Conflux 2012: 11/10/10

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Fracture-Speak

For those who are traveling between the shards of reality, the problem of communication is going to inescapably come up again and again. By Complete coincidence and not having Anything to do with making the story more than people trying to talk, one of the most useful abilities of Magic-users is the ability to understand various languages merely by listening for a couple of minutes and manipulating reality a tiny bit. Most shards of reality that see a lot of traffic generally have someone on hand who can help with translation problems, and travelers themselves generally have a magic-user among them. This type of communication, called Fracture-Speak, does an okay job for emergencies and random travelers, but actually speaking the language is always better.

Someone else might have the ethereal ability to understand and speak any language, with an appropriate Geise (they may be only able to speak in rhyme, lose the ability to stop talking, or be required to attack anyone who addresses them directly).

Particularly capable magic-wielders may be able to create charm bracelets or necklaces that allow the wearer the ability to understand and speak other languages, but of course wearing such an object while traveling from one shard to another is practically an invitation for Ethera interference.

Fractured Space

The best way to imagine Fractured Space is to think of a video game. Within the video game you have different areas, or levels. Usually they try to hide the edges of the map by putting obstacles there, such as cliffs, water, mountains, etc., but if you can ever manage to find those areas where they missed, you find a kind of blank wall that looks vaguely as if the map should keep extending beyond that point, but you can't pass it. With fractured space, the entire world, plus some, has been divided into large video game-type maps. If you get to the edge, then you are transported from one map to another map. The maps don't match up to each other exactly, and they are all jumbled together, so that a desert piece might be right next to an ocean piece and a frozen tundra piece. To make matters worse, you can't tell until you cross over what is in the next area. While most of the pieces transport you to the same place every time, some of them change. Traveling from one area to another, then, is a big deal.

For story purposes, this means that every time the characters travel from one slice of the world to another, they are in a completely different setting, from Victorian England to the Australian outback, from the wilds of a Jurassic jungle to a modern city, simply by stepping across an almost invisible line. Most people generally stay in the slice of world that they find themselves in, but some travelers search for family, a safer home, or even just business opportunities. In any event, traveling is a big deal.

The Cataclysm

In the year 2012, as predicted by the Mayan Calender, the sun disappeared. The stars ripped across the sky like streaks of fire, and the moon burned red and dripped boiling drops onto the earth. For three days the earth itself groaned and buckled with terrifying storms and earthquakes and tsunamis. Then, for seven long seconds, everything was lost in absolute darkness, silence, stillness. After the silence, people were greeted by a strange new world. A sun shone again in the sky, but it didn't seem the right size, and it took a little longer to make it's journey across the sky. Two moons orbit the earth, a small bright blue one and the older one now stained a dull bronze color. Stars in the sky now waver with watery light. The world itself was fractured, splintered. Strange creatures hunted the forests, and terrifying creatures haunted the edge of perception. In this new, post-apocalyptic world, you should know these things:

CHANGELINGS: At the beginning of the cataclysm three billion people disappeared all across the planet. Now some few millions of them reappear, at different times, and in different places than where they were. Sometimes they have no memory of who they were before. Sometimes they returned Changed in other ways- hair the blue color of the sky, an extra set of arms, cat-slit pupils, pointed ears, and stranger physical anomalies. Some of them seem to come from other time periods of the earths' history, and others don't seem to come from this planet at all.

FRACTURED SPACE: all around the world, strange, invisible cracks mark the place where space doesn't quite match up, like looking through a broken mirror, where the reflections don't fit together exactly right at the edges. A slice of cloud will be missing, or a doorway will lead to somewhere unexpected. Walking through these fractures, called Slicing, allows you to hop from one shard of reality to another. Sometimes a Slice goes only one way, and other times two Slices next to each other can trap you into a never-ending loop. Some Slices can trap you under thousands of feet of water or lead you into a poisonous atmosphere, or leave you thousands of feet above the earth. While these Slices are extremely rare, they still make Slicing extremely hazardous. You can never tell where a slice will actually lead to just by looking, because most fractures mirror the shard of reality that you are currently in. Most fractures stay put, but some drift slowly across the landscape. Others can lead to different places at different times. Each shard of reality is generally a couple of dozen miles, although some few cover hundreds of miles. Some are very small, only the size of a bedroom or closet.

FRACTURED TIME: Dotting the landscape are eddies of time called warps, places where time moves faster or slower than the world around it. They are barely visible, almost like a heat wave. The shards of reality themselves are from different time periods in earth history, although they now all share the same time line. You can have a shard of Victorian England that connects to a shard of world war 2. The latest time of any shard is 2012, and the earliest is the Triassic Period. The earth itself, because of these extra pieces from the past, has three times the surface area than it used to have, although gravity remains largely unchanged (sometimes a slice will lead you into another shard with reversed or omnidirectional gravity).

REMNANTS OF WORLDS: As well as our own world and its past, some rare shards seem to be from places and times completely unknown to earth. Inhabited by strange creatures, some completely alien and some strangely familiar, these other-world shards are unpredictable at best and present rare and unique challenges to explorers. While they largely seem to obey the same laws of physics that our world used to, it sometimes takes some research to find out exactly how some things, such as floating islands and giant flying monstrosities, can actually do the things they do. On the other hand, rare and valuable materials can often be found in these areas.

REMNANTS OF CIVILIZATION: While Nations have been ripped apart, technology seems largely to keep working. New power sources, such as blood-moon crystals, have been tapped. Bloodmoon crystals act like immensely powerful batteries (1000 times more powerful and longer lasting than anything we now have) and can be found several hundred feet below the surface of most shards. Bloodmoon crystals get their name from when the moon wept meteors onto the earth during the Cataclysm. Computer networks keep most of there functionality, although the internet is mostly broken apart by the shards. Modified vehicles can be used, although it is much harder now to get the parts to repair them. Rifles and guns are now limited by the remaining stockpiles of ammunition in each shard, and the ammunition that can be manufactured there. Anything that was manufactured elsewhere (read- almost everything) is now very valuable, and many things are again made by hand. Buildings that once housed business chains have been converted, and it is not uncommon to find a Golden Arches diner, or a thrift store in the remnants of an old JC Penny's.

ETHERA: Like shadows or mirages, ethereal forms wander the world, haunting the edges of reality. They are most visible near a fracture, but can be found anywhere. Some are human ghosts, some animal, and some are other things, things with teeth and claws, or with shining feathered wings, or others with twitching tentacles. These ethereal beings seep through the cracks of reality, possessing the bodies of living creatures and twisting them into strange new forms. If it is a human or animal spirit, or merely a remnant of one of the stranger creatures, the person touched may gain the ability to change form into that animal, or become stronger and faster than a regular human. They may even gain the rare and valued ability to see between the Slices to where the next shard is. These abilities come at a cost, for all beings of Ethera are bound by strange laws, called geise. One geise may prohibit the person from eating anything besides raw meat. Another may bind them to serve whoever knows their name, depending on the type of Ethera they are host to. If it is a stronger Ethera than the spirit of the living creature, it can take over the body completely, pushing the former occupant out. Once inside a host, the Ethera becomes immensely more powerful and terrifying, capable of directly affecting the world around them. While not all Ethera are monsters, and some could even be termed beneficent, it is wise to deal carefully with any of these strange entities. They are completely alien and many times do not understand human concepts such as kindness or the passage of time. Slicing is the time when these creatures have the most opportunity to capture a living body, although there must generally still be some sort of invitation from the host.

MAGIC: Some people have learned to manipulate this new, broken reality. They channel probability into new shapes, calling lightning from clear skies, enhancing their strength or speed, breaking or mending objects- manipulating reality. Doing so, however, has dangerous consequences, for changing reality too much in this way attracts the attention of the Ethera. Sometimes the backwash of energy is too much for a mortal form, and sometimes they lack the mental discipline necessary and go insane. Any who wish to survive long while using this ability would be wise to keep any changes to reality as small as possible.

Conflux 2012

Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Fracture-Speak

Fractured Space

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