Nestled in a maze of translucent zero-G habitrails and vivid alien playgrounds, the childlike inhabitants of Charm are devoted to the art of blissing out. More than any other Puzzleboxers, they use themselves as their aesthetic medium. Charmers paint their faces, hide their bodies with elaborate masks and costumes, and remake their flesh into bright, pretty, crazy things. Living dolls, balloon people, volunteer trip-toys, masked wind-up dancers, rubber gargoyles, neon-blue mouse trees, see-through harlequins, bubbles with butterfly wings -- these are ordinary sights inside the psychedelic sensory overload of a Charmtube.
Charm is a haven for vivid colors, playful notions, and irrepressible wonder. Its culture is firmly -- some would say relentlessly -- expressive, empathetic, and upbeat. An element of the psychedelic pervades Charm, compelling everything to decorate itself in whimsical, surreal ways. This goes especially for the people, who almost invariably go about in some kind of carnivalesque synthetic body, costume, masque, makeup, or paintjob. Visitors are encouraged to acquire a suitable outfit, from the Charmory or the Land of Disguises or from one of the many public-domain toyboxes, lest an overly enthusiastic local choose their guise for them.
Charm has a reputation as a land of mindless, happy automatons. Mind-modification is indeed more popular in Charm than in any other Warp, and the modes of consciousness popular there are often very simple and specialized, like those of the Bubble Dolls. But Charm attracts all sorts of people of jubilant disposition. Besides living toys, Charm's population includes cyberfairies and other postmodern mythicals, Toymakers and masters of clockwork, harlequins, carousel animals, living costumes, tie-dyed otters, treefolk, microphiles, catbulbs, balloonies, technohippies, neo-juveniles, the Fey Brigade, yellow submarine Zips, and the occasional cartoon character seeking refuge from a hostile [intellectual property] regime.
Charm is the only Warp with a single ruling figure, if you can call a wind-up mouse who does whatever she's told a "ruler." Queen Theeka rules Charm with a soft rubber paw, with the help of her creations and converts, the Bubble Dolls. Though she's rarely seen and almost never asserts herself, her presence somehow keeps her domain free of cynicism and bleakness. It's still rumored that threats to Charm actually disappear, only to be reintroduced as happy, shiny toy parodies of themselves. But nobody has ever caught Theeka or her servants in the act, and friends of the Dolls insist she would never order such a thing.
Charm evokes deep-stage dimethytryptamine (DMT) trances. [Terence McKenna speaks] about "self-transforming machine-elves" that "looked like the concrescence of liguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional space." See [comparable reference].