F: Friends and Followers of the Fiery Foundation

The notes on joining ”The Friends and Followers of the Fiery Foundation“ all more or less begin with a description of being down and out in Jubylon. The descriptions of their situations vary. A few examples are: "Booze. Far too much booze.", "Wine. Wine never changes." or "More coughing up tar after a blindingly deep bong rip". That would be Step 1.
Step 2 involves a meeting, usually in a cellar restaurant close to the city wall in the Third District. The applicants end up there, spontaneously order “the Evening Special”. Said Special consists of fried balls made of leeks, meat, and unleavened flatbread meal, served with boiled rice, alongside a horseradish and beet relish and a huge glass of chilled herbal tea made with honey.

After that meal, the (unknown to themselves) applicant is presented with a small pamphlet with a front page with a fiery motif and a bill, paid in full. Inside are an address with a time and date of the following day as well a letter for a hotel booking for the following night. As the potential applicants are usually desperate or at least willing to try something new, they go to the hotel and stay there until the day after. The locations given varies, but is usually a small theatre. The applicants enter a dark lobby lighted by a single petrol lamp where hints of a larger light can be seen through the edges of a large door. When the applicant step through the door, they are handed a mask in orange, red and yellow covering the top half of the face . In the middle of the room is a brass brazier filled with coals, often almost embers. The applicant is then handed another large glass of chilled herbal tea with honey and welcomed. No other rituals are invoked without the applicants full consent, but no information about the group’s purpose are given either.

What little hints of the group’s purpose are centred around the myth of Jubylon’s founding. According to a popular legend, lighting started a forest fire, which lead to erosion, which lead to a mud slide, which in turn created the bay of Jubylon. All in the course of three days. So that when the refugees from the local villages arrived to the newly formed bay, they arrived to new land steaming with smoke and fog, from a combination of mud and wood still burning. That, in essence, is the core of the story of the Fiery Foundation for the later city of Jubylon. That myth was always happening again and again in the cult’s rituals. Their decorations, blankets, carpets and paintings all carried that same motif. The notes all describe how members came and went at times. They all describe members leaving without any seemingly making much of a fuss about it. A lot of members all seems to have done better after joining. They drank less, they consumed fewer drugs, they were more active and they spent more time outside. So whatever the potential leaders of the Friends and Followers of the Fiery Foundation were planning to, it did seem like their cult did good things for it’s members. How and why they did so remains unknown however.