The Seed of a World

 Scattered scenes from a world entire.

When I say I’ve been marinating this world idea for over a decade, I mean it.  The earliest explorations took place through the medium of Bryce 3D, which my computer couldn’t handle too well (obviously).  A later processor upgrade helped somewhat, but the images still don’t compare with what I see in my mind’s eye.

 

 

Terraestris consists of a known continent with most of the standard features – wetlands, desert, grassland, mountains, and so on.  It lacks conspicuous tundra or arctic areas, the nearest mapped thing to it being the highest reaches of the mountain range separating Aios (the major ‘country’) from the desert to the north.  Dead center in the world is a structure known only as The Wall; a sheer cliff of stone no one’s ever seen the top of.  It can be circumnavigated by land if you really want to go through God knows how much desert or deal with the not-very-welcoming people in the not-very-traversible swamps to the south, but few want to try and even fewer ever managed to send their findings back.  Antos, mentioned in some of the images above, is what lies on the western side of The Wall.  It’s a settled land, probably older than Aios in that sense, but keeps pretty much to itself.  Some trading goes on between the two by sea, though ocean travel has its own unique hazards.

Antos was going to be the pet project of a good friend of mine – the one who suggested the name for the Comlegium way back when – but he found more pressing things to attend to.  It has since been handed over to Andy as a setting for his Sky Pirates storyline.  The death of his brother, who was deeply involved in that project, kind of put everything on hold, and considering the huge technological and ideological differences between Antos and Aios, we decided the Sky Pirates version of Antos is an alternate timeline.

The original map

 

The updated map as of 2019, including a populated Antos and its Skyland area.

If you’re thinking by now that Antos looks like a wild place to try and live, you’d be right. It’s a lot less welcoming than Aios is. Some people might recognize some of the place-names. I’ve played off them before. Faerbish/Fairbush, for example, has been the name of my town in Animal Crossing for years.

“Standard-issue attire for Field Archivist (F), consisting of Overcoat, Cinchkit (Leather) and Kitroll, Document Case and Tarpaulin. Employees may wear personal attire so long as any clothing in use is of a conservative style.”

Field Archivists operate out of the Great Library in Porto Donmarius.  Chosen from among the Librarians’ ranks, the hardy and resourceful (and usually very strong) Archivists are sent to document and observe important events or other occasions deemed momentous.  Most travel in pairs, especially if going far afield, and are treated with respect when travelling, being charged less for passage and generally otherwise left to their own devices.  Archivists afield are encouraged to interview those they meet, to obtain information, and those encountering an Archivist will usually initiate an exchange – Archivists get invited in to dinner or tea frequently. They’re numbered by the Library, and will usually go by those numbers when out and about on business, rather than by their names, to maintain third-party objective status.

The Oracle:  An item and not really a person, since once chosen, the vessel gives up their human name and identity, and is bound to the Engine from then on, remaining in a state of catatonia unless roused to prophesy, and even then the eyes remain closed.  It will not speak or respond until spoken to directly.  The Oracle itself is the only known Living Engine, an Engine with sentience.  It requires a human vessel in order to communicate, however, and will make its choice of vessel only after careful consideration.  Vessels can be either male or female, but are usually young adults and seldom unattractive.  The oracle does have a marked preference for pure-human vessels.  Bonding with it extends the lifespan almost indefinitely, as the Engine takes in trade all the years of one’s soul (lifeTIMES, as opposed to simply their remaining life years).  The vessel no longer ages, contracts illness, feels pain or hunger or discomfort…but they’re tethered in place to the Oracle itself (which in turn is chained in its own location), must be cared for by others for the remainder of their life, and sacrifices all of their possible turns in the cycle.  Those seeking the counsel of the Oracle are required to pay with a year of their own soul; a price which doubles for representatives from the Comlegium seeking to study the Engine itself.

This character is one of that ‘other species’, known in loose translation as ‘the Created’.  Created come in a variety of shapes, sizes, and materials; the one common thing binding them together as a race is their artificial origins.  This one is one of the more fleshly-looking specimens, though close inspection would show she has no heart – literally.  She also appears to have no emotion whatsoever, though if one spent enough time around her, one would realize she’s actually pretty sadistic and sly about it.

She was Created as a Divinity (Divinities being the aforementioned magical beings), and is easily distinguished from the real thing by both the semi-detached, artificial wings and the fact she has only one pair.  Otherwise she bears a striking resemblance.  Found deep beneath the Temple of Perfection when the Order was founded, she was set up as their goddess and has been worshipped exclusively there ever since. 

Thanks to her, the Order’s maidens are well-known and prized for their graceful, precise dancing skills…if they survive eight years’ training.  Annually during the Hermitas Full-Moon Festival (another thing specific to the Temple, thankfully), the maidens are required to dance in offering to their ‘goddess’.  In tribute to her, they wield large, decorative folding fans.  The purpose of the dance itself is to provide the necessary sacrifice – if performed correctly, the most skilled of the girls will die of wounds cunningly self-inflicted with her fans.

At no point during the performance may they touch each other either with limbs, garments, or fans, and the dance has been known to last a full day (in their terms, 32 hours give or take).  The best dancers make no sound or sign of discomfort during their ‘suicide of a thousand cuts’, as it were.

*I should note that the Temple are really a bunch of obsessive-compulsive fanatics, for all they’re extremely good at what they do, and most of the continent prefers to pretend they’re not there.  People very rarely seek them out, except as some exotic taboo thing to do.

Terraestris was originally conceived as a text-based world; something you'd see on a MUD or similar, based on my own fondness for using one's own imagination to supply the visuals, rather than having it all handed to you.  In the years since (considering the overall death of MUDs), I've thought of just using RPGmaker to do something with it.  Of course, other sidelined plans happened, and recently I discovered there's a Pokemon plugin for RPGMaker, and RPGMaker itself isn't expensive.  With the improvements in LCD screens (I guess they're all OLED now, idk), I think I could get bck into pixel work pretty easily, so... who knows?

it could happen.