Now for something more interesting -- religion in Pivotian society.
Religion in the world can be easily separated into three different groups -- Animas, Shrines, and Ancestors. I'll cover Animas and Shrines today, while Ancestors can wait until I start discussing the Ik'thulu.
Animas
An Anima is a term given to an animal spirit / animal deity of some specific clade of animals. It's a bit more abstract than that though -- there's not really a direct earth equivalent to this type of religion. Here's what belonging to an Anima entails:
* A great reverence for the animal clade in question. You're not directly worshipping them, but you are showing great levels of respect towards them, as though they were your rulers -- though sometimes the animal being revered is also domesticated. I guess there's parallels to cow reverence in hindu culture.
* The worship of an overall spirit or deity of that animal. These deities are non-corporeal and excessively abstract -- they don't exist outside time or on mount olympus or anything but are instead reflected through the physical presence of all members of that clade. They aren't even really separate entities at all -- the spirits/"deities" themselves are sometimes referred to as Destinies, which fits in a lot better with their abstract and metaphysical nature.
* The belief in Friends -- animals in the clade that will sometimes take on godly (though not human) attributes and guide members of the Anima. For example, The Roost believes in a Crow friend that led the war hero Yalomet-saint-Roc to a hidden Nal'Tek cache of Agate that they were going to use to completely destroy the New Roots pivot. These stories are sort of like myths except set in recent and historical times. Yalomet-saint-Roc himself actually claimed that he followed a crow to the camp while in the middle of a pre-battle Nesting Ritual -- his sect The Roost later turned it into Friend Lore.
* The widespread use of Virtues -- common traits related to that animal in worship practices. These can be symbols in architecture, pilgramages to places where those animals frequent, the attempt to imitate their calls, to dress or look like them in rituals, to attempt to be more like them in your day-to-day life, etc. Those who diligently practice virtues in an anima are known as Saints and will take on names appropriate to their faith.
Icons
Icons, which are also themselves confusingly known as "Animas" sometimes, are constructions made as monuments to a specific animal clade. They also function as useful places for worship (a bit like churches, except mostly outside), and are themselves sometimes used as intermediaries for worship -- not quite idol worship exactly, more like the role of the Kaaba in Islam. Icons are sometimes quite large -- The Roost for example has a Roc Icon that's larger than an actual Roc. There's a Tortoise Icon carved into the mountain of Tengrove Peak that looms above the entire island. They can also be reasonably small or made of cheap materials -- Rocite outposts will sometimes make them house-sized and construct them from wood. The few Ik'Thulu who worship Animas (such as the Edge Band) will make them in a similar way to their shrines -- by stacking rocks or blocks of wood together.
Ik'Thulu being Ik'Thulu, their constructions are far more impressive than Pivotian icons -- sometimes equally as large, but made with impossibly well-balanced blocks and stones, and with a high level of detail as well. And despite this, absolutely temporary -- Ik'Thulu don't attach their islands to Pivots, so all of their icons are eventually lost to the world.
Sects
While an "Anima" is an overall description of a religion (which is often based on the local culture or syncretic and free), there are things operating within them known as "Sects" which have much stronger organization and rituals/dogma. Sects operate a lot like Clans, and sometimes are Clans too -- wielding both religious and mercantile power. Some Sects have influenced their Anima so much that they're practically synonymous with it -- for example, virtually every common ritual and virtue of the Garmak Anima was created by the Garmak Saints.
Sects will typically be specific to either Rocites or Garmakians, however there are things known as "Seeding Sects" which try to evangelize across multiple Pivotian groups, and sometimes will try to evangelize Ik'Thulu as well. The Yak'ashan actually work in reverse -- they're a group of Ik'thulu (Karash'Thulu, to be more specific) that try to evangelize Pivotians.
Below, I'll briefly describe some of the more common Sects:
* The Roost -- These belong to the Roc Anima, though they aren't the only roc sect by any means. They're notable for having invented Wings (which the Ik'Thulu don't have).
* Garmak Saints -- A Garmak Anima sect that has a long and storied history in Umbilicus. They're virtually synonymous with the Garmak Anima as a whole, which is very widespread in Garmakian culture (for good reason).
* Knights of the Whalefur -- A Whalefur Anima sect, and while definitely the most politically active, not the most popular by any stretch. They also tend to be pretty decentralized -- they have different headquarters in all three pivots which are independently run and meet together in Fishdart Rock to discuss their different branches every so often. Heavenfloor and Rocite city branches will also be independently-run half the time. Overall, they're an absolute pain to deal with if you're on their bad side (as The Roost often is).
* Tortoise Saints -- A Tortoise Anima sect. They have a lot of regional presence in New Roots -- they're by far the biggest sect out there (and New Roots is known for its sects). They've also caused a lot of trouble -- their occasionally manipulative attempts at learning Ik'Thulu mythology surrounding the Tortoise led to the Ik'Thulu main settlement being completely destroyed and is one of the main reasons the Nal'Tek have such enmity with the Pivotians. Also, while they claim to be a sect and only a sect, they have a "mercantile branch" which has some really ruthless and violent tactics for controlling the economy of New Roots, including mass-poisoning brickwort farmers, threatening to Tide Bomb the Ik'Thulu on more than one occasion, sending its members to secretly demolish industrial buildings, and so on.
* Whalesong -- The most popular Whalefur sect. Whalefur anima worship is extremely popular in New Roots, so much so that the Tortoise Saints have incorporated many of their rituals (fortunately both Whalefurs and Tortoises have exoskeletons). Whalesong is exclusively a sect and encourages its members to also exclusively belong to a sect -- to peacefully achieve personal and especially economic freedom from clans, governments, theories, etc. Whalesong is thus very popular among Vagabonds, Homesteaders that live in their boats in Malachite Lakes, and similar groups.
* Croc's Wake -- A Croc Anima sect popular among Penal Homesteaders, Voidbound Garmakians (basically death row, though their system is a bit different), and Outpost homesteaders more generally. They also have a pretty large presence among Wetfoots (Pivotians that spend a large amount of time with the Ik'Thulu for trading purposes but haven't explicitly joined them -- a bit like french fur trappers). The Croc's Wake sect emphasizes ruthless individuality at all costs.
* Rightflown -- The most popular Roc Anima sect, it's also almost exclusively made of Rocites, though it has also become a Seeding Sect ever since The Roost started converting its members. One of its virtues are great precision with the use of Wings -- an initiation rite for leadership in it is to successfully fly through the Void Winds of a Heavenly island -- something totally feasible with training and a good pair of Rocite wings, but extremely disorienting and even dangerous with Garmakian wings.
More to come.
The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Shrines
The second type of religion is something known as "Shrine worship". This is a type of religion quite common in Ik'Thulu culture that has since spread among Pivotians. All shrines discussed in this post are distinct from the Nal'Tek Eye Shrines, which are an entirely different thing, but are what started the practice of shrine worship in the first place.
In a nutshell, Shrine Worship is the practice of revering the natural forces inherent in the world as though they were entities in their own right. unlike Animas, these entities are more human-like and somewhat removed from their physical presence -- it's more that these entities are controlling natural forces and events rather than being representations of them. Some even have physical presences outside of whatever they're controlling (Void Shrines, for example, contend that there's an actual Archroc who controls the void winds by flapping its wings). Unlike Animas, Shrine religions are not pluralistic -- they each have their own main set of archetypes and they explain other phenomena through it, which contradicts the beliefs of other shrines.
Shrine religions also believe in an afterlife -- a means of joining the entity in question or becoming a similar type of entity after death. These afterlifes are universal, and erratic behavior of natural forces can be explained by the deceased having a hard time adjusting to their new bodies. There's a lot of mythology surrounding this -- for example if you're Day Shrine and you notice a Sunshadow that only comes out for an hour before going back, well that's a member of the Night Shrine who died and is having a hard time adjusting to the truth.
Shrines are so named because members of the religion build elaborate shrines to honor these natural forces and even exploit them to some extent. Day Shrines for example, are built from Quartz and will actually absorb and emit charge accordingly. These shrines serve similar functions as Icons in Anima religion -- places to gather, monuments -- but they are also venerated directly. Shrines are believed to themselves be entities of a similar nature to the entity being worshipped. A bit like inanimate Friends.
Shrine members (also known as Shrinites) are somewhat persecuted in Pivotian society. While Shrine worship isn't explicitly illegal, it's frowned upon for several reasons:
* Anima worship is the main religion of Pivotians. Every single shaman everywhere has always openly belonged to an Anima.
* Shrine worship is heavily associated with Ik'Thulu (and even Nal'Tek) culture. The Ik'Thulu, while allies and valuable trading partners, are looked down on for their more rudimentary technology and semi-nomadic lifestyle. Their lack of wings is especially looked down on, even though Ik'Thulu falling into the Void by accident is extremely rare even when crossing Doldrums.
* Shrine worship in Pivotian culture is by far the biggest point of contention among the Nal'Tek. Of all the humans in the world, only the Nal'Tek know what's really going on, and having some of that secret forbidden knowledge slipped to the Pivotians (who would exploit it technologically) greatly angers the Nal'Tek. While currently (mostly) peaceful, the Nal'Tek are dangerous -- they have a far greater grasp of how to use nature to achieve destructive ends than even the Pivotians. If Shrine Worship ever took off in Pivotian culture, the Nal'Tek would absolutely start a terrible war over it.
As a result, Shrinites tend towards secrecy. They keep their most valuable shrines hidden in Outposts, in Ik'Thulu territory, and even in the Far Isles. They sometimes rely on Clans for protection (though those Clans won't openly admit it). And, disturbingly, their numbers are growing, year by year.
Here's a complete list of Shrine religions, and some information about each of them:
* Day Shrines -- These worship the Day, the main force of which is the perfect balance between day and night and the movement of Sunshadows. They believe that when people die they become Sunshadows, and their erratic behavior is based on personality differences between people and their inability to cope with their new bodies. Day Shrines are built with Quartz and Xanthite, and set up to absorb charge during the Day and emit it during the Night, as well as powering Xanthite and emitting yellow-orange day-like light as well. Due to the prevalence of quartz charging, Day Shrines are the most popular shrine among Rocites. It's easy to find people that are Day shrinites in Brightstar islands -- they find their work to be uniquely faith-fulfilling as well as quite profitable.
* Night Shrines -- These worship the Night, specifically Ambience. They believe that the deceased are responsible for ambient fluctuations and are inherently confused -- by aligning them with good geometry, they can can help them consolidate their "tendrils" to become inverted sunshadows. Night shrines are built with Polished Axewood, Kiteleaf Leaves, and other materials with very smooth surfaces, and are arranged in patterns of useful geometry. Night Shrines are thus the most popular shrine among Garmakians. It's worth pointing out that Night Shrine building techniques are actually what led to the development of Wings -- ironically the Ik'Thulu have had Night Shrines for longer than the Pivotians have been Pivotians but never invented them. Night Shrines *also* believe in an Archroc, however this is one who lives in the Heavens (basically the Void above islands), absorbs an enormous amount of Ambience and sheds feathers into the Sea and Edge which become Sunshadows.
* Void Shrines -- They believe in the distinct presence of four entities -- the Heavens, Void, Edge and Sea are all considered to be separate infinite Void "gods", and where they interact with each other is where things such as islands or sunshadows form. Beyond this, the religion gets quite mythological and theological -- for example, Edge is the god of chaos while Void is the god of death, and they both fight one another for control (this explains both the tortoise wind and their version of "gravity"). Islands are very definitely a creation of chaos, but Heavens keeps them cyclical and discrete.
Given their lack of popularity, Void Shrines have stayed closer to their Ik'Thulu roots, which emphasize a plurality of entities that interact via things called marriages -- brief or long-lived (but very definitely temporary) connections that combine the attributes of both to create children -- phenomena that share abstract traits with both. Pivots for example are formed due to a marriage between Heavens (cyclicality) and Void (death, stasis) , while crystals are formed from a marriage between Edge (chaos) and Sea (change). Since Edge and Sea are at war with Heavens and Void in various ways, combining crystals with Pivots is taboo in Void Shrine religion, and thus Pivotian culture in general is taboo. And yet many Void Shrinites are in fact Pivotian -- some get over their hypocrisy by staying on unattached islands, others have various justifications (for example, believing that Pivot-attaching will bring The Doom, but doom is just another manifestation of the Void). Overall, Void Shrinites are a rare breed, and somewhat hard to find in Pivotian society. There's a hidden order known as the Nil Saints which actively seeks to bring about The Doom.
Each entity has a Champion -- a huge mythological creature that's responsible for some set of phenomena, and to which members of the religion will go to when they die. The Void has an enormous Roc which flaps its wings to create the Void Winds.. the Sea has a giant Tortoise which moves around to make Seastorms happen (really interesting when you look at Sea Shrine mythology). The Edge and Heavens vary.. sometimes there's a Vulun whose innumerable legs create ambience, sometimes an Edge monkey who tears land apart into islands, sometimes there's a second Roc in the Heavens to contrast the Roc in the Void, and it's actually the rocs who are married.. it varies a lot.
Void Shrinites create their shrines from Latticed Kyanite and suspend them below islands. Due to the dangers of the Void Winds, they try to do this on Heavenly islands. Kyanite is usefully protective against the Void Winds (Rocite wings use them for stabilization), but as an added bonus their color makes them practically invisible during the blue/cyan haze of Deep Day.
* Earth Shrines -- These people believe that the islands are the only things that are real -- the Edge, Void and Sea are just barriers to other universes that the islands travel between. They believe in a very large island known as "Aleph Earth" which has guided the islands this far, and returns periodically to check on its people. The sunshadows are also guides -- they move around erratically to check on the islands as ordained by Aleph Earth. In Earth Shrine worship, the islands themselves are alive -- a race of people even -- that communicate with one another through Waterfalls and move of their own volition. In their mythology, this island race is numerous -- there are billions or trillions of them moving through this universe, trying to flee a catastrope and to escape into a safer universe. This might be some kind of lingering metaphor from humanity's distant past -- Drake knowledge and very very old Ik'Thulu oral traditions indicate that humans did exactly that a very long time ago.
Earth Shriners are unique among Pivotians for preferring burial -- believing that becoming one with an island allows them to join it on its journey. Earth Shrinites also don't build shrines so much as they carve shrines into the rock of their islands.
* Sea Shrines -- These believe that the Sea is the main force in the world, whose undulations and waves and storms are caused by the movements of an enormous luminescent Tortoise who lives within it. Behind the "curtain" of Edge there is another tortoise known as the Shadowstone Tortoise and behind the Edge another Sea. These enormous twin tortoises feed on one another -- the luminescent tortoise sends water bubbles of light to the Shadowstone tortoise, and the Shadowstone tortoise grows and sheds some of its body as islands which the Sea tortoise feeds on.
Mythologically speaking, there were once two open warm (not boiling hot) seas and the exchange of islands for sunshadows was harmonious and balanced -- islands going to the Sea tortoise and sunshadows going to the Shadowstone tortoise. Both Tortoises laid eggs on the Islands and taught their children how to live there between the two, changing and evolving into things that weren't explicitly tortoises to better suit this life. However, one day the humans came, and try as the Tortoises could, they couldn't convince the humans to live in harmony with the islands. The humans would dig things up and kill too many of the tortoise children, and eventually they went after the two tortoises themselves for resources. There was then a great war between the tortoises (and their children) against the humans. As a result, the Sea tortoise made its seas boiling hot and the Shadowstone tortoise closed its sea off by a wall known as the Edge. However ancient wounds in those tortoises are still healing, which is why the seas are erratic and sunshadows sometimes invert or get sent back from the Shadowstone tortoise. Pivots are also ancient Shadowstone Tortoise weapons, and Sea Shrinites fear them and stay the hell away.
Sea Shrinites build shrines from Tortoise Shells (when they can find them -- they won't kill Tortoises, believing them to be the "true children" of the two tortoises) and similar-looking rocks. These Shrines often have flowing water and waves where they can manage them -- they're a bit like fountains in our culture. They believe that by living peacefully with the islands and the tortoise-children, when they die they can rejoin a Tortoise egg (a bit like reincarnation, except a shared joining of spirits and experiences -- The Ik'Thulu have a lot of rejoining beliefs which goes back to their ancient oral traditions telling them that they're outsiders to this universe).
Up next, I'll begin talking about the Ik'Thulu.
The second type of religion is something known as "Shrine worship". This is a type of religion quite common in Ik'Thulu culture that has since spread among Pivotians. All shrines discussed in this post are distinct from the Nal'Tek Eye Shrines, which are an entirely different thing, but are what started the practice of shrine worship in the first place.
In a nutshell, Shrine Worship is the practice of revering the natural forces inherent in the world as though they were entities in their own right. unlike Animas, these entities are more human-like and somewhat removed from their physical presence -- it's more that these entities are controlling natural forces and events rather than being representations of them. Some even have physical presences outside of whatever they're controlling (Void Shrines, for example, contend that there's an actual Archroc who controls the void winds by flapping its wings). Unlike Animas, Shrine religions are not pluralistic -- they each have their own main set of archetypes and they explain other phenomena through it, which contradicts the beliefs of other shrines.
Shrine religions also believe in an afterlife -- a means of joining the entity in question or becoming a similar type of entity after death. These afterlifes are universal, and erratic behavior of natural forces can be explained by the deceased having a hard time adjusting to their new bodies. There's a lot of mythology surrounding this -- for example if you're Day Shrine and you notice a Sunshadow that only comes out for an hour before going back, well that's a member of the Night Shrine who died and is having a hard time adjusting to the truth.
Shrines are so named because members of the religion build elaborate shrines to honor these natural forces and even exploit them to some extent. Day Shrines for example, are built from Quartz and will actually absorb and emit charge accordingly. These shrines serve similar functions as Icons in Anima religion -- places to gather, monuments -- but they are also venerated directly. Shrines are believed to themselves be entities of a similar nature to the entity being worshipped. A bit like inanimate Friends.
Shrine members (also known as Shrinites) are somewhat persecuted in Pivotian society. While Shrine worship isn't explicitly illegal, it's frowned upon for several reasons:
* Anima worship is the main religion of Pivotians. Every single shaman everywhere has always openly belonged to an Anima.
* Shrine worship is heavily associated with Ik'Thulu (and even Nal'Tek) culture. The Ik'Thulu, while allies and valuable trading partners, are looked down on for their more rudimentary technology and semi-nomadic lifestyle. Their lack of wings is especially looked down on, even though Ik'Thulu falling into the Void by accident is extremely rare even when crossing Doldrums.
* Shrine worship in Pivotian culture is by far the biggest point of contention among the Nal'Tek. Of all the humans in the world, only the Nal'Tek know what's really going on, and having some of that secret forbidden knowledge slipped to the Pivotians (who would exploit it technologically) greatly angers the Nal'Tek. While currently (mostly) peaceful, the Nal'Tek are dangerous -- they have a far greater grasp of how to use nature to achieve destructive ends than even the Pivotians. If Shrine Worship ever took off in Pivotian culture, the Nal'Tek would absolutely start a terrible war over it.
As a result, Shrinites tend towards secrecy. They keep their most valuable shrines hidden in Outposts, in Ik'Thulu territory, and even in the Far Isles. They sometimes rely on Clans for protection (though those Clans won't openly admit it). And, disturbingly, their numbers are growing, year by year.
Here's a complete list of Shrine religions, and some information about each of them:
* Day Shrines -- These worship the Day, the main force of which is the perfect balance between day and night and the movement of Sunshadows. They believe that when people die they become Sunshadows, and their erratic behavior is based on personality differences between people and their inability to cope with their new bodies. Day Shrines are built with Quartz and Xanthite, and set up to absorb charge during the Day and emit it during the Night, as well as powering Xanthite and emitting yellow-orange day-like light as well. Due to the prevalence of quartz charging, Day Shrines are the most popular shrine among Rocites. It's easy to find people that are Day shrinites in Brightstar islands -- they find their work to be uniquely faith-fulfilling as well as quite profitable.
* Night Shrines -- These worship the Night, specifically Ambience. They believe that the deceased are responsible for ambient fluctuations and are inherently confused -- by aligning them with good geometry, they can can help them consolidate their "tendrils" to become inverted sunshadows. Night shrines are built with Polished Axewood, Kiteleaf Leaves, and other materials with very smooth surfaces, and are arranged in patterns of useful geometry. Night Shrines are thus the most popular shrine among Garmakians. It's worth pointing out that Night Shrine building techniques are actually what led to the development of Wings -- ironically the Ik'Thulu have had Night Shrines for longer than the Pivotians have been Pivotians but never invented them. Night Shrines *also* believe in an Archroc, however this is one who lives in the Heavens (basically the Void above islands), absorbs an enormous amount of Ambience and sheds feathers into the Sea and Edge which become Sunshadows.
* Void Shrines -- They believe in the distinct presence of four entities -- the Heavens, Void, Edge and Sea are all considered to be separate infinite Void "gods", and where they interact with each other is where things such as islands or sunshadows form. Beyond this, the religion gets quite mythological and theological -- for example, Edge is the god of chaos while Void is the god of death, and they both fight one another for control (this explains both the tortoise wind and their version of "gravity"). Islands are very definitely a creation of chaos, but Heavens keeps them cyclical and discrete.
Given their lack of popularity, Void Shrines have stayed closer to their Ik'Thulu roots, which emphasize a plurality of entities that interact via things called marriages -- brief or long-lived (but very definitely temporary) connections that combine the attributes of both to create children -- phenomena that share abstract traits with both. Pivots for example are formed due to a marriage between Heavens (cyclicality) and Void (death, stasis) , while crystals are formed from a marriage between Edge (chaos) and Sea (change). Since Edge and Sea are at war with Heavens and Void in various ways, combining crystals with Pivots is taboo in Void Shrine religion, and thus Pivotian culture in general is taboo. And yet many Void Shrinites are in fact Pivotian -- some get over their hypocrisy by staying on unattached islands, others have various justifications (for example, believing that Pivot-attaching will bring The Doom, but doom is just another manifestation of the Void). Overall, Void Shrinites are a rare breed, and somewhat hard to find in Pivotian society. There's a hidden order known as the Nil Saints which actively seeks to bring about The Doom.
Each entity has a Champion -- a huge mythological creature that's responsible for some set of phenomena, and to which members of the religion will go to when they die. The Void has an enormous Roc which flaps its wings to create the Void Winds.. the Sea has a giant Tortoise which moves around to make Seastorms happen (really interesting when you look at Sea Shrine mythology). The Edge and Heavens vary.. sometimes there's a Vulun whose innumerable legs create ambience, sometimes an Edge monkey who tears land apart into islands, sometimes there's a second Roc in the Heavens to contrast the Roc in the Void, and it's actually the rocs who are married.. it varies a lot.
Void Shrinites create their shrines from Latticed Kyanite and suspend them below islands. Due to the dangers of the Void Winds, they try to do this on Heavenly islands. Kyanite is usefully protective against the Void Winds (Rocite wings use them for stabilization), but as an added bonus their color makes them practically invisible during the blue/cyan haze of Deep Day.
* Earth Shrines -- These people believe that the islands are the only things that are real -- the Edge, Void and Sea are just barriers to other universes that the islands travel between. They believe in a very large island known as "Aleph Earth" which has guided the islands this far, and returns periodically to check on its people. The sunshadows are also guides -- they move around erratically to check on the islands as ordained by Aleph Earth. In Earth Shrine worship, the islands themselves are alive -- a race of people even -- that communicate with one another through Waterfalls and move of their own volition. In their mythology, this island race is numerous -- there are billions or trillions of them moving through this universe, trying to flee a catastrope and to escape into a safer universe. This might be some kind of lingering metaphor from humanity's distant past -- Drake knowledge and very very old Ik'Thulu oral traditions indicate that humans did exactly that a very long time ago.
Earth Shriners are unique among Pivotians for preferring burial -- believing that becoming one with an island allows them to join it on its journey. Earth Shrinites also don't build shrines so much as they carve shrines into the rock of their islands.
* Sea Shrines -- These believe that the Sea is the main force in the world, whose undulations and waves and storms are caused by the movements of an enormous luminescent Tortoise who lives within it. Behind the "curtain" of Edge there is another tortoise known as the Shadowstone Tortoise and behind the Edge another Sea. These enormous twin tortoises feed on one another -- the luminescent tortoise sends water bubbles of light to the Shadowstone tortoise, and the Shadowstone tortoise grows and sheds some of its body as islands which the Sea tortoise feeds on.
Mythologically speaking, there were once two open warm (not boiling hot) seas and the exchange of islands for sunshadows was harmonious and balanced -- islands going to the Sea tortoise and sunshadows going to the Shadowstone tortoise. Both Tortoises laid eggs on the Islands and taught their children how to live there between the two, changing and evolving into things that weren't explicitly tortoises to better suit this life. However, one day the humans came, and try as the Tortoises could, they couldn't convince the humans to live in harmony with the islands. The humans would dig things up and kill too many of the tortoise children, and eventually they went after the two tortoises themselves for resources. There was then a great war between the tortoises (and their children) against the humans. As a result, the Sea tortoise made its seas boiling hot and the Shadowstone tortoise closed its sea off by a wall known as the Edge. However ancient wounds in those tortoises are still healing, which is why the seas are erratic and sunshadows sometimes invert or get sent back from the Shadowstone tortoise. Pivots are also ancient Shadowstone Tortoise weapons, and Sea Shrinites fear them and stay the hell away.
Sea Shrinites build shrines from Tortoise Shells (when they can find them -- they won't kill Tortoises, believing them to be the "true children" of the two tortoises) and similar-looking rocks. These Shrines often have flowing water and waves where they can manage them -- they're a bit like fountains in our culture. They believe that by living peacefully with the islands and the tortoise-children, when they die they can rejoin a Tortoise egg (a bit like reincarnation, except a shared joining of spirits and experiences -- The Ik'Thulu have a lot of rejoining beliefs which goes back to their ancient oral traditions telling them that they're outsiders to this universe).
Up next, I'll begin talking about the Ik'Thulu.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Before I get into explaining the Ik'Thulu and Nal'Tek, it would be wise to show where they are:
A rough map and a geography lesson
I've created a rough map that illustrates where various territories are in relation to one another. Note that islands aren't to scale, however their distribution is similar to how they naturally distribute in a cyclical way:
Features
* Edge -- The Edge is an infinitely-tall barrier that new islands emerge from. No one really knows what it looks like because it's surrounded by Edge Clouds -- tempestuous white and gray clouds.
* Sea -- The Sea is a boiling and churning ocean. Both the Edge and the Sea are vertical, straight (relative to "gravity") and infinitely tall.
* Doldrums -- Island distribution is cyclical -- there are areas with a lot of smaller islands clustered close together (known as a "Grove", indicated by the gray lines and circle distribution on the map), and areas where islands are bigger and more spaced out (known as a "Meadow"). There are also areas where there are hardly any islands at all, and new ones appear very rarely. These areas are known as "Doldrums". Ironically, the lack of islands makes the weather here anything but calm -- Seastorms and Edgestorms will roil through these areas, making passage through them difficult and dangerous.
* Great Doldrums -- This is an area of doldrums that is much larger than other doldrums and therefore much much more difficult to traverse.
Territory
* Far Isles -- These are the islands on the other side of the Great Doldrums. They aren't colonized at all whatsoever by any of the other tribes. Instead, they're populated by people that have left society for various reasons and/or contain the bases of super-secret organizations. They also supposedly contain a group of people known as the Lost Tribes that are neither Pivotian nor Ik'Thulu and in fact predate both of them. If these people exist, they keep to themselves and don't Waterfall or otherwise leave signs that they exist -- they probably move along waterfall passages/agate pulses the way animals do.
* Pivotian -- Pivotians are focused in three main pivots and their attached islands -- Aleph Point, New Roots and Sea Pivot, which are roughly located where they appear to be (Sea Pivot is *inside* the great doldrums a little ways, aleph point is near the edge of one, and New Roots is pretty much inside a meadow). The territory between the Pivots is also highly utilized by the Pivotians for temporary settlments such as mining operations, but there's a lot of Ik'Thulu use of the land too. By treaty, the Ik'Thulu can't use any land attached to a Pivot without permission. Not that they'd want to -- there's a lot of superstition surrounding Pivots and chained islands.
* Ik'Thulu Territory -- While the green area is officially Ik'thulu territory, that just means there isn't a significant Pivotian presence -- the Ik'Thulu aren't using a fraction of their extensive land, and they use land inside Pivotian territory as well. Much of their population lives in the Meadow in between the two Doldrums, but they're scattered far and wide.
* Nal'Tek Territory -- near the second doldrum, Nal'Tek territory begins. There's a huge amount of territorial grievances in this area which is why the dividing line is such a strange shape. Nal'Tek venture deep into Ik'Thulu territory sometimes, and vice-versa, but actual settlements are built well outside of each other's territory -- when it's not for whatever reason, there's violence. It doesn't help that neither the Ik'Thulu nor Nal'Tek are centrally organized in any meaningful way -- the Ik'Thulu have Katar Nen but that's mostly set up as a way for them to manage their relationship with the Pivotians, compile Ik'Thulu knowledge and solve the rare inter-Ik'thulu dispute. The Nal'Tek are also openly hostile for a bunch of different reasons. Despite these issues, the Ik'Thulu consider themselves to be at "peace" with them.
It's unclear how deep Nal'Tek territory goes. It's difficult to even get inside it as a Pivotian without dying.
Similarly, it's unclear how far the Far Isles extend, or what the overall extent of the world is. Wetfoot explorers have gone pretty deep into the wilds there and have told fantastic-sounding stories, but the lack of terrain knowledge and infrastructure (even Ik'Thulu infrastructure) makes travel dangerous. One common theme is the presence of an even larger doldrums, a so-called "Greatest Doldrums" or "Aleph Doldrums" with some peculiar properties, though these are different depending on who's telling the story and they're all exaggerated.
More to come.
A rough map and a geography lesson
I've created a rough map that illustrates where various territories are in relation to one another. Note that islands aren't to scale, however their distribution is similar to how they naturally distribute in a cyclical way:
Features
* Edge -- The Edge is an infinitely-tall barrier that new islands emerge from. No one really knows what it looks like because it's surrounded by Edge Clouds -- tempestuous white and gray clouds.
* Sea -- The Sea is a boiling and churning ocean. Both the Edge and the Sea are vertical, straight (relative to "gravity") and infinitely tall.
* Doldrums -- Island distribution is cyclical -- there are areas with a lot of smaller islands clustered close together (known as a "Grove", indicated by the gray lines and circle distribution on the map), and areas where islands are bigger and more spaced out (known as a "Meadow"). There are also areas where there are hardly any islands at all, and new ones appear very rarely. These areas are known as "Doldrums". Ironically, the lack of islands makes the weather here anything but calm -- Seastorms and Edgestorms will roil through these areas, making passage through them difficult and dangerous.
* Great Doldrums -- This is an area of doldrums that is much larger than other doldrums and therefore much much more difficult to traverse.
Territory
* Far Isles -- These are the islands on the other side of the Great Doldrums. They aren't colonized at all whatsoever by any of the other tribes. Instead, they're populated by people that have left society for various reasons and/or contain the bases of super-secret organizations. They also supposedly contain a group of people known as the Lost Tribes that are neither Pivotian nor Ik'Thulu and in fact predate both of them. If these people exist, they keep to themselves and don't Waterfall or otherwise leave signs that they exist -- they probably move along waterfall passages/agate pulses the way animals do.
* Pivotian -- Pivotians are focused in three main pivots and their attached islands -- Aleph Point, New Roots and Sea Pivot, which are roughly located where they appear to be (Sea Pivot is *inside* the great doldrums a little ways, aleph point is near the edge of one, and New Roots is pretty much inside a meadow). The territory between the Pivots is also highly utilized by the Pivotians for temporary settlments such as mining operations, but there's a lot of Ik'Thulu use of the land too. By treaty, the Ik'Thulu can't use any land attached to a Pivot without permission. Not that they'd want to -- there's a lot of superstition surrounding Pivots and chained islands.
* Ik'Thulu Territory -- While the green area is officially Ik'thulu territory, that just means there isn't a significant Pivotian presence -- the Ik'Thulu aren't using a fraction of their extensive land, and they use land inside Pivotian territory as well. Much of their population lives in the Meadow in between the two Doldrums, but they're scattered far and wide.
* Nal'Tek Territory -- near the second doldrum, Nal'Tek territory begins. There's a huge amount of territorial grievances in this area which is why the dividing line is such a strange shape. Nal'Tek venture deep into Ik'Thulu territory sometimes, and vice-versa, but actual settlements are built well outside of each other's territory -- when it's not for whatever reason, there's violence. It doesn't help that neither the Ik'Thulu nor Nal'Tek are centrally organized in any meaningful way -- the Ik'Thulu have Katar Nen but that's mostly set up as a way for them to manage their relationship with the Pivotians, compile Ik'Thulu knowledge and solve the rare inter-Ik'thulu dispute. The Nal'Tek are also openly hostile for a bunch of different reasons. Despite these issues, the Ik'Thulu consider themselves to be at "peace" with them.
It's unclear how deep Nal'Tek territory goes. It's difficult to even get inside it as a Pivotian without dying.
Similarly, it's unclear how far the Far Isles extend, or what the overall extent of the world is. Wetfoot explorers have gone pretty deep into the wilds there and have told fantastic-sounding stories, but the lack of terrain knowledge and infrastructure (even Ik'Thulu infrastructure) makes travel dangerous. One common theme is the presence of an even larger doldrums, a so-called "Greatest Doldrums" or "Aleph Doldrums" with some peculiar properties, though these are different depending on who's telling the story and they're all exaggerated.
More to come.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
The people of Ik'Thulu need no wings.
Instead, they get between islands and sometimes climb mountains using a technique known as Waterfalling.
Waterfalls
Islands of all kinds will have streams or even rivers that flow to the lowest points. Sometimes this might be a lake or pond, but other times, it'll be edge of an island and they'll flow off into the Void. There's quite a bit of water trapped underground and Seastorms and especially Edgestorms will replenish things, as well as slow changes by island Malachite. These off-island waterfalls (known as watervoids) will flow down until they hit the Void Winds, at which point the aqueous metal in them will turn into Metal Tiles which will rotate under the pressure and eventually fall as well. All the churning caused by metal tiles forming, blocking the passage of fast-falling water, and rotating suddenly caused the water down here to be whipped into a froth and steam so these metal tiles are rarely visible.
Water on islands responds to Agate and Inverted Agate because it's composed mostly of aqueous metal, particularly Agatite (60-70%). This was a somewhat disturbing discovery since it's also used as drinking water, but the Void Wind conversion effects don't seem to happen with water bound closely to organic material.
Anyway, if you run Agate along the surface of water and it'll be pulled towards it; Run inverted Agate over it and it'll form depressions. These effects will resist gravity, but if strong enough, they'll actually prevent gravity, or rather, redirect it some other direction inside the field. The stronger the effect, the more able they are to prevent/redirect gravity, up to a limit of 45 degrees above the plane (though anything above 0 degrees inclination and a long enough trail and geometric problems will drag it into an arc).
Every so often, Agate cores on islands will pulse. This happens the first year after the generation of an island for sure, but will happen at other times as well, usually sometime after a Triday or a Twinday or any time there's an unusual amount of charge being beamed at the island. When an agate core pulses, the waterfalls of neighboring islands will be drawn towards it for a while, and then the effect will drop off and the waterfall will slowly return to the vertical. Anything inside the waterfall will experience gravity in whatever direction the waterfall is going -- instead of a downward force, there's a horizontal force directed towards the island. It'll crash somewhere on the land mass (usually itself in water), spilling water everywhere and breaking the gravity effects. Anything caught inside the waterfall can survive if it's tough enough -- which most things can't handle that kind of impact so they starve themselves into protective eggs instead.
Waterfalling
With enough inverted agate and agate at the right places, you can change the inclination and direction of a waterfall and point it at a nearby island. If there's already someone on that island, they can open up some agate fields of their own to steer it further (putting it in water or a Kyanite platform gives you a smooth landing). If there's no one there, then there are various things you can do:
* Attaching rope and sliding "down" a waterfall is probably the safest method of passage. Once you're there, you can move things around yourself if there's infrastructure there, or just let other people come down the same way.
* In modern times, you probably have a good pair of Kyanite Boots that'll simply absorb whatever impact you make. This is incidentally why Pivotians who travel with the Ik'Thulu are known as "Wetfoots" -- Kyanite Boots are notorious for leaking.
* There are some techniques with Charged Agate that will allow you to adjust gravity somewhat to slow yourself down, but this is tricky and dangerous if not handled right (very easy to just fall into the Void).
The Ik'Thulu try to maintain solid infrastructure to deal with these problems -- as vast as Ik'Thulu territory is, a huge amount of the islands in it have things already set up for safe Waterfalling, including diagrams carved onto nearby rocks (I'll cover these, and how they set up their Agate in a later update). Major points of contact (like the route to Katar Nen) have settlements set up solely to maintain waterfalls for travellers. They also have permanent metal chains set in place -- the Ik'Thulu don't have industry so they can't make these for the rest of their islands.
Elsewhere you might have Kyanite Platforms wired to Xanthite Beacons -- if the waterfall hits the kyanite platform, it'll send charge to the Xanthite and light it up. Since neither Kyanite nor Gold nor Xanthite corrode, this is a good long-term solution.
More to come.
Instead, they get between islands and sometimes climb mountains using a technique known as Waterfalling.
Waterfalls
Islands of all kinds will have streams or even rivers that flow to the lowest points. Sometimes this might be a lake or pond, but other times, it'll be edge of an island and they'll flow off into the Void. There's quite a bit of water trapped underground and Seastorms and especially Edgestorms will replenish things, as well as slow changes by island Malachite. These off-island waterfalls (known as watervoids) will flow down until they hit the Void Winds, at which point the aqueous metal in them will turn into Metal Tiles which will rotate under the pressure and eventually fall as well. All the churning caused by metal tiles forming, blocking the passage of fast-falling water, and rotating suddenly caused the water down here to be whipped into a froth and steam so these metal tiles are rarely visible.
Water on islands responds to Agate and Inverted Agate because it's composed mostly of aqueous metal, particularly Agatite (60-70%). This was a somewhat disturbing discovery since it's also used as drinking water, but the Void Wind conversion effects don't seem to happen with water bound closely to organic material.
Anyway, if you run Agate along the surface of water and it'll be pulled towards it; Run inverted Agate over it and it'll form depressions. These effects will resist gravity, but if strong enough, they'll actually prevent gravity, or rather, redirect it some other direction inside the field. The stronger the effect, the more able they are to prevent/redirect gravity, up to a limit of 45 degrees above the plane (though anything above 0 degrees inclination and a long enough trail and geometric problems will drag it into an arc).
Every so often, Agate cores on islands will pulse. This happens the first year after the generation of an island for sure, but will happen at other times as well, usually sometime after a Triday or a Twinday or any time there's an unusual amount of charge being beamed at the island. When an agate core pulses, the waterfalls of neighboring islands will be drawn towards it for a while, and then the effect will drop off and the waterfall will slowly return to the vertical. Anything inside the waterfall will experience gravity in whatever direction the waterfall is going -- instead of a downward force, there's a horizontal force directed towards the island. It'll crash somewhere on the land mass (usually itself in water), spilling water everywhere and breaking the gravity effects. Anything caught inside the waterfall can survive if it's tough enough -- which most things can't handle that kind of impact so they starve themselves into protective eggs instead.
Waterfalling
With enough inverted agate and agate at the right places, you can change the inclination and direction of a waterfall and point it at a nearby island. If there's already someone on that island, they can open up some agate fields of their own to steer it further (putting it in water or a Kyanite platform gives you a smooth landing). If there's no one there, then there are various things you can do:
* Attaching rope and sliding "down" a waterfall is probably the safest method of passage. Once you're there, you can move things around yourself if there's infrastructure there, or just let other people come down the same way.
* In modern times, you probably have a good pair of Kyanite Boots that'll simply absorb whatever impact you make. This is incidentally why Pivotians who travel with the Ik'Thulu are known as "Wetfoots" -- Kyanite Boots are notorious for leaking.
* There are some techniques with Charged Agate that will allow you to adjust gravity somewhat to slow yourself down, but this is tricky and dangerous if not handled right (very easy to just fall into the Void).
The Ik'Thulu try to maintain solid infrastructure to deal with these problems -- as vast as Ik'Thulu territory is, a huge amount of the islands in it have things already set up for safe Waterfalling, including diagrams carved onto nearby rocks (I'll cover these, and how they set up their Agate in a later update). Major points of contact (like the route to Katar Nen) have settlements set up solely to maintain waterfalls for travellers. They also have permanent metal chains set in place -- the Ik'Thulu don't have industry so they can't make these for the rest of their islands.
Elsewhere you might have Kyanite Platforms wired to Xanthite Beacons -- if the waterfall hits the kyanite platform, it'll send charge to the Xanthite and light it up. Since neither Kyanite nor Gold nor Xanthite corrode, this is a good long-term solution.
More to come.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
A primer to the Ik'Thulu language
The Ik'Thulu language derives from the common tongue spoken by Pivotians and Ik'thulu alike (which I've represented as a particularly agglutinative variant of English with a touch of Hebrew) at various points throughout their history.
Originally, it was used in addition to the common tongue as a means of communicating over long distances -- it's designed to be yelled and to use as few syllables as possible to describe whatever the Ik'thulu are trying to communicate (usually things they're tracking down or things they've found while exploring). The history of the language is long and complex -- loan words from the common tongue have been introduced multiple times at multiple different points in history. Sometimes they're easy to see in the language (Shan and Shaman for example), other times they have a longer history (wolf --> vu'luf --> vu'lun -> vulun), in many cases the etymology is unknown and has been lost.
Similarly, meanings have changed quite a bit from the source language. Part of this is intentional -- Ik'Thulu language was designed to have short easily-yellable words so words tend to have a lot of different meanings and intent is gathered from context (particularly whatever "mission" the ik'thulu are on).
Meanwhile, Ik'Thulu words have been loaned into the common tongue many times as well. Words like "Velt" and "Garmak" aren't merely yelled, they're used to describe things as well. Some words, meanwhile, have absorbed into the Ik'Thulu common tongue but not the Pivotian common tongue, for example "Ang'Tel" (Pivotians use "Brickbeetle") or "Na'Karash" (PIvotians use "Xanthgrass"). Then you have words like "Thulu'Narag" which were agglutinated together by Pivotians and aren't used by the Ik'Thulu at all.
Names are also a weird case -- Pivotian names derive almost exclusively from Ik'Thulu words, however this has happened many times throughout the history of the Ik'Thulu language -- so you'll have something reasonable like "Tekneneas" which is understandable in modern Ik'Thulu (granted it's using an older version of the female gender), but then you'll also have something like "Yalomet" where the etymology is totally unknown.
I'd like to take a minute to go over all of the Ik'Thulu words expressed so far, their meaning and etymology (either proven by records in Katar Nen or oral records or just theorized). Note that many words have both a "short" form and a "long" form.
Individual words
I'll try to keep these lists updated.
* Angash / Ang -- insect, bug.
* Ashan -- anima, spirit, community. A lot of words have an -ash suffix, some of which makes sense if it was originally a compound word, except whatever word was attached to it has been lost in most cases. Karash, however, is definitely a loan word.
* Dolash -- disaster
* Garan / Gar -- hand, paw, foot, claw, talon, flipper, fin, hoof, etc -- this word is used for a *lot* of different things meaning whatever the end part of a limb on an animal is. It doesn't refer to wings though.
* Ikam / Ik -- main, prime, right (as in "correct" or "just"). This is believed to come from the common word "Icon" -- some old texts use the word "Icon" or "Ikan" to refer to things in a similar way to "Aleph", such as rulers or animal descriptions.
* Kak -- Cactus. A shortened form of Kak'Tes, which is a pretty obvious loanword.
* Karash -- Grass. Also clearly a loanword, though with a more turbulent etymology.
* Katar -- feast, abundance, surplus, cache, etc. Used a lot when describing large discoveries on islands.
* Lut -- Fat, cream. Sometimes oil.
* Mak -- Fruit. This can be meant in a literal sense or in a more metaphorical sense meaning something that's harvested.
* Na -- yellow. This one's easy, but given its length, its etymological theories are crazy.
* Narag -- waterwick tree, victory, connection. A bit of a strange etymology here. Narag is clearly "yellow seed", which refers to the bright yellow seeds of the waterwick tree. However the secondary meaning comes from the way waterwicks grow on their islands -- they start out grossly outnumbered but over time rise to being the largest trees that almost rival Axeroot trees. The third meaning, meanwhile, has to do with the way their roots connect to mushroom filaments.
* Nalun / Nal -- eye, also "see", "view", and things like that.
* Nen -- egg, child (especially daughter)
* Rag -- seed, child (especially son)
* Shan -- shaman (still etymologically close), medicine/poison (I'll cover why these are kinda the same word when I cover Ik'Thulu shamans), mystery
* Takun / Tak -- rock, particularly rocks that have been separated or cut and are being used for some purpose.
* Tehash / Teh -- tree
* Tek -- gift, blessing. Used a lot to refer to the actions of Anima Friends.
* Tel -- claws, pincers, vice, trap, crush
* Thulu -- people. This definitely derives from the common word "Thorough", but why that word was used to refer to people in the first place is a Shan.)
* Velt -- A general term for wheeled carts of some kind. The Ik'Thulu will use these on islands that they've settled.
* Vulun / Vu -- Wolf. As I pointed out earlier, the etymology is clearly "Wolf" -> "Vu'luf" -> "Vu'lun" -> "Vulun". The creatures referred to as Vulun have been called all four of those names at different times.
* Yol -- Vine, rope (particularly rope used in waterfalls)
Compounded words
* Ang'Tel -- Pincer bug
* Garmak -- "fruiting" hands
* Ik'Thulu -- main/right people
* Kak'lut -- cactus cream
* Kak'tes -- Loanword, meaning "cactus". Shortened form is Kak.
* Karash'Thulu -- people of the grass
* Katar Dolash -- feast of disasters
* Katar Nen -- feast of eggs
* Na'Karash -- yellow grass
* Nal'Tek -- gift of eyes
* Takstone -- mix of Tak and pivotian "stone", literally means "stone stone" which is kinda funny.
* Teh'Shan -- poison/medicine tree
* Thulu'narag -- victory of people
* Vu'Mak -- wolf fruit
* Yak'ashan -- yak anima
* Yol'Mak -- Vine fruit. Fruit here is meant in a more metaphorical sense because what's actually gathered is the nectar.
More to come.
The Ik'Thulu language derives from the common tongue spoken by Pivotians and Ik'thulu alike (which I've represented as a particularly agglutinative variant of English with a touch of Hebrew) at various points throughout their history.
Originally, it was used in addition to the common tongue as a means of communicating over long distances -- it's designed to be yelled and to use as few syllables as possible to describe whatever the Ik'thulu are trying to communicate (usually things they're tracking down or things they've found while exploring). The history of the language is long and complex -- loan words from the common tongue have been introduced multiple times at multiple different points in history. Sometimes they're easy to see in the language (Shan and Shaman for example), other times they have a longer history (wolf --> vu'luf --> vu'lun -> vulun), in many cases the etymology is unknown and has been lost.
Similarly, meanings have changed quite a bit from the source language. Part of this is intentional -- Ik'Thulu language was designed to have short easily-yellable words so words tend to have a lot of different meanings and intent is gathered from context (particularly whatever "mission" the ik'thulu are on).
Meanwhile, Ik'Thulu words have been loaned into the common tongue many times as well. Words like "Velt" and "Garmak" aren't merely yelled, they're used to describe things as well. Some words, meanwhile, have absorbed into the Ik'Thulu common tongue but not the Pivotian common tongue, for example "Ang'Tel" (Pivotians use "Brickbeetle") or "Na'Karash" (PIvotians use "Xanthgrass"). Then you have words like "Thulu'Narag" which were agglutinated together by Pivotians and aren't used by the Ik'Thulu at all.
Names are also a weird case -- Pivotian names derive almost exclusively from Ik'Thulu words, however this has happened many times throughout the history of the Ik'Thulu language -- so you'll have something reasonable like "Tekneneas" which is understandable in modern Ik'Thulu (granted it's using an older version of the female gender), but then you'll also have something like "Yalomet" where the etymology is totally unknown.
I'd like to take a minute to go over all of the Ik'Thulu words expressed so far, their meaning and etymology (either proven by records in Katar Nen or oral records or just theorized). Note that many words have both a "short" form and a "long" form.
Individual words
I'll try to keep these lists updated.
* Angash / Ang -- insect, bug.
* Ashan -- anima, spirit, community. A lot of words have an -ash suffix, some of which makes sense if it was originally a compound word, except whatever word was attached to it has been lost in most cases. Karash, however, is definitely a loan word.
* Dolash -- disaster
* Garan / Gar -- hand, paw, foot, claw, talon, flipper, fin, hoof, etc -- this word is used for a *lot* of different things meaning whatever the end part of a limb on an animal is. It doesn't refer to wings though.
* Ikam / Ik -- main, prime, right (as in "correct" or "just"). This is believed to come from the common word "Icon" -- some old texts use the word "Icon" or "Ikan" to refer to things in a similar way to "Aleph", such as rulers or animal descriptions.
* Kak -- Cactus. A shortened form of Kak'Tes, which is a pretty obvious loanword.
* Karash -- Grass. Also clearly a loanword, though with a more turbulent etymology.
* Katar -- feast, abundance, surplus, cache, etc. Used a lot when describing large discoveries on islands.
* Lut -- Fat, cream. Sometimes oil.
* Mak -- Fruit. This can be meant in a literal sense or in a more metaphorical sense meaning something that's harvested.
* Na -- yellow. This one's easy, but given its length, its etymological theories are crazy.
* Narag -- waterwick tree, victory, connection. A bit of a strange etymology here. Narag is clearly "yellow seed", which refers to the bright yellow seeds of the waterwick tree. However the secondary meaning comes from the way waterwicks grow on their islands -- they start out grossly outnumbered but over time rise to being the largest trees that almost rival Axeroot trees. The third meaning, meanwhile, has to do with the way their roots connect to mushroom filaments.
* Nalun / Nal -- eye, also "see", "view", and things like that.
* Nen -- egg, child (especially daughter)
* Rag -- seed, child (especially son)
* Shan -- shaman (still etymologically close), medicine/poison (I'll cover why these are kinda the same word when I cover Ik'Thulu shamans), mystery
* Takun / Tak -- rock, particularly rocks that have been separated or cut and are being used for some purpose.
* Tehash / Teh -- tree
* Tek -- gift, blessing. Used a lot to refer to the actions of Anima Friends.
* Tel -- claws, pincers, vice, trap, crush
* Thulu -- people. This definitely derives from the common word "Thorough", but why that word was used to refer to people in the first place is a Shan.)
* Velt -- A general term for wheeled carts of some kind. The Ik'Thulu will use these on islands that they've settled.
* Vulun / Vu -- Wolf. As I pointed out earlier, the etymology is clearly "Wolf" -> "Vu'luf" -> "Vu'lun" -> "Vulun". The creatures referred to as Vulun have been called all four of those names at different times.
* Yol -- Vine, rope (particularly rope used in waterfalls)
Compounded words
* Ang'Tel -- Pincer bug
* Garmak -- "fruiting" hands
* Ik'Thulu -- main/right people
* Kak'lut -- cactus cream
* Kak'tes -- Loanword, meaning "cactus". Shortened form is Kak.
* Karash'Thulu -- people of the grass
* Katar Dolash -- feast of disasters
* Katar Nen -- feast of eggs
* Na'Karash -- yellow grass
* Nal'Tek -- gift of eyes
* Takstone -- mix of Tak and pivotian "stone", literally means "stone stone" which is kinda funny.
* Teh'Shan -- poison/medicine tree
* Thulu'narag -- victory of people
* Vu'Mak -- wolf fruit
* Yak'ashan -- yak anima
* Yol'Mak -- Vine fruit. Fruit here is meant in a more metaphorical sense because what's actually gathered is the nectar.
More to come.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Ik'Thulu Groups
The Ik'thulu can be separated roughly into three broad groups:
* The Katar Nen Band is the group most people think of when they mention Ik'Thulu -- this group freely roams the islands, worships Ancestors, is resistant to Pivotian technology and interacts heavily with Pivotians. This group also maintain a permanent Ik'Thulu settlement which changes names and locations every few generations. The current iteration is Katar Nen.
* The Edge Band stays near the Edge and moves islands frequently. While they do send people to Katar Nen, they're on the whole pretty isolationist. They'll trade with Pivotians but they won't take them in (known as Retribing) under most circumstances. They also avoid diplomatic contact and won't go into Pivotian cities for any reason whatsoever (not that they wander far from the Edge anyway). The Edge Band are also notable for their Bloomfriends religion -- an Anima-based religion that includes a multi-animal pantheon and a lot of tie-ins to Ancestors. I'll cover this when I cover Ik'Thulu religion.
* The Karash'Thulu are pastoral and inhabit many of the desert-like islands along with the animals that they've semi-domesticated such as the Yakfur, Crawbird and Setu. They tend to be sedentary island-wise, staying on whichever islands they're on until they get too close to the Sea. However they'll freely roam around their islands in a nomadic way. Like the Katar Nen, they interact heavily with Pivotians and will take them in and sometimes join their cities, though they fit in far far worse than the Katar Nen band does. I'll cover more about the Karash'Thulu a couple updates from now.
Ik'Thulu Organization
Outside of maintaining Katar Nen, the Ik'Thulu aren't organized in any meaningful way. There are groups known as Kinclans that have their own power structure, set their own rules, claim their own territory. These Kinclans can be as small as one family on one hill to spanning multiple islands. Kinclans operate independently, settling inter-kinclan disputes through neutral and remote third-parties known as Farkin or through Katar Nen.
While "Edge Band" and "Karash'Thulu" are meaningful names for shared cultures, the Kinclans operating within them don't have overarching authorities that they answer to. Similarly, there's no centralized authority in Katar Nen that dictates rules for Ik'Thulu in general. Any Pivotian treaty can be followed, reinterpreted or just flat-out ignored, which is endlessly frustrating to the Pivotians who can at least enforce things on their end. As a result, Ik'Thulu violators of a treaty are simply thrown into the void if they can't be reasoned with. And yet despite this, if a Pivotian group breaks a treaty the Ik'Thulu will become surprisingly unified in their resistance to trade.
One of the things the Ik'Thulu are known best for (other than their lack of wings) is their overall tribal unity. Unlike the Garmakians with their caste issues and frequent civil wars or the Rocites with their competing Sects and Clans, the Ik'Thulu simply don't have Kinclan disputes that escalate into violence, and they will sometimes act in heavily unified and centralized ways despite vastly different cultures and practices.
More to come.
The Ik'thulu can be separated roughly into three broad groups:
* The Katar Nen Band is the group most people think of when they mention Ik'Thulu -- this group freely roams the islands, worships Ancestors, is resistant to Pivotian technology and interacts heavily with Pivotians. This group also maintain a permanent Ik'Thulu settlement which changes names and locations every few generations. The current iteration is Katar Nen.
* The Edge Band stays near the Edge and moves islands frequently. While they do send people to Katar Nen, they're on the whole pretty isolationist. They'll trade with Pivotians but they won't take them in (known as Retribing) under most circumstances. They also avoid diplomatic contact and won't go into Pivotian cities for any reason whatsoever (not that they wander far from the Edge anyway). The Edge Band are also notable for their Bloomfriends religion -- an Anima-based religion that includes a multi-animal pantheon and a lot of tie-ins to Ancestors. I'll cover this when I cover Ik'Thulu religion.
* The Karash'Thulu are pastoral and inhabit many of the desert-like islands along with the animals that they've semi-domesticated such as the Yakfur, Crawbird and Setu. They tend to be sedentary island-wise, staying on whichever islands they're on until they get too close to the Sea. However they'll freely roam around their islands in a nomadic way. Like the Katar Nen, they interact heavily with Pivotians and will take them in and sometimes join their cities, though they fit in far far worse than the Katar Nen band does. I'll cover more about the Karash'Thulu a couple updates from now.
Ik'Thulu Organization
Outside of maintaining Katar Nen, the Ik'Thulu aren't organized in any meaningful way. There are groups known as Kinclans that have their own power structure, set their own rules, claim their own territory. These Kinclans can be as small as one family on one hill to spanning multiple islands. Kinclans operate independently, settling inter-kinclan disputes through neutral and remote third-parties known as Farkin or through Katar Nen.
While "Edge Band" and "Karash'Thulu" are meaningful names for shared cultures, the Kinclans operating within them don't have overarching authorities that they answer to. Similarly, there's no centralized authority in Katar Nen that dictates rules for Ik'Thulu in general. Any Pivotian treaty can be followed, reinterpreted or just flat-out ignored, which is endlessly frustrating to the Pivotians who can at least enforce things on their end. As a result, Ik'Thulu violators of a treaty are simply thrown into the void if they can't be reasoned with. And yet despite this, if a Pivotian group breaks a treaty the Ik'Thulu will become surprisingly unified in their resistance to trade.
One of the things the Ik'Thulu are known best for (other than their lack of wings) is their overall tribal unity. Unlike the Garmakians with their caste issues and frequent civil wars or the Rocites with their competing Sects and Clans, the Ik'Thulu simply don't have Kinclan disputes that escalate into violence, and they will sometimes act in heavily unified and centralized ways despite vastly different cultures and practices.
More to come.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Intro to Ik'Thulu religion
My next set of updates focuses on Ik'Thulu religion. Ik'Thulu religion is far more diverse and syncretic than Pivotian religion, and has influenced Pivotian religion many many times. They also know a decent amount of Forbidden Lore -- religious knowledge shared with the Nal'Tek and absolutely forbidden to tell the Pivotians under any circumstances. The Nal'Tek don't fully trust the Ik'Thulu with all of it, so Ik'Thulu religions are scattered and fragmented. Ik'Thulu groups will form theories and new religious movements which will grow, merge with other movements, or disperse. Over time this has led to a lot of very different beliefs and even entirely different types of religions, including the Anima one which was taken over by Pivotian culture a long time ago.
I'll cover *some* of the forbidden lore, hinting at some of the things mentioned so far. I'll cover quite a bit more during the Nal'Tek update, though not all of it.
Before any of that though I need to cover some things general to human religion that I haven't mentioned yet:
Thul'ashans (Ashans)
Something both Pivotians and Ik'Thulu have in common is the belief in "Thul'ashans" (lit. person spirit), which are also just known as "Ashans" in Pivotian culture. I might use them interchangeably here, but note that "Ashan" by itself in ik'thulu culture normally refers to Animas. The basic idea is a kind of animating spirit in humans that is active as long as they are alive, a bit like our concept of "spirit" or "soul", except without any of our other ideas attached. It's the primary force behind Willmaking -- the act of furthering some overarching personal or societal goal. However it isn't tied to personality -- personality is believed to be inherent to the body (and ultimately, the earth) rather than the Thul'ashan.
Death is seen as the event where the Ashan leaves the body, in contrast with our concept where death happens first and that causes the soul to leave. In human culture here, the Ashan simply ascends at some point and this is what causes death, whether it's through natural causes or violence. If an Ashan isn't ready to leave yet, then the person will be wounded (maybe severely) but the Ashan will cause them to recover. Ashans are thus closely tied to medicinal concepts.
When an Ashan leaves the body, various things might happen depending on the religion. If you're an Anima-worshipper, or maybe just a Pivotian in general, then you believe in "The mystery" -- the general idea that no one knows wtf happens after death because no one ever came back from it. There's a general consensus that you'll pass through the Sea in some way, but no one quite knows what an ashan *is* or how it interacts with things or anything really. The mystery is an ancient belief that predates human arrival in the world, or so ancient Ik'Thulu and Drake records say. Whatever the case, you leave your personality and life behind and go off to do whatever.
Shamans
While shamans have multiple purposes in human society, one of their fundamental jobs is to finish or at least bring closure to an unfinished act of Willmaking after that person's death. This is a bit like helping ghosts "move on", except it has nothing to do with the Ashan, which is already off doing whatever it is Ashans do. Instead, it's a way of tying up loose ends, bringing closure to loved ones and promoting overall social cohesion. Whatever crazy project you dedicate your life to, Shamans will find some way to finish it if you die prematurely.
The Pathing Rite
To find out your will, the shamans will initiate a ritual known as "The Pathing Rite":
* Shamans will sit by your body, which has ideally been coated in fat or oil or frozen with inverted Ruby or *something* to preserve it. They can also use Wing Nodes if the family has kept those for whatever reason.
* They will then take light entheogens such as Eyefish oil or Seerwort.
* They will then engage in a meditative practice known as keening -- a kind of forced entry into a mental space. They will keen into your body's personality.
* Once there, they will then engage in a meditative practice known as yawning -- an opening of the Shaman's mind to infinite possibilities.
* They will then initiate the chimera -- a wakeful dream-like state where the Shaman surrenders all mental control to whatever their mind conjures up from the keening and yawning. They'll persist here until they come up from the entheogen.
* At this point they'll at least have a "Path" -- a means of accessing the person's personality again regardless of their mental state or physical location. Now the body can be disposed of in whatever way the family sees fit (literally throwing it into the Void is usually the preferred choice).
The Hunting Rite
If your body has already been thrown into the void or is otherwise inaccessible, Shamans can still find the Path through a "Hunting Rite":
* Objects that the person used frequently in life, particularly close personal posessions like Wings or jewelry are the best choice here. If nothing like that exists, Shamans can use close family members and friends and/or just generally work through the Thulteh but that's highly recommended against without advanced training due to the presence of Maelstroms of various kinds. Slipping off the Thulteh can lead to some really horrible outcomes for the family and sometimes the Shaman as well. Even pets such as Setu are better -- keening into animals is significantly harder but their connection to the Thulteh is at least pure.
* Anyway, the Shaman has some personal effect of the deceased. For Pivotians this is almost universally going to be Wings. For Ik'Thulu, Scythes or Ruby Knives are a safe bet. Things made of wood, rock or metal are preferred over crystals, but things like personal crystal tools are used so frequently that their Lamash won't matter.
* Like before, the Shaman will take a light entheogen. However, they will prepare a stronger entheogen for later use.
* The Shaman will then keen into the personal effect with a different technique depending on the material -- wood is by far the easiest to keen into, so if there's any wood on the item at all they'll go there. Rock and metal require stronger concentration due to their lack of Lamash, whereas crystals have the opposite problem. Animal products like bones or fur are similar to wood except that requires at least a little bit of animal keening training due to marrow barriers. Heavily processed products (like from Garmakian industry) you can keen into based on what the original source material was, but they're difficult to enter because of Thulteh residue -- in those cases you can break or otherwise heavily damage the object and then bury it in dirt for a day and it'll become easy to enter again.
* Once inside, they might fully finish the Pathing rite if the family wants the object back or something so that they can resume this later.
* Once the shaman is ready for the next step, the stronger entheogen will be taken. Senalun is usually the best choice -- very easy to predict its dose and its raw ingredients are common and heavily traded by the Ik'Thulu. However, many shamans are opposed to industrialized drugs due to Thulteh residue, and other shamans are turned off by the specific mixture, as the three plants involved aren't harmonic. So sometimes things like Drake's Apple or Bulbfrog Root or even actual Bulbfrog Venom is used. If you're in the harmonic camp, then you can bridge the herbs with Tae'malan or Thystbloom and process the drug yourself -- though that can be some work. There's been some work to mass-industrialize the bridged drug in Earth's Maw that looks promising.
* Anyway, whichever entheogen is chosen, it will be taken at this stage, at a short-duration dose. Unless they're using Senalun and have great faith in it, they'll perform a greeting before the entheogen kicks in -- a mostly superstitious means of ensuring the experience will go well. Outside of Bulbfrog venom, all medium-tier entheogens are plant-based so the greeting really isn't necessary. If you're taking Bulbfrog Venom, you're probably an Ik'Thulu so you're going to be greeting everything -- there's an old joke about Ik'Thulu shamans greeting Jadeberry wine after every sip.
* When the second entheogen kicks in, the mental space will have expanded quite a bit. The Shaman will now search it for its owner-specific Thulteh residue. Since medium-tier entheogens are hallucinogenic, this will usually appear as a mountain or floating ball or some other monstrous archetype in the mindspace. The shaman will seek it out and keen into it, or if their keen-sense has become a chimera, they'll instead visually move into it.
* Once inside the residue's mindspace, the Shaman will wait to come up from the medium-tier entheogen. Ideally shamans have been trained to avoid Maelstroms in here, but even if they wander, they're at least circular and stay within the mindspace.
* The shaman is now keened into the owner's residue inside the physical object but is only experiencing the effects of the low-tier entheogen. At this stage they'll initiate a tortoise chimera -- a kind of chimera where the person is moving sideways as though they were following the tortoise wind. Eventually, they should reach some kind of destination and the "sideways gravity" will cease.
* When they come up from the low-tier entheogen, they should have the Path of the deceased. If they don't or are unsure if they do, they'll initiate a "yank" -- a high dose of the medium-tier entheogen and a complete relinquishing of shamanic control during the experience, including an abject lack of greeting. While yanks tend to take a mental/emotional toll on a Shaman, they're very effective for finding a Path when the Hunting Rite fails. If they *still* don't have a Path then there's some kind of Thulteh trickery going on, and the shaman will defer to someone more advanced.
More to come.
My next set of updates focuses on Ik'Thulu religion. Ik'Thulu religion is far more diverse and syncretic than Pivotian religion, and has influenced Pivotian religion many many times. They also know a decent amount of Forbidden Lore -- religious knowledge shared with the Nal'Tek and absolutely forbidden to tell the Pivotians under any circumstances. The Nal'Tek don't fully trust the Ik'Thulu with all of it, so Ik'Thulu religions are scattered and fragmented. Ik'Thulu groups will form theories and new religious movements which will grow, merge with other movements, or disperse. Over time this has led to a lot of very different beliefs and even entirely different types of religions, including the Anima one which was taken over by Pivotian culture a long time ago.
I'll cover *some* of the forbidden lore, hinting at some of the things mentioned so far. I'll cover quite a bit more during the Nal'Tek update, though not all of it.
Before any of that though I need to cover some things general to human religion that I haven't mentioned yet:
Thul'ashans (Ashans)
Something both Pivotians and Ik'Thulu have in common is the belief in "Thul'ashans" (lit. person spirit), which are also just known as "Ashans" in Pivotian culture. I might use them interchangeably here, but note that "Ashan" by itself in ik'thulu culture normally refers to Animas. The basic idea is a kind of animating spirit in humans that is active as long as they are alive, a bit like our concept of "spirit" or "soul", except without any of our other ideas attached. It's the primary force behind Willmaking -- the act of furthering some overarching personal or societal goal. However it isn't tied to personality -- personality is believed to be inherent to the body (and ultimately, the earth) rather than the Thul'ashan.
Death is seen as the event where the Ashan leaves the body, in contrast with our concept where death happens first and that causes the soul to leave. In human culture here, the Ashan simply ascends at some point and this is what causes death, whether it's through natural causes or violence. If an Ashan isn't ready to leave yet, then the person will be wounded (maybe severely) but the Ashan will cause them to recover. Ashans are thus closely tied to medicinal concepts.
When an Ashan leaves the body, various things might happen depending on the religion. If you're an Anima-worshipper, or maybe just a Pivotian in general, then you believe in "The mystery" -- the general idea that no one knows wtf happens after death because no one ever came back from it. There's a general consensus that you'll pass through the Sea in some way, but no one quite knows what an ashan *is* or how it interacts with things or anything really. The mystery is an ancient belief that predates human arrival in the world, or so ancient Ik'Thulu and Drake records say. Whatever the case, you leave your personality and life behind and go off to do whatever.
Shamans
While shamans have multiple purposes in human society, one of their fundamental jobs is to finish or at least bring closure to an unfinished act of Willmaking after that person's death. This is a bit like helping ghosts "move on", except it has nothing to do with the Ashan, which is already off doing whatever it is Ashans do. Instead, it's a way of tying up loose ends, bringing closure to loved ones and promoting overall social cohesion. Whatever crazy project you dedicate your life to, Shamans will find some way to finish it if you die prematurely.
The Pathing Rite
To find out your will, the shamans will initiate a ritual known as "The Pathing Rite":
* Shamans will sit by your body, which has ideally been coated in fat or oil or frozen with inverted Ruby or *something* to preserve it. They can also use Wing Nodes if the family has kept those for whatever reason.
* They will then take light entheogens such as Eyefish oil or Seerwort.
* They will then engage in a meditative practice known as keening -- a kind of forced entry into a mental space. They will keen into your body's personality.
* Once there, they will then engage in a meditative practice known as yawning -- an opening of the Shaman's mind to infinite possibilities.
* They will then initiate the chimera -- a wakeful dream-like state where the Shaman surrenders all mental control to whatever their mind conjures up from the keening and yawning. They'll persist here until they come up from the entheogen.
* At this point they'll at least have a "Path" -- a means of accessing the person's personality again regardless of their mental state or physical location. Now the body can be disposed of in whatever way the family sees fit (literally throwing it into the Void is usually the preferred choice).
The Hunting Rite
If your body has already been thrown into the void or is otherwise inaccessible, Shamans can still find the Path through a "Hunting Rite":
* Objects that the person used frequently in life, particularly close personal posessions like Wings or jewelry are the best choice here. If nothing like that exists, Shamans can use close family members and friends and/or just generally work through the Thulteh but that's highly recommended against without advanced training due to the presence of Maelstroms of various kinds. Slipping off the Thulteh can lead to some really horrible outcomes for the family and sometimes the Shaman as well. Even pets such as Setu are better -- keening into animals is significantly harder but their connection to the Thulteh is at least pure.
* Anyway, the Shaman has some personal effect of the deceased. For Pivotians this is almost universally going to be Wings. For Ik'Thulu, Scythes or Ruby Knives are a safe bet. Things made of wood, rock or metal are preferred over crystals, but things like personal crystal tools are used so frequently that their Lamash won't matter.
* Like before, the Shaman will take a light entheogen. However, they will prepare a stronger entheogen for later use.
* The Shaman will then keen into the personal effect with a different technique depending on the material -- wood is by far the easiest to keen into, so if there's any wood on the item at all they'll go there. Rock and metal require stronger concentration due to their lack of Lamash, whereas crystals have the opposite problem. Animal products like bones or fur are similar to wood except that requires at least a little bit of animal keening training due to marrow barriers. Heavily processed products (like from Garmakian industry) you can keen into based on what the original source material was, but they're difficult to enter because of Thulteh residue -- in those cases you can break or otherwise heavily damage the object and then bury it in dirt for a day and it'll become easy to enter again.
* Once inside, they might fully finish the Pathing rite if the family wants the object back or something so that they can resume this later.
* Once the shaman is ready for the next step, the stronger entheogen will be taken. Senalun is usually the best choice -- very easy to predict its dose and its raw ingredients are common and heavily traded by the Ik'Thulu. However, many shamans are opposed to industrialized drugs due to Thulteh residue, and other shamans are turned off by the specific mixture, as the three plants involved aren't harmonic. So sometimes things like Drake's Apple or Bulbfrog Root or even actual Bulbfrog Venom is used. If you're in the harmonic camp, then you can bridge the herbs with Tae'malan or Thystbloom and process the drug yourself -- though that can be some work. There's been some work to mass-industrialize the bridged drug in Earth's Maw that looks promising.
* Anyway, whichever entheogen is chosen, it will be taken at this stage, at a short-duration dose. Unless they're using Senalun and have great faith in it, they'll perform a greeting before the entheogen kicks in -- a mostly superstitious means of ensuring the experience will go well. Outside of Bulbfrog venom, all medium-tier entheogens are plant-based so the greeting really isn't necessary. If you're taking Bulbfrog Venom, you're probably an Ik'Thulu so you're going to be greeting everything -- there's an old joke about Ik'Thulu shamans greeting Jadeberry wine after every sip.
* When the second entheogen kicks in, the mental space will have expanded quite a bit. The Shaman will now search it for its owner-specific Thulteh residue. Since medium-tier entheogens are hallucinogenic, this will usually appear as a mountain or floating ball or some other monstrous archetype in the mindspace. The shaman will seek it out and keen into it, or if their keen-sense has become a chimera, they'll instead visually move into it.
* Once inside the residue's mindspace, the Shaman will wait to come up from the medium-tier entheogen. Ideally shamans have been trained to avoid Maelstroms in here, but even if they wander, they're at least circular and stay within the mindspace.
* The shaman is now keened into the owner's residue inside the physical object but is only experiencing the effects of the low-tier entheogen. At this stage they'll initiate a tortoise chimera -- a kind of chimera where the person is moving sideways as though they were following the tortoise wind. Eventually, they should reach some kind of destination and the "sideways gravity" will cease.
* When they come up from the low-tier entheogen, they should have the Path of the deceased. If they don't or are unsure if they do, they'll initiate a "yank" -- a high dose of the medium-tier entheogen and a complete relinquishing of shamanic control during the experience, including an abject lack of greeting. While yanks tend to take a mental/emotional toll on a Shaman, they're very effective for finding a Path when the Hunting Rite fails. If they *still* don't have a Path then there's some kind of Thulteh trickery going on, and the shaman will defer to someone more advanced.
More to come.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
I realize the last post was somewhat dense with technical jargon, so I'd like to take a minute to clarify some things:
Shamanic Substance Categories
Shamanic substances can be roughly separated into four categories:
* Light Entheogens -- These make shamanic "passage techniques" like keening and yawning easier to do. These techniques can also be achieved through skilled meditation, but the use of entheogens makes them more accessible to less-skilled practitioners.
* Medium-tier entheogens -- These are more potent and basically hallucinogens -- mindspaces (i'll cover this term in another section, but basically think "mental states") will expand greatly in size and detail and entire senses may become "chimeric" -- meaning that the individual sensations are themselves expansive and hallucinogenic so a lot of techniques simply won't work and you'll instead have to visualize or literally move towards your objective.
Medium-tier entheogens are useful for techniques that require deeper passage, such as finding residue inside of other residue or navigating the Thulteh.
* Aleph entheogens -- All senses, including less touch-based ones like sight become chimeric. Reality and thought become indistinguishable. Navigation of mindspaces becomes inordinately difficult as the expansion and hallucinogenic processes are recursive. Additionally, things like memory and sense of self start to turn chimeric (if they haven't gone that way already).
Aleph entheogens are useful in bypassing hard barriers such as time, life/death, self/unself, and so on. They tend to be used in an information-gathering or reality-altering kind of way, rather than to solve a specific problem. The exception here is the "yank" technique, which will make a medium-tier entheogen briefly cross into aleph territory in order to cross over some insurmountable barrier.
* Nil entheogens -- At this level, everything is recursively chimeric and totally indescribable. Chimeras freely flow into one another. The passage between individual sensations in a chimeric experience slow way down subjectively and take on an "eternal" nature. The Ashan becomes entirely detached from the mindspace -- unable to influence or move through it but is at least in its purest form.
Given its properties, nil entheogens have no techniques associated with them (the thing capable of remembering the technique and the thing capable of performing it have both gone chimeric and turned into recursive mindspaces in their own right). Instead, they're used to cause specific experiences conducive to some training or otherwise overarching goal.
Shamanic Substances
* Eyefish oil -- A light entheogen, created by refining the oil of the Eyefish -- a fish whose body naturally produces some psychoactive compounds. Eyefish oil is more popular on Malachite Lakes and any island that has close trade connections with them.
* Seerwort -- Another light entheogen, the leaves of a low-growing bush. While Seerwort isn't common by any means, it's a much better source for islands that don't have close trading access to malachite lakes. There have been attempts to farm it, but its psychoactive potency seems to be dictated by its proximity to other Seerwort plants.
* Senalun -- A medium-tier entheogen created by processing Seerwort Nectar, Bootvine Fiber, and the Ik'thulu spice Lilak'nen. Seerwort nectar by itself contains the same compounds as Seerwort leaves in higher concentrations, however they're chemically bound together and aren't really bioavailable. Lilak'nen contains a compound which inhibits drug-metabolizing enzymes and thus drastically increases the potency of a drug for a short duration -- this compound is also not bioavailable. Bootvine fiber, meanwhile, makes both of these compounds very bioavailable and increases their metabolism as well. As a result, you get a much much higher dose of Seerwort after a bit of a delay, with a reasonably short duration.
To process Senalun, Bootvine Fiber and Lilak'nen are both dried and ground into a thin powder. This mixture is then mixed in with Seerwort Nectar, forming a kind of paste which is slowly heated and kinetically agitated (ideally via Kyanite Needles) to help it dissolve together. This product is then frozen and cut cleanly into dose-sized pieces. Each piece will be wrapped with some kind of nonstick leaf, for example Sleekwort. Senalun keeps pretty much indefinitely and its dose is highly precise and very easy to customize, making it the most popular medium-tier entheogen. There are a couple problems for people concerned with alchemical harmonics or Thulteh residue, which I'll cover later.
* Drake's Apple -- A hard fruit that develops undergound, a bit like the peanut, although larger (about the size of a yellow squash). Fruits that haven't yet ripened contain a strong entheogen in the skin with the same name that acts as a potent pesticide. Over time this diffuses through the rest of the fruit and then the ripening process causes it to metabolize. Drake's Apples are pretty uniform for a plant-based drug -- the size of the fruit dictates the potency of the drug. That, plus their neat package, makes them a suitable replacement for Senalun.
* Bulbfrog Venom -- The venom of a rather bulbous and very slow-moving frog. Given their shape and slow movement, they make good prey, so they've evolved fast-acting venom that will leach out their skin -- a potent paralytic and hallucinogen designed to make the predator confused and limp. While there are anti-paralytic antidote herbs available, Ik'Thulu Shamans actually prefer to go paralytic when using it.
* Bulbfrog Root -- The root of a short woody tree found primarily on semi-mushroom islands. It has similar hallucinogenic effects as Bulbfrog venom, however instead of being a paralyic, it's an anxiolytic. Bulbfrog Root experiences are thus quite pleasant. Unfortunately the dose varies a lot without any real rhyme or reason -- shorter root tips are believed to have shorter durations, but this doesn't seem to be universal across all varieties of the plant. Given the overall preference for Bulbfrog Root, there have been a lot of attempts to homogenize and streamline its dose, though refinement tends to destroy the anxiolytic properties that make it useful in the first place.
More to come.
Shamanic Substance Categories
Shamanic substances can be roughly separated into four categories:
* Light Entheogens -- These make shamanic "passage techniques" like keening and yawning easier to do. These techniques can also be achieved through skilled meditation, but the use of entheogens makes them more accessible to less-skilled practitioners.
* Medium-tier entheogens -- These are more potent and basically hallucinogens -- mindspaces (i'll cover this term in another section, but basically think "mental states") will expand greatly in size and detail and entire senses may become "chimeric" -- meaning that the individual sensations are themselves expansive and hallucinogenic so a lot of techniques simply won't work and you'll instead have to visualize or literally move towards your objective.
Medium-tier entheogens are useful for techniques that require deeper passage, such as finding residue inside of other residue or navigating the Thulteh.
* Aleph entheogens -- All senses, including less touch-based ones like sight become chimeric. Reality and thought become indistinguishable. Navigation of mindspaces becomes inordinately difficult as the expansion and hallucinogenic processes are recursive. Additionally, things like memory and sense of self start to turn chimeric (if they haven't gone that way already).
Aleph entheogens are useful in bypassing hard barriers such as time, life/death, self/unself, and so on. They tend to be used in an information-gathering or reality-altering kind of way, rather than to solve a specific problem. The exception here is the "yank" technique, which will make a medium-tier entheogen briefly cross into aleph territory in order to cross over some insurmountable barrier.
* Nil entheogens -- At this level, everything is recursively chimeric and totally indescribable. Chimeras freely flow into one another. The passage between individual sensations in a chimeric experience slow way down subjectively and take on an "eternal" nature. The Ashan becomes entirely detached from the mindspace -- unable to influence or move through it but is at least in its purest form.
Given its properties, nil entheogens have no techniques associated with them (the thing capable of remembering the technique and the thing capable of performing it have both gone chimeric and turned into recursive mindspaces in their own right). Instead, they're used to cause specific experiences conducive to some training or otherwise overarching goal.
Shamanic Substances
* Eyefish oil -- A light entheogen, created by refining the oil of the Eyefish -- a fish whose body naturally produces some psychoactive compounds. Eyefish oil is more popular on Malachite Lakes and any island that has close trade connections with them.
* Seerwort -- Another light entheogen, the leaves of a low-growing bush. While Seerwort isn't common by any means, it's a much better source for islands that don't have close trading access to malachite lakes. There have been attempts to farm it, but its psychoactive potency seems to be dictated by its proximity to other Seerwort plants.
* Senalun -- A medium-tier entheogen created by processing Seerwort Nectar, Bootvine Fiber, and the Ik'thulu spice Lilak'nen. Seerwort nectar by itself contains the same compounds as Seerwort leaves in higher concentrations, however they're chemically bound together and aren't really bioavailable. Lilak'nen contains a compound which inhibits drug-metabolizing enzymes and thus drastically increases the potency of a drug for a short duration -- this compound is also not bioavailable. Bootvine fiber, meanwhile, makes both of these compounds very bioavailable and increases their metabolism as well. As a result, you get a much much higher dose of Seerwort after a bit of a delay, with a reasonably short duration.
To process Senalun, Bootvine Fiber and Lilak'nen are both dried and ground into a thin powder. This mixture is then mixed in with Seerwort Nectar, forming a kind of paste which is slowly heated and kinetically agitated (ideally via Kyanite Needles) to help it dissolve together. This product is then frozen and cut cleanly into dose-sized pieces. Each piece will be wrapped with some kind of nonstick leaf, for example Sleekwort. Senalun keeps pretty much indefinitely and its dose is highly precise and very easy to customize, making it the most popular medium-tier entheogen. There are a couple problems for people concerned with alchemical harmonics or Thulteh residue, which I'll cover later.
* Drake's Apple -- A hard fruit that develops undergound, a bit like the peanut, although larger (about the size of a yellow squash). Fruits that haven't yet ripened contain a strong entheogen in the skin with the same name that acts as a potent pesticide. Over time this diffuses through the rest of the fruit and then the ripening process causes it to metabolize. Drake's Apples are pretty uniform for a plant-based drug -- the size of the fruit dictates the potency of the drug. That, plus their neat package, makes them a suitable replacement for Senalun.
* Bulbfrog Venom -- The venom of a rather bulbous and very slow-moving frog. Given their shape and slow movement, they make good prey, so they've evolved fast-acting venom that will leach out their skin -- a potent paralytic and hallucinogen designed to make the predator confused and limp. While there are anti-paralytic antidote herbs available, Ik'Thulu Shamans actually prefer to go paralytic when using it.
* Bulbfrog Root -- The root of a short woody tree found primarily on semi-mushroom islands. It has similar hallucinogenic effects as Bulbfrog venom, however instead of being a paralyic, it's an anxiolytic. Bulbfrog Root experiences are thus quite pleasant. Unfortunately the dose varies a lot without any real rhyme or reason -- shorter root tips are believed to have shorter durations, but this doesn't seem to be universal across all varieties of the plant. Given the overall preference for Bulbfrog Root, there have been a lot of attempts to homogenize and streamline its dose, though refinement tends to destroy the anxiolytic properties that make it useful in the first place.
More to come.
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alynnidalar
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Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Are keening/yawning/yanking/etc. "real"--that is, are shamans actually accessing a dead person's personality, or is it simply a hallucinogenic ritual believed to do this?
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Shamanic techniques are very definitely accessing "residue", which is a kind of personality imprint accessible from physical objects -- or more accurately, personality itself is caused by the interaction of earth residue (aka Lamash and Lesser Lamash) and links to the Thulteh. Such residues are permanent, and after death become static, though over time they become harder and harder to access as physical objects change or people/animals linked in the Thulteh also die.Are keening/yawning/yanking/etc. "real"--that is, are shamans actually accessing a dead person's personality, or is it simply a hallucinogenic ritual believed to do this?
However, as long as you have a Path, you have a permanent link to the residue that you can access at any time and at any entheogenic state (or lack thereof). Thus, most Shamanic technique is concerned with finding these Paths through various means, rather than accessing the actual residue, which is pretty intuitive in most cases. For some reason, Paths seem to be tied to Ashans rather than a shaman's personality -- even if you keen inside a shaman you're not going to find any of their Paths that *they* found, and when a Shaman dies, all those Paths are lost.
The absolute crux of Shamanic practice (outside of controlled mental states like the chimera) is something known as the "keen-sense" or just "keen", a subtle sense somewhere in between touch and hearing in terms of furl --- roughly equivalent to pain actually (in fact, it's theorized that pain and keen are variations of the same thing since they also both go chimeric at roughly the same level). Its subtlety isn't that bad either -- high enough to where naturally recongizing it is rare, but low enough to where it doesn't take years of practice to recognize and distinguish it. People that aren't shamans or shamanically-inclined are using it in the background without realizing it -- sometimes it goes brash and non-shamans will get an overwhelming intuition or "gut feeling" about something.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Reviving this. It's been a while, so I'm going to take a bit of a break from Ik'Thulu stuff for the time being.
A primer on Wings
The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings. The Pivotians, however, find them absolutely essential to traversing the Winged Isles (name of the world). One of the reasons the Ik'Thulu can't just use them occasionally is because they're mounted to implanted structures in a person's body and finely controlled by a person's well-trained muscles. The reasons the Ik'thulu have no wings is a bit more complicated than that though -- part of it derives from the taboo nature of Agate and its relation to The Doom, while another part is its reliance on chaotic forces in order to stay away from the Void. There's also a lot of traditionalism dictating the use of Waterfalling for navigation instead. I'll probably cover some of this when I get back to the Ik'Thulu.
In Pivotian society, children that come of age are given Wing Nodes -- wide Agate cylinders that are implanted and fused to shoulder blades. The skin surrounding them is exposed to a variety of herbs that make them stronger and more gum-like or cuticle-like to prevent infection and other complications down the road. Rocites tend to ritualize the timing of Wing Nodes (doing it during an Inversion or Triday or some other significant period of time), while Garmakians do it as soon as humanly possible because of their society's overreliance on wings.
Wings also have a pair of Agate cylinders (Known as Wing Mounts) which can attach to Wing Nodes. Remember that Agate is significantly stronger when attached at a 180 degree angle -- this means that in one orientation, they can be pulled off with a bit of force, and in the other orientation, they're more connected to you than your bones are to each other.
Attached to these Wing Mounts is a squat diamond-shaped object known as The Pen. They're typically constructed of metal or some other hard object, though wooden pens aren't unheard of and the agile Rightflown Banshans used Takarash (a special construction of dried and hardened Na'Karash) during the war of the vulun king.
Inside The Pen are the actual Wings, known also as Winglets to avoid ambiguity. Winglets are thin metal/Quartz constructions that are accordion-like in their furled form, and are straight with some interesting geometry in their unfurled form. Connecting each winglet to the Pen is a long curved Kyanite quill, usually just known as a Quill. There are four sets of Winglets on each side of the diamond. When fully unfurled, Winglets are quite large -- twice the width of a person each.
The way Wings work is that the Winglet geometry captures and focuses ambient fluctuations into ambient pulses (or AP for short if you're a Garmakian). This is then curved around the Kyanite quills and translated into lift. Left unchecked, a typical set of Rocite Wings can lift an average human up at about 20-30ft per second. Garmakian wings are far better and can sustain speeds of about 50-100ft per second, though this requires a lot of compromises in terms of orientation control. I'll get to their differences in a bit.
Kyanite
To explain how Wings change orientation and stabilize themselves, I first need to talk a bit about Kyanite.
Kyanite is a cyan-colored Crystal with a variety of properties. Depending on its geometric shape and what it's fed with, it can:
* Turn charge into momentum
* Turn momentum into charge
* Absorb momentum
* Pass momentum from end to end
Basically, if you want a side to absorb momentum, it needs to be flat, and if you want a side to emit or absorb charge, it needs to be tapered (though still flat at the end). The weird construction of Kyanite Platforms is done to diffuse momentum without ruining whatever the platform is housed by (with wings in particular, you don't want jettisoned momentum to break you or your wings). Some are quite elaborate.
Inverted Kyanite has weird cyclical properties. While it's heavily researched because of a variety of very useful effects, it isn't widely adopted for anything, so I won't cover it at the moment.
Pivotian machinery and other advanced technology (particularly Harp Gates) is heavily reliant on Kyanite, so much so that machines are colloquially referred to as "kyans".
Pretty much every Kyanite construction has some kind of long tube in it. The reason for this is that like Onyx, kyanite transport of energy is directional, so by hitting it with charge or momentum from the side, you can interrupt the flow of the main construction. So wings for example are stabilized by hitting the sides of Quills with a bit of charge or momentum. This will interrupt the flow of momentum and make the wings lift more slowly. The momentum lost in this way doesn't just disappear, it turns into a pocket of inverted space perpendicular to both flows -- so if the quill is flowing along the X axis and it gets hit by charge along the Y axis, it'll create a pocket of inverted space somewhere along the Z axis. Inverted space tends to do nothing more than to locally increase ambient fluctuations, but is pretty useful with other Pivotian technology which I'll cover later.
Getting back to Wings
Given these principles, wing lift can be slowed by hitting it with a bit of charge (or looping some of the momentum itself back around, with a toggle-able gate). It can also be oriented by rotating the quills -- with different angles you can lift in different angles, roll/"turn" along various axises, and so on. You can also get more exaggerated movements by furling some wings and leaving others unfurled. Wings tend to include some kind of machinery that translates the wing's orientation on the shoulders into these various orientations. The wearer can then just move their shoulders around to get their wings to do different things.
Given the fact that you can move your shoulders individually and that orientation changes are based on relative positions from whichever way you're currently facing, wing use requires quite a bit of training so you don't randomly smash into walls. Making things worse, wing movesets have evolved away from the intuitive and towards deep levels of control and customization. If you haven't been using wings since childhood you're probably going to have a hard time learning the skill.
Differences between Garmakian and Rocite wings
Garmakians mostly use wings to move up and down towers and get around their city easier. Their wings are thus geared for ascending, with rapid furling for descent, and some amount of rotation to allow horizontal movement. The main way they do this is by connecting all the quills into one "Spine" which can be rotated or moved on its own. Garmakian wings are a lot simpler to operate, and given various means of consolidating this and other types of machinery they're quite fast and precise with ascents. With Rocite wings, an inclination of 3-5 degrees from the vertical is considered very precise, while Garmakian wings boast an inclination no more than 1/1000th of a degree. This essentially means that you can scale an entire Garmakian tower, Lowfloor to Heavenfloor without moving an inch.
Rocite wings, meanwhile, offer a lot more control over individual quill movements. This unfortunately means that aligning them all to one orientation is quite difficult. Even if they have some design specification for it, over time the positions of the quills will shift because they move around a lot. There's always some kind of non-aligned quill as well, which creates drag on movement speed. Where Rocite wings shine, then, is in their ability to travel horizontally as well as to roll/yaw really quickly. Horizontal movement is extremely useful in Rocite islands where settlements are spread way out and neighboring islands are reachable by wings. Rolling and Yawing is absolutely vital for staying oriented correctly while traveling through Void Winds or other unfavorable conditions. Rocite wings can even travel quite well through storms (provided you have the training for it).
More to come. Next section will probably be worm gates.
A primer on Wings
The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings. The Pivotians, however, find them absolutely essential to traversing the Winged Isles (name of the world). One of the reasons the Ik'Thulu can't just use them occasionally is because they're mounted to implanted structures in a person's body and finely controlled by a person's well-trained muscles. The reasons the Ik'thulu have no wings is a bit more complicated than that though -- part of it derives from the taboo nature of Agate and its relation to The Doom, while another part is its reliance on chaotic forces in order to stay away from the Void. There's also a lot of traditionalism dictating the use of Waterfalling for navigation instead. I'll probably cover some of this when I get back to the Ik'Thulu.
In Pivotian society, children that come of age are given Wing Nodes -- wide Agate cylinders that are implanted and fused to shoulder blades. The skin surrounding them is exposed to a variety of herbs that make them stronger and more gum-like or cuticle-like to prevent infection and other complications down the road. Rocites tend to ritualize the timing of Wing Nodes (doing it during an Inversion or Triday or some other significant period of time), while Garmakians do it as soon as humanly possible because of their society's overreliance on wings.
Wings also have a pair of Agate cylinders (Known as Wing Mounts) which can attach to Wing Nodes. Remember that Agate is significantly stronger when attached at a 180 degree angle -- this means that in one orientation, they can be pulled off with a bit of force, and in the other orientation, they're more connected to you than your bones are to each other.
Attached to these Wing Mounts is a squat diamond-shaped object known as The Pen. They're typically constructed of metal or some other hard object, though wooden pens aren't unheard of and the agile Rightflown Banshans used Takarash (a special construction of dried and hardened Na'Karash) during the war of the vulun king.
Inside The Pen are the actual Wings, known also as Winglets to avoid ambiguity. Winglets are thin metal/Quartz constructions that are accordion-like in their furled form, and are straight with some interesting geometry in their unfurled form. Connecting each winglet to the Pen is a long curved Kyanite quill, usually just known as a Quill. There are four sets of Winglets on each side of the diamond. When fully unfurled, Winglets are quite large -- twice the width of a person each.
The way Wings work is that the Winglet geometry captures and focuses ambient fluctuations into ambient pulses (or AP for short if you're a Garmakian). This is then curved around the Kyanite quills and translated into lift. Left unchecked, a typical set of Rocite Wings can lift an average human up at about 20-30ft per second. Garmakian wings are far better and can sustain speeds of about 50-100ft per second, though this requires a lot of compromises in terms of orientation control. I'll get to their differences in a bit.
Kyanite
To explain how Wings change orientation and stabilize themselves, I first need to talk a bit about Kyanite.
Kyanite is a cyan-colored Crystal with a variety of properties. Depending on its geometric shape and what it's fed with, it can:
* Turn charge into momentum
* Turn momentum into charge
* Absorb momentum
* Pass momentum from end to end
Basically, if you want a side to absorb momentum, it needs to be flat, and if you want a side to emit or absorb charge, it needs to be tapered (though still flat at the end). The weird construction of Kyanite Platforms is done to diffuse momentum without ruining whatever the platform is housed by (with wings in particular, you don't want jettisoned momentum to break you or your wings). Some are quite elaborate.
Inverted Kyanite has weird cyclical properties. While it's heavily researched because of a variety of very useful effects, it isn't widely adopted for anything, so I won't cover it at the moment.
Pivotian machinery and other advanced technology (particularly Harp Gates) is heavily reliant on Kyanite, so much so that machines are colloquially referred to as "kyans".
Pretty much every Kyanite construction has some kind of long tube in it. The reason for this is that like Onyx, kyanite transport of energy is directional, so by hitting it with charge or momentum from the side, you can interrupt the flow of the main construction. So wings for example are stabilized by hitting the sides of Quills with a bit of charge or momentum. This will interrupt the flow of momentum and make the wings lift more slowly. The momentum lost in this way doesn't just disappear, it turns into a pocket of inverted space perpendicular to both flows -- so if the quill is flowing along the X axis and it gets hit by charge along the Y axis, it'll create a pocket of inverted space somewhere along the Z axis. Inverted space tends to do nothing more than to locally increase ambient fluctuations, but is pretty useful with other Pivotian technology which I'll cover later.
Getting back to Wings
Given these principles, wing lift can be slowed by hitting it with a bit of charge (or looping some of the momentum itself back around, with a toggle-able gate). It can also be oriented by rotating the quills -- with different angles you can lift in different angles, roll/"turn" along various axises, and so on. You can also get more exaggerated movements by furling some wings and leaving others unfurled. Wings tend to include some kind of machinery that translates the wing's orientation on the shoulders into these various orientations. The wearer can then just move their shoulders around to get their wings to do different things.
Given the fact that you can move your shoulders individually and that orientation changes are based on relative positions from whichever way you're currently facing, wing use requires quite a bit of training so you don't randomly smash into walls. Making things worse, wing movesets have evolved away from the intuitive and towards deep levels of control and customization. If you haven't been using wings since childhood you're probably going to have a hard time learning the skill.
Differences between Garmakian and Rocite wings
Garmakians mostly use wings to move up and down towers and get around their city easier. Their wings are thus geared for ascending, with rapid furling for descent, and some amount of rotation to allow horizontal movement. The main way they do this is by connecting all the quills into one "Spine" which can be rotated or moved on its own. Garmakian wings are a lot simpler to operate, and given various means of consolidating this and other types of machinery they're quite fast and precise with ascents. With Rocite wings, an inclination of 3-5 degrees from the vertical is considered very precise, while Garmakian wings boast an inclination no more than 1/1000th of a degree. This essentially means that you can scale an entire Garmakian tower, Lowfloor to Heavenfloor without moving an inch.
Rocite wings, meanwhile, offer a lot more control over individual quill movements. This unfortunately means that aligning them all to one orientation is quite difficult. Even if they have some design specification for it, over time the positions of the quills will shift because they move around a lot. There's always some kind of non-aligned quill as well, which creates drag on movement speed. Where Rocite wings shine, then, is in their ability to travel horizontally as well as to roll/yaw really quickly. Horizontal movement is extremely useful in Rocite islands where settlements are spread way out and neighboring islands are reachable by wings. Rolling and Yawing is absolutely vital for staying oriented correctly while traveling through Void Winds or other unfavorable conditions. Rocite wings can even travel quite well through storms (provided you have the training for it).
More to come. Next section will probably be worm gates.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
A primer on Worm Gates
The other big piece of Pivotian technology is the "Worm Gate" -- this technology ties into both the instant-transportation Harp Gates and the infinite-measurement Worm Scanners, which I'll cover individually. There are also a lot of varieties of Harp Gates which I've mentioned elsewhere and will cover here as well.
Interruptable Crystals
The first component of this technology are what are know as "Interruptable Crystals" -- these are crystals whose effect happens on some axis, and can be halted when charge/etc is applied on a perpendicular axis. Whatever's passing through it won't just disappear, it will instead turn into a pocket of "Inverted space" along the third axis. Inverted space tends to disappear very quickly -- it will locally influence ambient fluctuations or sometimes provide a mild attractive force, but it is usually very short-lived. The kind produced by Onyx is a very powerful exception, however.
If you pass charge through one side of an Onyx crystal and Inversion through another side on the X axis, they'll flow out the correct opposing sides. If you push in a bit of charge or inversion from the Y axis, then both the charge and inversion will disappear and a pocket of inverted space will appear along the Z axis. This type of inverted space is quite stable and quite strong as well. It can last up to about 30 seconds before dissipating, while other types are split-second manifestations.
While experimenting with stable inverted space, the Garmakians noticed that while mildly attractive to matter, inverted space is extremely attractive to other inverted space, and if spaced at the right distance, the two would fuse into an even stronger, even longer-lasting pocket of inverted space, collapsing the space between them into nothing. With a chain of inverted space, you could create a "tunnel" from one end to the other so that things arriving in one end would exit the other side instantaneously despite moving over the distance of the chain. These manifestations are known as Worm Gates and are basically comparable to portals, except that they require the construction of multiple pockets of inverted space.
Worm Gates
As exciting as this development was, the Garmakians quickly ran into problems when they tried to connect inverted space over long regions. You could easily determine the direction that the inverted space would be thrown by changing the proportions of inversion and charge (and charge was quite easy to come by), and change the distance by the magnitude of the total charge+inversion. With short distances, increasing charge wasn't a big deal, but with larger distances seemed to come almost exponential increases in charge.
Each time a pocket of inverted space connected with another pocket of inverted space, they could "reach out" to another pocket roughly twice as far away as they were from each other. So for a worm gate 4m in length, you'd need only pockets at 1m, 2m and 4m. The Garmakians assumed that the distance a worm gate could travel was based on the strength of the inverted space, so in their early trials they threw pockets as far as they could with enormous amounts of charge, and were limited by the amount of charge they could actually throw at the problem. Shortages of power were thus very common in Garmakian society around this time, which eventually caused a lot of social upheaval and even revolt in the case of the Mawhand Rebellion.
Eventually, though, it was discovered that the strength of the attractive force was based on the amount of steps taken rather than the distance of those steps from each other. Inverted space at 1m, 2m and 4m would attract just as much as inverted space at 1cm, 2cm and 4cm, despite costing considerably less charge to set up. So instead, the Garmakians developed a prototype design known as a Synchronous Gate.
Synchronous Gates
A synchronous gate is a pair of worm gate generating machines separated some distance apart. The first machine, known as the Mouth, would create a chain of inverted space separated from each other in increasing amounts of space, starting at the very very very small. The second machine, known as the Tail, would create a single pocket of inverted space that the worm gate chain at the mouth would be attracted to. Both machines would have to be synchronized so the Tail pocket was created right after the last Mouth pocket. If the calculations were right, you could successfully transport things and people between the two gates over whatever the lifespan of the combined inverted space pocket was for relatively minimal charge.
The problem, though, was synchronizing the machines to create gates at the correct time. Small-scale Synchronous gates had wires made of sympathetic metals running through them -- while this was definitely a better solution than flying between those two places, this was not a good solution for inter-island travel.
Eventually though, a timepiece called a Harp was invented. This fixed the last problem with Worm Gates and created the inter-island Harp Gates still used today.
Harps
The basic idea of a Harp is that you take some metal that resonates when you pass momentum through it (for example, those used in musical harps) and pass momentum to it via a Kyanite Tube. It will then translate the momentum into a wave, which when it peaks, will pass through a kyanite lens into the next array, effectively doubling the timing of the next array's pulses. With a very fast initial timing in the original array and some different connections to different points in the harp, you can get some very precise timing. This allows you to synchronize far-off harp gates, create timetables to connect one gate to several destinations over the course of a day, and so on.
Harp Gate Improvements
Due in no small part to the civil wars caused by the implementation of harp gates, a number of improvements have been made to Harp Gates over time:
* Synchronization -- once every few weeks, harp gates will connect for the sole purpose of synchronizing their Harps through a wire that runs through the worm gate. Harp gates do sometimes get misaligned from each other. It's usually not a big deal because the window for them staying open is quite large, but the drift can sometimes disconnect them from each other and then people have to fly out with a reference harp to get them connected again.
* Power monitoring and hot-swapping crystals -- Since harp gate timing requires continuous power, some systems have been set up to show when quartz crystals are getting low, and also to allow you to switch crystals out without interrupting power flow (by having multiple crystals attached). Garmakians don't really require this because their towers provide continuous and reliable power from ambient fluctuations, however Rocites have had entire colonies vanish during wartime due to faulty crystals.
* Lesser Harp Gates -- these gates are physically close to one another and tend to use wires for syncing purposes. Their power requirement due to these differences is very very low, making them perfect fits for in-island colony travel.
* Auto-syncing gates -- a reasonably new technology, gates of this type both have wires that will connect together once the gate connects, synchronizing their harps automatically. The staging area for these wires takes up a bit of room though, so colonists in particular are reluctant to upgrade their gates.
Harp Gate Timetables
The timing of different harp gate connections have gotten quite complicated over time. While it would be sanest to connect capitol cities of different Pivots together and then have another set to connect a capitol with neighboring colonies, the schedule is instead this jumbled mess that changes over time according to economic requirements and city partnering. Inside a Garmakian city, you'll typically find heavenfloor gates that connect to other heavenfloors in the same city, giving about a minute for each jump. Finding the best route to a particular tower can sometimes be an exercise in madness and flying around might honestly be a better option. Each gate does at least track which gates it connects to and when, but it doesn't necessarily track where *those* gates lead so sometimes you just have to wander around and hope for the best. Capitols tend to be more organized and track things better, so it should be smart to just travel to the Capitol and figure out your route from there -- the problem with that is that Capitol traffic is extremely congested.
Given all the insanity, it's made a lot of sense to just create new harp gates with different schedules -- the problem is that the owners of these stand to profit immensely by making specific connections, so it ends up just creating even more chaos.
If you're a native Pivotian you kind of have a feel for how settlements are connected and how to reach anywhere from anywhere, including shortcuts and alternate routes. Your internal map of this changes a lot over time. If, however, you're an Ik'Thulu or particularly if you're a returning Wetfoot, you'll find yourself hopelessly lost and confused. You'll also be sharing the gate with foot traffic, wing traffic, birds, and huge winged shipments of goods, which can definitely take some getting used to. Harp gates tend to be quite large (because why not), but they can be quite disorienting to travel through if you're not used to the two-way three-dimensional traffic. Additionally, Harp Gates don't necessarily make use of Frames around the actual gate -- so sometimes you're going from one patch of land to another patch of land that looks exactly the same with no indication that there's even a gate there.
Harp Gate Safety
Harp Gates are quite safe to travel through. The biggest danger is walking or flying into someone/something else. The way inverted space works, if any part of you is touching one side of the gate, the other side will pull you out whether the gate still exists or not. The appearance of travelers from seemingly thin air at the end of a worm gate run is quite common, as is missing the window and stepping to the other side of the origin point where the gate used to be. If there's no delay between gates, it's also possible to step into one exit point and emerge from the wrong one as the gate changes over. People monitoring the Gates will usually give you warnings of this, but you're not necessarily listening for them. It seems like every Pivotian has a hilarious story of being separated from their party and then having to navigate the labyrinthine clusterfuck to find them again only to end up in some remote colony that gets gate connections once per week at most.
Up next: Worm Scanners.
The other big piece of Pivotian technology is the "Worm Gate" -- this technology ties into both the instant-transportation Harp Gates and the infinite-measurement Worm Scanners, which I'll cover individually. There are also a lot of varieties of Harp Gates which I've mentioned elsewhere and will cover here as well.
Interruptable Crystals
The first component of this technology are what are know as "Interruptable Crystals" -- these are crystals whose effect happens on some axis, and can be halted when charge/etc is applied on a perpendicular axis. Whatever's passing through it won't just disappear, it will instead turn into a pocket of "Inverted space" along the third axis. Inverted space tends to disappear very quickly -- it will locally influence ambient fluctuations or sometimes provide a mild attractive force, but it is usually very short-lived. The kind produced by Onyx is a very powerful exception, however.
If you pass charge through one side of an Onyx crystal and Inversion through another side on the X axis, they'll flow out the correct opposing sides. If you push in a bit of charge or inversion from the Y axis, then both the charge and inversion will disappear and a pocket of inverted space will appear along the Z axis. This type of inverted space is quite stable and quite strong as well. It can last up to about 30 seconds before dissipating, while other types are split-second manifestations.
While experimenting with stable inverted space, the Garmakians noticed that while mildly attractive to matter, inverted space is extremely attractive to other inverted space, and if spaced at the right distance, the two would fuse into an even stronger, even longer-lasting pocket of inverted space, collapsing the space between them into nothing. With a chain of inverted space, you could create a "tunnel" from one end to the other so that things arriving in one end would exit the other side instantaneously despite moving over the distance of the chain. These manifestations are known as Worm Gates and are basically comparable to portals, except that they require the construction of multiple pockets of inverted space.
Worm Gates
As exciting as this development was, the Garmakians quickly ran into problems when they tried to connect inverted space over long regions. You could easily determine the direction that the inverted space would be thrown by changing the proportions of inversion and charge (and charge was quite easy to come by), and change the distance by the magnitude of the total charge+inversion. With short distances, increasing charge wasn't a big deal, but with larger distances seemed to come almost exponential increases in charge.
Each time a pocket of inverted space connected with another pocket of inverted space, they could "reach out" to another pocket roughly twice as far away as they were from each other. So for a worm gate 4m in length, you'd need only pockets at 1m, 2m and 4m. The Garmakians assumed that the distance a worm gate could travel was based on the strength of the inverted space, so in their early trials they threw pockets as far as they could with enormous amounts of charge, and were limited by the amount of charge they could actually throw at the problem. Shortages of power were thus very common in Garmakian society around this time, which eventually caused a lot of social upheaval and even revolt in the case of the Mawhand Rebellion.
Eventually, though, it was discovered that the strength of the attractive force was based on the amount of steps taken rather than the distance of those steps from each other. Inverted space at 1m, 2m and 4m would attract just as much as inverted space at 1cm, 2cm and 4cm, despite costing considerably less charge to set up. So instead, the Garmakians developed a prototype design known as a Synchronous Gate.
Synchronous Gates
A synchronous gate is a pair of worm gate generating machines separated some distance apart. The first machine, known as the Mouth, would create a chain of inverted space separated from each other in increasing amounts of space, starting at the very very very small. The second machine, known as the Tail, would create a single pocket of inverted space that the worm gate chain at the mouth would be attracted to. Both machines would have to be synchronized so the Tail pocket was created right after the last Mouth pocket. If the calculations were right, you could successfully transport things and people between the two gates over whatever the lifespan of the combined inverted space pocket was for relatively minimal charge.
The problem, though, was synchronizing the machines to create gates at the correct time. Small-scale Synchronous gates had wires made of sympathetic metals running through them -- while this was definitely a better solution than flying between those two places, this was not a good solution for inter-island travel.
Eventually though, a timepiece called a Harp was invented. This fixed the last problem with Worm Gates and created the inter-island Harp Gates still used today.
Harps
The basic idea of a Harp is that you take some metal that resonates when you pass momentum through it (for example, those used in musical harps) and pass momentum to it via a Kyanite Tube. It will then translate the momentum into a wave, which when it peaks, will pass through a kyanite lens into the next array, effectively doubling the timing of the next array's pulses. With a very fast initial timing in the original array and some different connections to different points in the harp, you can get some very precise timing. This allows you to synchronize far-off harp gates, create timetables to connect one gate to several destinations over the course of a day, and so on.
Harp Gate Improvements
Due in no small part to the civil wars caused by the implementation of harp gates, a number of improvements have been made to Harp Gates over time:
* Synchronization -- once every few weeks, harp gates will connect for the sole purpose of synchronizing their Harps through a wire that runs through the worm gate. Harp gates do sometimes get misaligned from each other. It's usually not a big deal because the window for them staying open is quite large, but the drift can sometimes disconnect them from each other and then people have to fly out with a reference harp to get them connected again.
* Power monitoring and hot-swapping crystals -- Since harp gate timing requires continuous power, some systems have been set up to show when quartz crystals are getting low, and also to allow you to switch crystals out without interrupting power flow (by having multiple crystals attached). Garmakians don't really require this because their towers provide continuous and reliable power from ambient fluctuations, however Rocites have had entire colonies vanish during wartime due to faulty crystals.
* Lesser Harp Gates -- these gates are physically close to one another and tend to use wires for syncing purposes. Their power requirement due to these differences is very very low, making them perfect fits for in-island colony travel.
* Auto-syncing gates -- a reasonably new technology, gates of this type both have wires that will connect together once the gate connects, synchronizing their harps automatically. The staging area for these wires takes up a bit of room though, so colonists in particular are reluctant to upgrade their gates.
Harp Gate Timetables
The timing of different harp gate connections have gotten quite complicated over time. While it would be sanest to connect capitol cities of different Pivots together and then have another set to connect a capitol with neighboring colonies, the schedule is instead this jumbled mess that changes over time according to economic requirements and city partnering. Inside a Garmakian city, you'll typically find heavenfloor gates that connect to other heavenfloors in the same city, giving about a minute for each jump. Finding the best route to a particular tower can sometimes be an exercise in madness and flying around might honestly be a better option. Each gate does at least track which gates it connects to and when, but it doesn't necessarily track where *those* gates lead so sometimes you just have to wander around and hope for the best. Capitols tend to be more organized and track things better, so it should be smart to just travel to the Capitol and figure out your route from there -- the problem with that is that Capitol traffic is extremely congested.
Given all the insanity, it's made a lot of sense to just create new harp gates with different schedules -- the problem is that the owners of these stand to profit immensely by making specific connections, so it ends up just creating even more chaos.
If you're a native Pivotian you kind of have a feel for how settlements are connected and how to reach anywhere from anywhere, including shortcuts and alternate routes. Your internal map of this changes a lot over time. If, however, you're an Ik'Thulu or particularly if you're a returning Wetfoot, you'll find yourself hopelessly lost and confused. You'll also be sharing the gate with foot traffic, wing traffic, birds, and huge winged shipments of goods, which can definitely take some getting used to. Harp gates tend to be quite large (because why not), but they can be quite disorienting to travel through if you're not used to the two-way three-dimensional traffic. Additionally, Harp Gates don't necessarily make use of Frames around the actual gate -- so sometimes you're going from one patch of land to another patch of land that looks exactly the same with no indication that there's even a gate there.
Harp Gate Safety
Harp Gates are quite safe to travel through. The biggest danger is walking or flying into someone/something else. The way inverted space works, if any part of you is touching one side of the gate, the other side will pull you out whether the gate still exists or not. The appearance of travelers from seemingly thin air at the end of a worm gate run is quite common, as is missing the window and stepping to the other side of the origin point where the gate used to be. If there's no delay between gates, it's also possible to step into one exit point and emerge from the wrong one as the gate changes over. People monitoring the Gates will usually give you warnings of this, but you're not necessarily listening for them. It seems like every Pivotian has a hilarious story of being separated from their party and then having to navigate the labyrinthine clusterfuck to find them again only to end up in some remote colony that gets gate connections once per week at most.
Up next: Worm Scanners.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
It's been three years since the last update, so I'm switching focus again (though the Worm Scanner does actually tie into this update).
The far reaches of the world
In this section, I'll aggregate a lot of the knowledge and rumors the Pivotians and Ik'Thulu have about the farthest reaches of the world. This isn't exhaustive but it does cover all the major points. The Nal'Tek also have a large wealth of knowledge that far surpasses what's here, but they're extremely secretive and don't share it with other peoples.
Knowledge Storage
The knowledge described here is religiously aggregated in Katar Nen, Jade Hills and Crowrod. In the case of Pivotians, they store this information in Jade Monoliths (which are better at transcription), whereas the Ik'Thulu prefer Jade Tablets (which are way easier to move). The Ik'Thulu also have a tendency of discarding information irrelevant to their way of life and/or compacting information into a shorter format. Anything extremely important will be compacted repeatedly and will eventually pass into their Ragatar (oral history basically).
The differences here have to do with fundamental differences in their societies -- the Pivotians are able to stay in one place forever and their society is more organized, so larger structures that can be transferred around to other parts of society easier are preferred, whereas the Ik'Thulu have to move their central settlement every so often, so being able to pack it up and move it easily is essential.
I'll get to these storage objects (and the crystal that powers them) eventually, but a good summary for them is the ability to store written information in a very small format (a bit like microfilm). They're also printed on crystal, so they're extremely durable compared to something more fragile like Waterwick Panes.
The written language the Pivotians/Ik'Thulu use is pretty weird -- half logographic and half abjad, with the letters vaguely approximating roman letters. There are three separate logographic number systems that are used in different ways -- A base-60 number system that's very clearly derived from a base-10 system that's used for science, a base-33 logographic number system that's used for measuring time and world cycles, and a base-10 system for everyday use and in wide use by the Ik'Thulu, who like you and me have 10 fingers and lack wings. There are 60 distinct number words in the Ik'Thulu language, and Ik'Thulu number words are also used by the Pivotians for some reason. I'll get to all of this at some point.
The role of Worm Scanners
Worm Scanners are a relatively new technology that allows someone to read infinite data in order to make broad conclusions about natural phenomena. Without getting into the technical specifics (that'll be soon), they compress an infinite series of potential conditional events into a finite timeframe and then read whether the Plumb Bob returns or not. What the output here means depends on how the conditions were set up, but with physical structures the Plumb Bob returning means a structure is not infinitely long. There's also a very new technique called Curve Mapping that allows for more specific measurements once you've ruled out infinity, provided you're willing to wait for long periods of time to get the accuracy you want.
A lot of newer knowledge about the structure of the world was found out through Worm Scanners, for example the fact that the Edge and Sea are both infinitely tall. However, as good as the technology is at confirming infinity, it's not so good at identifying finite states when infinity isn't directly confirmed. For example, the Plumb Bob is returning when measuring an Edge horizontally, but that could either mean that the world is finite or there's just something in the way.
Anyway, onto some actual knowledge:
The Edge
The Edge is the infinitely-tall wall that new islands come from. It's covered in white and gray clouds that are visible from pretty far away (sunshadows permitting) and a thick fog if you get close enough. The gray coloring doesn't make physical sense, so it's theorized that something in them or behind them is sucking light out, possibly inverted sunshadows. Strangely if you get close enough to the clouds, they actually form a smooth, flat surface. Like the gray coloring, this makes no physical sense. If you add steam to it, the steam will merge with the existing clouds and maintain its smoothness once it enters that region.
The Winged Isles don't have infinite visibility -- they are lit up by the dim purple of Night and the smaller radiuses of Sunshadows. If you're at the Edge and you look up or down you're not going to see infinity, it'll be black after a while. Sunshadows seem to exclusively pop out along the narrow vertical plane where islands exist (though above them a bit); they don't appear further up where some light could illuminate farther-away sections of the Edge. Similarly, whatever's happening in the Edgefield (Clouds layer) doesn't ever produce storms, so there also aren't lightning flashes.
As mentioned, the Worm Scanners have determined that the Edge is infinitely tall. They also can't pinpoint whether it's infinite or finite horizontally -- even if you go several miles up and scan horizontally the plumb bob will still return. It's possible that the islands are ascending or descending slightly with respect to distance, things are different further away, or there's just something else out there. Or the world/edge are finite. Using Curve Mapping at a high height is a promising idea -- this would tell you where the barrier is, and you could measure at different heights to try to figure out a pattern. Unfortunately this technique is still in its infancy and getting the gigantic scanner needed to fly up several miles is a ludicrous task. The work Earth's Maw is doing to miniaturize scanners for Lakjos and his crew is a promising way to fix that problem, so maybe eventually it'll be possible.
Behind the Edgefield, where the combination of cloud and fog is the thickest, is a gaseous gray wall called the Veil. Because the moisture is so thick, it's hard to tell if the Edge is actually gray. Regardless though at some point there's a gray wall with no visibility beyond it. Islands that are half out will simply disappear beyond that wall, and so you could probably claim that the wall is the actual Edge -- the problem though is that the Edgefield is equally flat despite the clouds' tumultuous movements, and you can't reach the Veil without passing through the cloud layer. The Edgefield is both perfectly straight and also perfectly perpendicular to gravity -- this has been proven with worm scanners.
The physical space inside the Edgefield, for lack of a better word, weird. If you don't go into the Veil and just hang out in the Edgefield you can still return, but it takes significantly longer than you'd expect. Islands that are passing through it on their way out of the Edge seem to be much longer than should be physically possible, and markings made along the length with random unique symbols every foot seem to either repeat or create entirely new random symbols that weren't written in totally unpredictable ways. The only reasonable explanation for the latter case is that something in the edge is messing with uniform causality, but that wouldn't explain why patterns of symbols would instead sometimes repeat. Physical objects such as ropes that run from one end to the other seem to be longer than they should be, with unique fraying on the previously nonexisting parts. Overall it's highly strange and doesn't make a lot of sense. A lot of the experimentation here happened with a previous exploration group known as the Verge Ghosts, a thoroughly ironic name given what eventually happened.
The Veil is an actual gray barrier (at least it appears gray). It isn't dangerous or anything, you can put your hand in it if you want or poke it with a stick -- however things in there get pulled relative to how much of them go in. Putting your fingertips in is going to make them heavier than normal (like they were made out of metal), but you can still pull them out easily. Putting a hand in will require more exertion to pull it back out, though as you do the pull will drop off because less of you is inside the Edge. Put enough of yourself in there and you'll fall in and snap whatever rope you're attached to or even metal chains.
You can however put just your face in to look around -- what was found is that it's very dark in there. So no problem, bring some external light in -- except the light also gets pulled relative to its distance, effectively making it dark. The most bizarre part of the area beyond the Veil is that the islands cease to exist -- if you reach down you'd expect to find some land basically level to where you're standing but apparently the islands don't exist on the other side of the Veil. Similarly, Sunshadows will come out of the Edge but won't be visible on the other side -- it's hard to tell if they don't exist or the light just doesn't work right because you don't want to get close enough to a Sunshadow to confirm its existence.
There were some other discoveries about the Edge, like its acoustic properties and the way it interacted with Crystals, but I'll have to get to them later. It's pretty late as is.
The far reaches of the world
In this section, I'll aggregate a lot of the knowledge and rumors the Pivotians and Ik'Thulu have about the farthest reaches of the world. This isn't exhaustive but it does cover all the major points. The Nal'Tek also have a large wealth of knowledge that far surpasses what's here, but they're extremely secretive and don't share it with other peoples.
Knowledge Storage
The knowledge described here is religiously aggregated in Katar Nen, Jade Hills and Crowrod. In the case of Pivotians, they store this information in Jade Monoliths (which are better at transcription), whereas the Ik'Thulu prefer Jade Tablets (which are way easier to move). The Ik'Thulu also have a tendency of discarding information irrelevant to their way of life and/or compacting information into a shorter format. Anything extremely important will be compacted repeatedly and will eventually pass into their Ragatar (oral history basically).
The differences here have to do with fundamental differences in their societies -- the Pivotians are able to stay in one place forever and their society is more organized, so larger structures that can be transferred around to other parts of society easier are preferred, whereas the Ik'Thulu have to move their central settlement every so often, so being able to pack it up and move it easily is essential.
I'll get to these storage objects (and the crystal that powers them) eventually, but a good summary for them is the ability to store written information in a very small format (a bit like microfilm). They're also printed on crystal, so they're extremely durable compared to something more fragile like Waterwick Panes.
The written language the Pivotians/Ik'Thulu use is pretty weird -- half logographic and half abjad, with the letters vaguely approximating roman letters. There are three separate logographic number systems that are used in different ways -- A base-60 number system that's very clearly derived from a base-10 system that's used for science, a base-33 logographic number system that's used for measuring time and world cycles, and a base-10 system for everyday use and in wide use by the Ik'Thulu, who like you and me have 10 fingers and lack wings. There are 60 distinct number words in the Ik'Thulu language, and Ik'Thulu number words are also used by the Pivotians for some reason. I'll get to all of this at some point.
The role of Worm Scanners
Worm Scanners are a relatively new technology that allows someone to read infinite data in order to make broad conclusions about natural phenomena. Without getting into the technical specifics (that'll be soon), they compress an infinite series of potential conditional events into a finite timeframe and then read whether the Plumb Bob returns or not. What the output here means depends on how the conditions were set up, but with physical structures the Plumb Bob returning means a structure is not infinitely long. There's also a very new technique called Curve Mapping that allows for more specific measurements once you've ruled out infinity, provided you're willing to wait for long periods of time to get the accuracy you want.
A lot of newer knowledge about the structure of the world was found out through Worm Scanners, for example the fact that the Edge and Sea are both infinitely tall. However, as good as the technology is at confirming infinity, it's not so good at identifying finite states when infinity isn't directly confirmed. For example, the Plumb Bob is returning when measuring an Edge horizontally, but that could either mean that the world is finite or there's just something in the way.
Anyway, onto some actual knowledge:
The Edge
The Edge is the infinitely-tall wall that new islands come from. It's covered in white and gray clouds that are visible from pretty far away (sunshadows permitting) and a thick fog if you get close enough. The gray coloring doesn't make physical sense, so it's theorized that something in them or behind them is sucking light out, possibly inverted sunshadows. Strangely if you get close enough to the clouds, they actually form a smooth, flat surface. Like the gray coloring, this makes no physical sense. If you add steam to it, the steam will merge with the existing clouds and maintain its smoothness once it enters that region.
The Winged Isles don't have infinite visibility -- they are lit up by the dim purple of Night and the smaller radiuses of Sunshadows. If you're at the Edge and you look up or down you're not going to see infinity, it'll be black after a while. Sunshadows seem to exclusively pop out along the narrow vertical plane where islands exist (though above them a bit); they don't appear further up where some light could illuminate farther-away sections of the Edge. Similarly, whatever's happening in the Edgefield (Clouds layer) doesn't ever produce storms, so there also aren't lightning flashes.
As mentioned, the Worm Scanners have determined that the Edge is infinitely tall. They also can't pinpoint whether it's infinite or finite horizontally -- even if you go several miles up and scan horizontally the plumb bob will still return. It's possible that the islands are ascending or descending slightly with respect to distance, things are different further away, or there's just something else out there. Or the world/edge are finite. Using Curve Mapping at a high height is a promising idea -- this would tell you where the barrier is, and you could measure at different heights to try to figure out a pattern. Unfortunately this technique is still in its infancy and getting the gigantic scanner needed to fly up several miles is a ludicrous task. The work Earth's Maw is doing to miniaturize scanners for Lakjos and his crew is a promising way to fix that problem, so maybe eventually it'll be possible.
Behind the Edgefield, where the combination of cloud and fog is the thickest, is a gaseous gray wall called the Veil. Because the moisture is so thick, it's hard to tell if the Edge is actually gray. Regardless though at some point there's a gray wall with no visibility beyond it. Islands that are half out will simply disappear beyond that wall, and so you could probably claim that the wall is the actual Edge -- the problem though is that the Edgefield is equally flat despite the clouds' tumultuous movements, and you can't reach the Veil without passing through the cloud layer. The Edgefield is both perfectly straight and also perfectly perpendicular to gravity -- this has been proven with worm scanners.
The physical space inside the Edgefield, for lack of a better word, weird. If you don't go into the Veil and just hang out in the Edgefield you can still return, but it takes significantly longer than you'd expect. Islands that are passing through it on their way out of the Edge seem to be much longer than should be physically possible, and markings made along the length with random unique symbols every foot seem to either repeat or create entirely new random symbols that weren't written in totally unpredictable ways. The only reasonable explanation for the latter case is that something in the edge is messing with uniform causality, but that wouldn't explain why patterns of symbols would instead sometimes repeat. Physical objects such as ropes that run from one end to the other seem to be longer than they should be, with unique fraying on the previously nonexisting parts. Overall it's highly strange and doesn't make a lot of sense. A lot of the experimentation here happened with a previous exploration group known as the Verge Ghosts, a thoroughly ironic name given what eventually happened.
The Veil is an actual gray barrier (at least it appears gray). It isn't dangerous or anything, you can put your hand in it if you want or poke it with a stick -- however things in there get pulled relative to how much of them go in. Putting your fingertips in is going to make them heavier than normal (like they were made out of metal), but you can still pull them out easily. Putting a hand in will require more exertion to pull it back out, though as you do the pull will drop off because less of you is inside the Edge. Put enough of yourself in there and you'll fall in and snap whatever rope you're attached to or even metal chains.
You can however put just your face in to look around -- what was found is that it's very dark in there. So no problem, bring some external light in -- except the light also gets pulled relative to its distance, effectively making it dark. The most bizarre part of the area beyond the Veil is that the islands cease to exist -- if you reach down you'd expect to find some land basically level to where you're standing but apparently the islands don't exist on the other side of the Veil. Similarly, Sunshadows will come out of the Edge but won't be visible on the other side -- it's hard to tell if they don't exist or the light just doesn't work right because you don't want to get close enough to a Sunshadow to confirm its existence.
There were some other discoveries about the Edge, like its acoustic properties and the way it interacted with Crystals, but I'll have to get to them later. It's pretty late as is.
-
alynnidalar
- Posts: 336
- Joined: Mon Jul 09, 2018 11:51 am
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Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Very excited to read more about this. It's quite a unique world and I love reading all the unusual bits! I think about it every now and again so it's neat to see an update!
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Pivots
The rest of the Edge post will have to wait since it's on another computer. Instead, I'm going to compile everything that's known about Pivots. I'm also unfortunately going to have to wait until I get to my other computer before underlining new words, so bear with me.
It's worth pointing out that the actual knowledge here is split -- the Pivotians have a huge wealth of information about them because their society requires it, however the Ik'Thulu have a better understanding of what they actually are. Much of this Ik'thulu knowledge is not known by the Pivotians because the Nal'Tek have forbidden them from talking about it, and similarly, much of the information the Pivotians have about them is not known or recorded by the Ik'Thulu as it's irrelevant to their daily life. So bear with me as I try to combine the two separate knowledge bases.
Physical Description
As mentioned before, the Pivots are charged Agate cores surrounded by Brightstar Groves. The brightstar here causes the Agate to maintain its high level of charge, as sunshadows pass near it. Unlike all other islands, Pivots stay fixed in place.
It's been demonstrably shown that any Charged Agate of a similar size and exposure will take on Pivot properties, so manufacturing Pivots is theoretically possible, particularly since every island has an Agate core. However a project of this size is beyond even the capabilities of Pivotian society. The hard part isn't creating the Agate shape but in charging it and keeping it charged -- there's enough Hyperquartz production to do this, and there's also more than enough Brightstar to surround one, however the energy production economy doesn't work that way -- trying to nationalize it for even one small project would lead immediately to large-scale civil war. No single energy production group has anywhere near the amount of Hyperquartz capability needed, you'd have to nationalize several hundred big players simultaneously.
So possible, but highly unlikely. There's also the small problem of the Nal'Tek very probably going to war with you -- Pivot creation would be an absolute abomination of the natural order in their eyes. The Ik'Thulu would probably also begin breaking treaties en masse -- they're tolerant of Ik'Thulu technology but they still have Nal'Tek sensibilities and also don't exactly want to fight the Nal'Tek over some stupid thing the Pivotians did.
Pivotian Ancient History
As mentioned, Pivots are natural. Somewhere at the dawn of Pivotian society, the pre-Pivotians discovered them and began attaching islands to them with their already fairly developed crystal technology. A lot of the history here is fuzzy because permanent written records weren't a thing until Pivotian society had existed for a while.
Comparative Ragatar (particularly of the Edge Band, who are probably the closest relative to the Pivotians) has come up with an idea of a relatively advanced Ik'Thulu society that was possibly more advanced with crystal technology than any modern culture. The group split as some members began experimenting with Pivots despite the taboo while others, knowing the danger, moved further and further away from the first group. This eventually splintered the society, leaving the new Pivotians without their technological edge and the new Ik'Thulu without their ability to break tradition for progress. Both groups crippled until they were able to meet up again.
The earliest Pivotian records refer to the Pivotian Ragatar at the time, and unlike the Ik'Thulu records mention widespread attacks by the Nal'Tek on the fledgling Pivotian society. They probably left the proto-Ik'Thulu alone so that would explain the gap in their records, or maybe attacks on Proto-Pivotians just were not relevant. In any case, the records point towards the Pivotians being able to beat them back, even though they lost several Pivots in the process and entire early cities had fallen into the Sea. The Ik'Thulu have a similar story in the same time period known as Tferthday (an unusual time when there were eight Tridays in a row) where the Nal'Tek fled the area, being afraid that the long Days presaged an imminent return of The Doom (getting to that in a moment).
Pivot Occurance
Pivots are natural, however they are very rare and given their smallness, difficult to find. Some surveys in Pivotian territory have identified that there's only the three known ones there, but Ik'Thulu territory and particularly the Far Isles contain a lot more. Given the Ragatar, it's believed that the other Pivots in Pivotian territory were destroyed by the Nal'Tek.
Attaching anything to Ik'Thulu Pivots is forbidden by treaties with the Ik'Thulu, despite how big some of them are (there's one just outside Pivotian territory that's three times the size of Aleph Point). It's also highly likely to provoke the Nal'Tek, who would probably attack both the Pivotians for using the Pivot and the Ik'Thulu for allowing it.
Pivotians believe that the Pivots come from small islands with large Agate cores that have been worn down over time. However, they're wrong. Pivots actually come out of the Edge like islands do, fully formed with Brightstar Groves attached. They flow along the Tortoise Wind like an island, however if they're big enough and charged enough will gradually slow down until they fix in place.
This piece of knowledge is one of the things the Ik'Thulu know that the Pivotians do not -- they've seen several Pivots coming from the Edge throughout their history and massive territory. The Nal'Tek have forbidden them from telling the Pivotians, as they would undoubtedly experiment on the half-edge Pivots, which would accelerate The Doom.
The Doom
This is definitely the point where Pivotian knowledge drops off and Ik'Thulu knowledge takes over. This is also the point where myth and facts are going to start merging in weird ways (as anything around the Nal'Tek tends to).
The Pivotians have no concept of The Doom other than the few bits they've gathered from the Ik'Thulu, various wars with the Nal'Tek over bits and pieces of it slipping, and general non-Pivotian uneasiness around Pivots. Nal'Tek are so afraid of Pivots they will willingly jump into the void rather than get near them -- though there are exceptions for Bashees or Vulunkin who feel more protected in whatever mission is having them go towards them (like one to destroy them). Ik'Thulu aren't that afraid of them, but they're wary and prefer avoiding or looking at them.
In Pivotian mind, The Doom is a reverent myth that the Ik'Thulu and Nal'Tek share. Some ancient taboo probably based on nothing that holds both cultures back technologically and helps to inform other things like the Ik'Thulu's ridiculous aversion to wings. However in the Ik'Thulu mind (who are way more technologically advanced than you'd think), specific signs of it are actually predictable and obvious.
So, the Ik'Thulu theory here is that Charged Agate holds back Inverted Sunshadows. The best evidence of this is a careful decade-based survey of Inverted sunshadow amounts per year in Pivotian territory - it has dropped over the last hundred years by about 0.1 per decade, resting at a current average of 1.2 . Meanwhile Inverted Sunshadows in Ik'Thulu territory fluctuate between 3 and 4 per year, with the current decade having an average of 3.22 . Nal'Tek have said that their territory is in the 5 or 6 range because of their restless campaign of destroying all the Pivots they find.
The prevalence of Tridays in Pivotian territory is also worrying, particularly things like Tferthday. Ik'Thulu/Nal'Tek understanding of Tridays is that Inverted Sunshadows alter the Sunshadow travel currents and prevent them from lingering (usually).
The third and most damning piece of evidence is the Pivotian territory being bordered by a Great Doldrums. Doldrums are a natural cyclical occurrence, but given one of The Doom's supposed effects, it's very likely that island production in Pivotian territory is already crippled. Nal'Tek have described the even bigger Doldrums in the Far Isles as the Unholy Origin, which I'll get to at some point. Basically though they also see that as an unnatural phenomenon.
As the Pivotians continue to attach islands to Pivots, they continue to alter the amount of Charged Agate in their area -- both the chains that attach islands to Pivots and the actual island cores are slowly absorbing charge, and with the prevalence of Tridays this only makes the process accelerate. Plus Agate is in wide use in Pivotian society as the basis for wings if nothing else (which is one of the Ik'Thulu hesitations towards them).
As for The Doom itself, the Nal'Tek know what it entails because they've lived through it before, or at least their records say as much. Before I get to this, it's probably wise to finally describe a bit about what the Nal'Tek are.
Nal'Tek History
Note that the information on the Nal'Tek here is incomplete, it's based solely on what the Ik'Thulu know about them, as describing the Nal'Tek from their perspective would spoil the biggest secrets of the world. Note also though that none of the information here is widely accessible by Pivotians -- there are some rare Wetfoots that know some of it, but even small leaks lead to Nal'Tek wars so they're extremely secretive about this knowledge, refusing to even store it in Katar Nen lest Pivotians find it.
The Nal'Tek precede the Ik'Thulu and even believe that the Ik'Thulu is a misguided splinter group, though the objective reality is that they're branches from the same group.
Long ago, there was a great Civilization in the Winged Isles that the Nal'Tek call the Dolash Dek'Velts or Dolash Tek'Velts (depending on the group). Sometimes Dek'Velts or Tek'Velts is preferred since the Dolash word (meaning disaster) is pretty redundant. This Civilization used Pivots to an extent that would make modern Pivotians blush -- they would create them from islands or yank them from the Edge directly as they knew how to manipulate island formation, and then attach all kinds of islands to them. As Day became more common the population would only grow as farming and husbandry became easier and easier.
The Dek'Velt territory was wide, on either side of a great gash they called The Dead River in the world where neither islands nor sunshadows would roam (The Nal'Tek believe this to be a description of the Greatest Doldrums). The Dek'Velts had powerful crystal technology to close the gap and were able to build a gigantic Civilization on both sides and ever further out.
Eventually this hubris caught up with them, and The Doom happened for the first but probably not last time. A long Night, the presence of thousands of Inverted Sunshadows, and eventually the destruction of everything as Agate cores turned repulsive and blasted everything else apart. As best as they could tell, only the Nal'Tek survived, saved by their Eye Shrines and mastery of the world's cycles.
They then had to watch as False Unholy Nal'Tek took the technology they remembered and spread out again and began to make the same mistakes again. But this time, the Tortoise is ready to eat everything borne on its wind. This time, the Vulun King is detached from his bride, he too is ready to dine. Only the Banshees and their Kinfriends will survive, and only if the Banshees keep them pure.
Nal'Tek relations
As you can no doubt tell by now, the Nal'Tek have terrible relations with other groups in the Winged Isles. They see Pivotians as absolute abominations, a degenerated group of Dek'Velts nowhere near their glory but equivalent in arrogance. They see the Ik'Thulu as almost Kinfriends but misguided and in need of constant correction. They have hope for Wetfoots but too young and weak to be in their society. The Nal'Tek guard their secrets carefully, do not make friends among other groups, and keep their society and particularly their Eye Shrines hidden. Outwardly, they're the same technological level as the Ik'Thulu, but the Ik'Thulu know better -- they have a far greater understanding of the world and its creatures. They are however far fewer in number, or at least appear to be because of their excessive use of Banshee Rites and inability to summon large forces in wars.
There is a fragile peace between the groups where the Nal'Tek can't compete but still are willing to Correct anything that egregiously threatens their long-term survival. They therefore accept the inevitability of a second Doom and use it to control the Ik'Thulu with constant reminders in scientifically accurate terminology of how close they are to destruction.
Contrary Opinions
Despite the incessant nagging of the Nal'Tek, there's still a sizeable minority of Ik'Thulu (particularly the Karash'Thulu) that believe The Doom will not occur -- the tales of the Dek'Velts are exaggerated or very definitely missing the role of the Eye Shrines ----- don't tell the Nal'Tek you believe that though, any appeal to reason around them is a good way to have your entire Kinclan destroyed.
There are also multiple Ragatars that conflict with the official Nal'Tek account, particularly the ones shared by the Edge Band -- the real downfall in their story was the Vulun King marrying a Sunshadow. It's not the Dek'Velts fault for following their Bloomfriend's example, the Tortoise knows when a meal would be rotten.
The Karash'Thulu also don't have a Ragatar that says they came from the Nal'Tek. The Nal'Tek have always been their enemies, and in the Tek'Velts time long past they raised Vulun for eating so how could they possibly be related to Banshees? Furthermore the Nal'Tek get sick on Yakfur Wine and even Kak'Lut, whereas even the most isolated Garmakian can drink it and become wiser. In the Karash'Thulu mind, The Nal'Tek are the wrong ones and their Eye Shrines poison their minds and bodies.
Back to The Doom
So all that aside, the Ik'Thulu have a pretty good idea of what The Doom would look like, were it to happen again. Despite the sizeable dissenting opinion and despite their decentralization they've managed to take many paranoid surveys of Inverted sunshadow frequency, Tridays, and Doldrum distribution. They've also sent groups well out into the Far Isles (which I'll get to at some point since they made some interesting and highly secretive discoveries) to measure things there.
As the Nal'Tek will incessantly point out, the signs of a coming Doom are all there:
* Lessened Inverted Sunshadows every year. If it ever drops below 1, that will be a very worrying sign. In recent decades, even the frequency in Ik'Thulu territory is dropping, though it remains to be seen if it'll drop below 3.
* Tridays, and Sunshadow frequency in general. There's supposed to be an average of 16.5 hours of day and 16.5 hours of night in a 33-hour period, and this holds true in human experience, however with very precise Kyanite Clocks there are small discrepancies that add up to about an extra hour of Day in the last year (and a bit less per year the further back you go). As mentioned, the Ik'Thulu are a lot more scientifically adept than they appear to be.
* The presence of a Great Doldrums on the edge of Pivotian territory. While the Pivotians swear up and down they picked their territory because of the doldrums, the Edge Band has Ragatar that says that they used to be a lot smaller, particularly the Sea Pivot -- a Pivot appearing in the middle of doldrums makes no sense because the doldrums don't produce anything. Similarly the various stories about the pre-Pivotian culture having access to much more Pivots and Islands would imply that they were actually in a Meadow.
As for what The Doom entails, all the Ragatar agrees it's pretty nasty. It's worth mentioning that the Pivotians don't have Ragatar that goes back this far, for some reason theirs stops at the pre-Pivotian culture, most likely due to Nal'Tek meddling.
The Doom Effects
* Several years without any Inverted Sunshadows. The amount varies between Ragatars, but it's more than one year of it for sure. The range is unknown -- with the Dek'Velts it happened everywhere, but they also used Pivots elsewhere. So it may just be local to areas of Pivot exploitation, which would imply The Doom would only destroy Pivotians. However probably not since Inverted Sunshadow amounts are going down elsewhere as well.
* A time where there are no Sunshadows. A very long Night basically. This would begin to weaken Agate bonds slowly -- the Dek'Velts had a few islands break from Pivots during this time, though they were able to repair the links.
* A time where there is a huge influx of Inverted sunshadows. In story, they're everywhere, hundreds in the same area sometimes, and they also slow and get "stuck" in various regions the way Pivots do. This causes all Pivots to lose their charge, or even become Inverted, as well as Agate chains and the cores of islands themselves.
* And then, the most destructive part -- when the Agate Cores of islands reach Inversion (slowed by the dirt surrounding them, though this accelerates as the repulsion pushes dirt off). The repulsive force becomes so great that islands break apart. On Malachite islands this can cause additional havoc, but this might be survivable if the geometry of the island is still right.
* For as long as the Inverted Sunshadows remain, the Agate Inversion grows, sending these pieces further and further, but also preventing new islands from forming -- at a high enough Inversion charge their Agate cores can't push through the Edge and so the island won't form, and what manages to will be pushed with huge force back through the Veil.
* Island Fragments are also very likely to crash into the Edge or the Sea, or even each other, with all the destruction that entails.
* Eventually with enough Inverse Agate destroyed, the physics will stabilize, and new islands can form again. Without the Charged Agate messing with Sunshadow cycles, the Inverse Sunshadows will return, and Sunshadows will begin coming out again.
At least in theory according to what happened last time. The Nal'Tek, meanwhile, believe that the Winged Isles are on their second (or third, if they've been talking to the Drakes) and worst instance of this and this time around the Inverted sunshadows will remain for good. The Islands, insignificant things that they are relative to the ever-hungry Sea, will finally be devoured whole.
The Ik'Thulu meanwhile don't see that possibility as likely, nor do they necessarily see The Doom as being universal or even necessarily happening again. Though they are very definitely disturbed by the physical changes in Pivotian territory. Unfortunately they can't share very much of what they do know with the Pivotians under pain of war and destruction by the Nal'Tek.
Fortunately, the Pivotians themselves aren't blind. They too have noticed the change in Day and Inverted Sunshadow timing, though their records aren't as precise and they also don't know what it means, for now believing it to be yet another unknown cycle of the world. In time they might get a clearer picture or an Ik'Thulu might risk war to tell them what they know.
The rest of the Edge post will have to wait since it's on another computer. Instead, I'm going to compile everything that's known about Pivots. I'm also unfortunately going to have to wait until I get to my other computer before underlining new words, so bear with me.
It's worth pointing out that the actual knowledge here is split -- the Pivotians have a huge wealth of information about them because their society requires it, however the Ik'Thulu have a better understanding of what they actually are. Much of this Ik'thulu knowledge is not known by the Pivotians because the Nal'Tek have forbidden them from talking about it, and similarly, much of the information the Pivotians have about them is not known or recorded by the Ik'Thulu as it's irrelevant to their daily life. So bear with me as I try to combine the two separate knowledge bases.
Physical Description
As mentioned before, the Pivots are charged Agate cores surrounded by Brightstar Groves. The brightstar here causes the Agate to maintain its high level of charge, as sunshadows pass near it. Unlike all other islands, Pivots stay fixed in place.
It's been demonstrably shown that any Charged Agate of a similar size and exposure will take on Pivot properties, so manufacturing Pivots is theoretically possible, particularly since every island has an Agate core. However a project of this size is beyond even the capabilities of Pivotian society. The hard part isn't creating the Agate shape but in charging it and keeping it charged -- there's enough Hyperquartz production to do this, and there's also more than enough Brightstar to surround one, however the energy production economy doesn't work that way -- trying to nationalize it for even one small project would lead immediately to large-scale civil war. No single energy production group has anywhere near the amount of Hyperquartz capability needed, you'd have to nationalize several hundred big players simultaneously.
So possible, but highly unlikely. There's also the small problem of the Nal'Tek very probably going to war with you -- Pivot creation would be an absolute abomination of the natural order in their eyes. The Ik'Thulu would probably also begin breaking treaties en masse -- they're tolerant of Ik'Thulu technology but they still have Nal'Tek sensibilities and also don't exactly want to fight the Nal'Tek over some stupid thing the Pivotians did.
Pivotian Ancient History
As mentioned, Pivots are natural. Somewhere at the dawn of Pivotian society, the pre-Pivotians discovered them and began attaching islands to them with their already fairly developed crystal technology. A lot of the history here is fuzzy because permanent written records weren't a thing until Pivotian society had existed for a while.
Comparative Ragatar (particularly of the Edge Band, who are probably the closest relative to the Pivotians) has come up with an idea of a relatively advanced Ik'Thulu society that was possibly more advanced with crystal technology than any modern culture. The group split as some members began experimenting with Pivots despite the taboo while others, knowing the danger, moved further and further away from the first group. This eventually splintered the society, leaving the new Pivotians without their technological edge and the new Ik'Thulu without their ability to break tradition for progress. Both groups crippled until they were able to meet up again.
The earliest Pivotian records refer to the Pivotian Ragatar at the time, and unlike the Ik'Thulu records mention widespread attacks by the Nal'Tek on the fledgling Pivotian society. They probably left the proto-Ik'Thulu alone so that would explain the gap in their records, or maybe attacks on Proto-Pivotians just were not relevant. In any case, the records point towards the Pivotians being able to beat them back, even though they lost several Pivots in the process and entire early cities had fallen into the Sea. The Ik'Thulu have a similar story in the same time period known as Tferthday (an unusual time when there were eight Tridays in a row) where the Nal'Tek fled the area, being afraid that the long Days presaged an imminent return of The Doom (getting to that in a moment).
Pivot Occurance
Pivots are natural, however they are very rare and given their smallness, difficult to find. Some surveys in Pivotian territory have identified that there's only the three known ones there, but Ik'Thulu territory and particularly the Far Isles contain a lot more. Given the Ragatar, it's believed that the other Pivots in Pivotian territory were destroyed by the Nal'Tek.
Attaching anything to Ik'Thulu Pivots is forbidden by treaties with the Ik'Thulu, despite how big some of them are (there's one just outside Pivotian territory that's three times the size of Aleph Point). It's also highly likely to provoke the Nal'Tek, who would probably attack both the Pivotians for using the Pivot and the Ik'Thulu for allowing it.
Pivotians believe that the Pivots come from small islands with large Agate cores that have been worn down over time. However, they're wrong. Pivots actually come out of the Edge like islands do, fully formed with Brightstar Groves attached. They flow along the Tortoise Wind like an island, however if they're big enough and charged enough will gradually slow down until they fix in place.
This piece of knowledge is one of the things the Ik'Thulu know that the Pivotians do not -- they've seen several Pivots coming from the Edge throughout their history and massive territory. The Nal'Tek have forbidden them from telling the Pivotians, as they would undoubtedly experiment on the half-edge Pivots, which would accelerate The Doom.
The Doom
This is definitely the point where Pivotian knowledge drops off and Ik'Thulu knowledge takes over. This is also the point where myth and facts are going to start merging in weird ways (as anything around the Nal'Tek tends to).
The Pivotians have no concept of The Doom other than the few bits they've gathered from the Ik'Thulu, various wars with the Nal'Tek over bits and pieces of it slipping, and general non-Pivotian uneasiness around Pivots. Nal'Tek are so afraid of Pivots they will willingly jump into the void rather than get near them -- though there are exceptions for Bashees or Vulunkin who feel more protected in whatever mission is having them go towards them (like one to destroy them). Ik'Thulu aren't that afraid of them, but they're wary and prefer avoiding or looking at them.
In Pivotian mind, The Doom is a reverent myth that the Ik'Thulu and Nal'Tek share. Some ancient taboo probably based on nothing that holds both cultures back technologically and helps to inform other things like the Ik'Thulu's ridiculous aversion to wings. However in the Ik'Thulu mind (who are way more technologically advanced than you'd think), specific signs of it are actually predictable and obvious.
So, the Ik'Thulu theory here is that Charged Agate holds back Inverted Sunshadows. The best evidence of this is a careful decade-based survey of Inverted sunshadow amounts per year in Pivotian territory - it has dropped over the last hundred years by about 0.1 per decade, resting at a current average of 1.2 . Meanwhile Inverted Sunshadows in Ik'Thulu territory fluctuate between 3 and 4 per year, with the current decade having an average of 3.22 . Nal'Tek have said that their territory is in the 5 or 6 range because of their restless campaign of destroying all the Pivots they find.
The prevalence of Tridays in Pivotian territory is also worrying, particularly things like Tferthday. Ik'Thulu/Nal'Tek understanding of Tridays is that Inverted Sunshadows alter the Sunshadow travel currents and prevent them from lingering (usually).
The third and most damning piece of evidence is the Pivotian territory being bordered by a Great Doldrums. Doldrums are a natural cyclical occurrence, but given one of The Doom's supposed effects, it's very likely that island production in Pivotian territory is already crippled. Nal'Tek have described the even bigger Doldrums in the Far Isles as the Unholy Origin, which I'll get to at some point. Basically though they also see that as an unnatural phenomenon.
As the Pivotians continue to attach islands to Pivots, they continue to alter the amount of Charged Agate in their area -- both the chains that attach islands to Pivots and the actual island cores are slowly absorbing charge, and with the prevalence of Tridays this only makes the process accelerate. Plus Agate is in wide use in Pivotian society as the basis for wings if nothing else (which is one of the Ik'Thulu hesitations towards them).
As for The Doom itself, the Nal'Tek know what it entails because they've lived through it before, or at least their records say as much. Before I get to this, it's probably wise to finally describe a bit about what the Nal'Tek are.
Nal'Tek History
Note that the information on the Nal'Tek here is incomplete, it's based solely on what the Ik'Thulu know about them, as describing the Nal'Tek from their perspective would spoil the biggest secrets of the world. Note also though that none of the information here is widely accessible by Pivotians -- there are some rare Wetfoots that know some of it, but even small leaks lead to Nal'Tek wars so they're extremely secretive about this knowledge, refusing to even store it in Katar Nen lest Pivotians find it.
The Nal'Tek precede the Ik'Thulu and even believe that the Ik'Thulu is a misguided splinter group, though the objective reality is that they're branches from the same group.
Long ago, there was a great Civilization in the Winged Isles that the Nal'Tek call the Dolash Dek'Velts or Dolash Tek'Velts (depending on the group). Sometimes Dek'Velts or Tek'Velts is preferred since the Dolash word (meaning disaster) is pretty redundant. This Civilization used Pivots to an extent that would make modern Pivotians blush -- they would create them from islands or yank them from the Edge directly as they knew how to manipulate island formation, and then attach all kinds of islands to them. As Day became more common the population would only grow as farming and husbandry became easier and easier.
The Dek'Velt territory was wide, on either side of a great gash they called The Dead River in the world where neither islands nor sunshadows would roam (The Nal'Tek believe this to be a description of the Greatest Doldrums). The Dek'Velts had powerful crystal technology to close the gap and were able to build a gigantic Civilization on both sides and ever further out.
Eventually this hubris caught up with them, and The Doom happened for the first but probably not last time. A long Night, the presence of thousands of Inverted Sunshadows, and eventually the destruction of everything as Agate cores turned repulsive and blasted everything else apart. As best as they could tell, only the Nal'Tek survived, saved by their Eye Shrines and mastery of the world's cycles.
They then had to watch as False Unholy Nal'Tek took the technology they remembered and spread out again and began to make the same mistakes again. But this time, the Tortoise is ready to eat everything borne on its wind. This time, the Vulun King is detached from his bride, he too is ready to dine. Only the Banshees and their Kinfriends will survive, and only if the Banshees keep them pure.
Nal'Tek relations
As you can no doubt tell by now, the Nal'Tek have terrible relations with other groups in the Winged Isles. They see Pivotians as absolute abominations, a degenerated group of Dek'Velts nowhere near their glory but equivalent in arrogance. They see the Ik'Thulu as almost Kinfriends but misguided and in need of constant correction. They have hope for Wetfoots but too young and weak to be in their society. The Nal'Tek guard their secrets carefully, do not make friends among other groups, and keep their society and particularly their Eye Shrines hidden. Outwardly, they're the same technological level as the Ik'Thulu, but the Ik'Thulu know better -- they have a far greater understanding of the world and its creatures. They are however far fewer in number, or at least appear to be because of their excessive use of Banshee Rites and inability to summon large forces in wars.
There is a fragile peace between the groups where the Nal'Tek can't compete but still are willing to Correct anything that egregiously threatens their long-term survival. They therefore accept the inevitability of a second Doom and use it to control the Ik'Thulu with constant reminders in scientifically accurate terminology of how close they are to destruction.
Contrary Opinions
Despite the incessant nagging of the Nal'Tek, there's still a sizeable minority of Ik'Thulu (particularly the Karash'Thulu) that believe The Doom will not occur -- the tales of the Dek'Velts are exaggerated or very definitely missing the role of the Eye Shrines ----- don't tell the Nal'Tek you believe that though, any appeal to reason around them is a good way to have your entire Kinclan destroyed.
There are also multiple Ragatars that conflict with the official Nal'Tek account, particularly the ones shared by the Edge Band -- the real downfall in their story was the Vulun King marrying a Sunshadow. It's not the Dek'Velts fault for following their Bloomfriend's example, the Tortoise knows when a meal would be rotten.
The Karash'Thulu also don't have a Ragatar that says they came from the Nal'Tek. The Nal'Tek have always been their enemies, and in the Tek'Velts time long past they raised Vulun for eating so how could they possibly be related to Banshees? Furthermore the Nal'Tek get sick on Yakfur Wine and even Kak'Lut, whereas even the most isolated Garmakian can drink it and become wiser. In the Karash'Thulu mind, The Nal'Tek are the wrong ones and their Eye Shrines poison their minds and bodies.
Back to The Doom
So all that aside, the Ik'Thulu have a pretty good idea of what The Doom would look like, were it to happen again. Despite the sizeable dissenting opinion and despite their decentralization they've managed to take many paranoid surveys of Inverted sunshadow frequency, Tridays, and Doldrum distribution. They've also sent groups well out into the Far Isles (which I'll get to at some point since they made some interesting and highly secretive discoveries) to measure things there.
As the Nal'Tek will incessantly point out, the signs of a coming Doom are all there:
* Lessened Inverted Sunshadows every year. If it ever drops below 1, that will be a very worrying sign. In recent decades, even the frequency in Ik'Thulu territory is dropping, though it remains to be seen if it'll drop below 3.
* Tridays, and Sunshadow frequency in general. There's supposed to be an average of 16.5 hours of day and 16.5 hours of night in a 33-hour period, and this holds true in human experience, however with very precise Kyanite Clocks there are small discrepancies that add up to about an extra hour of Day in the last year (and a bit less per year the further back you go). As mentioned, the Ik'Thulu are a lot more scientifically adept than they appear to be.
* The presence of a Great Doldrums on the edge of Pivotian territory. While the Pivotians swear up and down they picked their territory because of the doldrums, the Edge Band has Ragatar that says that they used to be a lot smaller, particularly the Sea Pivot -- a Pivot appearing in the middle of doldrums makes no sense because the doldrums don't produce anything. Similarly the various stories about the pre-Pivotian culture having access to much more Pivots and Islands would imply that they were actually in a Meadow.
As for what The Doom entails, all the Ragatar agrees it's pretty nasty. It's worth mentioning that the Pivotians don't have Ragatar that goes back this far, for some reason theirs stops at the pre-Pivotian culture, most likely due to Nal'Tek meddling.
The Doom Effects
* Several years without any Inverted Sunshadows. The amount varies between Ragatars, but it's more than one year of it for sure. The range is unknown -- with the Dek'Velts it happened everywhere, but they also used Pivots elsewhere. So it may just be local to areas of Pivot exploitation, which would imply The Doom would only destroy Pivotians. However probably not since Inverted Sunshadow amounts are going down elsewhere as well.
* A time where there are no Sunshadows. A very long Night basically. This would begin to weaken Agate bonds slowly -- the Dek'Velts had a few islands break from Pivots during this time, though they were able to repair the links.
* A time where there is a huge influx of Inverted sunshadows. In story, they're everywhere, hundreds in the same area sometimes, and they also slow and get "stuck" in various regions the way Pivots do. This causes all Pivots to lose their charge, or even become Inverted, as well as Agate chains and the cores of islands themselves.
* And then, the most destructive part -- when the Agate Cores of islands reach Inversion (slowed by the dirt surrounding them, though this accelerates as the repulsion pushes dirt off). The repulsive force becomes so great that islands break apart. On Malachite islands this can cause additional havoc, but this might be survivable if the geometry of the island is still right.
* For as long as the Inverted Sunshadows remain, the Agate Inversion grows, sending these pieces further and further, but also preventing new islands from forming -- at a high enough Inversion charge their Agate cores can't push through the Edge and so the island won't form, and what manages to will be pushed with huge force back through the Veil.
* Island Fragments are also very likely to crash into the Edge or the Sea, or even each other, with all the destruction that entails.
* Eventually with enough Inverse Agate destroyed, the physics will stabilize, and new islands can form again. Without the Charged Agate messing with Sunshadow cycles, the Inverse Sunshadows will return, and Sunshadows will begin coming out again.
At least in theory according to what happened last time. The Nal'Tek, meanwhile, believe that the Winged Isles are on their second (or third, if they've been talking to the Drakes) and worst instance of this and this time around the Inverted sunshadows will remain for good. The Islands, insignificant things that they are relative to the ever-hungry Sea, will finally be devoured whole.
The Ik'Thulu meanwhile don't see that possibility as likely, nor do they necessarily see The Doom as being universal or even necessarily happening again. Though they are very definitely disturbed by the physical changes in Pivotian territory. Unfortunately they can't share very much of what they do know with the Pivotians under pain of war and destruction by the Nal'Tek.
Fortunately, the Pivotians themselves aren't blind. They too have noticed the change in Day and Inverted Sunshadow timing, though their records aren't as precise and they also don't know what it means, for now believing it to be yet another unknown cycle of the world. In time they might get a clearer picture or an Ik'Thulu might risk war to tell them what they know.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Number Systems
Since it's going to come up in future updates, I'm going to take a minute to describe the Ik'Thulu number system (also in use in Pivotian and Nal'Tek society).
I'm using English words as a substrate here (like with the rest of the language) because I wouldn't know where to begin with thousands of years of linguistic combination and drift. However the principles of the number system are at least represented fairly.
The language has distinct words for every number up to sixty (Feften). These are made by agglutinating together base-10 composites (like Twenty-one becomes Twun). There are a few differences from the English base here, however:
* One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten are the same as they are in base-10, except that Seven has become Sev.
* Eleven has become Lev and Twelve has become Duz.
* 13-19 have the Ti- prefix and part of the number as the word. So they are Tither, Tifor, Tifive, Tisix, Tisev, Tiet, Tine.
* the 20s work similarly, except the prefix is -Tw(e) and -ten is an acceptable suffix, so 21-30 are Twun, Tweto, Tweth, Twefer, Twefive, Twesix, Twesev, Twiet, Twine, and Tweten. 20 itself is Titan (ten-teen basically).
* This applies for any number up to sixty, the prefixes for 30, 40 and 50 being Th-, For- and Fef-. "Nine" tends to have the most variation, with Twine being 29 and Fefnin being 59. Similarly "Three" tends towards both -ther and -th , depending on the prefix.
* Feften is the highest number in the system, which represents sixty. It also ties into other aspects of the system so "Full Feften" is sometimes used to describe 60 by itself to prevent ambiguity.
* Once you go above feften (60), what's to the left of it represents orders of magnitude and what's to the right represents precision. So for example, "One Feften Five" is 1*60 + 5 or 65. "Three Feften Twun" would be (3*60)+21, or 201.
* This holds true up to Fefnin Feften (59*60 = 3540), at which point you have two numbers to the left, the second one representing scale and the first one representing orders of magnitude *of* scale. This starts at Onetwo Feften (1*(60^2)) and can go up in either direction-- Twotwo Feften is (2*(60^2)) while Onethree Feften is (1*(60^3)). Both words on the left are agglutinated together and tend to have regional variances for common number ranges, but things like "Eighttwo" instead of "Eighto" or "Aito" can help prevent ambiguity.
* The right side is then used for precision, so 30,000 would be Eightwo Feften Titen Feften (8/2-60-20-60, or (8*(60^2))+(20*60). When you have agglutinated numbers on the left you know you're dealing with large numbers and anything after the first Feften is just precision.
* With this system you can go up to 60^60, which is way more than anyone in this society needs. Anything below a scale of 10 (60^10) tends to be good enough, though that may change as Curve Mapping gets more common.
So a basic summary of this system
* Anything up to 60 is represented by a single word.
* Anything up to 3599 is represented by up to three words (the left of the feften gives the 60s place and the right of the feften is the 1-59 "ones" place).
* Anything between 3600 and 216,000 can be represented by XXXtwo on the left, Feften and then whatever words are necessary for precision on the right. The highest number here would be 215,999 -- "Fefnintwo Feften" takes out 3600*59 of it, reducing it to 3599. With "Fefnin Feften" you reduce it to 59, then that gets pulled off with an additional Fefnin. So 215,999 can be represented by "Fefnintwo Feften Fefnin Feften Fefnin", which is 4 syllables less than the English base-10 equivalent word.
* 216,000 to 12,960,000 can be represented by "Onethree" to "Fefninthree" on the left, Feften and then whatever amount of precision is needed on the right.
* Onefour to Fefninfour covers the 1*(60^4) to 59*(60^4) range and so on.
* You definitely get longer number sentences with more precision on bigger numbers, however the total amount of syllables is less than English equivalents due to the base-60 system
* The number system as described only goes up to Fefninfefnin Feften, though granted that describes 2.88e108, which is way higher than anything anyone in that society needs. This may change as Curve Mapping becomes more developed, since it tends to deal with very large numbers -- the working solutions use a second scale characteristic so you can go up to 60^^60 (basically a power tower that has 60 60s).
* The logograms are a lot easier -- there are individual logograms for every number from 1-60, as well as a universal means of combining things on the left side of the feften, with some short forms for common numbers (like Onetwo up to Fefnintwo) having their own dedicated symbols.
It's worth pointing out that Jade technology works completely differently than digital technology, though it can hold similar amounts of data. It stores data in a written format rather than a digital format, so using more logograms or even defining and using them on the fly is not a problem.
Since it's going to come up in future updates, I'm going to take a minute to describe the Ik'Thulu number system (also in use in Pivotian and Nal'Tek society).
I'm using English words as a substrate here (like with the rest of the language) because I wouldn't know where to begin with thousands of years of linguistic combination and drift. However the principles of the number system are at least represented fairly.
The language has distinct words for every number up to sixty (Feften). These are made by agglutinating together base-10 composites (like Twenty-one becomes Twun). There are a few differences from the English base here, however:
* One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six, Seven, Eight, Nine, Ten are the same as they are in base-10, except that Seven has become Sev.
* Eleven has become Lev and Twelve has become Duz.
* 13-19 have the Ti- prefix and part of the number as the word. So they are Tither, Tifor, Tifive, Tisix, Tisev, Tiet, Tine.
* the 20s work similarly, except the prefix is -Tw(e) and -ten is an acceptable suffix, so 21-30 are Twun, Tweto, Tweth, Twefer, Twefive, Twesix, Twesev, Twiet, Twine, and Tweten. 20 itself is Titan (ten-teen basically).
* This applies for any number up to sixty, the prefixes for 30, 40 and 50 being Th-, For- and Fef-. "Nine" tends to have the most variation, with Twine being 29 and Fefnin being 59. Similarly "Three" tends towards both -ther and -th , depending on the prefix.
* Feften is the highest number in the system, which represents sixty. It also ties into other aspects of the system so "Full Feften" is sometimes used to describe 60 by itself to prevent ambiguity.
* Once you go above feften (60), what's to the left of it represents orders of magnitude and what's to the right represents precision. So for example, "One Feften Five" is 1*60 + 5 or 65. "Three Feften Twun" would be (3*60)+21, or 201.
* This holds true up to Fefnin Feften (59*60 = 3540), at which point you have two numbers to the left, the second one representing scale and the first one representing orders of magnitude *of* scale. This starts at Onetwo Feften (1*(60^2)) and can go up in either direction-- Twotwo Feften is (2*(60^2)) while Onethree Feften is (1*(60^3)). Both words on the left are agglutinated together and tend to have regional variances for common number ranges, but things like "Eighttwo" instead of "Eighto" or "Aito" can help prevent ambiguity.
* The right side is then used for precision, so 30,000 would be Eightwo Feften Titen Feften (8/2-60-20-60, or (8*(60^2))+(20*60). When you have agglutinated numbers on the left you know you're dealing with large numbers and anything after the first Feften is just precision.
* With this system you can go up to 60^60, which is way more than anyone in this society needs. Anything below a scale of 10 (60^10) tends to be good enough, though that may change as Curve Mapping gets more common.
So a basic summary of this system
* Anything up to 60 is represented by a single word.
* Anything up to 3599 is represented by up to three words (the left of the feften gives the 60s place and the right of the feften is the 1-59 "ones" place).
* Anything between 3600 and 216,000 can be represented by XXXtwo on the left, Feften and then whatever words are necessary for precision on the right. The highest number here would be 215,999 -- "Fefnintwo Feften" takes out 3600*59 of it, reducing it to 3599. With "Fefnin Feften" you reduce it to 59, then that gets pulled off with an additional Fefnin. So 215,999 can be represented by "Fefnintwo Feften Fefnin Feften Fefnin", which is 4 syllables less than the English base-10 equivalent word.
* 216,000 to 12,960,000 can be represented by "Onethree" to "Fefninthree" on the left, Feften and then whatever amount of precision is needed on the right.
* Onefour to Fefninfour covers the 1*(60^4) to 59*(60^4) range and so on.
* You definitely get longer number sentences with more precision on bigger numbers, however the total amount of syllables is less than English equivalents due to the base-60 system
* The number system as described only goes up to Fefninfefnin Feften, though granted that describes 2.88e108, which is way higher than anything anyone in that society needs. This may change as Curve Mapping becomes more developed, since it tends to deal with very large numbers -- the working solutions use a second scale characteristic so you can go up to 60^^60 (basically a power tower that has 60 60s).
* The logograms are a lot easier -- there are individual logograms for every number from 1-60, as well as a universal means of combining things on the left side of the feften, with some short forms for common numbers (like Onetwo up to Fefnintwo) having their own dedicated symbols.
It's worth pointing out that Jade technology works completely differently than digital technology, though it can hold similar amounts of data. It stores data in a written format rather than a digital format, so using more logograms or even defining and using them on the fly is not a problem.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Number system use
I forgot to mention this in the other post, but the people of the Winged Isles use the number system described here in three different ways:
* They use a base-10 number system for basic counting. This is similar to our own except it uses the left-side rule for counting digits, so 600,000 would be "Sixfive ten" rather than "six hundred thousand". This goes all the way up to Ninenine ten (9 billion), which is way more than anyone in the society needs. Usually around the ten thousand mark (Onefour ten) using the base-60 system makes more sense since you're dealing with more abstract data.
* The base-60 system is in use for anything scientific or abstract, for example large centralized guilds may use it for tracking their overall operation. Anything scientific is definitely going to use it.
* Decimal precision works by using "Piece" as a go-between with numerals on the left side and precision on the right. The base-60 rule still applies, so "Nine Piece Twun" is equal to 9 and 21/60. When more precision is required, you can use "Tups" and "Threps" to describe 3600 and 216,000 precision ranges accordingly. Things beyond that level of precision don't make sense in this society, half because that level of accuracy in craftsmanship isn't required in any capacity and half because the people here don't deal with abstract data to that extent.
* Time is measured with the same set of base-60 words and rules, however it only goes up to Theth (33). Anything excessively abstract might instead use the base-60 system, but a base-33 system makes a lot of sense since many natural cycles operate on one or two levels of 33-ordinal logic.
* The time system uses an entirely different set of glyphs from the base-60 system. Similarly, the base-10 system uses much simpler glyphs than the base-60 system (though anything up to 10 is very similar). So from a glance you can easily see which one a piece of text is working with.
I forgot to mention this in the other post, but the people of the Winged Isles use the number system described here in three different ways:
* They use a base-10 number system for basic counting. This is similar to our own except it uses the left-side rule for counting digits, so 600,000 would be "Sixfive ten" rather than "six hundred thousand". This goes all the way up to Ninenine ten (9 billion), which is way more than anyone in the society needs. Usually around the ten thousand mark (Onefour ten) using the base-60 system makes more sense since you're dealing with more abstract data.
* The base-60 system is in use for anything scientific or abstract, for example large centralized guilds may use it for tracking their overall operation. Anything scientific is definitely going to use it.
* Decimal precision works by using "Piece" as a go-between with numerals on the left side and precision on the right. The base-60 rule still applies, so "Nine Piece Twun" is equal to 9 and 21/60. When more precision is required, you can use "Tups" and "Threps" to describe 3600 and 216,000 precision ranges accordingly. Things beyond that level of precision don't make sense in this society, half because that level of accuracy in craftsmanship isn't required in any capacity and half because the people here don't deal with abstract data to that extent.
* Time is measured with the same set of base-60 words and rules, however it only goes up to Theth (33). Anything excessively abstract might instead use the base-60 system, but a base-33 system makes a lot of sense since many natural cycles operate on one or two levels of 33-ordinal logic.
* The time system uses an entirely different set of glyphs from the base-60 system. Similarly, the base-10 system uses much simpler glyphs than the base-60 system (though anything up to 10 is very similar). So from a glance you can easily see which one a piece of text is working with.
Re: The people of Ik'Thulu have no wings.
Jade Technology
Jade is a grayish-green flaky crystal which looks similar to Jade on earth. Unlike most other crystals, it can hold charge discretely -- individual chunks of it can hold charge separately from other chunks, which can be variously charged, uncharged or inverted. The scale of this is pretty tiny -- the smallest distinguishable unit is around 1.55 nanometers big. Go smaller and charge areas might be stable but more likely will Chargebleed into adjacent ones -- this seems to have to do with the physical structure of the Jade, but researchers haven't figured out how to work around it yet. Using the 1.55 nm sized jadenodes, you can fit around 537,000,000,000 logograms in a 10x5 meter Jade Monolith, or around 967,000,000 characters in a 30x30 cm Jade Tablet. Assuming my math is right. Logograms use a standardized character space of 60x60 jadenodes, but the written abjad can go a lot smaller than that, and then things like physical drawings or Xanthite Etchings take up a bunch of "characters" of space. It really depends on how you're writing to the Jade, which I'll get to in a minute.
Jade is a two-sided crystal and what it does when you hit one side of it with charge depends on whether the other side is carrying charge or not. If the other side is chargeless, then hitting it with charge in, say, a triangle pattern will permanently etch a triangle of charge into it. If you hit the other side with charge, the charged area on the near side will begin glowing white and will emit around half of whatever charge is passed through the part that's been etched -- so you will see a white triangle appear where you had etched it. This area passes through charge as well as light, so this can be used to make a second (but backwards) etching.
This only works as long as the area you're passing charge through has an etching on the near side -- if the near side is blank, it would instead make an etching on the far side that corresponds to whatever you're throwing at it. You'd then be unable to use the near side in that space without wiping the back of the tablet. This isn't really a problem for smaller tablets since the entire thing gets targeted at once, however with monoliths, only sections are hit at a time to conserve power, so following the 60x60 character rule becomes more important. Incidentally, this particular problem is known as Backwriting -- with large storage devices or the storage of large amounts of data it's important to have a way of solving this.
Inversion is easier to explain -- passing inversion into an etched side will erase anything that's been etched, provided there's something there within the space that you're inverting. Passing inversion into a totally blank side will instead etch it with inversion. This works in a similar way to passing charge through -- pass inversion through the other side and regain half inversion in the etched side. Pass charge into an etching and reset the inversion. This property isn't terribly useful however, because Sunshadow charge is enough to erase etched inversion, whereas etched charge is immune to anything but direct contact with a crystal that's emitting Inversion (such as Inverted Quartz).
Transcription
So, given the way these properties work, A jade tablet of any size can be copied by passing charge through one side and putting an unetched tablet on the other side. This will create a mirror image known as a Chiral. The Chiral's information can then be copied onto a third unetched tablet, which will be in the correct orientation.
Minor imperfections don't matter very much -- the charge emitted from Jade can flow about half a foot before it starts dissipating. It's still common practice to put a tablet and a Chiral right up against each other, however, preferably wrapped with something coated in Onyx powder in a dark room so ambient charge doesn't cause any issues.
Smaller jade objects, like the Jade Tablets used in Katar Nen or the small Jade Pads used by mobile (and wingless) Ik'Thulu, tend to be transcribed on the go under some kind of blanket with portable tools and gems. Honestly this particular piece of technology is very easy to use -- all you need are power sources for charge and inversion, an Onyx Plate to transfer charge evenly, the record in question and an extra tablet for use as a Chiral. You can then transfer whatever you have written down (or stored) to someone with the same kit. The Onyx plate doubles as a way of passing charge through to read or transcribe and passing inversion through to wipe a tablet.
Writing
It's worth pointing out again that this is a writing system, not a digital format -- you can store anything that can be etched, including writing, drawings, something similar to very sharp black-and-white photos (Xanthite Etchings, getting to those in a moment), etc. The 60x60 character rule is there mostly to prevent Backwriting when the writing process is more automated.
Doing the actual writing is easy -- just scrawl along the tablet with a Kyanite Lens -- If you tap this, the momentum will turn into charge, which when passed through the tip will etch into the Jade.
This works well for automated writing, however for personal writing, you have both the issue of not being able to write effectively because you're tapping with the other hand and also you can't see what you're writing. The second problem is pretty easy to fix -- once you have *some* kind of etching, hit the other size with oscillating charge. When the charge is being applied there you can see what you've written, and when it isn't, you can do more writing. Oscillate this fast enough and you can't even tell that it's switching states, it'll look like you're writing with light.
Similarly, the first problem can be solved by writing with a Kyanite Quill that emits oscillating charge at the other end. This particular device was itself called a Kyanite Quill, but the momentum transfer properties became so ubiquitous in Pivotian society (particularly with Wings), that the kyanite piece itself started being called that. So the new name is a Harp Quill due to using a very small version of the Harp in Harp Gates as the oscillation piece.
Because of the wide use of Harp Quills and the overall progress of the society, the Kyans here have gotten increasingly more modular and compact -- the most popular one right now allows you to easily add and remove Hyperquartz Pebbles of any shape, which is a very cheap power source with a lot of longevity and a very small size. Once it has a power source, you flick the Spring Switch at the top to turn it on, and it'll just continuously put out enough charge for Writing. Pull the Spring Switch back and it'll re-wind the spring (used for momentum fed into kyanite) and also remove the wire that was feeding the quartz back into itself. Very easy to use, very challenging to design.
Xanthite Etchings
Xanthite Etchings are a relatively recent technology that allows you to write onto Jade from other mediums, like ink on paper. The newest version of this technology can actually take a kind of "photo" (albeit one that's black and white with no grayscale), but the Kyans here are a lot more complex. Still, there's been some progress in Seahome to miniaturize it for Lakjos and his crew. With some luck they'll have both small Worm Scanners and small Xanthite Cameras.
Xanthite is an opaque yellow crystal that emits light when charge is applied to it. In particular, it emits a yellowish-orange Day-like light, so it's pretty useful for indoor lighting. Unlike other crystals, it doesn't store charge -- whenever charge is no longer applied to it, it will immediately stop producing light. It also has to be hit with charge directly -- sunshadow light won't affect it. Due to its opacity, safety and pure yellow hue, it was in use as a yellow dye for a very long time.
Inverted Xanthite does the opposite -- it absorbs light and outputs charge. Unlike the above, the output here isn't particularly efficient -- putting xanthite in a loop with an inverted version of itself will only put back out about 10% of the original charge. It does however maintain Inversion extremely well; it doesn't bleed and will only get removed by passing it charge.
To create Xanthite Etchings, you set up an array of Inverted Xanthite Needles (very small hexagonal prisms basically) with an unetched Jade tablet at the other end -- this particular part of the device is known as the Retina. There's a kind of square box that holds all the needles and keeps them from rolling, though their hexagonal nature makes them more stable. You put the other side of the Retina facing an enclosure with the item you want to copy, and several pieces of Xanthite attached to a switch and power source. Flick the switch and the Xanthite will turn on, reflecting off the object and going into the Inverted Xanthite Retina, where that image will turn into variously charged or uncharged needles. These will then either etch or not etch into the Jade, creating an image, albeit one that's entirely black and white. Apply charge to the other side of this new tablet and you'd get something that looks kinda like this:
https://i.imgur.com/aULmwRg.png
Tl;dr not a terrible way for transcribing stuff from a written form, where it's far easier to write or draw things. The reason this technology took as long as it did is because it took a while for Kyans to get advanced enough to be able to manufacture things like hexagonal Xanthite Needles. Crystal Fracturing is highly difficult without Kyan Molds and Hyperquartz, and creating the molds is highly time-consuming because Kyanite doesn't fracture. I'll get to these technologies at some point. The theory for Xanthite Etchings (and even Xanthite Cameras) has been known since the dawn of Crystallurgy but the practicality of it was another matter altogether.
Scaling Devices
The main thing that makes Jade as useful of a data storage device as it is is its capacity to store things at the scales of 1.55 nanometers. However, humans can't write that small and Kyans are nowhere near that precise, so in order to make things work on that scale there are devices known as Scalers.
Scalers have a slot for two tablets of the same size. You can also adjust the position of a box known as the Window which can move to a fixed number of positions on its tablet based on the size ratio between it and the tablet (always a whole number). Between the Window and the other tablet are a series of Brightstar Lenses that focus the charge that comes out of a charged etched tablet to smaller points. Because of the half a foot rule, these lenses have to be fairly close to one another or the charge will dissipate.
By charging the bigger side, you can transcribe to a smaller format. You can then move the position of the Window and put in additional tablets to put all of them into the new tablet. Alternately, you can put an unetched tablet into the bigger side and charge the smaller side -- this will go in reverse and scale up the writing. Move the Window and put in additional unetched tablets to scale up every part of the storage tablet.
By using a series of Scalers, you can take a large amount of writing and condense it to a smaller form and then scale it back up later at your leisure. In this way you can go all the way down to the 1.55 nm limit.
It's worth noting that Scalers will transcribe the writing into a Chiral, however since the small versions are just there to become smaller and won't be read directly, this doesn't matter.
Jade Monoliths and Jade Tablets
Pivotians prefer Jade Monoliths, while Ik'Thulu prefer Jade Tablets. Jade Monoliths are huge standardized crystals that are 10 meters tall, 5 meters wide and about 15cm thick. They weigh a monstrous 21 tons. While they can be moved, it's highly impractical. It is however very easy to copy gigantic amounts of data -- there's a lot of infrastructure set up at the tablets in major settlements for reading and copying.
The Ik'Thulu, meanwhile, prefer Jade Tablets, which are 30 cm long, 30cm wide and 5cm thick. These only weigh 25lbs, so they're a lot more practical to carry elsewhere. The Main Ik'Thulu settlement location changes every few generations, so they have to be able to transfer their records to the other side of the world along Waterfall routes without hassle.
Jade Hills
Jade hills is the main Rocite settlement. It's around 15 miles across, and has gigantic columns of Jade everywhere, including a huge core in the middle of the island that's several miles thick. Anywhere there isn't Jade there are instead industry buildings or the occasional forest with its Homestead Spiral in it. Gigantic Ruby apparatuses surround the Core on all sides, with large (for Rocites) buildings nearby. One jut of the island is higher than the rest and faces the Pivot, having a fairly good view of some of the islands attached to it. This jut contains administrative buildings and some of the most lavish homesteads in all of the Winged Isles. It also contains the main Harp Gate (though the island has local ones all over the place) and even has a fairly powerful waterfall for Ik'Thulu visitors (they'll use the Harp Gates if they have to, but are a little weirded out by them).
Jade Hills supplies 90% of the Winged Isles' use of Jade. It doesn't just have columns and a huge core, the Jade goes deep into the ground as well, going so far that it forms the boundary with the Agate core of the island. Jade is the primary means of storing information and also more recently has been used for shaping Charge in some fairly advanced Kyans. It's used by Rocites in their sprawling settlements, it's used by Garmakians in their lofty towers, and it's even used by the roaming Ik'Thulu. So the entire island is extremely prosperous, and its wealth and population growth have spawned additional useful industries. The Rocites finally abandoned the crumbling First Chain and made this their new main settlement.
Distant and isolated settlements will mine their own Jade rather than be reliant on Jade Hills -- while it's readily available, the Harp Gate timetables aren't lined up very well for these kinds of settlements, so often it's way more economical to find Jade in nearby islands or the core of the current one. The Roost has tried for decades to take over the local Jade trade, but it's way too decentralized so they only control it in a few places (like Seastar, and only then mostly to cripple the Free Trader's Syndicate).
Jade is a grayish-green flaky crystal which looks similar to Jade on earth. Unlike most other crystals, it can hold charge discretely -- individual chunks of it can hold charge separately from other chunks, which can be variously charged, uncharged or inverted. The scale of this is pretty tiny -- the smallest distinguishable unit is around 1.55 nanometers big. Go smaller and charge areas might be stable but more likely will Chargebleed into adjacent ones -- this seems to have to do with the physical structure of the Jade, but researchers haven't figured out how to work around it yet. Using the 1.55 nm sized jadenodes, you can fit around 537,000,000,000 logograms in a 10x5 meter Jade Monolith, or around 967,000,000 characters in a 30x30 cm Jade Tablet. Assuming my math is right. Logograms use a standardized character space of 60x60 jadenodes, but the written abjad can go a lot smaller than that, and then things like physical drawings or Xanthite Etchings take up a bunch of "characters" of space. It really depends on how you're writing to the Jade, which I'll get to in a minute.
Jade is a two-sided crystal and what it does when you hit one side of it with charge depends on whether the other side is carrying charge or not. If the other side is chargeless, then hitting it with charge in, say, a triangle pattern will permanently etch a triangle of charge into it. If you hit the other side with charge, the charged area on the near side will begin glowing white and will emit around half of whatever charge is passed through the part that's been etched -- so you will see a white triangle appear where you had etched it. This area passes through charge as well as light, so this can be used to make a second (but backwards) etching.
This only works as long as the area you're passing charge through has an etching on the near side -- if the near side is blank, it would instead make an etching on the far side that corresponds to whatever you're throwing at it. You'd then be unable to use the near side in that space without wiping the back of the tablet. This isn't really a problem for smaller tablets since the entire thing gets targeted at once, however with monoliths, only sections are hit at a time to conserve power, so following the 60x60 character rule becomes more important. Incidentally, this particular problem is known as Backwriting -- with large storage devices or the storage of large amounts of data it's important to have a way of solving this.
Inversion is easier to explain -- passing inversion into an etched side will erase anything that's been etched, provided there's something there within the space that you're inverting. Passing inversion into a totally blank side will instead etch it with inversion. This works in a similar way to passing charge through -- pass inversion through the other side and regain half inversion in the etched side. Pass charge into an etching and reset the inversion. This property isn't terribly useful however, because Sunshadow charge is enough to erase etched inversion, whereas etched charge is immune to anything but direct contact with a crystal that's emitting Inversion (such as Inverted Quartz).
Transcription
So, given the way these properties work, A jade tablet of any size can be copied by passing charge through one side and putting an unetched tablet on the other side. This will create a mirror image known as a Chiral. The Chiral's information can then be copied onto a third unetched tablet, which will be in the correct orientation.
Minor imperfections don't matter very much -- the charge emitted from Jade can flow about half a foot before it starts dissipating. It's still common practice to put a tablet and a Chiral right up against each other, however, preferably wrapped with something coated in Onyx powder in a dark room so ambient charge doesn't cause any issues.
Smaller jade objects, like the Jade Tablets used in Katar Nen or the small Jade Pads used by mobile (and wingless) Ik'Thulu, tend to be transcribed on the go under some kind of blanket with portable tools and gems. Honestly this particular piece of technology is very easy to use -- all you need are power sources for charge and inversion, an Onyx Plate to transfer charge evenly, the record in question and an extra tablet for use as a Chiral. You can then transfer whatever you have written down (or stored) to someone with the same kit. The Onyx plate doubles as a way of passing charge through to read or transcribe and passing inversion through to wipe a tablet.
Writing
It's worth pointing out again that this is a writing system, not a digital format -- you can store anything that can be etched, including writing, drawings, something similar to very sharp black-and-white photos (Xanthite Etchings, getting to those in a moment), etc. The 60x60 character rule is there mostly to prevent Backwriting when the writing process is more automated.
Doing the actual writing is easy -- just scrawl along the tablet with a Kyanite Lens -- If you tap this, the momentum will turn into charge, which when passed through the tip will etch into the Jade.
This works well for automated writing, however for personal writing, you have both the issue of not being able to write effectively because you're tapping with the other hand and also you can't see what you're writing. The second problem is pretty easy to fix -- once you have *some* kind of etching, hit the other size with oscillating charge. When the charge is being applied there you can see what you've written, and when it isn't, you can do more writing. Oscillate this fast enough and you can't even tell that it's switching states, it'll look like you're writing with light.
Similarly, the first problem can be solved by writing with a Kyanite Quill that emits oscillating charge at the other end. This particular device was itself called a Kyanite Quill, but the momentum transfer properties became so ubiquitous in Pivotian society (particularly with Wings), that the kyanite piece itself started being called that. So the new name is a Harp Quill due to using a very small version of the Harp in Harp Gates as the oscillation piece.
Because of the wide use of Harp Quills and the overall progress of the society, the Kyans here have gotten increasingly more modular and compact -- the most popular one right now allows you to easily add and remove Hyperquartz Pebbles of any shape, which is a very cheap power source with a lot of longevity and a very small size. Once it has a power source, you flick the Spring Switch at the top to turn it on, and it'll just continuously put out enough charge for Writing. Pull the Spring Switch back and it'll re-wind the spring (used for momentum fed into kyanite) and also remove the wire that was feeding the quartz back into itself. Very easy to use, very challenging to design.
Xanthite Etchings
Xanthite Etchings are a relatively recent technology that allows you to write onto Jade from other mediums, like ink on paper. The newest version of this technology can actually take a kind of "photo" (albeit one that's black and white with no grayscale), but the Kyans here are a lot more complex. Still, there's been some progress in Seahome to miniaturize it for Lakjos and his crew. With some luck they'll have both small Worm Scanners and small Xanthite Cameras.
Xanthite is an opaque yellow crystal that emits light when charge is applied to it. In particular, it emits a yellowish-orange Day-like light, so it's pretty useful for indoor lighting. Unlike other crystals, it doesn't store charge -- whenever charge is no longer applied to it, it will immediately stop producing light. It also has to be hit with charge directly -- sunshadow light won't affect it. Due to its opacity, safety and pure yellow hue, it was in use as a yellow dye for a very long time.
Inverted Xanthite does the opposite -- it absorbs light and outputs charge. Unlike the above, the output here isn't particularly efficient -- putting xanthite in a loop with an inverted version of itself will only put back out about 10% of the original charge. It does however maintain Inversion extremely well; it doesn't bleed and will only get removed by passing it charge.
To create Xanthite Etchings, you set up an array of Inverted Xanthite Needles (very small hexagonal prisms basically) with an unetched Jade tablet at the other end -- this particular part of the device is known as the Retina. There's a kind of square box that holds all the needles and keeps them from rolling, though their hexagonal nature makes them more stable. You put the other side of the Retina facing an enclosure with the item you want to copy, and several pieces of Xanthite attached to a switch and power source. Flick the switch and the Xanthite will turn on, reflecting off the object and going into the Inverted Xanthite Retina, where that image will turn into variously charged or uncharged needles. These will then either etch or not etch into the Jade, creating an image, albeit one that's entirely black and white. Apply charge to the other side of this new tablet and you'd get something that looks kinda like this:
https://i.imgur.com/aULmwRg.png
Tl;dr not a terrible way for transcribing stuff from a written form, where it's far easier to write or draw things. The reason this technology took as long as it did is because it took a while for Kyans to get advanced enough to be able to manufacture things like hexagonal Xanthite Needles. Crystal Fracturing is highly difficult without Kyan Molds and Hyperquartz, and creating the molds is highly time-consuming because Kyanite doesn't fracture. I'll get to these technologies at some point. The theory for Xanthite Etchings (and even Xanthite Cameras) has been known since the dawn of Crystallurgy but the practicality of it was another matter altogether.
Scaling Devices
The main thing that makes Jade as useful of a data storage device as it is is its capacity to store things at the scales of 1.55 nanometers. However, humans can't write that small and Kyans are nowhere near that precise, so in order to make things work on that scale there are devices known as Scalers.
Scalers have a slot for two tablets of the same size. You can also adjust the position of a box known as the Window which can move to a fixed number of positions on its tablet based on the size ratio between it and the tablet (always a whole number). Between the Window and the other tablet are a series of Brightstar Lenses that focus the charge that comes out of a charged etched tablet to smaller points. Because of the half a foot rule, these lenses have to be fairly close to one another or the charge will dissipate.
By charging the bigger side, you can transcribe to a smaller format. You can then move the position of the Window and put in additional tablets to put all of them into the new tablet. Alternately, you can put an unetched tablet into the bigger side and charge the smaller side -- this will go in reverse and scale up the writing. Move the Window and put in additional unetched tablets to scale up every part of the storage tablet.
By using a series of Scalers, you can take a large amount of writing and condense it to a smaller form and then scale it back up later at your leisure. In this way you can go all the way down to the 1.55 nm limit.
It's worth noting that Scalers will transcribe the writing into a Chiral, however since the small versions are just there to become smaller and won't be read directly, this doesn't matter.
Jade Monoliths and Jade Tablets
Pivotians prefer Jade Monoliths, while Ik'Thulu prefer Jade Tablets. Jade Monoliths are huge standardized crystals that are 10 meters tall, 5 meters wide and about 15cm thick. They weigh a monstrous 21 tons. While they can be moved, it's highly impractical. It is however very easy to copy gigantic amounts of data -- there's a lot of infrastructure set up at the tablets in major settlements for reading and copying.
The Ik'Thulu, meanwhile, prefer Jade Tablets, which are 30 cm long, 30cm wide and 5cm thick. These only weigh 25lbs, so they're a lot more practical to carry elsewhere. The Main Ik'Thulu settlement location changes every few generations, so they have to be able to transfer their records to the other side of the world along Waterfall routes without hassle.
Jade Hills
Jade hills is the main Rocite settlement. It's around 15 miles across, and has gigantic columns of Jade everywhere, including a huge core in the middle of the island that's several miles thick. Anywhere there isn't Jade there are instead industry buildings or the occasional forest with its Homestead Spiral in it. Gigantic Ruby apparatuses surround the Core on all sides, with large (for Rocites) buildings nearby. One jut of the island is higher than the rest and faces the Pivot, having a fairly good view of some of the islands attached to it. This jut contains administrative buildings and some of the most lavish homesteads in all of the Winged Isles. It also contains the main Harp Gate (though the island has local ones all over the place) and even has a fairly powerful waterfall for Ik'Thulu visitors (they'll use the Harp Gates if they have to, but are a little weirded out by them).
Jade Hills supplies 90% of the Winged Isles' use of Jade. It doesn't just have columns and a huge core, the Jade goes deep into the ground as well, going so far that it forms the boundary with the Agate core of the island. Jade is the primary means of storing information and also more recently has been used for shaping Charge in some fairly advanced Kyans. It's used by Rocites in their sprawling settlements, it's used by Garmakians in their lofty towers, and it's even used by the roaming Ik'Thulu. So the entire island is extremely prosperous, and its wealth and population growth have spawned additional useful industries. The Rocites finally abandoned the crumbling First Chain and made this their new main settlement.
Distant and isolated settlements will mine their own Jade rather than be reliant on Jade Hills -- while it's readily available, the Harp Gate timetables aren't lined up very well for these kinds of settlements, so often it's way more economical to find Jade in nearby islands or the core of the current one. The Roost has tried for decades to take over the local Jade trade, but it's way too decentralized so they only control it in a few places (like Seastar, and only then mostly to cripple the Free Trader's Syndicate).