Alicornutopia

all right all right all right

4. Cosmology and Geography

The world is an infinite three-dimensional space divided into an infinite number of finite subsections by magical barriers. You can probably get a good idea of the approximate shape and distribution of these cells by googling "Voronoi fracture". I haven't decided on a name for the pieces but let's go with "chunks" for now.

A single chunk is a (usually?) convex contiguous space containing some amount of matter. Generally there is air and also some sort of landscape. Sometimes there is air but not any landscape. Sometimes there might be solid rock with no air at all. I don't currently think you get vacuum very often, but it's theoretically possible.

From within a chunk, if you stand on the ground and look up, you see a sky. It more or less resembles our Earth sky, although you can usually see slight differences in colour between adjacent barrier facets. During the day there will be a sun, and during the night there will be stars and perhaps a moon. All these celestial phenomena are part of the barrier, but the projection is not straightforward; you cannot go up to the sun and play shadow puppets. If you approach the sun you will find that it still looks very far away even when you are right next to the barrier.

If you go up to the barrier and touch it, it's solid. Up close it's also somewhat visible, especially if you're at ground level and can see the ground stopping at the barrier. It doesn't reflect much: if you throw a rock at it, the rock will bounce back very limply; if you yell, it won't throw clear echoes. The texture when you touch it resembles glass or ceramic. It is extremely smooth and flat: you won't find any detectable irregularities in the surface.

It is fairly trivially possible to make an attempt to cross a barrier, but doing that with no preparation is dangerous. You have to study each barrier facet separately in order to learn how to build a technomagical portal that will allow people and objects to safely cross it.

Barriers generally range from a few millimeters to a few feet thick. Crossing thinner ones tends to be easier, but even the thinnest barrier can potentially kill you if you cross it unaided.

Ground level is not necessarily similar between adjacent chunks; you could try to cross a barrier and end up hitting a wall of dirt, or falling from three hundred feet, or stepping onto the bottom of an ocean.

The inhabited portion of this universe is a mostly-contiguous set of chunks (there are a few instances where someone crossed an inhospitable chunk and settled on the other side) whose combined habitable land area is probably about on the order of Earth's. Of course, Undines exist, so there are also people living in most of the available oceans. Most of the inhabited chunks are on the same very approximate horizontal plane, but in a few places people have gone up or down, taking appropriate measures to establish safe transportation. Elevators, ramps, that sort of thing.

Very small chunks - definitely anything less than house-sized, and some that are bigger than that - tend to be filled-in, like they're just a particularly thick bit of barrier. It's nearly impossible to cross them safely, because the facet you're entering and the facet you're exiting won't count as the same facet, which means it has two separate chances to kill you and two separate facet signatures for you to learn, and you can't even get started on the second one until you've already figured out the first. Also, if you somehow manage to build a portal across one of these it will be as stable as any other, but until then, there's no guarantee that two attempts to cross the same facet from the same point will spit you out in the same place, which further complicates the attempted learning process. In short, if you start examining a barrier facet with an eye to building a portal through it and you discover that it is thirty feet thick, you have found a filled chunk and you should give up and put your portal somewhere else. Even if you manage to get around it via alternate routes and study two approximately-opposite facets of the filled chunk well enough to build a portal between them, the barrier thickness and the signature mismatch will make it absurdly difficult to get the portal settled, and also your "portal" will be a thirty-foot-long tunnel.

Relatedly: Portals can collapse. It's rare but it happens. Preventive maintenance and regular inspections can keep the chance negligible, and it's usually only a problem in thicker barriers anyway.

I am currently pondering exactly what sort of disaster might have cut off the Piotr template's desired not-Thule colony from the rest of the inhabited chunks.

If a group of colonists went somewhere with multiple uninhabitable chunks between them and civilization and their portals collapsed and making them was a skill and the person who had been doing them died unexpectedly and no one else knew for sure where they went...

My guess would be an unexpected disaster in the original settlement location so they had to suddenly move to a new one, timed with the discovery of portal collapse (to the original location) so they did it without portals, all with bad records. Could that do it? Would that be at all plausible?

Maybe they found a unusually large group of chunks on a level above/bellow the normal? Maybe they did something that left several chunks uninhabitable cutting the passage?

Is it possible to change/reshape chunks?

If this was early enough, I could have them discover volcanoes, and take out the portal and the settlement with the same disaster. (One of the ways it's possible to collapse a portal is by doing very destructive things to it, such as for example burying it in lava.)

And it doesn't even necessarily have to be that early; not every chunk is going to contain the right kind of conditions to produce a volcano, so the first time somebody finds one, it will be a surprise even if society has been noodling along pretty efficiently for a while.

Barriers can be traversed but not altered. You can cross a barrier, you can build a portal across a barrier, but you cannot move or reshape a barrier.

Do barriers ever move or reshape on their own? If they do, then a new filled chunk could grow where there was just a barrier before, and make recreating the portal impossible.

Are there air-only chunks for sylphs to fly around in?

Yes, there are air-only chunks. They're not very habitable, but they exist and you can fly around in them if you are a flying sort of creature.

By the way: crossing barriers is easy enough that plants and animals have been known to do it. Neighbouring chunks with a reasonably thin barrier facet between them tend to have similar biospheres. Even without a reasonably thin barrier facet, there's nonzero crossover.

As for chunks ever reshaping themselves, I'm divided on this issue but I suspect I'm going to come down on the side of no.

Brain has been mulling over the not-Thule situation.

So ordinarily, while being any nonhuman turned into a sky-kin is pretty awesome, the effects fade out after a few generations when it gets so that your descendants are less than 1/4 nonhuman-born sky-kin.

It turns out that when nearly all of your ancestors are some flavour of elemental-born sky-kin, it works out a little differently.

When the original colony collapsed, there were a few sky-kin and a lot of elementals around, and they were all very worried about completely dying out because the volcano killed a lot of people and shook up the rest considerably. So the sky-kin turned everybody. And they were totally right about it being a good idea, because even with old age eliminated as a cause of death, turnover was pretty high in those first few generations. After the dust settled and they had a few nice cozy towns established in adjacent chunks, the whole population was the descendants of a few born sky-kin and a lot of turned elementals.

The population of not-Thule is something of an exception to the "magic doesn't skip generations" rule. Your parents' elemental balance is a decent indicator of what yours is likely to be, but sometimes a kid pops up with a wildly different balance from their parents. This combined with existing individual variation in exact magic between different members of the same species... well, powersets in not-Thule can be pretty unpredictable.

I should give this place an actual name. *writes specialized word generator* *rejects all its suggestions* Apparently I am not giving this place an actual name today.

Anyway, the population of not-Thule has a lifespan of approximately 4x human, and speed/strength/durability all ranging from approximately 4x-6x human. Every single one of them is fully sky-kin, but not of any pure recognized type. There's a lot of variance in who stops at Young Adult and who stops at Adult, but almost nobody makes it to Elder. And while everyone's eyes are recognizably in the sky-kin genre, very few of them have pure starry-black or pure gold or pure silver. It's most common to have a starry or silvery or golden overlay/cast/tint on an otherwise ordinary eye colour.

I think normal sky-kin hybrids mostly tend to wash out to a single recognizable flavour of sky-kin after a couple of generations, with first- and second-generation hybrids able to turn people to their specific combinations but mostly not choosing to do so. But with the unique situation in not-Thule, much like with the elementals, the things that usually wash out didn't.

If you are turned by a not-Thule sky-kin, you get that not-Thule sky-kin's exact combination of innate magical characteristics - including elemental things, which ordinarily don't transfer.

I need to think of specific examples of sets of visible and magical characteristics one might have as a resident of not-Thule, but first I should go to bed.

I had envisioned chunks shifting and moving like you see bubbles doing in foam, or like the voronoi cells in this video, but on geologic time scales (with occasional abrupt changes, ala volcanoes or bubbles in foam bursting). If that helps you decide more firmly :P

I am very curious if there is a haut-equivalent to this not-Thule and if so how they game the weird biology

The issue with shifting chunks is that I do not want it to be even theoretically possible for an inhabited chunk to shift or collapse in a way that would harm the people inside. Because it's not like volcanoes or earthquakes or tornadoes or hurricanes or whatever, there is no place in this universe you can go and not be in a chunk, so if the chunk you're in can up and kill you all of a sudden, the world becomes a lot more inescapably terrifying than I mean it to be.

I don't think genetic engineering has, like, been discovered.