Many stories have been told of civilisations under the ground, living their lives under the feet of the creatures of the Earth, of a entire world inside the Earth whose entrances were at the poles. People have claimed to have entered in to this underground world beyond the poles; but what no one realised was that nobody had actually ventured inside the Earth, but instead, had passed through a rift into a new dimension, into the Underland.
If one considers dimensions as buildings, then the Underland is just around the corner from all the Earths of the Multiverse - (dimensional physics; who, other than a supernatural intelligence can understand it?).
The Underland is a vast dimensional plane at right angles to the dimension known as RIFTs Earth. There are a few stable junctions between the two planes, but of those, most have been closed, or are fluctuating due to the difference in energy flowing between the dimensions caused by the vast rifts network on Earth.
The Underland consists of a vast network of caverns which are between five and fifty kilometres across, and between ten and a hundred kilometres long, with an average height of ten to fifteen kilometres.
Due to the unique magical-rich environment, an odd visual effect occurs that ensures the caverns do not look like gigantic caves, but vast plains & blue and white mottled skies. There is a bright light source, for twenty of the Underland's 30 hour day, but it is diffuse, and can not be spotted in the dappled sky. Unless a character is within one kilometre of the cavern wall, he or she will not see it, but as the character approaches, the wall begins to take on form and structure until, at a distance of a hundred meters, is a solid wall of rock that reaches up to vanish in the haze of the sky.
Each cavern has a number of streams, and in some cases, a bubbling spring of glowing straw-coloured liquid that serves as both light and heat for the vast network. Some caverns have a fountain of it, welling up from an underground source, while others have little more than a static lake that never seems to empty. This liquid is known as Vril, and is in essence liquefied PPE, and extremely potent. A single tablespoonful is equivalent to one PPE point, but only if drunk within ten seconds of being removed from the source.
A network of Vril rivers and streams, much like veins and arteries, runs through each cavern and allow the Vril to flow freely within and through the cavern walls into other caverns and also back to the unknown source of this magical fluid.
These rivers are from ten to fifty meters across and average five meters deep. The fluid within them is at a constant temperature of 45c. No matter what happens to a portion of the fluid, the temperature will never shift by more than a few degrees, unless it is removed from the main body of liquid.
Even in the caverns which are mostly, or totally flooded, the Vril rivers flow, as the fluid is neutrally buoyant and runs through the water as glowing cylinders of light and heat, until they pass into the cavern walls and on towards other caverns.
Each cavern is connected to between two and eight others by a network of tunnels that are in some places rough and look as if they were simply blasted out of the rock, and in other places look as if they were cut with machines, due to the unnatural smoothness of the walls and floor.
The caverns themselves are filled with forests and jungles, with vast stretches of tree and swamp, strange creatures, and many different peoples living in and around the mass of flora. Mixed among the normal trees and plants are extra-dimensional flora from a hundred worlds, all adapted to the odd lighting and environmental conditions of the Underland.
Most plants have their root systems partially or totally immersed in the Vril rivers, making it very easy to cross the streams of magic fluid by crossing on the mass of roots. Also, the leaves of the majority of trees are small and stunted, but with each tree having a huge canopy approximately ten meters from the ground. The reason for this is not known, but is assumed to be some side effect of the trees using Vril instead of water as their main fluid source.
The weather within the caverns is much like normal weather, with rain, thunderstorms, and even hurricanes manifesting themselves with devastating results in Agharta.
And, there are the fearsome World Storms, which are a combination of a full-strength Hurricane, and a Ley Line Storm.
The current number of charted caverns is somewhat more than six thousand. Of these, over 60% are grassland and jungle, and 20% flooded, with Vril rivers glistening like gigantic veins within the crystal-clear water, and another 15% being harsh desert and arid lands. The remaining 5% of the charted caverns are cold and snow-filled. Not a very hospitable place to be.
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