Everway is the capital city of the realm of Roundwander, located on a sphere called Fourcorner, which is at a nexus point in a complexly interleaved network of parallel worlds.

Virtue: Autumn (plenty). The culture is old, but still vigorous; there is great wealth and great variety, both. Fault: Spring--Inverted (stagnation). Because of the age of this place, habit is deeply ground into it. Fate: Cockatrice (corruption vs. recovery). New people, magic, ideas, could destroy the place or make it thrive.

The city is located on the northwest bank of the west-flowing river called the Sunset, where it flows out into the bay. The realm extends over a large area of cultivated land and pasture. On the other side of the river, the district of the city known as Strangerside is home to the Strangers and Outsiders who have chosen to settle in the area. Strangers are visitors from other realms (nations) on the sphere (planet); Outsiders have come to Everway through a gate.

At the center of Everway is a structure known as the Walker's Pyramid. It's a step pyramid about three hundred feet on a side and a hundred fifty feet tall -- it dominates the skyline. It is said to have been built by the hand of, who else, the Walker, who is the god whose footsteps from sphere to sphere are said to have resulted in the existence of the worldgates. Legend has it that he's still wandering the spheres (and thus connecting them) looking for a suitable capstone, and people argue about what it'll mean if he finds it. Around the base of the pyramid are dozens of temples, religion peddlers, and people who will be happy to accept your donation.

Most of the buildings in the city are made of stone; most of the stonework is adorned with gods, faces, animals, spirits, monsters, gargoyles, and generalised decoration. The architecture has gone through a number of phases, and as such can be seen as a sort of catalog of local styles. The wealthy have estates, mostly stone but also with a good bit of imported wood; estates are generally large, walled, and have gardens and several buildings within. The poor, on the other hand, tend to live in adobe shored up with bits of scrounged stone, often the rubble of old palaces. There are fountains in many places in the city.

Everway proper, not including the Strangerside, is encircled with city walls. However, much of the newer construction is outside the walls; this is a peaceful realm. The city's streets are twisted and tangled, with descriptive but not always useful naming. Visitors from Atlanta will not find the corner of Peachtree and Peachtree, but they will feel right at home on Old Temple Street, all twenty of it.

The city is large enough that it has subcities, regions with their own character and personality that might well have grown into each other. To the west of the Pyramid, for example, are the Gaming Houses, which also include houses of ill-repute and scenic alley muggers. It's fairly welcoming of foreigners, for some reason. To the northwest is the Library of All Worlds, a repository of knowledge collected from at least a thousand known spheres. The Library sponsors the Chamber Platinum, who explore new realms and discover new worldgates. To the north is the Council House area, which is full of estates, nobles, and the functions of government. To the northeast, the Gardens contain a lot of the temples to nature divinities, zoological gardens, greenhouses, and all sorts of exotics. Eastwards is the Temple of Mercy and associated temples and charities; this is a poor region of the city, one with orphanages and hospices as well as temples to many fertility and healing gods. To the southeast are the Houses of Dusk and the mortuary temples; local tradition is that the dead are floated out to sea. The south holds the Court of Fools, a plaza for entertainers, and the southwest has the Arenas.

The Strangerside is, of course, diverse. It can accomodate all needs, and take advantage of and exploit any skillset. It has a number of enclaves of people from similar cultures, as well as salesman, beggars, thieves, recruiters, indigents, and partridges in pear trees. Technically, all Strangers and Outsiders are considered visitors, but there are people of those names who have lived in the Strangerside for generations.

The general running of the city is divided up among a thousand or so families, each of them sharing a surname and a generally related set of skills. People are considered related by blood to those people who are born with their surname. The culture is matrilineal; men take their wives' names when they marry, though they're still considered bloodkin to their original families.

A House is not just an affiliation of relatives, but a pool of skills; each House passes down its own lore and traditions, and its children are trained in skills appropriate to their placement. Etiquette, iconology, philosophy of life, private rituals -- all of these are things that get passed down through the Houses. (And, strangely enough, most of the Houses' secret histories include how they founded the city, or saved it from disaster, or . . .) Most House names reflect what the family tends to be associated with, but some of them have undergone some semantic drift.

Foreigners of whatever sort are treated as members of the amorphous and technically nonexistent Houses, 'Stranger' or 'Outsider', and are given the appropriate surname upon arrival. Male foreigners can, of course, marry in; female ones can petition to found a House of their own if they want to become proper citizens.

Clothing tends towards the long, loose, and draped. Colours, of course, show up depending on House, personal preference, superstition, whatever. Jewelry is common, and often fraught with personal significance. Many people pay a great deal of attention to their appearance, if they can afford it. Modesty standards, of course, differ according to family and arrogance.

The king is a member of the royal family, the House Emerald. It is, of course, terribly gauche to refer to the king as "the king". "Great King Horizon," "His Imperial Majesty", or other appropriately formal-sounding phrases (some of them, of course, a matter of House tradition) are preferred. Succession is to his eldest sister's eldest son, and, of course, he may not marry; that would mean leaving the royal family and hence disqualifying himself. Most of the power is, mind, located elsewhere, in this case in the Royal Council.

The law is mostly concerned with property crime and violent crime, if that; the personal vices criminalised in other realms are considered to be properly a family affair. Ahem. Most families tend to police their own sufficiently rigorously that the guarding Houses don't have to.

The economy is mixed; a great deal of exchange is by means of barter. Most coinage is silver ("heft"), which coin is also a unit of weight. Smaller units of monetary exchange are handled with copper beads, which have the advantage of being easy to transport on a string. Gold coins exist, but mostly at the inter-family exchange level rather than the common one.

Any god which has ever been worshipped anywhere has an image in Everway, and many of them have temples, too. Probably also some that haven't been heard of. Divine images are quite popular, and scattered all through the city; the various families have their own various spiritual practices. The royal family largely worships a single transcendent female deity, who, as a result, is somewhat generally popular. The great king is responsible for handling the ritual fertility and prosperity of the kingdom through various religious rituals.

There are seventy-one gates that lead out of Everway. Each of them links Roundwander with a realm on one of the many other parallel spheres. Some of these realms are known as dead ends; others have further gates that go beyond. On all of these other spheres, broadly similar conditions prevail; the worlds are almost all congenial to human life, though there are other intelligent species on a good number of them. The constellations appear similar, and the wandering stars as well. Philosophers argue about all this a great deal.

Gates themselves are often stone arches or gaps; some of them may be caves, spaces between trees, or some other structure, and a few are free-standing. Many of them have structures -- most commonly temples or fortifications -- built over them.

The typical gate crossing takes about a week of objective time; subjectively, it tends to only take a few moments, maybe a minute at the most. Of course, 'objective time' is a bit tricky, but because the stars are consistent, it can be more or less judged. Some gates take a wildly different amount of time to cross, and nobody's entirely sure why.

Particularly perceptive (high water) spherewalkers can feel the energies of the places they're travelling between and their shift, and sometimes are subject to visions at their passage. Travelling through gates too often is a bit risky; generally it's considered wise to take as much downtime as the objective time elapsed in a gate crossing before moving on to the next. Pushing it will wear one out at least, and tend to go through dizziness, epilepsy, hallucinations, and the like before winding up at death if one's really, really dumb.

Powerful wizardly types have been able to make gates that connect different realms on a sphere, rather than the spheres themselves -- basically a teleportation to the other side of the planet. Nobody has been able to duplicate a gate that will go to another sphere, however.