Harvesters

Warning! This article contains topics such as kidnapping, being locked in a cramped space, and mutilation.

A clang of pickaxes, the sound of fabric being torn, and the snipping of the scissors. Those are the sounds meaning that the harvesters are close. When the darkness takes away something from a person, it incorporates the lost thing into the Hall in various forms, making it grow. Sometimes, the lost things take on forms or gain properties that might be valuable or useful for survival in the Dark Halls. But while the owner of what was lost could still retrieve it, some don't care about that, seeing it only as a material or a way to profit.
Those people are often called "harvesters".
There is no structure to harvesters. Some work alone, while others form groups or even communities. Some try to deal as little damage and never hurt anyone else, while others do some heinous things. The only thing common between all of them is that they all "harvest" things the Halls are made out of.

Barren Halls and Resource Farms

When the Hall is covered with valuable things, harvesters tend to go overboard. The result of their exploitation is known as Barren Halls. These wastelands, devoid of most but the sturdiest structures will never give back anything to the righteous owners and worse, they tend to get hungrier and hungrier. The darkness of those Halls becomes so powerful, that the light level needed to avoid its "bites" rises dramatically. To even get to that point, harvesters have to kill the Archivist of the Hall, who would otherwise try to stop them.
Even worse are the Resource Farms. If the produces of a few Halls close to each other are profitable enough and easy to find or extract, the harvesters might start to kidnap and bring people to it, just to expose them to darkness and have more materials to gather only to transport them to the next Hall and deprive them of another thing. One of their scarier inventions that help harvesters with that are threshers, vehicles designed to transport as many people as possible between the stops of the Resource Farm. The threshers are practically moving tanks, capable of withstanding attacks of many of the creatures of the darkness. Within them, the victims are stuck, either within small cages or strapped to stretchers and exposed to constant blinding light. The light only turns off when it is time for another stop and another "harvest".

Rumors and stories

• There are rumors about the city built by the harvesters. According to them, said settlement has been growing at an alarming rate. Harvesters are more of an official profession there and they can get their gear there, Threshers included. Trying to get close to the city might prove dangerous as anyone who doesn't already live there might quickly become a target for the next harvest.

Demand

Sadly, the resources that can be gathered from the Halls tend to be pretty hard to get. And so, as much as most of them do some messed up stuff, there is still demand for them and things they manage to find.

Related Locations

• Dark Halls

Related Vehicles

• Threshers

Related Technologies

• Light-powered engines

Perception

Due to what most of the harvesters tend to do to other people, it is no wonder that the members of this profession aren't welcomed with open arms. Almost everyone encountered one or more of them either by themselves and many of them lost someone to harvesters in their life. On the other hand, some settlements need a constant supply of goods that can only be provided by going into the Halls and gathering resources they might need.
Those brave enough, and not broken by the Dark Halls, might try to lessen the evils of this place by hunting down the harvesters and releasing their prisoners before it is too late for them.
But the humans aren't the only ones who don't like the harvesters. Archivists, who tend to help those who have lost something in the Hall they live in retrieve those things, don't take kindly to harvesters. Depending on the amount extracted, an Archivist might drive them out of the Hall or simply attack them. According to the witnesses, when an Archivist attacks a thresher, it doesn't pull any punches and becomes truly monstrous.