repost note: some of this has changed either a little or a lot since I wrote this back in 2016 -Lyn

I’m trying something new with the upcoming serial – essentially asking the prompter($5+)-level donors to fill in parts of the serial description (you can see it here in my reward-tier profile).

M. B. and Hob gave me setting notes, which tells us that our family of hikers lived on a tropical sky island.

So here’s your floating archipelago: 

The Aereaxerer archipelago hovers high above the Nevilla Forest, curving in a crescent shape so that the smallest islands on one tip of the crescent float over the Nevilla mountains while the other tip reaches over the Anexnith Sea.

Said to be a result of the Age of Darkness 500 years ago, the Aereaxerer islands do actually float, or, at least, they hang high up in the air, with only narrow plantlike stalks tethering them to the ground. They were once, so the story goes, small settlements in the Forest and mountains – all but the smallest three islands, which were islands even then.

The highest island – Aereaxera – floats a mile above the center of the Nevilla Forest. The lowest islands are 500 feet above the Anexnith Sea on one end and only a hundred feet above the Nevilla mountains on the other.

The islands are all joined by complex bridges which are built to sway with the wind and to move with the islands’ minute but constant movement. The lowest islands on the mountain side are connected to the ground by a series of pulley-based contraptions, which can be severed without permanent harm in the event of another attack.

Aereaxera itself sits in a warm air current and is the warmest of the islands with a nearly-tropical environment; Tenador, by the mountains, is the coolest, and Caraloorber, over the sea, is the wettest by far.

If you are a $5+ patron, check out the mad libs post.