Ballico

Overview

Ballico is a small city on the western coast of Calin. Once a Shogunate port city, it was destroyed during the conflicts of the Shogunate Era, the few scavengers who still dwelt there falling in the Great Contagion. After the Contagion ended, it was left empty, viewed as a highly inauspicious place, marking the border between the territories of Port Calin and Marin Bay.

When House Iselsi assumed sponsorship of Port Calin, it funded the reconstruction of the city, to provide the Imperial Navy with a base now that the Marin Lighthouse was inaccessible and to strengthen the presence of the Immaculate Order in the Scavenger Lands, as well as granting its own Dynasts fine vacation properties. In the wake of the Calibration War, the Marin capital in the shadow of the Lighthouse was depopulated to make way for the Marin Redoubt, and most inhabitants were resettled in Ballico, where many were accommodated by dividing emptied Dynastic villas into apartments and raising new structures in their surrounding gardens, resulting in a distinctively laid out urban area where broad Blessed Bond-paved streets pass walled building clusters linked by gravel paths.

Gathering of Faiths

While the Calinti are not known as particularly devout, Ballico serves as something of a religious capital of the Shogunate, much as Goodharbour is economic capital. When the Iselsi were driven out of the city, the Immaculate Order did not depart along with them… as with the Realm, it was not officially involved in the Calibration War, and had support from the local population. The influx from Marin made the Immaculate faithful into a (still significant) minority, and also brought a myriad of temples to individual gods. In fact, many gods local to the area seem to have made a point to demand their cults raise temples in Ballico, to thumb their noses at the proselytizers of Perfected Hierarchy.

The Immaculate Order remains the largest single faith in Ballico, controlling a massive walled temple complex on the coast, the Coenobium of the Unassailable Truth, which is surrounded to the north by the maze of minor cult temples, and to the south by a thick-walled fortress of the Shogun’s Bailiffs charged with ensuring the Order does not engage in activities which would subvert defense against the Realm. To the east stands the School of Honourable Virtue, a small school for thaumaturges and exorcists whose staff includes visiting Sohei out of Lookshy.

Secret Ways

Atop Shogunate ruins, House Iselsi, a family of Exalted spies and schemers, built a city in which they could dwell, according to their own plans and specifications. After the Calibration War, the Calinti and later Lookshyan advisors spent a great deal of time searching the city to uncover hidden paths and caches left by the departed Dynasts, and came upon a great many which were destroyed. However, to the present day there are still new discoveries made as smugglers who have taken an Iselsi hideaway for themselves are caught by the Bailiffs, and rumours abound that when they were finally cast down on the Blessed Isle, many Iselsi fled into the Threshold by way of their secret ways in Ballico. What secret doors still open between chambers now rebuilt as separate apartments, what tunnels wind beneath the floors of new public buildings? None can be sure.