Editing Interstitial Peace Committee (section)

== Setting Overview ==

There are many different realities: worlds of fantasy, horror and everything you could imagine. Despite being incompatible with each other, they can coexist because of a metaphysical separation that allows them to each exist as an entire creation unto itself. This is known as the multiverse.

Sometimes, people falls through the cracks. Those metaphysical separations aren’t strong enough to restrain everyone, and each day people are lost to the nameless space between reality: the Interstices.

Unable to return to their homes, these people have gathered together and formed an alliance dedicated to policing the Interstices. Because if they can fall out of reality, evil intelligences can just as easily force their way back in. The IPC (Interstitial Peace Committee) was founded to protect the multiverse from those threats that lurk outside of all creation.

You’ve recently fallen through the cracks: maybe it was a traumatic experience, maybe it was a liberating one. Either way, with your whole world turned upside-down the easiest way to get by has been to band together. And the biggest band is the IPC, who are always looking for more agents.

=== The Black Market ===

Being cut off from the multiverse and consigned to the Interstices is inconvenient: there's no fixed world to inhabit except what people have cobbled together out of the metaphysical detritus, and attempting to return to reality ends in tears before long as you're inevitably rejected by the universe. But where some might despair, others see an opportunity: the Incoherents (a term of art for the inhabitants of the Interstices) may not be able to return to their old lives, but they can visit many different universes that would otherwise be cut off from each other entirely.

That means its possible to buy goods cheap from a universe where they're plentiful, and transport them through the Interstices to another lacking them entirely. The potential for price gouging is monstrous. These traders have formed an underground society in the Interstices, separate from the IPC, called the Black Market. The IPC doesn't approve of exploiting reality like this, but their ability to secure resources is nowhere near the Black Markets' capabilities. Thus a miserable peace exists between the two groups, as the IPC lets the Black Market make their profit and live in luxury, while the Black Market restrain their members so as to not force the IPC's hand.

=== Margarida's Handy Guide to the Multiverse! ===

==== Coherence ====
Though we call it the Multiverse, there's not actually a set of separate universes existing side-by-side. Instead, there's only one universe, that can take on multiple expressions. At its most abstract, reality can be described as a group of facts: "Gravity pulls down," "Leaves grow on trees," "Dave Matthews Band is the best band in the world," and so on. Some of these facts might seem impossible, or self-contradictory, but they're all out there, somewhere, in the Interstices.

Get enough facts together and you can start to describe a consistent universe. These are the places you've come from: one might be a world where elves and dwarves live side-by-side, another might be a Solar System run by evil corporations. They seem incompatible with each other, but they're all assembled out of the same enormous list of facts. We call the process of binding facts together into a reality Coherence... I guess because you get a coherent reality at the end?

What's happened to you, my lovely dears, is the opposite: Decoherence. You've become unmoored from the Coherence binding your reality together. You no longer have a place in your home reality, any more than a Cyberpunk assassin would in the world of elves and dwarves.

This might seem very scary, and it probably was at first for the original people scattered about the Interstices. But, since the IPC was founded, we've gotten better about organising and cohering stray facts to assemble something vaguely like a reasonable place to live here. And those techniques developed to survive here are now how we go about our missions: by studying a reality, we can figure out what identifies a fact as coherent with it, and by writing that identifier into your body through the usual method we can make you yourselves coherent with that reality. It's not permanent, though, so watch you don't spend too long on a mission!