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’.