Alicornutopia

So I've been worldbuilding a setting lately, and even discussed it on IRC a few times, and I've decided to put it into a thread here. Additionally, this thread can contain discussion of all things DeAnno, many of which will be templates that have instances on the Fractal Frontier.

This first post is going to be mainly just for setting stuff.

The Origin of the Fractal Frontier, on "Earth Before"

Long ago, probably on something resembling modern Earth, a superpowers gene was introduced artificially through genetic engineering. The gene essentially makes a hack on reality that works because of quantum consciousness/information theory/many worlds that creates a conceptual link between the person with it and one of an infinite possible number of alternate universes, and that link tends to manifest itself as something people would call a "Power".

What the power links a person to has to do with what they think they need and who they think they are. The concept inherent in the linked dimension usually is reflected in these needs, and tends to dig itself into the psyche of the person rather permanently. It isn’t always very noticeable, but people tend to get a little “stuck” mentally once they get a power. You don’t always quite get what power you imagined you would have, but you always get something you want. Somebody’s power usually ends up being pretty useful to them specifically, well sculpted to the challenges they’re used to facing and how they’re used to solving problems.

Powers in the setting are big. Since they're linked to concepts, they can be pretty much anything, and they tend to grow with time and use too. Someone might have the power to become a giant shadow monster that metabolizes fear, or to treat reality like a video game, or to know with great precision the feelings they will feel in the future. Powers all involve interdimensional shenanigans, but are very, very difficult to outright block because of the nature of the links. Powers don't all seem like the same sort of thing, even to detailed analysis; some might register as magic, or psionics, or something else, or none of those. Interactions between powers from this setting and powers from other settings would be difficult to predict.

Though the first powers were the result of genetic engineering, after that first wave, further experiments tended more and more frequently to have disastrous results due to symmetry breaking after the first few links formed. The results were people whose personalities were completely overwhelmed by their powers, becoming entirely alien in psychology rather than just mildly unhinged. Genetic engineering in-vitro is generally safe, but accelerating growth artificially is usually a bad idea.

Naturally born children with both copies of the recessive gene could still get stable powers however, and natural breeding became the source of all (productive) new Powers after the first few years. Children with the right genes for a power tend to first manifest it between the ages of 7-18 (mostly on the younger side); younger children get weaker powers that ramp up with time, and those that get one later tend to get something that starts already relatively strong. By 18 or so, most powers are "developed", but they can still grow with time, just at a lesser rate. Though people with literal superpowers in their genes would seem to be at a large competitive advantage, the genes also carry a rather steep reduction in overall fertility which makes getting large numbers of new powered people quickly even more difficult.

Though there were only dozens of people with these powers at the start, even First World nations were unable to deal with them effectively and the world was soon entirely destabilized. In spite of the controlling factors against growth, the number of powered people slowly rose, and the situation on Earth became more and strained. One might expect that eventually powers of this magnitude would eventually reach a critical density such that there were so many in one place that Earth would either be torn apart entirely or reach a sort of Singularity; one of these probably happened, but it's not clear which, and it doesn't actually affect the setting very much.

A certain fraction of people with Powers are called "Keepers" because the form their power takes includes what is basically a personally "owned" demiplane of varying size, with its own bizarre rules and laws separate from our Universe. Many of the people with Powers (and many normals as well) moved onto these demiplanes more or less permanently, though they still often interacted with Earth. When these people had children, some of them were Keepers too. These Keepers however, tended to identify the demiplanes of their birth as "home", so their own personal demiplanes were tied more tightly to them than to Earth. Many of these new demiplanes were also eventually settled, and the process repeated itself. And repeated itself. And repeated itself.

As the years wore on, the number of these demiplanes multiplied exponentially, and their subjective "distance" from Earth grew greater and greater. Adding to the effects of this distance, some Keepers died, and their planes became much more difficult to pass through afterwards, creating natural barriers further separating the "Frontier" from Earth, making any sort of coherent travel or communications network more and more difficult to maintain. Eventually, the separation at the leading edge was more or less total, and the Fractal Frontier had become a de-facto Cosmology all its own, a literally fractal collection of demiplanes growing at the speed of human generations.

The Fractal Frontier

Many thousands of years later, “Earth Before” is a myth, and the tales of the first Power users ("Nobles") of old have passed into legend. The culture is a bizarre mix of Parahuman Feudalism and a Fantasy Wild West, with a rarified Superpowered “Gentry” ruling over a much more populous “peasantry” of humans without a double-copy of the recessive Powers gene. By now, there are more demiplanes in the Fractal Frontier than there are atoms in humanity’s original universe, but the surviving networks of connection between them tend to be small, and continue to fracture as time goes on.

Demiplanes tend to be both ruled and tamed by small "cliques" of Nobles ranging in size from a couple to a couple dozen; collections of more than that in one place tend to be dangerously unstable. The most common cause of death among the Gentry is inter-Nobility-violence, and most of their social structure has evolved to minimize tensions and keep this toll as low as possible. New Keepers tend to gather a group of close Noble friends as well as whatever peasants can be scrounged up and go off on their own relatively quickly; often most of the Nobility of a new plane is made up of teenagers. There is a degree of exchange between nearby cliques which softens the effects of inbreeding, but it is still a recurring problem for the Gentry only held at bay by interbreeding with the much denser peasant population and the occasional peasant who gets two copies of the recessive gene, becoming a Noble.

On the edge, the nature of record-keeping-by-teenager happening every generation or so makes for a fairly lawless and wild environment. "Might Makes Right", "Mind Your Own Business", and "Respect the Local Keeper" are about all that pass for universal rules, and the last two are more like suggestions. Noble children are given a lot of free range and a general lack of structure in their lives; sometimes the Peasantry are better educated on average than the Nobility. This free range upbringing does lead to a fairly visible child mortality rate (either from the dangers of the demiplane or enemy action), and "helpless" dead children are a common cause for violent scuffles between cliques. While one might expect that more structure could help, pinning unpowered children into close quarters with powered adults in early childhood tends to cause problems as well as solving them, and since these problems result in intra-clique violence instead of inter-clique violence they often have even worse results.

While powers can be created stably through normal human reproduction, this is not an entirely reliable process. In extreme conditions (such as mass cloning, accelerated growth, or other similar procedures one might try to use to create many powers quickly), “Unseelie” often develop instead of Nobles. This also applies to any artificial application of the powers gene, and is the result of the broken-symmetry effect mentioned earlier. There are persistent rumors that something called "The Second Veil" prevents large scale interference with the superpower gene itself. It might be anything from some kind of extreme bad luck curse to a subtle attention deflecting effect to the cause and the object of the Unseelie, but whatever its nature, it is often brought up as a reason to avoid this sort of activity. What the First Veil was, if anything, is not well understood either, but it is commonly attributed as present on Earth Before.

In an Unseelie the power itself completely supplants the personality of the human; even by the standards of the somewhat psychotic Gentry population, Unseelie are unreasonably violent and impossible to work with. Many a demiplane or group of such have been wrecked by Unseelie, and they end up both as an incentive against extreme social upheaval and yet another roadblock cutting off demiplanes from each other. Unseelie also sometimes develop naturally in peasant-born children with a double copy of the power gene; this can create a mild stigma against interbreeding despite the beneficial genetic effects, and is yet another danger which can destabilize a demiplane by surprise.

While individual demiplanes or collections of such on the Fractal Frontier are generally quite unstable and vulnerable to any number of possible disasters, the extremely spread out and resilient nature of the structure as a whole is almost impossible to destroy. Even if the majority of branching demiplanes become dead ends, the exponentially growing nature of the beast is such that even one surviving head is enough to regrow fairly quickly. The natural roadblocks to communication and travel also serve to keep the network as a whole insulated from catastrophic problems such as degenerate power combinations and rampaging Unseelie, meaning that any single apocalypse is usually limited to less than a hundred demiplanes out of the innumerable existing legions of them.

The Fractal Frontier is a wide civilization take past all rational extremes. With resources and territory literally increasing without bound to match the pace of the population, the power of exponential growth is given full sway, and this strange Cosmology supports a profusion of human life in a way our native universe never could.

The Condition of the Peasantry

While the Nobles are often capricious with their peasants, in some respects life for normals on the Fractal Frontier is better than the lot of their Feudal cousins was on Earth Before. Peasants do not actually support the Nobility; in fact, the reverse is probably more true. Nobles usually use their Powers to create infrastructure, actualize food supplies, provide health care, and defend peasant settlements from the deprivations of the local demiplane. For their part, peasants generally provide various services the local Gentry clique is unable to replicate with their Powers and manage advanced technological, magical, and biological resources produced in bulk by Crafters. As peasant settlements (and in all truth, the peasants themselves) are an economic resource of the cliques, they are typically managed in a pseudo-socialist manner, with available resources distributed in the interest of keeping the maximum number of peasants working productively.

While peasants themselves are typically not closely monitored and free to roam as they will within a demiplane, interplanar travel is often tightly controlled by the Gentry so this freedom is usually illusionary. Survival on demiplanes is often much more difficult outside of the Gentry-subsidized settlements, so despite their increased freedom “wild” peasants often do much worse than their nominally indentured peers. While wild peasants living without Gentry support are relatively rare on the Edge, in the older planes deeper in they become more common, and might even be the only residents of unowned planes abandoned due to a dead Keeper.

While most peasants do enjoy many advantages that might remind one of the citizens of Earth Before, they pay in spades for these with a loss of autonomy to the frequently capricious and arbitrary rule of the Gentry. While peasant-on-peasant crime is very low, an unlucky peasant might be subject to any number of deprivations against their happiness, liberty, and life by Nobles who sometimes see them more as livestock than as people. The carrot generally is more effective than the stick, but the Gentry to not hesitate to use either when exploiting the essentially helpless peasant population. Even wild peasants are not truly free of the Gentry; when they are noticed, they are often leaned on all the harder for being so useless for anything else.

Though the life expectancy of the peasants tends to be lower than that of the Gentry (the luckiest of whom might live for hundreds of years or even indefinitely), the recessive Powers gene inhibits fertility significantly (even with only a single copy) and therefore normal humans biologically outbreed those with Powers, keeping the balance of Nobles and peasants on the Frontier's Edge relatively stable. In older demiplanes, growing populations of wild peasants in otherwise abandoned planes and general violent attrition among the Gentry tends to swing numbers further, making Nobles a higher proportion of the population at the leading Edge of the Frontier. The deeper, older planes are a source of resupply for cliques that have run out of peasants for some reason or another though, preventing actual shortages of peasants from occurring often even on the Edge.

Even for cliques with power combinations that make peasants rather ancillary to the economy, a large and healthy population of them is considered a status symbol that advertises the power of the clique to possible competitors. A clique that seems weak on the surface is often suspected to have hidden advantages when their demiplane hosts thriving peasant villages; conversely a clique might be suspected of weakness or internal strife if their demiplane has run empty or low of peasants for some reason. This more than anything else tends to protect peasants from outright whimsical slaughter, and the abuse they suffer is more usually the kind that doesn’t leave marks, for better or for worse.

Discrimination against first generation Nobles is almost absent, and peasant-born Nobles often become relatively happy and well adjusted members of cliques. While their lack of experience and friends usually gets them taken advantage of initially, as usual the specific Power a Noble possesses is more important than anything else, and the new Noble’s value to their clique is usually quickly apparent with new luxuries or defenses being made available. Peasants are not generally victimized because they are peasants so much as because they are helpless, so when the second condition no longer applies one’s birth with the first loses meaning.

Powers: A Spotter's Guide

While there is tremendous variation in powers, a couple key types of power or common elements in powers are the topic of frequent discussion or categorization by the peoples of the Fractal Frontier. Many powers don't easily fall into one of these categories, and almost all of them are very useful in conflict in some way.

Keepers: As mentioned earlier, a Keeper's power includes (but is usually not limited to) some form of demiplane. The Keeper tends to be able to access that demiplane in some way from any other plane (but is not necessarily able to hold the way open or find a way back) and can almost always bring others into the Demiplane to visit or stay. Keepers usually have some amount of personal power as well, either themed with their demiplane or directly tied to it. Often to reach their full potential Keepers must explore, conquer, or solve elements of their demiplane's nature.

Demiplanes can sometimes be moved between without the active participation of a Keeper, and this sort of travel is almost always between "adjacent" demiplanes (demiplanes are adjacent if the keeper of one demiplane first gained powers in the other demiplane). This is usually the only method of travel through demiplanes with dead Keepers, and such places usually become rather more hostile to inhabitants.

Crafters: Crafters have a power which allows them to somehow create real things which can be used in some way by other people. These things may take any sort of form or aesthetic depending on the Crafter, from technological ray guns to bioengineered domestic animals to enchanted cloaks. Maintaining or even duplicating these is sometimes even possible for normal people who are skilled enough; it is somewhat more commonly possible for other Crafters that are similar in some way.

Unlike Keepers, Crafters more often don't have "extra" personal power except in the form of any of their own creations that they keep themselves. For this reason, they must be careful not to get into difficult situations and should try to be prepared for surprises. On the other hand, Crafters have more force multiplication potential than most other powers, and usually have enormous versatility as well.

Soldiers: While almost any power can be weaponized to a degree, Soldiers have powers that are especially good at winning fights. Soldiers often don't do very much for a clique when they aren't fighting, but just by having capable Soldiers around a clique does a lot to discourage attacks against it. Even if a Noble doesn't have a particularly combat focused power, they will sometimes be referred to as a Soldier if they are powerful enough that they can easily mix it up with focused Soldiers in spite of that.

Cliques with lots of Soldiers lacking economic power tend to depend more on their peasant populations for material and labor. Conversely, cliques with few soldiers might rely much more usual on peasants militarily, often equipping them heavily with Crafter-built weapons.

Seers: Seers have powers focused on helping them gather information or make decisions. Even though many seers are as physically as helpless as peasants, they are highly prized none the less for their often incredible potential when used intelligently. A Seer might be able to perceive a wide area easily, predict the future, dominate social interactions, or even help others with the development or coordination of powers. While many powers have a little bit of "Seer" in them, pure Seers tend to be extremely good at what they do, and often rise to the top of their cliques with the local Keeper.

Producers: Producers tend to have powers that have their strongest impact on the economy, either by injecting lots of raw materials, low quality goods, or basic services. Producers usually can't make or do things with their powers that couldn't be gotten in other ways (unlike Crafters) but they can do it easily and on a large scale. Producers are often useful for supporting large peasant populations with little effort, or conversely for providing services that might replace some of the common uses of peasant populations.

FAQ:

Q) I want to do something in the Fractal Frontier! Tell me How.
A) The demiplanes of the Fractal Frontier are nearly infinite in variety and extremely varied. People are free to set nonprofit fanfic or glowfic in the Fractal Frontier as long as they allow recursive fanfic or glowfic of whatever they set there. I will probably be willing to do interactive Fractal Frontier glowfic with people myself too.

Q) DeAnno, what are all these characters' actual names? All you ever write are their cape names.
A) Nobles get normal peasanty names at birth, but choose their own "cape" name once they get a power, discarding their old one. Sometimes they'll identify themselves additionally by home demiplane or clique, such as "Daydream of Ice Core". Secret identities are (almost always) not a thing, due to the social structures common on the Fractal Frontier.

Daydream might eventually be one of the two protagonists of a novel-ish-thing set in the Fractal Frontier. She is not currently templatey as I'm not sure what other versions of her would look like.

Daydream is a "Noble" girl from the Fractal Frontier setting, aged 16. She grew up on Ice Core, a cold dark demiplane with a somewhat dysfunctional clique led by its emotionally abusive Keeper, White Out (her second cousin). Daydream is red headed, gawky, thin, and a bundle of teenaged abandonment issues.

Daydream has no close friends her own age as the Ice Core clique is rather small, and suffers from abandonment issues due to her dead mother and her detached father. She tends to be rather reclusive by nature, but all the same is increasingly desperate to get out of Ice Core and into a cozy position with a new clique on a new demiplane. She doesn't want to end up like her father, a fear that alternately bounces in her mind between being unloved by a significant other and being unfavored by the local Keeper.

She takes the responsibility of Nobility seriously, but does simply consider herself to be "better" than the unpowered peasantry. Her attitude towards new people is generally friendly but reserved, and she is quick to become defensive if she feels socially threatened. She is very hesitant to show or admit to any sort of weakness or inability, but won't directly lie about her Power (which she feels is unimpressive).

Daydream's Power:

Daydream can generate Figments at touch range made out of real organic matter from a refilling subjective pool. Newly generated Figments are tied to Daydream until she stops paying attention to them and releases them; mass tied up in such controlled Figments does not regenerate in the pool until it is let go.

Generating Figments is always at least slightly tiring, and becomes more exhausting the father down into the mass pool Daydream has to dig. There is no maximum depth, but at a certain point it becomes too fatiguing to get more mass out of the pool. Due to the nature of her limitations, Daydream can generate lots of mass more easily when she is retaining control over less of it at any given time.

Normally when Daydream releases control of a Figment the mass loses connection to her and her power source, sitting and eventually rotting where she leaves it. This mass difference is slowly regenerated in her pool. Alternatively, at touch range she can reabsorb a controlled Figment back into her pool instantly (the exchange is a bit lossy, still requiring a bit of regen after to make up the loss), leaving nothing behind in the world. Once she has relinquished control of a Figment, it can never be reabsorbed in this way.

Daydream often generates Figments in the form of mindless creatures. While these creatures are not especially anatomically accurate on the inside, they are quite convincing on the outside. Daydream can puppet such creatures mentally, moving their muscles and seeing through their senses, but doing this directly takes up large amounts of her attention. When managing large numbers of controlled Figments Daydream more often employs simple "programming" techniques, giving Figments automatic behaviors and responses to stimuli. Daydream’s control has no range limit, but can be cut off if Figments somehow become dimensionally very far away or similar.

While Daydream's Figments are not constructed accurately enough to use stored chemical energy like normal animals, connected figments have continuous access to an outside power source in proportion to their mass. While this is not an enormous amount of power, it does allow Figments to be rather physically impressive by organic standards, if not by the standards of superpower Projections in general. This energy flow has a tendency of making controlled Figments warm to the touch.

Daydream has the most difficulty making her Figments accurately simulate taste and smell. She can make food, but it won't smell or taste quite right, and will be less nutritious than the real thing even though it's about as filling (her tendency to subside on such is part of the reason for her skinny figure.)

Some other people in Daydream's orbit:

White Out: Keeper of “Ice Core” (quick out, slow in, poor aim), Snow Telekinesis (short range), Snow Proprioception (short range), Snow Expelling Portals, Immunity to Cold.

Ice Core is a chilly cylinder that is absolutely dark with snow blowing down from one side. Natural foliage is lichen that collects nutrients and energy from the rock and competes for snowwater on the surface. Animals are mammaloid up to monstrous sizes, extensive use of echolocation, hearing, and smell.

White Out is a natural albino and a complete and total bitch. Slim and striking, she rules her clique with a mixture of Keeper’s prerogative and clever emotional abuse. She generally wears snow as clothing, continuously replenishing it if happens to be melting.

Cancer: Crustacean Bio-Crafter. Lots of variety, able to work on his own biology. Creations are numerous, powerful, versatile, but stupid: they need constant supervision and control. Own body is heavily modded, a number of added armor plates, generative organs and manipulative limbs.

Cancer is a reclusive Noble obsessed with his creations. Even the rest of the Gentry generally find him repulsive, but he is surprisingly kind, if often clueless. Cancer is rather older than most of the clique, and primarily came along to find a useful outlet for his power. Cancer’s creations are both the main occupation for and the main means of supporting the peasantry in Ice Core’s harsh conditions.

Chiral: Echolocation Shaker Soldier. He can produce ultrasound for a variety of purposes and has unbelievable hearing; this can be used for long range echolocation, personnel area denial, or object shattering. He can also mimic ordinary sounds extremely well, or simply use his hearing to listen in over long distances. People caught in bursts of his ultrasound might be killed, hurt, confused, or deafened, depending on range and usage.

Chiral is Daydream’s father, a chronically depressed sometimes toy of White Out’s unable to truly get over Daydream’s dead mother. He does genuinely love his daughter, but feels that his role in keeping Ice Core stable and secure is sufficient to keep her happy and safe. He often spies on her with his hearing, but rarely has the will to intercede in her life even when he disapproves.