[Early/Nascent Pre-Alpha][WIP][Staging][Worldbuilding] Swords and Sourcery (Title Tentative)

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

This thread is for ideas for my take on answering the writing prompt from this other thread I started. Two worlds, one science-fantasy hosting magitech and the other a less fantastical science-fiction future colony of Earth, come into first contact over FTL/interdimensional comms entirely by accident. This is the story of those involved.

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

All have for now are some names for elements I sketched out in the other thread:

• 'PoV 1' is Blair/Blaire (befoe/after gender/sex swap) (tentative, no definitive last name just yet.)
• I don't have a name for the world he lives on yet.
• 'PoV 2' lives on the planet 'Dyresia,' namely on the lengthy 'Leymridian peninsula and archipelago' (perhaps a distinct province) of the 'Commonwealth of Mercaedia,' a country on one of her world's major continents.
• 'PoV 2' is Ariastħane ri Feljeux (no middle name yet.)

(Makes a note to post a brief, preliminary description of Dyresia at some point…)

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

Some other (potential?) characters:

Unnamed Character 1

This is a character I mentioned off-hand in the other thread:

a local rookie police detective

Click to shrink...

(I"m not necessarily set on that being her exact title, though; she was just the — or one of the — right person/people on the force for the case that gets her sucked into the plot.) She's:

• Young for her position (around Ariastħane's age) but not quite/necessarily a prodigy, just a hard worker who notices things and put the hours of study needed in.
• Good with languages, both learning and teaching them.
• Spoiler

  Potentially a reincarnation, but any memories she has of her past life in the same universe Blair calls home are fuzzy/ill-defined and only get filled in with the context needed to understand them properly retroactively as she gains experience this time around. For example, she doesn't remember any languages from Earth or any of its colonies until after she learns them all over again from spending time with people from that plane of existence.

Hikaru Shirai

(No middle name yet.)

A boy, possibly from Earth proper/itself, at least partly of both Japanese and Irish descent who gets 'isekai'd to Dyresia the traditional way, by truck-kun, for whatever reason. They end up getting discovered lying unconscious and then picked up along the way Ariastħane and her rebel allies take on their way off the island she escaped to during her unplanned exile. Hikaru also gets a gender/sex swap as part of the deal. (IIRC, their name's gender-neutral, so they won't need to change it.) They wake up soon after, only to witness the battlefield chaos of the frenzied flight they're now part of as her rescurers take off in a dropship to regroup with some other resistance members on a seafaring carrier vessel.

Unnamed Character 2

This boy was an enemy soldier who eventually found the courage to voice his vehement, violent objection to the treatment his forces, those close to him (including in the chain of command over his unit) in particular, were giving to the locals in the path of their conquest. Specifically, he took his stand inside a church in occupied terriotry which found itself amongst the local edifices his country's troops were defacing. It turned out that the blade he drew from its pedestal there in the middle of his outrage was the Myrttenssvaard.

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Partial physical descriptions for some characters might come soon, if not next.

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Also, I intend to mirror or move documentation off-thread (specifically, to a — currently private and barely started — GitLab repository) so as to get it out of the way of further discussion. I'll post where that is when it's fleshed out enough and ready to share. I'm not sure when that'll be, though, as I'm only working on this off and on at my leisure at the moment.

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

A brief detour/aside before we get to additional and/or more detailed character descriptions, actually: (Correction: Scratch that, there may be couple other things I need to post before I get to those.)

The peninsula and archipelago of Leymridia is quite extensive. It somewhat resembles, topographically, at least:

• Alaska's Aleutian island chain
• the Japanese archipelago
• Southeast Asia, including the Indonesian archipelago, albeit an east-west mirror-flipped version
• the Phillipine archipelago
• the Greek peninsula
• an east-west mirror-flipped version of the Italian peninsula

in some respects, though it's more temperate and only gets colder in the north, like Japan's Hokkaido. It's actually situated most like a much meatier version of the first of the listed examples in appearance, even to the extent of where it's located, sort of. Anyway, the Leymridian peninsula and archipelago hangs off the northwestern corner of the Commonwealth of Mercaedia. The country, in turn, lies somewhat in the north of a continent which, aside from the Leymridian region, resembles a crescent shape or a spiral shape or arm from a storm system, with the concave side facing partly westward and the convex side facing more to the east. (I might do a rough sketch of it at some point, but I don't have any drawings just yet.)

(Note that this doesn't necessarily mean all of Dyresia's landmasses have any partial similarities to Earth ones. Either way, though, you might find the Commonwealth of Mercaedia to be analogous to the United States and Canada, though, as its name implies, not necessarily politically — more on politics and the structure of some civil institutions later —, and its continent to be such to North America, albeit perhaps shifted south a non-trivial amount. Whether or not Dyresia has an analogue of South America, I'm leaving up in the air for now, though I'm leaning towards this landmass just being a larger continent with a range similar to that of both Americas combined, with no skinny tail like North America has between itself and South America in the middle.)

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

(This is actually for later, but one of the characters whose sketch snippets I'm going to post lives there, so I'll post a preliminary description of it now.)

The seastead known, when its name is translated to English, as 'Haggler's Rest' is a merchant port city on the water not always known to be the safest of harbors. It's not actually that bad — most of the time, anyway — but has, infamously to some, historically had an somewhat unjustified reputation as the key port of call for more than the occasional rough-and-tumble scavenger, salvager, or smuggler, some of whom, though, to be fair, freqent the settlement or just flat-out live there even today. (Though what scavenging or salvaging work could be around for the taking on a world that's not post-apocalyptic, I don't really have much of an idea.)

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

Just a small trivia tidbit to stash here for the moment: Dyresia has beastkin, at least to the extent of them being 'little-bit-beastly'/kemonomimi (whether more animalistic anthropomorphic animals exist there is something I'm still leaving up in the air for now.) (I'd do a full post on the planet's races, but I haven't really defined them beyond these and humans, neither of which need — much — explanation, yet.)

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

Ánzia

(No last or middle name yet.)

A scrappy little delinquent of a young (late pre-teen or early teenager) catgirl from Haggler's Rest who prefers stowing herself away on a certain courier/shipping/salvage/scavenger/smuggling ship over doing her schoolwork, which often bores her. Naturally, this irks said vessel's captain and crew to no end — especially when they find out she's gotten her grubby little paws into the ship's mess. Curiously, though, when Ánzia isn't fooling around, she seems to have picked up a thing or two in her escapades and taken to the life of a sailor like a fish to water. Her fellow shipmates may pretend she's a nuisance at times, but, actually, they've really come to love her like their little sister or cousin cabin girl underfoot.

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

Blair/Blaire
As both Blair and Blaire:

Age: Late teens
Homeworld: Unnamed Earth colony

As Blair:

Sex: Male
Race: Human
Hair color: Black or dark brown
Eye color: Undecided

As Blaire:

Sex: Female
Race: Fox beastkin
Beastkin traits: Ears, tail
Hair/fur color: Dark medium flame cobalt blue
Eye color: Dark medium flame cobalt blue

Ariastħane ri Feljeux

Age: Late teens
Sex: Female
Race: Human
Hair color: Undecided (Perhaps also a darker shade of blue, but not the exact same one as Blaire's, or maybe honeydirty/ash blonde?)
Eye color: Undecided
Homeworld: Dyresia
Home:

• Country: Commonwealth of Mercaedia
• Region: Leymridian peninsula and archipelago
• City: Undecided

Unnamed Character 1

Age: Late teens
Sex: Female
Race: Human
Hair color: Light blue (tentative)
Eye color: Undecided
Homeworld: Dyresia
Home:

• Country: Commonwealth of Mercaedia
• Region: Leymridian peninsula and archipelago
• City: Undecided

Hikaru Shirai

Age: Late teens
Race: Human
Hair color: Dark red
Eye color: Undecided
Homeworld: Earth
Home country: Japan

Before getting 'isekai'd:

Sex: Male

After getting 'isekai'd

Sex: Female

Unnamed Character 2

Age: Late teens
Homeworld: Dyresia
Home country: Undeveloped (The enemy country)

Before drawing that holy sword:

Sex: Male
Race: Human
Hair color: Black or dark brown (tentative)
Eye color: Undecided

After drawing that holy sword:

Sex: Female
Race: Cat beastkin
Beastkin traits: Ears, tail
Hair color: Silver
Eye color: Undecided

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(Note to self: I might well want to consider merging this additional information into my initial character post(s,) perhaps? Alternatively, I could merge posts about each as part of documenting them in the GitLab repository I'm making for this project.)

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

The holy sword Myrttenssvaard ('Maiden's/Maidens' Sword/Ward') is a divine blade meant only to serve maidens of destiny chosen by its patron goddess during times of trouble or instability. Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on your point of view,) males deemed worthy to wield it became touched by its power and reshaped to fit that requirement, though this doesn't necessarily happen that often. (The sword wasn't for everday, or even ceremonial, use, anyway.)

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Noe: I haven't quite come up with what to do for a post on said goddess just yet.

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

Haggler's Rest used to be on the frontier (generally or just in terms of 'the frontier between maritime borders') but isn't quite really any more, hence it not being as crazy as it used to be.

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

Some things I still have left to make posts on:

• The Orion Colonial Federation, or OCF; the predominant faction in the region of human influence surrounding Earth in its plane of existence. (I…guess this could be a reference to the Orion's Arm setting…?)
• Faster-than-light propulsion and communications technology used by the OCF and its contemporaries: the 'flux impeller' and 'flux ansible.' (Yes, those can be construed as oblique references to Back to the Future's flux capacitor.)
• The Hunter's Moon: A ship hidden unassumingly in something resembling plain sight under its humble disguise as a breakaway habitation, laboratory, office, campus, and/or storage module, albeit an oddly-shaped one with lots of sealed hatches to hide its ture nature from any prying eyes questing about inside, stowed away as part of the seastead Blair calls home. He uses it to escape the attack on said settlement in a manner not unlike the Lusankya's departure from Coruscant in Star Wars Legends, though not with anywhere near the same level of infrstructure or population loss.
• Artemis, the Hunter's Moon's ship AI, and Diana, her less-sophisticated 'low power'/'stealth' personality layer.

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Also, I should note that I'm thinking Blair might get enlisted to be a covert bodyguard as part of the personal staff for a princess or similar, whether they're another noble or actual royalty. (If said royal is from the Leymridian region or Mercaedia in general, then the country and its member states are a constitutional monarchy of some sort at some level.)

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Finally, I gave the Leymridian language a Germanic (and, additionally and separately, northern European) flavor to it before I realized that this (the former) might be a nod to Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha's Belkan.

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

I'm half-tempted to turn the double 'a' ('aa') in 'Myrttenssvaard' into an 'å' ('a' with overring,) but I'm not entirely sure that's an edit I want to make yet. I guess I'll let the thought sit here and simmer for a bit to see if it sticks.

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

A few more tidbits:

• A name I'm considering for the Myrttenssvaard's patron goddess is 'Visⱬ́ħřaiya.' She's variously depicted, and occasionally seen, as either a human or, much more commonly, a single or 'mix-and-match' mammal beastkin with long hair, though her hair/eye(/fur) color isn't always consitent. (She prefers a slightly dark medium cobalt with streaks of silver in it for her hair color, at least, though sometimes changes it for a bit on a whim.)
• Mercaedia's military has a division whose name as rendered in English translates to 'Field Magecraft and Reconnaissance Corps (FMRC.)' This is the branch which Ariastħane joins. As you might be able to guess from its name, the FMRC is somwhat unique in being a multidisciplinary organization tasked both:
  • with handling the (sometimes-improvised) construction and use of functional and formulaic magic, as well as technology both magical and mundane, in the field and/or with active field agents under its purview
  • and filling a non-trivial number of intelligence roles.
• The Hunter's Moon's internal hangar/landing bay holds six or eight transforming mecha-planes. I've yet to come up with call signs; unit names; or series, make, or class names for them, though. (I have a few ideas on that front, but I'll save them for later, perhaps when I've given the topic a little more consideration.)
• I…might well go back and rethink my few initial thoughts on the Leymridian language. I originally said I'd given it a Germanic and northern European flavor, but now I mnight have let some eastern European influences (and even one Japanese one) in. (Also, Ariastħane's surname, 'ri Feljeux,' sounds French. Whether that should be native to Leymridian, due to some old or current dialect of the language, or come from another language entirely isn't something I've come to any firm conclusion on just yet.)
• Posts may become subject to change after first seeing publication as I develop this setting further.

Also, as you may well have noticed, updates here have unfortunately been, and may continue to be, somewhat irregular for the foreseeable future;. I also can't entirely guarantee a lack of hiatuses on my part here. My apologies on this.

 

[RandomDSdevel_WCFaWF]

My next post here was going to collect some more of my thoughts on the Leymridian language, as well as the existing ones in one place, but…then I lost my draft of it. I do plan on reconstructing what I had before at some point, naturally.