Erset

I would like to state for the record that
a) It is hard to find any Sumerian online.
b) The words Google does give me look really odd written in English script - which they are slightly wrong.

They call them the rakbene. One human in ten thousand, who is born with the favor of the gods upon them.
When grown, they stand eight feet tall, with silver skin, and eyeless faces. Around their heads, are horns in the shape of a crown, and from their back sprout great golden wings (both horns and wings grow at puberty). They are, in short, hard to miss.
And they are kings and queens, in almost every case. No human can stand against them, and in almost every case, they are cursed with overwhelming ambition. If they cannot rule, they die in the attempt.
And once they have become rulers, their ambition drives them towards conquest. Their gaze falls upon the land beyond their borders, and they war with each other.
As they grow older, they also tend to grow calmer, and subtler. They forge alliances, make treaties, and even groom heirs. Everything, however, remains ultimately in service of their ambition - few of them will not break any agreement they have made, if that is the course that will most benefit them.
This is not to say, of course, that there are no exceptions. Beings with free will have an annoying tendency to deviate from the norm. But the weight of expectation is a powerful influence, and those who still choose to act differently tend not to be of particular historical significance. Or, indeed, to be live very long - their more ambitious kin regard them as potential threats to their power.
This, indeed, is the fate of most of the rakbene born. For most of the word is now ruled by rakbene, and most are not fond of threats. Thus, those who they are not grooming as their successors or vassals, they often have executed.
But some, whether because they are useful tools whilst they can be controlled, because they are not quite willing to kill helpless children, or for any other reason, do not hold such a policy. And so, rakbene do exist who are not (or are not yet) rulers in their own right. Such kingdoms, naturally, often become havens for those who have given birth to a rakbu child.
As has been noted, the rakbene rule most of the known world - they are stronger and faster than a human, steel breaks against their skin, and many have supernatural powers. It is rarely possible for anyone who is not a rakbu to stop them from doing anything much. And those nations who are not ruled by one, tend to be conquered rather quickly by a neighbour who is.
But they do not quite rule the entire world. There, are, of course, the Unknown Lands, which lie beyond the horizon. They have not yet been conquered, or even mapped, for the simple reason that shipbuilding has not advanced to the point where it is possible for ships to reliably reach them. The occasional ambitious rakbu sends a fleet out with ambitions of spreading their reach to an entirely new land. But, invariably, the cost will either quickly dissuade them, or make them easy prey for their hungry neighbours.
And then, there are the Masku republics, the human nations which have retained their independence by the simple method of hiding the entire country.
As one might imagine, the process of hiding an entire country is more easily said than done. Traditionally, the Masku republics are located in the mountains in the most literal sense - they are dug into excavated holes in the rock, connected to the outside only by cleverly concealed doors in the rock. But some are in other places - Masku republics can be found both in the desert and the deep forests. These tend to be nomadic in structure, to make up for the simple fact that they are not as well concealed as are their mountain-dwelling brethren.
Despite this diversity, there are significant similarities between most of the Masku republics.
Firstly, that they are indeed republics - almost universally. Those who hate the rakbu enough to be willing to live in mountains and forests to avoid their rule, tend also to dislike the system of government they represent. And so, Masku culture is strongly opposed to monarchy, and any Masku nation which does adopt a monarchy tends quickly to become diplomatically isolated from its brethren.
Secondly, they are heavily reliant on trade. Although they tend to be just about able to feed themselves (noone outside the Masku is entirely sure how they manage this), the environments they tend to live in makes trade vital for anything beyond survival. Thus, Masku merchants can often be found throughout the world. Needless to say, many of the rakbu would absolutely love to capture such a merchant, so they could find the republic they hail from - which is why such merchants universally carry poison, and will kill themselves upon arrest. And, as a result, rakbu monarchs rarely bother to arrest them, and they are allowed to move freely. In any case, most of them consider it better than allowing their own citizens to leave the country.
Thirdly, they are very small. Despite all their precautions, Masku republics are occasionally discovered by outsiders - and so, they tend to divide themselves as much as possible, in order to survive such things.
And finally, they kill babies. Rakbu are still born in the Masku republics, and they would not have remained republics if they had been willing to let such people grow up. And so, they are euthanised when they are still babies. Needless to say, mothers often object to this practice, and so most republics are very careful to ensure that newborns are not hidden from them (which is made much easier by their small size. Nevertheless, rakbu born locally are the leading cause of Masku republics being conquered.
There is little else to say about the world of Erset. Economic and technological progress is slow - as is population growth - thanks to the warlike tendencies of the rakbu, and their aforementioned unwillingness to allow their subjects to travel. Countries rarely last more than two or three generations, and there are very few great thinkers who have had a chance to do anything of note - fewer still who have been remembered.

Munda

I haven't given up on this, yet. I'm aware that taking my second week off wasn't exactly ideal, but honestly it wasn't really an ideal week.

So far, this is, I believe, the first time I've used names that aren't derived from somewhere else.

Sometimes, it can be hard to see how abstract theory could be relevant to anything at all. People ask awkward and unreasonable questions like ‘why should we spend our entire GDP on trying to detect this stuff, when the whole reason we can’t detect them is that they affect us in no meaningful way whatsoever?’
But one answer is that you can’t put a value on you might find, until you’ve done the research. Certainly, it might be exactly what you expect. But at least sometimes, you strike gold.
There are other answers one might give, of course, but none give so pat a segue, so we’ll pretend they don’t exist.
Because, on the world of Munda, alchemists in the Republic of Qellim discovered something… odd. It could be shown mathematically that there should exist a certain mathematical relationship between spells, and the effects they would produce. That is, after all, how new spells are invented.
But as technology advanced, measurements of spell effects became more and more precise. And that was when the alchemists of Qellim made their great discovery. Magic wasn’t quite strong enough. Somewhere, somehow, some of the power that should be in spells was going missing - too little to really notice but some, nevertheless. It wasn’t the maths that was wrong, and by the normal method, it was eventually accepted that the problem wasn’t the measurements, either. Which is to say, everyone who thought that it had been a measurement error eventually died. And so, the hunt began for where, exactly, it was going. And, as with all worthwhile pursuit of knowledge, it was extremely expensive, and the average person wasn’t entirely sure what it was for.
But nevertheless, the alchemists persisted. And, in time, they made a discovery - Xamini, the great wall. It was, as far as anyone could tell, entirely natural. In that it didn’t seem like something that could have been made. It was a kind of magical wall, between reality and… something. And it stole from every spell ever cast, to strengthen itself. Which led to an obvious question - what on earth was on the other side?
Of course, the people of Qellim had some concept of fiction. They were, at least, reasonably cautious about the idea of drilling through the fabric of reality to see what might be on the other side. But, as time went on, noone was having any success finding out what might be on the other side. As time went by, it started to occur to certain people that, there being no evidence whatsoever of anything on the other side, it didn’t seem sensible to base one’s decisions upon popular fiction.
But what eventually tipped the scales was what has driven human advancement since the dawn of time - the idea that if one doesn’t do it, someone else will do so first. And if the choice was between destroying the world, and letting those bastards in Fensimi do it first, the alchemists of Qellim knew that that was no real choice at all. And so, the machinery was constructed, and readied. And a blow was struck at Xamini.
It probably goes without saying that there was, indeed, something on the other side. Strange, alien gods lashed out at them, with terrifying strength, and within an hour, the lab was in ruins. Within the day, nearly a hundred square miles had become what are known as the broken lands, from which strange and misshapen creatures regularly emerge.
But it is at this point at which the story stopped following the traditional script. For as powerful as these alien gods might have been, Munda is a world in which magic has essentially been solved, in which the perfect spell for a particular situation can be calculated to hundreds of decimal places using a mobile app. Whilst the alien gods are unused to the magic of Munda, and are forced to act through the crack in Xamini. As such, their ability to actually use their power is extremely limited. In truth, they are more a diplomatic nuisance for Qellim, than a true existential threat.
But that they are not a threat yet, is not to say that they could not become one. Limited as they are by the lack of easy access to the world, the alien gods have, quite sensibly, been trying to widen the crack in Xamini. A task which, unfortunately for them, appears only to be possible from the human side. And so, they have been recruiting human allies. It is a slow process - few people are eager to bind themselves to horrors from outside of space and time.
But the world is full of all kinds of people, and some of them have rather… interesting… motivations. And so, cults have arisen following these alien gods, who seek to give them more of a foothold in the real world.
It is these cults which are considered most threatening by the governments of the world - not least because, freedom of religion and the rule of law being a value shared by most of the civilized nations of [], it is generally considered somewhat uncivilized to place restrictions upon who one can worship. Which is not to say that people aren’t willing to ban world-ending cults, but rather that such cults tend not to be open about who exactly it is that they worship, and that the state has as yet been unwilling to introduce more general restrictions.
Of course, there are citizens who are less dedicated to individual rights, and religious groups suspected of secretly following the alien gods are often attacked - especially in Qellim, where the threat is more immediate.
Noone is sure exactly how often these vigilante groups make mistakes - it’s almost impossible to prove someone doesn’t secretly worship a world-destroying creature of pure malevolence and hatred - but mistakes have, surely, been made.
And finally, lackimg an entirely appropriate segue, there are the Bridge Projects.  For although humans have so far been holding their own, they have as yet been unable to strike back at their attackers. And so, they have started the Bridge Projects - a series of projects related to Xamini, and named after the most ambitious of them.
There are several such projects, of course, dedicated to healing the crack in Xamini, and thus to barring the alien gods forever from the world. But the main Bridge Project comes from an apparently solid theory by the alchemist Derimi, who determined that it should be possible to use the nature of Xamini to create… well, a ‘bridge’ over the realm beyond, allowing human explorers to learn what else might exist in that place, without making themselves vulnerable. Indeed, it should be possible for such explorers to act upon the realm beyond Xamini, without anything from that realm being able to act upon them in return. The Bridge Projects are multi-national initiatives, and are, needless to say, something in which a number of factions in Munda have a significant interest. Even those nations who otherwise have no interest in the alien gods are interested in what might be gained from the other world if they were not a threat, and are worried about what advantage other nations might gain from such a ‘bridge’.

Riabor

Why is this going up now, rather than yesterday?
Because I am easily confused by schedules and complex things like 'the day of the week'.
This is why I started off not taking weekends off.


It is a tragic fact in almost every world, that eventually, the blank spaces on the map are all filled up, and there is nothing new left to discover.
The world of Riabor is different, though in that it is (as far as anyone can tell) an infinite flat plane. Where exactly the sun goes at night is one of the many questions about this situation to which noone has yet been able to give an adequate answer.
The world is one in which exploration and discovery are a way of life.  The civilizations of the known world are constantly hungry for resources, and so they send out teams to uncover new lands, and send back what they find there. Slowly, as more and more people follow those first pioneers, and as the infrastructure there becomes more and more built up, the new land becomes more and more a part of the known world, and the pioneers who first discovered it move on, to find yet more places to settle.
Civilization in Riabor thus has a strange, sloping structure - at the center, the people of the world have built wonders that on most worlds, where resources are ultimately finite, would be simply impossible. And as one travels further from that center, civilization becomes sparser and sparser, until at the frontier, one would barely know that one was still in the same century.
The only indication, indeed,  would be the great rails that run throughout the world. The central parts of civilization are almost entirely dependent upon goods from the frontier, while the frontier relies upon goods and people from more developed parts of the world. And so, it is vital that transport between the two be as fast and as smooth as possible. And so in towns where the height of technology otherwise is the spade, there are nevertheless electrified rails, along which come the great trains. The rails run through mountains, and across oceans, able in places to travel at more than twice the speed of sound.
As one can probably guess, there exists a  certain degree of tension between those who live closer to the center of civilization, and those who live on the edge. Indeed, the two groups ultimately have almost nothing in common. And states the size of those in Riabor rarely survive for long at the best of times. Open war would probably have erupted long ago between the center and the periphery, were the two not so utterly dependent upon each other. As it is, they exist in a precarious balance, in which neither can afford to try to exert too much influence on the other.
Wars between can be very quickly ended simply by the disruption of the rail-lines. And as a result, war of any kind is rare - the damage that could be done by even a short war with a weak nation is immense. Instead, conflicts between nations tend to be resolved by more indirect means.
But there is one group which stands apart from these general rules, and those are the true pioneers - the first people who come to new lands and settle there, who go beyond where it is possible to get by train, and so who travel instead by ship, by plane, and even on foot. Riabor is a world in which one really doesn’t know what might lie over the next hill - the valley on the other side could be filled with anything from mountains of precious metals, just lying there on the ground, to swarms of ravenous, flesh-eating insects. Or just a new species of tree. There were a lot of new species of tree.
In fact, the only thing you could be pretty sure you wouldn’t find, was civilization.
To  be  fair, it had happened, exactly once - a group of explorers had found a peaceful group of forest spirits. However, said spirits had had little technology, and no concept of war. As a result, they didn’t count, or at least hadn’t counted for very long.
To the average person in the more developed parts of the world, the life of an explorer is romantic and exciting. Stories of people like Balbin, Liemir and Suel Merson are the stuff of myth. They say you can make your fortune exploring and, indeed, you can. But though many explorers might end up rich, more than half of them end up dead.
Given this, it would be easy to think that those who become explorers are probably mostly those who don’t realise what it will involve. But what people forget is that even though resources are infinite, there is still a limit to the rate at which they can be extracted, and so population growth has led to poverty throughout the developed word. Those with no other way out often travel towards the frontiers, hoping for a better life. And some of those who do so keep going, join up with an expedition, and explore unknown lands. Often, they come from  the more developed parts of the world, and find frontier life intolerable. Sometimes, however, they have reasons of their own for accepting the risk - to try and characterise the whole group would be an exercise in futility.

The three realms

Managed it.
This one doesn't exactly have much of what one would call 'conflict'. I think there is probably enough here that there would be a significant number of stories to tell in this world without one, plus I may come back here at some point.

As every child knows, the world is divided into three realms.
The topmost, is the Realm of Fire, which lies closest to the uncompromising light of creation. Strange creatures live there, short lived things that seem to be made of fire.
The bottommost, meanwhile, is the Realm of Ice, and it is as cold as the topmost is hot, far from creation’s light. Nothing lives there but the spirits of the dead, who roam that endless realm wrapped in an eternal melancholy. It is a slow place, too, each day lasting a full month in mortal reckoning.
And then, there is the middle realm - the familiar world of humanity, and of matter. It is special because it is connected to the two other realms, by means of two great portals in the sky. There is the life-giving Sun, which connects the mortal world to the realm of fire. And there is the pale moon, which connects the mortal world to the realm of ice, waxing and waning with the days and nights of that realm.
Mortal magic depends upon one of the three reams. Those who draw upon the Realm of Fire, are empowered by the presence of the sun, and when it is not in the sky, they cannot do magic at all. Similarly, those who draw upon the Realm of Ice must rely upon the pale moon, and when it is not present, they too are powerless.
And then there are those who draw upon the native magics of the mortal realm, which obviously is not blocked, as long as one remains in the mortal realm. Not only this, it is far closer than the other two realms, so there is no need to go through the difficulty of drawing magic from another realm - those who draw upon the magic of the mortal realm have no need of the unwieldy and inflexible rituals upon which other magi must rely.
But that is not to say that the magic of the mortal ream is always more useful. For the creatures of the mortal world draw naturally upon its power. It is what allows them to accomplish great feats, and to make heroic efforts. Devoid of it entirely, most creatures of the mortal realm cannot even move.
And the mortal realm is far more populated than either of the other two - meaning that there is far more call upon its power than upon the magic of the other realms. The magic of the mortal realms waxes and wanes in strength - and is often weakest when it is most needed.
One might expect the mages of these three schools to be opposing factions, each convinced of their own superiority. In fact, little could be father from the truth - the three schools relate to each other much as different scientific disciplines do, defined more by friendly rivalry than genuine hatred.
In fact, the mortal realm is in most ways like any other human world, divided amongst squabbling mortal nations. The main influence  of magic has been in allowing technological innovations which would otherwise be impossible for a world with its current level of technological development. The most major part of this is the potential for widespread magical destruction which could take place were a powerful enough group of magicians to open  a new portal between the realms. The politics of mutually assured destruction have thus come early to the more powerful nations.
Further, whilst magic drawing upon other realms is difficult to start, it is almost self-sustaining once the spell is cast. Thus, magic is used frequently to replace technologies not yet discovered - the power of the Realm of Fire, for example, is used in transportation, for everything from hot air balloons, to extremely lightweight steam-engines. The power of the Realm of Ice, on the other hand, is often used for preservation of perishable goods - allowing them to be easily transported across the whole continent - though the ability to call up and talk to the spirits of the dead (albiet with great difficulty) cannot be overestimated in usefulness.
The magic of the mortal realms requires the mage to be more immediately present than does the magic of the other two realms, but is useful nonetheless to those who can afford one. Even the most novice mage of that school is able to give to unmoving things that same motive power which humans enjoy, is able to run like the wind  and to create buildings almost out of nothing. Magic, therefore, is ubiquitous amongst those who can afford an education - it is never not in demand.

Hespon

This is the one from yesterday. Advantage of being ill, it's shorter!
Hopefully I can get today's done as well.
So:
In the land of Hespon, magic is a finite resource. Something which the kingdom of () would have rather liked to know about in advance. For the kingdom made rather… liberal… use of magic. Floating cities, with impossible architectures. Life-support. Power. Transport. Kratia was the most powerful nation in all of Hespon at its height, and magic was its lifeblood.
Then the magic ran out. It was slow - but ultimately, that didn’t matter much, because it was the big spells which ran out fast. Spells like the ones which kept the great cities of Kratia aloft.
It was, obviously, a disaster. Magic was all but gone from the world, and even those nations who had relied upon it less than Kratia did, had used it extensively. Who wouldn’t, when it could solve so many problems? And so, not only did hunger and poverty returned to the world, but the infrastructure of the world,  unsuited to functioning without magic, were utterly unprepared to deal with them.
But less obvious than the immediate  devastation were the social implications - those who survived  the devastation were understandably bitter, and telling them that it was noone’s fault, and that noone could have known what was coming was, probably understandably, less than satisfying to them.
And those who bore the brunt of their anger, were the wizards. For magic was exhausted, but not completely gone. The cleverer wizards are still able to use the last dregs of it.
But they have lost massive amounts of power, and live in constant fear of their lives. So, naturally, they have banded together, to survive in this new world.
The most prominent of the wizard guilds is Astrothetema. And they have made a discovery - that the overuse of magic really wasn’t their fault.
Studies at the University-Fortress of Loes, where Astrothetema makes its home have, by painstaking research, pieced together what must have happened.
In fact, there must have been some incredible spike in magic usage, far beyond what any mortal would be capable of, to so thoroughly drain the world of magic. Research into what, exactly, might have caused this spike is ongoing, but seems constantly to be plagued by inexplicable bad luck.
Meanwhile, taking advantage of the hatred of magic that has been stirred up, the New Empire of Noeta has started to form in the East. It is led by a cabal of fanatics, who rejected the use of magic long before it became fashionable to do so. And they are slowly expanding across the world.
They aren’t the only power in Noeta, though. The University Fortress of Aucha is dedicated to science and non-magical technology. They have provided incredibly advancement to the Empire, and are popular with the common people.  Which the government dislikes, because Aucha considers itself to be above the laws of the Empire, and will regularly flout any they feel impinge upon their status as an independent body. Laws with which they disagree strongly enough, they have even been able to bring down entirely. The council ruling Noeta finds this situation intolerable, but needs the cooperation of the scientists of Aucha to cement its power.

Slight issue.

I'm really, really sorry, I'm feeling really, really sick today.
I've done this twice in nine days, and that's not great, but I honestly just can't write right now. I'm about 3/4 done, but the rest just isn't working out.
I love you all, and I genuinely am sorry.

Some Science Fiction. For Variety.

This one is shorter than normal. I am posting two today (yesterday's is actually going to be a thing.)
I actually tend to try and keep these shorter, I'm just really, really bad at it.
So:
There had been, before the technology was actually created, a not insignificant amount of fiction dealing with the creation of perfect virtual worlds. Unfortunately, it quickly became apparent that very little of it had dealt with the subject well. People, as it turned out, were not at all prepared for the changes it brought.
The big change, as it turned out, was speed. The interface which hooked one up to the virtual world allowed one alter more than just the user’s senses. For example, if you shunted some of the processing outside the user’s natural biological hardware, you could speed up the user’s perception of time a thousandfold or more.
The consequences of such a change were predictable. Being able to do a decade’s worth of research in the afternoon after tea accelerated technological progress beyond all recognition.
As time went by, people who could afford to spent less and less of their time in the real world. Spending a day visiting friends outside of a computer, was not worth losing centuries for.
But there was a problem, and it was the obvious one. Hackers. Even in a broadly post-scarcity economy, people connecting their brains directly to the Internet was a temptation for a thousand reasons, from lust for power, to activism, to simple sadism. And even in a technological wonderland, the universal truth still holds - there is no such thing as perfect security.
Everyone knew a few tricks, of course - when the world is data, why would you not? But it was, ultimately, a matter of degree. People were, understandably, rather keen not to have their minds forcibly altered by strangers on the Internet.
The hackers, although they have communities for the purpose of learning and teaching, don’t tend to be a particularly organised force - in general, they act either on their own, or in small groups based on mutual interest.
Of course, it is traditional that in such a world, the government should be a tyrannical and oppressive force, opposed only by the hackers. But the government is, in general, a rather inoffensive (if outdated) institution.  Beyond the fact that their terms are still measured in real time, they do very little that is of consequence from day to day.
But that is where the Consortia come in. The Consortia are not governments, in the traditional sense. They are voluntary associations, headed by digital security experts, and concerned with data security. They are on the cutting edge of security research, keep backups of people’s minds behind an air gap, and are, in short, a counterbalance to the hackers. Most people are members of several.
People are not, in general willing to be without the protection that the Consortia provide. And access to digital copies of someone’s mind gives a certain amount of obvious leverage. The Consortia, therefore, are able to wield a degree of pseudo-governmental power over their members. Though the government may be for the most part inoffensive, the Consortia have to a large extent divided the population amongst themselves, and wield their power with terrifying efficiency.
The major conflict of the virtual world, then, is between the Consortia, and the hackers they oppose. The majority of people are broadly on the side of the Consortia, but the prevailing opinion would more accurately be described as a combination of apathy and an undirected loathing for the whole business.
But the virtual world is not the only one with which we need be concerned. For though the majority of resources are no longer limited, the development of an entirely human-free economy has been somewhat slower than expected. The building and maintenance of the high technology required to allow the majority of the world to live in a virtual world requires a certain number of workers who are not plugged into said virtual world.
Then, there is the group who are for moral or ideological reasons opposed to spending their entire lives in an artificial world. They are a diverse group, but few in number - very few people are willing to give up eternal life for principle, nor to forgo the numerous other advantages the virtual world offers.
Naturally, there is a certain degree of… animosity… between the eternal, godlike creatures who spend their lives in a world of their own creation, and those who are still stuck in the mundane world of matter and flesh. And, despite the security that people are sure to have around their physical bodies, more and more attacks are carried out against the machinery that houses the worlds in which the majority of the world.