Warning that this page is VERY much under construction and kind of sucks lmfao
Hudson is my pet dystopia. It sucks (affectionate) and is terrible (affectionate) and i hate (read: love) it a lot. It is full of feeeeshhhhhhhh and also fungus. Also the seat of power for the Eastern Dominance, an empire spanning the entire eastern part of the continent.
EBC like NYC, as the actual city is called the Ever-Burning City. Inventors of Everfire, the equivalent to a nuclear weapon in terms of the on-continent arms race. Slowly taking over the continent; the Eastern Dominance is kind of pushing back but there's only so much they can do before the EBC finally gets its tendrils into everything. One of the only cities on the continent with explicit legal protections for dragons. Also one of the only cities on the planet with explicit legal drinking ages and age of consent laws. In what is essentially the Wild West of the future, considers itself to be a bastion of civilization. (It isn't.) Constructed upon the ruins of an ancient city made of glass and steel that burns in the light of the sunset, not that anyone knows what the fuck is up with that.
okay picture the most boring possible militarized religious compound. now add child soldiers. cool, you've probably got it.
Okay so first we have to go over...
Okay so first we have to go over...
Okay! so before that we have to go over...
Okay so this is gonna get looped back around to, so stay tuned; this is just a quick overview because i wanna talk about the magical mutually-assured-destruction arms race. So Shaids are like, people. Sort of. Not really. Actually let's start over. Shaids aren't supposed to exist.
Shaids aren't supposed to exist here, at least.
The actual systems of geomagnetism and electricity are wildly broken in the Closer-verse. Just totally borked. Completely shit. They don't do dick or if they do it's not like, reliable.
Therefore we are all very lucky that shaids exist, because don't we all like electronics? Anyways shaids are not supposed to exist in this reality, and they do anyway, so everywhere they go reality just completely FLIPS OUT. Bends over backwards trying to buck the shaid back to where it came from and does all sorts of weird shit in the meantime. It makes a shit-ton of energy. All that energy can get harnessed.
Cool, so now we can get to...:
Bearing in mind that shaids are, like, people, some people can talk to them. You have to be a little bit cracked, realistically-speaking, to make it work. Like, you have to be a person that is physically not attached to reality enough. I don't mean mental illness. I mean there's an actual mechanism by which people sometimes fall out of existence and you have to be predisposed to yeeting off the mortal coil by geological coincidence before you'll be able to make heads nor tails of a shaid.
Some people can speak to shaids; these people are known as a lot of things but usually 'seers' or 'fortune-tellers', because by nature of being enemies of reality shaids can hop along the timeline with ease.
if someone is capable of bending shaids to their will- or they think they are capable of it- instead, they are termed shaidbinders. So are non-seers who can do mechanical work with enshaiden parts. It generally just means taking shaiden energy and making it do shit. Shaidbinders, despite the name, can't exactly force a shaid to do anything; but some people are able to respond and some people aren't. Some shaidbinders do not physically have the ability to communicate with shaids, but work through other means; typewriters are common shaidbinding tools.
The whole point of this being that shaidbinders, given they're working wth mysterious and powerful individual creatures, can do weird magical things.
Shaidfire is not, as it might sound like, just fire that someone made by shaidbinding. Shaidfire refers to a very particular kind of magical weapon that operates in some very particular parameters, and can be created by shaidbinders and non-shaidbinders alike as long as it fulfills the shaidfire criterion.
Shaidfire must:
COOL OKAY WE CAN FINALLY GET TO:
Actually scratch that. First we have to talk about...
~Politics!~
So the politics in the closer-verse SUCK.
(by that i mean i care a lot about them and i think they're interesting in a "wow I am glad I don't fucking live there" kind of way.)
To set the stage:
We are going to go back in time about... sixty or so years and establish the major players back then. I swear all thsi shit is relevant.
The Eastern Dominance, headed up by Lord Deiya, as it had been at that time for nearly two centuries already. The Dominance was at this time significantly smaller, spanning only from the lower reaches of Mentrel to the middle of the Aplacean Mountains.
The Ever-Burning City, headed up by Rauren Thusus, then-scion of the soon-to-be-extinct Thusus Dynasty. The EBC at the time was remarkable for being the most militaristic country on the continent, though the city-states defending themselves against the Dominance were beginning to catch up.
The Kingdom of Metecia, headed up by Queen Lexus Metec, a relatively large empire to the direct north of the EBC. Known for its large mage armies.
The Hollyleaf States, a semi-religious collection of city-states headed up by a semi-elected council but with Rocaim ket'Aothea acting as a figurehead king. As the Eastern Dominance expands, it is getting uncomfortably close to the borders of the Hollyleaf States.
The Thylian Empire, headed up by General Ayron Tekmat, reduced to one small land holding in arid rocky ground after the death of their rulers and defeat of their armies at the hands of the expanding EBC.
and then we have to take a brief detour through the religious tensions in the Closer-verse because nothing can ever be simple. <3
(This is like half of what the story is about. For the record.)