Cities built on water often find themselves slowly sinking into it. This may be by millimetres per year or per five years or per hour. Formerly dry courtyards become aquariums within a weeks and the lower areas become reefs before the concrete foundations can properly set.
Now the correct solution to this would be to build on higher ground, either uphill or on a raised platform but this city doesn't do that. This city builds homes on top of sunken homes until centuries later they are floating skyscrapers,mostly submerged but still very much inhabited.
The people are trapped in a loop of built on the roof, move into the new home, built a newer home on top and move in etcetera and so forth until they forget they can live outside of the loop. Humans in general often form habits that they can't or don't break for the rest of their lives, this is no different.
They no longer bury their dead, choosing instead to leave them to sit in the rooms they will abandon within months. You can't smell a corpse when it's five floors below you, feeding the fish that then feed you. Some consider it kinder to make a trapdoor in one room, leave it open when they move and let the bodies go down there, tie a rock to them and let them pile up deep down.
This stability doesn't always last, some towered homes were built originally on weak foundations, poor materials and the like. It only takes three generations to forget this but by then the damage is done. So many homes have been lost as they just tilted ever so gently in the night, tipping everyone into the cold ocean while they sleep and dragging them down in their heavy brick homes. They join the countless brick tombs all along the floor by the other towers, that is if they don't cause a chain reaction of collapse by hitting another tower on the way down.
Now the correct solution to this would be to build on higher ground, either uphill or on a raised platform but this city doesn't do that. This city builds homes on top of sunken homes until centuries later they are floating skyscrapers,mostly submerged but still very much inhabited.
The people are trapped in a loop of built on the roof, move into the new home, built a newer home on top and move in etcetera and so forth until they forget they can live outside of the loop. Humans in general often form habits that they can't or don't break for the rest of their lives, this is no different.
They no longer bury their dead, choosing instead to leave them to sit in the rooms they will abandon within months. You can't smell a corpse when it's five floors below you, feeding the fish that then feed you. Some consider it kinder to make a trapdoor in one room, leave it open when they move and let the bodies go down there, tie a rock to them and let them pile up deep down.
This stability doesn't always last, some towered homes were built originally on weak foundations, poor materials and the like. It only takes three generations to forget this but by then the damage is done. So many homes have been lost as they just tilted ever so gently in the night, tipping everyone into the cold ocean while they sleep and dragging them down in their heavy brick homes. They join the countless brick tombs all along the floor by the other towers, that is if they don't cause a chain reaction of collapse by hitting another tower on the way down.
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