Tag Archive | febcreate

February is World Building Month. Day Thirty-One: Fae Apoc

Mar13

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I answered question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here.

The fourth question comes from an offline friend and is for the Faerie Apocalypse

What does the world look like in the year 2150?

The short answer is: I don’t know yet. I’ve only specced out in any detail at all through about fifty years after the apoc.

What I know:

Starting from a noncimated population of about 31,000,000 at the end of 2012, the American population did not grow for at least a generation (say, until 2035) – disease, starvation, contaminated water and food sources, and a lack of expected medical supplies, as well as remaining returned gods, isolationism, small territory wars, and monsters spawned by the Collapse conspired to keep the population very low, actually trickling down a bit more to around 29 million people.

By 2050, the population was beginning to grow again:
33 million in 2050, 57 million by 2080. By that rate, it’s safe to assume that, by 2150, the population of what had been the United States might get to be around 120,000,000 or a little over 1/3 of what it is IRL today.

140 years is a long time in terms of oral history and predjudice; the first generation of humans after the war almost universally hated fae; even those who had experienced positive relationships with specific fae didn’t like all Ellehemaei. There were maybe “a few good apples” in an otherwise rotten bunch.

And predatory Ellehemaei did not help that impression: especially directly after the war, there were more than a few fae who set up their own little nation-states – some not so little. There were humans who did the same, of course, but the fae “cheated,” using magic and their innate durability and longevity to hold positions of strength over “lesser” humans.

In general, by 2060, there are some humans who believe that fae are all right, maybe less than 25% of the whole population. By 2150, the numbers have shifted in the other direction, and nearly 75% of the population believes, if not that Ellehemaei the equals of humans, at least that they should be allowed to co-exist. And many in both eras know they can be useful (“just get someone who can make the collaring stick and use it!”)

By 2060, Addergoole and Addergoole East were already having a strong influence on the world around them: their graduates became teachers, mayors, despots, doctors, city-builders. By 2150, two creations of Addergoole grads are also shaping the world: a teaching hospital and Doomsday Academy, both formed around 2060.

~

This is a bit all over the place, back to government for a moment. In 2060, the remains of the United States is governed in primarily settlement-based city-states, with as little contact with other settlements as possible, save by those who wander, either to sell goods or offer services. By 2150, many of those settlements have begun to coalesce into small countries; there are 6 major-geographic-area nations and at least 25 smaller ones, many of who battle over land on a semi-regular basis.

The world will never again be what it was before the Collapse, but what it could become is still wide open.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/692874.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Thirty: Facets of Dusk

Mar12

[personal profile] piratekitten declared February world-building month.
And now it is March and I am finishing up the questions!
The question post is here
The eighteenth question comes from [personal profile] clare_dragonfly and is for Facets of Dusk
Who discovered the portal thingies? How did it start out?

In the universe the team calls Prime, in our era, Alexa discovered the Doors by accident.

She was – or had been – dating Aerich, and they got into yet another fight, as they were prone to doing. She stormed out of his study and into his library, through a door that was older than the family house in which he lived.

[Aerich’s family consist of a long and esteemed lineage of scholarly mages who discovered the Doors centuries ago, but had never figured out how to make them properly function. As only a few people in any given billion have the ability, nobody in Aerich’s family, nor their associates, had ever managed to spark the doors. Alexa did.]

She traveled from universe to universe for three years; there was a murder investigation back on Earth Prime, and she was officially declared missing: presumed dead.

While Aerich was being charged with her murder, Alexa was discovering by trial and error how the Doors work and how to find them. They do not always lead to the same place multiple times in a row and, unlike a Stargate, they don’t come with a coordinate system. Each universe has several, although the specific number varies with world.

When she returned – not into Aerich’s family library, but into a storeroom in the basement of a famous university – she was immediately snagged by a shadow branch of the U.S. Government, working with an unwilling but competent Aerich and several of his associates.

Once they determined that Alexa could, indeed, open the Doors, they put together an exploration team, and the Facets team was born.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/691062.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty*cough*Nine: Addergoole

Mar11

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here.

The twenty-ninth question comes from [personal profile] librarygeek and is for Addergoole.

Keeping: Was it part of the original plan or it something fae? Is there any specific magical binding for Keeper and Kept? I just read a reference to ‘Hell Night’ and wasn’t caught so he should be home free. Is being caught at Hell Night how you get to be Kept?

Keeping is the effect of one of the Laws of Belonging.

The Laws are the rules which bind all Ellehemaei (fae); they fall in a few different categories, but the ones that interest us here are those of Belonging.

These laws state that a fae will first belong to its* Mother, then to its Mentor, and then to itself, but that a fae, once they belong to themselves, may choose to belong to another adult fae.

There are connotations to the word “belong” in the language used for the Laws (commonly called The Old Tongue) which include a sense of responsibility rather than just proprietorship; the word literally means “under another’s name,” and one who Belongs to another, either as their child, their student, or their Kept, is that person’s complete responsibility.

The ritual that makes two fae Keeper and Kept – at its most basic, a repeated statement of “you’re mine;” “Yes, I’m yours” – binds the Kept to the Keeper. Once Kept, a fae cannot disobey direct orders from its Keeper. The Kept feels bad if they disappoints or angers the Keeper, good if they are praised, and will often strive to please their Keeper at all costs.

The binding on Keeper is societal – if the Kept upsets or offends someone, it is the Keeper’s responsibility to ameliorate the problem. If the Kept breaks a law, the Keeper has to deal with the consequences. And the Keeper is responsible for making sure its Kept are fed, housed, clothed (if they so wish), and so on.

All of this covers Keeper and Kept relationships in the greater world outside of Addergoole, as they happen within what passes for fae society in the world.

“Hell Night” is a function of Addergoole.

Originally intended as a gentle hazing ritual to induce stress in new students – because stress is part of what causes juvenile fae to go through the Changes that make them full fae – over the years of the school, it has become a darker, more intense day of pranks, chases, and flat-out bullying, with an underlying secondary cause of enticing students who do not yet know about Keeping to agree to belong to someone for the year. So, in Addergoole, being caught on Hell Night is how you are often Kept, and the day in which the upperclassmen are the most intent on hunting down their new prey.

* Ellehemaei use a gender-neutral pronoun; the closest English has is “it.”

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/689925.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty-Eight: Meta

Mar10

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

I’m finishing this up in March!

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twenty-eighth question comes from [personal profile] rix_scaedu and is a meta-question

Do any of your universes have a “big bad” or a “he who must not be named”?)

No.

Next question?

😀

Okay, that’s not entirely fair.

Unicorn/Factory has the unknown, un-met Governors, who seem to have some control over everything and motives that are questionable at best.

Faerie Apocalypse has the Departed Gods (who Return), a group of powerful fae who have been trapped in another world.

One could possibly argue that Regine in Addergoole is a big bad, although she is not nearly as Big nor as Bad as most end bosses.

But in Tír na Cali, the main antagonist is the setting. Dragons Next Door, human ignorance is the main bad guy. Reiassan and Stranded both have bad guys for the individual story.

I’m not a big fan of bad guys, I suppose, despite the recent Bad Guy Giraffe Call. I prefer settings where the world itself makes the antagonist, or writing small villains who are either misunderstood (they weren’t actually bad in the grand scheme of things) or that can be redeemed.

That being said, writing a Xanatos Gambit style Big Bad From The Shadows might be an entertaining project at some point.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/689603.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day x: Addergoole/Fae Apoc

Mar6

Physical damage, Ellehemaei, Hawthorn and rowan

I was starting a story and realized I hadn’t determined how Ellehemaei dealt with damage.

So:

A normal Ellehemaei (defined here as a fae who has a Change and the ability to use Words) heals damage the same way as a human and at the same rate; the only difference is that an Ellehemaei can survive damage that would kill a human, and the older the Ellehemaei, the longer they can hold out without healing. (For example, hypothermia, bleeding out, poisoning).

Ellehemaei can, of course, heal themselves, too, with the proper Words (Jasfe (repair) Tlacatl (Flesh of Makers). (And is it not interesting that the same Word covers all fae and all humans?) (And possibly aliens…) They can repair almost any sort of damage, even lost limbs (although something that severe may take Meentik (create) as well as Jasfe.

When hawthorn and rowan get involved, things get complicated. The two woods are poison to all Ellehemaei; hawthorn, in addition to being poison, also inhibits magic use in its presence; it’s hard to Work, hard to Work around, and if it gets into the bloodstream of a fae, it’s almost impossible for them to do any Workings at all while it’s running around in their blood.

A wound made with hawthorn or rowan will act like an acid burn in addition to any stabbing or slicing damage done. The wound will be slow to heal without magic, very slow, and will be difficult to impossible to heal with magic, depending on the power level of the Worker involved. If a limb is amputated with hawthorn or rowan, esp. if the sap is used on the wound, only the most powerful fae in the world can repair it.

On the other hand, they don’t appear to age quickly, and when they do age, they can always use Workings to repair some of the signs of age.

(Thanks to @KissofJudas for help figuring this out)

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/688227.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month; March is Catch-Up Day 27: Unicorn/Factory

Mar5

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

And now I’m catching up in March!

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twenty-seventh question comes from [personal profile] wispfox and is for Unicorn/Factory

here did the unicorns originally come from?
Nobody knows, and everyone has theories.

The people who live in the Villages, the ones who used to sometimes lose a daughter or possibly just misplace her for a while to the unicorns, they say that the creatures were born out of the deep canyon that lies four day’s journey east of Easton.

Certainly the first that the people in the Villages can remember when there were very few unicorns, and those were sighted only in the easternmost parts of the country, only near that horrible canyon or the deep and impassible river that shoots out of it.

The Administrators and those who come from Centon City, the “Enlightened” and “Educated” folk, believe that the unicorns are a natural environmental response to changing factors; that something like a goat was pressed into service by nature itself to be a sort of cleaning service as well as a check on human population growth.

(There are, from that, two opinions stemming outwards: that that’s a useful and reasonable thing for nature to do, and that nature ought not dare mess with mankind and its growth and creation – the second factor being that which has sought the eradication of the unicorns.)

There is a third point of view, a very quietly whispered one, that says that the mysterious and never-spoken-of, never-seen Governors created the unicorns for some unknown purpose.

My theory, as the author and world-creator, is a bit of all three. Certainly the Governors created the situation in which unicorns were needed; they may have evolved to fit a niche, but considering their relatively unique form of species propagation, natural evolution seems unlikely.

But they did come to the land in which these stories are set from the east, from the canyon, and they did come to fill a need both the land and the people had.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/686867.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty-Six: Tír na Cali

Feb28

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twenty-third question comes from [personal profile] wispfox and is for Tir na Cali.

Why did it originally start out as a hostage situation?

(Referencing the end of this.)

This is a bit of worldbuilding that could definitely use more scrutiny.

When Tír na Cali began as its own country, it was in a precarious place. The Civil War was in full swing, and the northern U.S. was very clear on what it wanted to do to rebellious states.

The Californians needed a decisive victory. At the same time, they needed workers; there was plenty of labor to be had and less people to do it. Thirdly, with the aristocracy just beginning to flex its muscle, the powers-that-were understood that their normal human population was going to need some sort of sop to accept a ruling class.

The royalty – or the extended family line that would become California’s monarchy – had always believed in a stratified society of responsibility and control. It was, while not easy, reasonable and practical to expand that to all segments of their new country; bringing in a slave population gave normal-human citizens, even the poor, someone else who was below them.

Back to the hostages. The first slaves taken were actually hostages, the children and sometimes (unlike in modern day) wives of decision-makers. Along with them were a large swath of ordinary teens and twenty-somethings and relatives of newspapermen and financiers. The first round of slave-taking was done with the intention that no corner of the Union would have a family who didn’t have a child somewhere in California.

This could have backfired horribly, yes. It could have led to a massive retaliatory war.

But it didn’t.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/682929.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty-Five: Addergoole

Feb28

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February, I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twenty-fifth question comes from [personal profile] anke and is for Addergoole.

What’s the reasoning behind keeping future Addergoole students in the dark about pretty much everything?

This one is actually fairly straight-forward.

One of the primary purposes of the Addergoole School is to encourage more half-breed children to Change, thus coming into the full extent of their powers, and to Change in a safely controlled environment, where they are unlikely to, say, set the school gym on fire or get killed by a mob.

Stress and surprise can trigger the change, and a series of stressors and surprises can trigger it more quickly than all the surprises at once; thus Hell Night, which originally was meant to spook and scare students more than it was meant to ambush them into Keepings.

However, for various and sundry reasons, the Administration is happier if every student of Addergoole experiences a year Kept. A secondary reason for the secrecy is that it makes new students easier to catch.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/682733.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month. Day Twenty-Four: Unicorn/Factory

Feb25

[personal profile] piratekitten has declared February world-building month.

Every day in February (or most days), I will answer one question about any one of my settings.

The question post is here, please feel free to add more questions!

The twenty-fourth question comes from Kelkyag and is for Unicorn/Factory

How and why were the unicorns chained?

There is a bit of an answer in this story.

The Silver Road is a major magical artifact, created by the application of a great deal of very dark and horrible magic, most of it fueled by blood and by lives.

The creators of the Factories knew from previous experiments that they needed a way to clean the air and the water; their current scrubbing technology was pretty much non-existent, and their first factories sickened the nearby villages and poisoned the food, thus denying them of a source of workers, people to buy their products, or a reason to exist at all.

The unicorns were there. They were, before the Factories, before the Silver Road, far more wilds, and their attacks were far much more… attacks, and less an unwritten contract with villagers. They were much like tigers or bears, living where they would and venturing out when they needed or desired prey.

(In that time, unicorns often left their seed in other creatures, which led to some truly horrifying beastlike beings.)

The makers of the Factory tried other solutions first, bribery (leaving virgins on stakes), hunting, domesticating, but, just as their normal stone roads were ripped up and destroyed, every attempt they made to bring the unicorns over to their side failed.

(There are many who believe that even then, the unicorns were too tied to the villages, and vice-versa. If one was against the Factories, both would be.)

The Silver Road, paved with the blood of unicorns and villagers alike, ended the rebellion, at least for the time being. It chained not just the unicorns, but the towns, the villages, and the factories – as well as those who made the factories.

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/678923.html. You can comment here or there.

February is World Building Month, a Summary to Date

Feb25

February is World-Building Month
The Questions! (still need 4 more)
Other People Playing!
Day One – Planners
Day Two – Aunt Family
Day Three – Addergoole
Day Four – Fae Apoc
Day Five – Vas’ World
Day Six – Tír na Cali
Day Seven – Stranded
Day Eight – Dragons Next Door
Day Nine – Unicorn/Factory
Day Ten – Aunt Family
Day Eleven – Addergoole
Day Twelve – Stranded
Day Thirteen – Tír na Cali
Day Fourteen – Space Accountant
Day Fifteen – Worldbuilding Meta
Day Sixteen – Space Accountant
Day Seventeen – Aunt Family
Day Eighteen – Fairy Town
Day Nineteen – Fae Apoc
~
Day Twenty-Four – Unicorn/Factory

This entry was originally posted at http://aldersprig.dreamwidth.org/672815.html. You can comment here or there.