prevalent in the Zone.

The Fetches

Every Zoner has seen the Fetches at work, silently searching junk heaps or digging tunnels or nudging asteroids into decaying orbits. Their natures, motives, and powers are the most talked-about mysteries in the Zone, but at least everyone can agree what they look like: little glowing humanoid figures, featureless, seemingly shaped out of pure light.

When a Fetch needs to communicate with a non-Fetch, and hand signs won't suffice, it reaches out to touch the other---and immediately assumes the exact shape and form of the one touched. If this form has a mouth, the Fetch can speak (Fetches in their natural forms don't have mouths).

Activities

Greenhorns sometimes recognize the Fetches as sanitation workers or (in barbarous cultures) "alien abductors" from their home universes. They make all the contracts for Garbage Zone waste management services, and at least one Fetch accompanies every mission Outside and upon return guides the load of refuse to its appointed place in the Jam.

Within the Zone, Fetches are known to spend considerable time sorting and arranging things and digging and collapsing tunnels. No one knows why. A Fetch might expose a new vein of silver spoons under a Dwarven mining settlement one day, then cut off access to the town's water source the next, but more often the Fetch-holes lead nowhere at all. Fetches never use tools; they either work with their hands or employ some sort of potent psionic power, staring at massive obstacles in utter silence until the obstacles simply move.

Those who interfere with a Fetch's work suffer terribly bad luck. Those foolish enough to harm or kill a Fetch are either made into horrifying examples or never seen again at all.

Fetches and Adventurers

Adventurers have been known to trade with the Fetches for secrets or for powerful artifacts. The Fetches will often accept any cheap shiny trinket in payment---they seem as delighted as magpies by anything that glitters---but will sometimes demand bizarre services instead. One group of heroes was asked to arrange for everyone in a small nearby city to get married on the following Tuesday, then divorced precisely one month later.

Origins and Motivations

Ask ten people what the Fetches really are, and you'll get 12 different answers and start a fistfight.

One popular theory is that they are holographic projections controlled by an Artificial Intelligence somewhere deep in the Jam, desperate for a way to save itself. Some claim that the machine is using its servants to enact the somatic components of an unthinkably complex spell.

Others hold that the Fetches are the native inhabitants of the Garbage Zone; that long ago in their home universe, the pangalactic bureaucracy ruled that arcano-active waste must not be disposed of in live stars, but must instead be dumped into black holes. As one local government made arrangements to comply, its explorers found that the comet clouds orbiting several nearby black holes were inhabited by small glowing people who loved to collect trinkets, and the rest is history (or rather, mythology).