City Name: Sand-Fran-Crawler
Population: Officially between 200,000-400,000 at any given time, though its size would suggest it could comfortably support far more citizens than this. However, it also supports a population of a million or more slaves working in the city's Gut, composed of those captured from other cities as well as the more heinous criminals of Sand-Fran-Crawler and the descendants of the same, none of whom are really considered "people".
Method of Locomotion: Sand-Fran-Crawler's name is not precisely indicative of how it moves: its single true wheel seems to be little more than an immense, seemingly-solid ball of steel and other metals, kept slick with oil by automated processes and the city's slaves both, rounded by the immense forces it is constantly subjected to, and with Sand-Fran-Crawler balanced atop it by both a series of Holy Giraskopes and the six massive Arms of the City, though they are technically its legs as well. These immensely-complicated limbs, three to a side and placed evenly around the city's centre of mass, are both its primary method of propulsion- either walking SFC along atop the giant ball with all six Arms to maintain relative stability, or pushing with either two or four Arms and allowing SFC to coast rapidly for immense distances in a single burst- and its main method of resource gathering and Urbivorism, with each Arm containing a set of Jaws that can tear away great chunks of both other cities and any interesting environmental deposits that may somehow still exist in the Traction Era, depositing the wreckage and any survivors of such an attack into Sand-Fran-Crawler's Gut to be picked over once the meal is fully consumed.
The city also possesses the capacity to walk, albeit very slowly, on these massive legs by lifting itself skyward, the ball gripped by additional mechanisms within the Gut so as to avoid it tearing free, as well as titanic Helium Floatation Sacks around the city's lowest levels that allow for some degree of amphibious movement, using the Arms of the City to effectively swim across any ocean it may need to pass, though SFC is not strictly designed to remain ocean-bound forever. To wit, the Arms are clad in armour thick enough to shield them from most significant hits, since they would otherwise be very notable weak points, and many citizens believe they are irreparable if destroyed. The time SFC would spend stopped in order to rebuild even one destroyed arm would certainly be intolerable by the standards of the Traction Era, and more than one or two lost is likely to spell the city's end, or at least its certain consumption by other Traction Cities which happen upon it.
Physical Description: Sand-Fran-Crawler is a surprisingly large city for its population size: even counting the massive yet oft-ignored population of slaves in the Gut, its population density is very low for the Traction Era, as it is nearly fifteen miles across at its widest point (much of that due to its oversized Gut and the Wheel the city sits atop), and very tall on top of this, the Gut and Tier 1 totalling a good five or six miles high by necessity, and the remaining two Tiers adding another three or four miles on top of that, in theory only stopping there because any bigger would risk overbalancing the city beyond the ability of the Holy Giraskopes to compensate, as well as requiring the Arms of the City to be repositioned accordingly. Whilst appearing to be deceptively cumbersome as a result, the plus side of such excess space is that the Tiers proper are able to be built up in a very loose fashion, and with a design aesthetic often leaning towards sleek metal and even glass in some buildings, visitors are frequently shocked at how stylish the city itself looks... so long as they don't venture down into the clustered, steampunkish Gut.
In theory, the city's baseplate is balanced atop the Wheel; in practice, it is actually wrapped around the ball of metal down to about two hundred meters from the Wheel's lowest point, with the Gut built around the baseplate and shafts to the Wheel itself present in many areas, Tier 1 built around the Gut, and Tiers 2 and 3 built on top of Tier 1. At any level, the city's movements are obvious, either shuddering due to the movement of its arms and their engines pulling it across the ground, or a constant twitch which occurs as a result of the Holy Giraskopes and the weights they control working as intended, repositioning SFC atop the Wheel and making sure the city does not topple over and destroy itself; whilst only a couple of centimeters at a time in the Gut and Tier 1, this twitch becomes more obvious as one moves upward into Tier 2 and 3, to the point that at significantly higher elevations most flooring is fairly rough to stand upon, and loose objects must be tied down when not in use, or else risk being lost to the movements of the city.
Culture and People: The citizens of Sand-Fran-Crawler are somewhat homogenous: most share a similar lightly-tanned skin tone, those who don't engage in much manual labour tend to share similarly slender builds, and those who do tend to develop musculature in much the same ways, and in the same pattern of existing muscles becoming preferentially stronger and leaner rather than having an excess of new musculature develop when it's not necessary, plus a largely-shared, law-enforced hatred of "Homasekshuls" (in spite of not many really knowing what Homasekshuls are, beyond the key indicator that they tend to be attracted to people of their own gender). What they don't share throughout are hair styles and hair colours, and both headgear and hair decorations are impressively common in SFC, with many a contest being held in various portions of the city. Slaves, by contrast, are often incredibly varied simply by the nature of most being foreign, and they range from incredibly dark hair and skin, all the way through to practical albinos whose families have spent countless generations within the Gut, away from the light of the sun; decorations are rare, for the slaves rarely have time off to so much as consider creating them, and regardless they tend to be considered indicators that their owners aren't working hard enough by the guards, thus being detrimental either way. Nobody mourns for the slaves: the slaves are too busy for self-pity or rebellion, and the citizens don't even see them as people, guards included.
Much of the city's culture revolves heavily around worship of their twin deities, the Tons: Billary, exemplifying gravity and the earth, symbolised by the sphere or ball; Hills, representing mass and weight, symbolised by the hoop or ring; and both together encouraging balance and self-sufficiency in life as in physics, officially symbolised by the Holy Giraskopes, though informally by a set of scales. Whilst significant deities worldwide like the Thatcher and Nicolas Quirke are acknowledged and any relevant holidays mandated, they are hardly celebrated with anything like as much fervour as Billary and Hills, to the point that the individual gods get a holiday each on the first day of opposing months, and both receive two at the midpoints between their individual holidays. Ironically, while the nature of these gods is such that many of SFC's citizens are rather well-educated and, thanks to a mostly-fair system of resource distribution removing the need for money, don't typically want for too much in terms of welfare and quality of life- even slaves are kept well-fed to ensure they work as best they can, though other living conditions are paltry at best- their lives are rarely very balanced, as so many of them specialise into performing just a small subset of tasks day in and day out, with little to no variation; very few actually manage to arrange their lives in a satisfactory manner as The Teachings of the Tons suggests, and a surprising number of these are the farmers growing food in Tier 3, simple as their existence typically is.
One particular point of note is the lore behind The Teachings of The Tons, and why Homasekshuls are hated so: long ago, or so they say, the citizens of Sand-Fran-Crawler were suffering due to the Sixty-Minute War, and such was their plight that Billary and Hills Ton came down to them, raising their city off the ground and on to the Wheel that it might be untouched by the ills of the outside world, and giving it its six mighty Arms that it might defend itself if the ills should try to come to them. For a time, all was well; then, the Devil-God known only as The Donnal descended upon the city from above where the Arms of the City couldn't stop it, a foul creature shaped like a humanoid duck with orange feathers, dressed in a sharp blue suit and those objects of disgust symbolising it called the Twopay and the Wigg. Its demon-slave the Sand Burner came into SFC with it, something so destructively powerful that it took the might of both Billary and Hills to take the creature down; but, cowardly and conniving as the Donnal was, it sacrificed the Sand Burner to strike at the Tons whilst they were weakened, slaying both, and then sending a plague of Homasekshuls down to smite the city, until the finicky and fickle Devil-God grew bored and left for other pastures. Historians have noted that the supposed timing of this event coincides with a massed two-stage die-off of citizens, a sandstorm of some form followed by a long period of heightened same-gender relations that reduced breeding to intolerably low levels, but citizens are not typically so past-aware.
Leadership and Power Groups: It is generally accepted by most that The Teachings of The Tons, and the techno-priests that make it up, are the single most important group in SFC, for without their prowess the city would have toppled from the Wheel long ago. In spite of this, it does not have absolute power over its laws by any means: most of the techno-priesthood is preoccupied with maintenance of the Holy Giraskopes, and those few who regularly find themselves preaching to the citizens are unlikely to establish new teachings for how ingrained the present teachings are. However, The Teachings of The Tons does possess two High Techpriests, one for each of the Twin Peaks, and both of these holy individuals are by default incorporated into SFC's ruling council, a group of six individuals who together create the laws of the city, the other four drawn in from the foremost figures in the military, private and public sectors, plus one individual elected by the citizens every few years - oligarchic perhaps, but not the absolute dictatorship the city would be underneath the techno-priesthood alone.
With that said, the High Techpriests do typically agree on matters of policy unless an individual raised into one of the positions is specifically intended to counteract the other incumbent, which can make it hard for the other four to get any policy changes made if they cannot convince the High Techpriests to allow it, for oftentimes at least two of the other positions in the council find themselves diametrically and irreconcilably opposed to one another's views. Of course, the military's General Marshal is often in the position of greatest real power, given their command over the people with weapons and armour, but for obvious reasons abstains from utilising this power excessively.
The exception to the general power of the techno-priesthood and the ruling council are those who have been inducted into the rebel group called the Homasekshuls, quite deliberately named as though they are the true targets of The Teachings' ire. Whilst counter-intuitive as a tactic, this fact is very often leveraged by their recruiters to make it seem as though they are being oppressed simply for disagreeing with those in command, even though most citizens do not especially consider either the techno-priesthood or the council particularly oppressive. Either way, their power base has increased to a few tens of thousands of individuals, enough to be annoying for the actual lawmakers to handle, though certainly no greater than the number of people living in Tier 3. Of course, the true goal of the Homasekshuls beyond becoming the new leaders of SFC are rather nebulous, though "freeing the slaves" is often cited as a major ideal of theirs, amongst many and varied other possibilities.
Foreign and Internal Policy: As the city's creed dictates, self-sufficiency is paramount; as such, the city produces its own food in large quantities, attempts to reuse any materials that aren't for whatever reason lost outright or otherwise irreplenishable, and typically only trades with other cities when they are in desperate need of substances that cannot be acquired anywhere else, namely fuel and various rare minerals- though efforts are being made to figure out a way of producing these from both exhaust fumes and the food they grow, so far with very little success. To Sand-Fran-Crawler, any city that cannot provide it with something valuable is essentially wasted resources, and so it is somewhat feared by a lot of smaller Traction Cities, though those cities that it does see reason to strike trade with are often sweet-talked into ignoring the less moral aspects of SFC's function.
As described, much of the city's scientific progress and basic sustenance of its citizens is created by the techno-priests and farmers of Tier 3, but most other functions beyond the maintenance functions of Tier 1 and the Gut are performed in Tier 2, loosely split into the public, private, and military sectors: the public sector covers projects intended for the good of the citizens, including the vast majority of product creation for these citizens; the private sector mostly covers matters of state, interactions with foreign ambassadors and, to some extent, the internal politics of the techno-priesthood; and the military sector covers, of course, military matters, namely internal protection, external defense (including managing the movement of the Arms of the City for both locomotion and combat purposes), and espionage against other cities, though often SFC acquires new catches simply by using its Arms to disable their methods of movement before forcing an evacuation of the target city into SFC's Gut. Once in the Gut, it is almost always the case that the former city's population is added to the slave population within the Gut, and kept in line by the guards; these individuals do also help protect the city alongside the standard military forces should it be boarded by enemy soldiers, and are largely protected by thick steel plates which, though heavy, make them practically invincible, especially compared to any slaves that might try to revolt against their treatment.
These guards pale, however, in comparison to the large population of Stalkers SFC's military maintains, a side-effect of the city-wide waste-not-want-not attitude: most corpses from the lower Tiers are brought up to the SFC's military compounds, and there preserved in ice until such time as the city acquires the materials to transform them into a new Stalker, for in this regard SFC has in fact succeeded in emulating the complicated Old-Tech components and substances of a common Stalker through sheer force of observation and replication, though in many cases these replications are somewhat less than perfect. Thus, whilst as tough to kill as any other Stalker, they are typically somewhat "stupider" than their usual counterparts, often killing everything in sight that is not an allied Stalker whilst fully active unless specifically directed by human handlers. Not so the Giro-Stalkers, their bodies acquired specifically from the techno-priesthood of The Teachings alone, and built and rebuilt as needed within the Stalker facilities in and on Billary Peak. They are more advanced than their SFC-standard counterparts, possessing heavier armour, deadlier weapons, the intelligence to act without additional guidance on the field, and greater movement speed and agility, the latter thanks to the replacement of their standard human legs with six robotic versions in emulation of the Arms of the City, some even possessing the capacity to clamber up walls and across ceilings with them. In effect, they are the elite guard of SFC, brought out to protect the most important aspects of the city's functionality, the Holy Giraskopes, save for when circumstances are most dire. To those outside the privileged few involved in creating the Giro-Stalkers, how they are built is unknown, but to those they defend, they are a welcome sight.
Miscellaneous Information: Sand-Fran-Crawler is inevitably quite tough to maintain, as you'd expect from one of the more impractical designs for a Traction City. There are occasionally periods where it is forced to stop moving for days or even weeks whilst certain difficult procedures are performed, most commonly on the massive system of weights and checks that balances SFC atop the Wheel whilst in motion or the motors running any given arm, leaving it somewhat vulnerable to attack at these times save for whatever protection the locale's remoteness grants it; on the other hand, only a city of fools would risk coming in range of SFC's Arms whilst they are active, lest they be taken apart and turned to sustenance, and of course top-up maintenance can always be performed within the relative safety of a trading cluster.
Population: Officially between 200,000-400,000 at any given time, though its size would suggest it could comfortably support far more citizens than this. However, it also supports a population of a million or more slaves working in the city's Gut, composed of those captured from other cities as well as the more heinous criminals of Sand-Fran-Crawler and the descendants of the same, none of whom are really considered "people".
Method of Locomotion: Sand-Fran-Crawler's name is not precisely indicative of how it moves: its single true wheel seems to be little more than an immense, seemingly-solid ball of steel and other metals, kept slick with oil by automated processes and the city's slaves both, rounded by the immense forces it is constantly subjected to, and with Sand-Fran-Crawler balanced atop it by both a series of Holy Giraskopes and the six massive Arms of the City, though they are technically its legs as well. These immensely-complicated limbs, three to a side and placed evenly around the city's centre of mass, are both its primary method of propulsion- either walking SFC along atop the giant ball with all six Arms to maintain relative stability, or pushing with either two or four Arms and allowing SFC to coast rapidly for immense distances in a single burst- and its main method of resource gathering and Urbivorism, with each Arm containing a set of Jaws that can tear away great chunks of both other cities and any interesting environmental deposits that may somehow still exist in the Traction Era, depositing the wreckage and any survivors of such an attack into Sand-Fran-Crawler's Gut to be picked over once the meal is fully consumed.
The city also possesses the capacity to walk, albeit very slowly, on these massive legs by lifting itself skyward, the ball gripped by additional mechanisms within the Gut so as to avoid it tearing free, as well as titanic Helium Floatation Sacks around the city's lowest levels that allow for some degree of amphibious movement, using the Arms of the City to effectively swim across any ocean it may need to pass, though SFC is not strictly designed to remain ocean-bound forever. To wit, the Arms are clad in armour thick enough to shield them from most significant hits, since they would otherwise be very notable weak points, and many citizens believe they are irreparable if destroyed. The time SFC would spend stopped in order to rebuild even one destroyed arm would certainly be intolerable by the standards of the Traction Era, and more than one or two lost is likely to spell the city's end, or at least its certain consumption by other Traction Cities which happen upon it.
Physical Description: Sand-Fran-Crawler is a surprisingly large city for its population size: even counting the massive yet oft-ignored population of slaves in the Gut, its population density is very low for the Traction Era, as it is nearly fifteen miles across at its widest point (much of that due to its oversized Gut and the Wheel the city sits atop), and very tall on top of this, the Gut and Tier 1 totalling a good five or six miles high by necessity, and the remaining two Tiers adding another three or four miles on top of that, in theory only stopping there because any bigger would risk overbalancing the city beyond the ability of the Holy Giraskopes to compensate, as well as requiring the Arms of the City to be repositioned accordingly. Whilst appearing to be deceptively cumbersome as a result, the plus side of such excess space is that the Tiers proper are able to be built up in a very loose fashion, and with a design aesthetic often leaning towards sleek metal and even glass in some buildings, visitors are frequently shocked at how stylish the city itself looks... so long as they don't venture down into the clustered, steampunkish Gut.
In theory, the city's baseplate is balanced atop the Wheel; in practice, it is actually wrapped around the ball of metal down to about two hundred meters from the Wheel's lowest point, with the Gut built around the baseplate and shafts to the Wheel itself present in many areas, Tier 1 built around the Gut, and Tiers 2 and 3 built on top of Tier 1. At any level, the city's movements are obvious, either shuddering due to the movement of its arms and their engines pulling it across the ground, or a constant twitch which occurs as a result of the Holy Giraskopes and the weights they control working as intended, repositioning SFC atop the Wheel and making sure the city does not topple over and destroy itself; whilst only a couple of centimeters at a time in the Gut and Tier 1, this twitch becomes more obvious as one moves upward into Tier 2 and 3, to the point that at significantly higher elevations most flooring is fairly rough to stand upon, and loose objects must be tied down when not in use, or else risk being lost to the movements of the city.
Sand-Fran-Crawler's Gut is very large and bloated compared to the rest of the city, a necessity when what would otherwise be the majority of its space is taken up by a titanic ball of metal multiple miles in diameter, and as hot, filthy, cramped, and dangerous as one would expect. Indeed, most of this lower section save the outermost few districts comprise the Gut itself, and naturally, this massive Gut supports a massive population of slaves as well as the citizens and Stalkers who keep them in line, set to maintaining the wheel, the weight systems that balance out the city atop the wheel, and to a minor extent the lower joints of the Arms of the City, which roughly line up to the "equator" of the steel ball and deposit any consumed matter in that portion of the Gut. Should either of these somehow fail, of course, the entire city might well topple to one side or another, taking with it the lives of citizen and slave alike, so it is naturally in the best interests of these slaves to do as commanded anyway.
Tier 1 is in effect what is visible of the lowest portion of SFC, the shell of nicety that surrounds its Gut like an oddly-shaped skirt - rounded at the back, flat at the sides, and forming a sharp point at the front - though even this outer layer is somewhat grimy given its purpose. The majority of citizens here, a good third-to-half of the official population, are tasked with working upon the Arms of the City, ensuring that their section of whatever Arm they are tasked with maintaining is functional at all times, for no single person could ever hope to upkeep even one arm; this is to some extent regarded as a sacred task, though nothing like so much as maintaining the Holy Giraskopes, and it happens that some people and families even manage to live consistently within the Arms themselves, in spite of their tendency to rotate every which way constantly.
Less discussed, unfortunately, is the nature of Tier 1 as a degree of sacrificial armour plating for the Gut: a distinct divide is made between the Gut and Tier 1 in the form of many, many meters of armour, particularly at the very front of the city where few dare to persist in case a ramming procedure is ordered, for even a substantial number of lost mechanics is not immediately catastrophic with appropriate reassignment of manpower, whereas any notable damage to the city's Wheel could spell its near-immediate doom in any number of ways.
Less discussed, unfortunately, is the nature of Tier 1 as a degree of sacrificial armour plating for the Gut: a distinct divide is made between the Gut and Tier 1 in the form of many, many meters of armour, particularly at the very front of the city where few dare to persist in case a ramming procedure is ordered, for even a substantial number of lost mechanics is not immediately catastrophic with appropriate reassignment of manpower, whereas any notable damage to the city's Wheel could spell its near-immediate doom in any number of ways.
Tier 2 is neatly separated from both Tier 1 and the Gut by the huge number of exhaust chutes that mark the divide, sucking in every ounce of gas and ensuring that no wayward fumes make their way into the city's higher layers: here in Tier 2 is where the city finally rises above its ball bearing, and where the constant microadjustments that the Holy Giraskopes make to its balance begin to be felt more strongly as you move further upward. Many of the city's services are conducted here, both municipal and military, often actively built around the many exhaust chutes for an easy source of heating at all times, and most of the population that doesn't live in any other part of SFC is located in Tier 2. Though the preferred strategy of the city is to get up close to its prey so the Arms can do their job, and/or allow a boarding party to be established, there are certainly a variety of large guns in place all around this tier with a maximum range of a few miles, should the city be forced into a gun battle for some incalculable reason; the military presence here is also what builds and maintains the majority of standard Stalkers, and most airship docks are also stations at this tier.
Tier 3 starts at the base of what are called the Twin Peaks, a pair of mountain-like structures almost a mile high that represent the dual nature of SFC's primary religious organisation, The Teachings of The Tons, and the techno-priesthood that maintains the Holy Giraskopes within their Giro-Temples, arranged with Billary Peak in front and Hills Peak behind. Whilst said priesthood is not technically inaccessible to any citizen, the advanced knowledge needed to maintain even the smallest of Holy Giraskopes as well as keeping the faith ensures that most of the 50,000 or so souls living in Tier 3 are bred into the position rather than working their way up to it (though visitors to Tier 3 are not actively discouraged either). The two largest and most important Holy Giraskopes are kept within the High Giro-Temples of The Tons, at the very top of each peak, a necessity to ensure the best balance for the city proper, yet present intolerable and otherwise-obvious weak spots which are consequently protected by layer upon layer of armour plating, for the consequences of their destruction would be as terrible as any sort of damage to the Wheel.
Whilst many of Tier 3's inhabitants are techno-priests, the Twin Peaks also handle a few major functions within the city beyond maintenance of the Holy Giraskopes. Billary Peak contains a number of scientific institutions for the techno-priesthood and other learned individuals to study at in their down-time, as well as facilities to produce what are call Giro-Stalkers, differing from and superior to the standard Stalkers in various ways, most notably possession of six legs rather than just two in emulation of SFC itself. Hills Peak contains a number of farms designed to help produce food for the city's inhabitants and slaves, as well as channeling the exhaust captured between Tiers 1 and 2 through to the Main Exhaust Ports, where it is safely expelled from the city some hundreds of meters above the High Giro-Temple of Hills without clogging up the Holy Giraskopes.
Whilst many of Tier 3's inhabitants are techno-priests, the Twin Peaks also handle a few major functions within the city beyond maintenance of the Holy Giraskopes. Billary Peak contains a number of scientific institutions for the techno-priesthood and other learned individuals to study at in their down-time, as well as facilities to produce what are call Giro-Stalkers, differing from and superior to the standard Stalkers in various ways, most notably possession of six legs rather than just two in emulation of SFC itself. Hills Peak contains a number of farms designed to help produce food for the city's inhabitants and slaves, as well as channeling the exhaust captured between Tiers 1 and 2 through to the Main Exhaust Ports, where it is safely expelled from the city some hundreds of meters above the High Giro-Temple of Hills without clogging up the Holy Giraskopes.
Culture and People: The citizens of Sand-Fran-Crawler are somewhat homogenous: most share a similar lightly-tanned skin tone, those who don't engage in much manual labour tend to share similarly slender builds, and those who do tend to develop musculature in much the same ways, and in the same pattern of existing muscles becoming preferentially stronger and leaner rather than having an excess of new musculature develop when it's not necessary, plus a largely-shared, law-enforced hatred of "Homasekshuls" (in spite of not many really knowing what Homasekshuls are, beyond the key indicator that they tend to be attracted to people of their own gender). What they don't share throughout are hair styles and hair colours, and both headgear and hair decorations are impressively common in SFC, with many a contest being held in various portions of the city. Slaves, by contrast, are often incredibly varied simply by the nature of most being foreign, and they range from incredibly dark hair and skin, all the way through to practical albinos whose families have spent countless generations within the Gut, away from the light of the sun; decorations are rare, for the slaves rarely have time off to so much as consider creating them, and regardless they tend to be considered indicators that their owners aren't working hard enough by the guards, thus being detrimental either way. Nobody mourns for the slaves: the slaves are too busy for self-pity or rebellion, and the citizens don't even see them as people, guards included.
Much of the city's culture revolves heavily around worship of their twin deities, the Tons: Billary, exemplifying gravity and the earth, symbolised by the sphere or ball; Hills, representing mass and weight, symbolised by the hoop or ring; and both together encouraging balance and self-sufficiency in life as in physics, officially symbolised by the Holy Giraskopes, though informally by a set of scales. Whilst significant deities worldwide like the Thatcher and Nicolas Quirke are acknowledged and any relevant holidays mandated, they are hardly celebrated with anything like as much fervour as Billary and Hills, to the point that the individual gods get a holiday each on the first day of opposing months, and both receive two at the midpoints between their individual holidays. Ironically, while the nature of these gods is such that many of SFC's citizens are rather well-educated and, thanks to a mostly-fair system of resource distribution removing the need for money, don't typically want for too much in terms of welfare and quality of life- even slaves are kept well-fed to ensure they work as best they can, though other living conditions are paltry at best- their lives are rarely very balanced, as so many of them specialise into performing just a small subset of tasks day in and day out, with little to no variation; very few actually manage to arrange their lives in a satisfactory manner as The Teachings of the Tons suggests, and a surprising number of these are the farmers growing food in Tier 3, simple as their existence typically is.
One particular point of note is the lore behind The Teachings of The Tons, and why Homasekshuls are hated so: long ago, or so they say, the citizens of Sand-Fran-Crawler were suffering due to the Sixty-Minute War, and such was their plight that Billary and Hills Ton came down to them, raising their city off the ground and on to the Wheel that it might be untouched by the ills of the outside world, and giving it its six mighty Arms that it might defend itself if the ills should try to come to them. For a time, all was well; then, the Devil-God known only as The Donnal descended upon the city from above where the Arms of the City couldn't stop it, a foul creature shaped like a humanoid duck with orange feathers, dressed in a sharp blue suit and those objects of disgust symbolising it called the Twopay and the Wigg. Its demon-slave the Sand Burner came into SFC with it, something so destructively powerful that it took the might of both Billary and Hills to take the creature down; but, cowardly and conniving as the Donnal was, it sacrificed the Sand Burner to strike at the Tons whilst they were weakened, slaying both, and then sending a plague of Homasekshuls down to smite the city, until the finicky and fickle Devil-God grew bored and left for other pastures. Historians have noted that the supposed timing of this event coincides with a massed two-stage die-off of citizens, a sandstorm of some form followed by a long period of heightened same-gender relations that reduced breeding to intolerably low levels, but citizens are not typically so past-aware.
Leadership and Power Groups: It is generally accepted by most that The Teachings of The Tons, and the techno-priests that make it up, are the single most important group in SFC, for without their prowess the city would have toppled from the Wheel long ago. In spite of this, it does not have absolute power over its laws by any means: most of the techno-priesthood is preoccupied with maintenance of the Holy Giraskopes, and those few who regularly find themselves preaching to the citizens are unlikely to establish new teachings for how ingrained the present teachings are. However, The Teachings of The Tons does possess two High Techpriests, one for each of the Twin Peaks, and both of these holy individuals are by default incorporated into SFC's ruling council, a group of six individuals who together create the laws of the city, the other four drawn in from the foremost figures in the military, private and public sectors, plus one individual elected by the citizens every few years - oligarchic perhaps, but not the absolute dictatorship the city would be underneath the techno-priesthood alone.
With that said, the High Techpriests do typically agree on matters of policy unless an individual raised into one of the positions is specifically intended to counteract the other incumbent, which can make it hard for the other four to get any policy changes made if they cannot convince the High Techpriests to allow it, for oftentimes at least two of the other positions in the council find themselves diametrically and irreconcilably opposed to one another's views. Of course, the military's General Marshal is often in the position of greatest real power, given their command over the people with weapons and armour, but for obvious reasons abstains from utilising this power excessively.
The exception to the general power of the techno-priesthood and the ruling council are those who have been inducted into the rebel group called the Homasekshuls, quite deliberately named as though they are the true targets of The Teachings' ire. Whilst counter-intuitive as a tactic, this fact is very often leveraged by their recruiters to make it seem as though they are being oppressed simply for disagreeing with those in command, even though most citizens do not especially consider either the techno-priesthood or the council particularly oppressive. Either way, their power base has increased to a few tens of thousands of individuals, enough to be annoying for the actual lawmakers to handle, though certainly no greater than the number of people living in Tier 3. Of course, the true goal of the Homasekshuls beyond becoming the new leaders of SFC are rather nebulous, though "freeing the slaves" is often cited as a major ideal of theirs, amongst many and varied other possibilities.
Foreign and Internal Policy: As the city's creed dictates, self-sufficiency is paramount; as such, the city produces its own food in large quantities, attempts to reuse any materials that aren't for whatever reason lost outright or otherwise irreplenishable, and typically only trades with other cities when they are in desperate need of substances that cannot be acquired anywhere else, namely fuel and various rare minerals- though efforts are being made to figure out a way of producing these from both exhaust fumes and the food they grow, so far with very little success. To Sand-Fran-Crawler, any city that cannot provide it with something valuable is essentially wasted resources, and so it is somewhat feared by a lot of smaller Traction Cities, though those cities that it does see reason to strike trade with are often sweet-talked into ignoring the less moral aspects of SFC's function.
As described, much of the city's scientific progress and basic sustenance of its citizens is created by the techno-priests and farmers of Tier 3, but most other functions beyond the maintenance functions of Tier 1 and the Gut are performed in Tier 2, loosely split into the public, private, and military sectors: the public sector covers projects intended for the good of the citizens, including the vast majority of product creation for these citizens; the private sector mostly covers matters of state, interactions with foreign ambassadors and, to some extent, the internal politics of the techno-priesthood; and the military sector covers, of course, military matters, namely internal protection, external defense (including managing the movement of the Arms of the City for both locomotion and combat purposes), and espionage against other cities, though often SFC acquires new catches simply by using its Arms to disable their methods of movement before forcing an evacuation of the target city into SFC's Gut. Once in the Gut, it is almost always the case that the former city's population is added to the slave population within the Gut, and kept in line by the guards; these individuals do also help protect the city alongside the standard military forces should it be boarded by enemy soldiers, and are largely protected by thick steel plates which, though heavy, make them practically invincible, especially compared to any slaves that might try to revolt against their treatment.
These guards pale, however, in comparison to the large population of Stalkers SFC's military maintains, a side-effect of the city-wide waste-not-want-not attitude: most corpses from the lower Tiers are brought up to the SFC's military compounds, and there preserved in ice until such time as the city acquires the materials to transform them into a new Stalker, for in this regard SFC has in fact succeeded in emulating the complicated Old-Tech components and substances of a common Stalker through sheer force of observation and replication, though in many cases these replications are somewhat less than perfect. Thus, whilst as tough to kill as any other Stalker, they are typically somewhat "stupider" than their usual counterparts, often killing everything in sight that is not an allied Stalker whilst fully active unless specifically directed by human handlers. Not so the Giro-Stalkers, their bodies acquired specifically from the techno-priesthood of The Teachings alone, and built and rebuilt as needed within the Stalker facilities in and on Billary Peak. They are more advanced than their SFC-standard counterparts, possessing heavier armour, deadlier weapons, the intelligence to act without additional guidance on the field, and greater movement speed and agility, the latter thanks to the replacement of their standard human legs with six robotic versions in emulation of the Arms of the City, some even possessing the capacity to clamber up walls and across ceilings with them. In effect, they are the elite guard of SFC, brought out to protect the most important aspects of the city's functionality, the Holy Giraskopes, save for when circumstances are most dire. To those outside the privileged few involved in creating the Giro-Stalkers, how they are built is unknown, but to those they defend, they are a welcome sight.
Miscellaneous Information: Sand-Fran-Crawler is inevitably quite tough to maintain, as you'd expect from one of the more impractical designs for a Traction City. There are occasionally periods where it is forced to stop moving for days or even weeks whilst certain difficult procedures are performed, most commonly on the massive system of weights and checks that balances SFC atop the Wheel whilst in motion or the motors running any given arm, leaving it somewhat vulnerable to attack at these times save for whatever protection the locale's remoteness grants it; on the other hand, only a city of fools would risk coming in range of SFC's Arms whilst they are active, lest they be taken apart and turned to sustenance, and of course top-up maintenance can always be performed within the relative safety of a trading cluster.