Alicornutopia

I decided to make a thread about one of my favourite games ever ever, because yes.

(Final Fantasy X is the game in question.)

Geography
Spira is a spherical world, but you wouldn't know it from what its people know of it. As far as anyone is aware, it contains exactly one continent with several islands. Its people have enough technology to be able to explore all of it if they want to except for one little thing to be explained. There are a bunch of names below that won't make sense until you read the rest of the thread, so you can come back to this list later.

Relevant locations from the south up are:

• Besaid Island: A teeny tiny island at the very tip of the continent, is only large enough to contain one village. Contains a temple (which is relevant for reasons);
• Kilika Island: A somewhat less tiny island, also contains a temple;
• Luca: Pretty much the most technological place around that doesn't belong to the Al Bhed, it's where Blitzball tournaments, the only form of mass entertainment available, happens. Also the southernmost city on the continent proper;
• Djose Temple: A temple pretty much in the middle of nowhere;
• Moonflow: A very pretty body of water that contains ~spirits~ (actually pyreflies) (it's complicated);
• Guadosalam: The main city of the guado, entrance to the afterlife;
• Thunder Plains: Plains where there's a constant thunderstorm;
• Macalania Woods: A very pretty frozen magical forest. Also has a temple;
• Bevelle: Seat of the World Government And Religion, everything important happens there. Also has a temple;
• Bikanel Island: A desert island. As in, an island with a huge desert. The Al Bhed live there, with their wretched technology;
• The Calm Lands: Large plains where the first battle against Sin (explained below) was fought;
• Remiem Temple: A huge temple hidden in the Calm Lands;
• Cave of the Stolen Fayth: A hidden cave in the Calm Lands where a fayth that was stolen from a temple is hidden;
• Mount Gagazet: A cool mountain chain with lots of floating rocks and passages, home of the ronso;
• Baaj Temple: A hidden temple in a secluded island somewhere;
• Zanarkand: The machina city to the very north, spiritual Mecca, the place to go if you want to fix all the problems ever.

People
The most common species by far is humans, who live pretty much everywhere (except Guadosalam and Mount Gagazet). Ethnicities as we know them aren't distributed sensibly, except for the Al Bhed, who all have their own island.

The guado are a race of frog elves who are very spiritual and protect the woods and the only known entrance to the afterlife. This gives them some political power but until recently they mostly didn't care and race relations are strained. Interfertile with humans.

The ronso are a race of blue lion people with horns. Not spiritual in the same sense as the frog elves but much more religious. Probably not interfertile with humans but who knows.

The hypello are also frog people but much less spiritual. They don't do much and live pretty much anywhere too, though they come from the Moonflow.

Pyreflies, the Farplane, and monsters
No one really knows what those pretty lights on the Moonflow are, except for "very magical" and "connected to spirits somehow." When someone dies, if they have accepted their death in life, they go straight to the afterlife, the Farplane, which is very pretty but kinda insipid and boring and nothing much happens.

If they resent and grieve their own deaths, they can become trapped, and unless someone (a summoner, explained in a bit) performs a Sending (in which pretty pyreflies leave the bodies of the deceased and go into the sky) (which is funny because the Farplane is actually in the centre of the planet), pyreflies containing their soul will stay around and, eventually, become monsters. When a monster dies, the person (or people) they were goes (go) to the Farplane. If someone had a really really strong reason to stay around, they can actually stay around as Unsent, basically physical ghosts. Being around Sendings is not healthy for them because Sendings don't exactly require consent of the dead, and going to the Farplane via the portal in Guadosalam is also not very good.

Magic and Spheres
There is vague magic of the Final Fantasy style, elemental magic and gravity manipulation and buffs and boosts and stuff. Anyone can learn it.

Also there's a strong "sphere" thing going on, DVDs are actually spheres and you just have to look at them to play it hologram-style, and you learn magic by applying magic spheres to yourself, and some magic spheres can be used to give you completely different magic powers/classes at a time if you want to specialise. The magic spheres that give you power can be manufactured out of pyreflies by specialised people, or sometimes coalesce naturally when a monster dies.

(In-game, the method for becoming more powerful is a "sphere grid" which contains all the magic and strength and power etc and you use magic spheres and move along it. I think I'll do some worldbuilding here and say that the sphere grid is something like a mindscape or something for power which you then activate and move around using the magic spheres.)

Elaboration on pyreflies and magic

History, culture, religion, and Sin
The teachings of Yevon, the main (or only) religion in the world, say that a thousand years ago, a huge war happened that almost destroyed the world, with enormous machina and irresistible firepower. To punish humans for their hubris, Yevon sent a huge whale monster named Sin, which stopped the war by pretty much destroying everything (including Zanarkand, one of the cities involved in the war) and then retreating to the ocean. The almost-starfaring civilisation then became stagnant, because whenever a place becomes too technologically advanced or there are too many people around Sin shows up and destroys everything and kills everyone. It also likes destroying people who try to travel too far away from the mainland, which is why no one's ever managed to explore anything.

The only way to kill Sin is by becoming a summoner and going through a pilgrimage. A summoner is a priest of sorts, except they have magical power to summon big monsters called Aeons. These Aeons are the monster forms of people who sacrificed themselves to become "fayth," stone statues containing the power to give summoners this ability. Summoners walk throughout Spira to pray at temples and join with the fayth so they can commune with them and use their Aeons in battle. Summoners typically have a small group of people that are their Guardians, people trained to protect them in their pilgrimage. The goal of the pilgrimage is gaining enough summoning experience that they can reach Zanarkand and learn how to perform the Final Summoning, which summons an Aeon as big as Sin that then kills Sin.

Who comes back to life a certain number of years later, anyway, and the Sinless period is called the "Calm," which lasts a few years. After the first Calm, the second one took five hundred years to happen. There have been a few more since then.

Also the summoner who killed Sin is awarded the title High Summoner and, well, dies. Because the Final Summoning kills summoner and Sin. So the title is posthumous. We don't actually find this out in-game until much later but, well, it's all voluntary and stuff.

Yevon teaches that only when humanity has atoned for their sins will Sin disappear, and the Final Summoning is a palliative, to give people some peace and rest for a while. Yevon is horribly vague about what "atoning" looks like.

The Al Bhed are special in that they think Yevon is full of shit and continue doing machina research, especially military, so they can try to kill Sin by other methods than just throwing people at it all the time. They're kinda sorta tolerated heretics, present here and there. Most pious people treat them like some religious people on Earth treat gay people (love the sinner, hate the sin, style of thing), most people who aren't particularly pious are sorta wary of them because Sin likes attacking whenever there's too much tech and the Al Bhed are always courting that with theirs.

Furthermore, there's a mystery: two people who say they come from Zanarkand as it was a thousand years ago. Except a bit different. Ten years ago, High Summoner Braska, then just-regular-summoner Braska, also kinda-pariah-because-he-married-an-Al-Bhed Braska, met this guy called Jecht who said he was from a Zanarkand that was an island and was super technological n stuff, except his Zanarkand had never heard of any Bevelles or anything south of it, nor of summoners or Sin. Braska killed Sin, all was well for a while, Sin returned. Meanwhile, in this mysterious island-Zanarkand, Jecht's 17-year-old son Tidus was playing Blitzball in a tournament when Sin attacked. Auron, this mysterious guy who took care of Tidus since (from his perspective) his father disappeared ten years ago, guided Tidus towards the giant monster, and the giant monster ate Tidus, and Tidus washed up in Spira after a bizarre sequence of events involving Al Bhed and weird dreams.
Other miscellaneous facts (to be added as I recall them)

• The ronso guard Sacred Mount Gagazet and make sure only the worthy can go on to Zanarkand, and are in general very loyal - as a society, to Yevon, as individuals, to other individuals. They are also more-or-less a warrior race and take pride in battle skills;
• Humans were sort of racist against the guado for the longest time, until Lord Jyscal Guado married a human woman and had a kid with her. Said kid is named Seymour. He's weird. He's also evil and wants to destroy the world because his mother sacrificed herself to become a fayth when he was a kid and he thinks everything in the world is suffering so it might as well end;
• When you reach a temple of Yevon to pray to a fayth and learn to summon it, there is a little challenge thing (involving spheres) before called the Cloister of Trials which you must pass before gaining admittance to the Chamber of the Fayth;
• Pyreflies are what powers spheres, and they can replay events or memories even without said spheres. They react very strongly to the thoughts and emotions of people around them;
• The fayth of Yevon share their consciousness, so when they ask the main characters to kill Sin and end the Dream of the Fayth, this is a "unanimous" decision of all the ex-citizens of Zanarkand Yu Yevon turned into fayth, regardless of the desires of their summoned citizens;
• A person can only be turned into a fayth willingly, they cannot be coerced to do so, and the aeon they generate when they do is associated with their dreams and their very strongest emotion;
• A fayth must willingly offer its aeon to a summoner, but once it has the aeon a summoner calls can be called no matter what the fayth think of this, and are somewhat independent of the fayth that created/is that aeon;
• Sin releases a neurotoxin that makes people who come near him get confused and often hallucinate, but is not fatal;
• Often fiends attach themselves to Sin, and are named Sinspawn, and whenever they get unattached Sin will come back for them if they're alive.

A few more interesting posts are linked below, but there are some interspersed comments that are enjoyable/useful as well not linked here.

Sequel Worldbuilding
Blitzball
Pyreflies
Main Characters

Canon Plot

• Chapter 1: Zanarkand
• Chapter 2: Besaid (LIN comment)
• Chapter 3: Kilika (LIN comment)
• Chapter 4: S.S. Winno (LIN comment)
• Chapter 5: Luca
• Chapter 6: Luca (LIN comment)
• Chapter 7: The Mi'ihen Highroad - South (LIN comment)
• Chapter 8: The Mi'ihen Highroad - North
• Chapter 9: Operation Mi'ihen (LIN comment)

Haha wow what the fuck, that's amazing. This universe Needs Glowfic.

I think I might replace Yuna (Lord Braska's daughter and one of the main characters) with a Sadde for the extra added value of "the most recent savior of the world was abusive but Sadde can't say anything about it because everyone loves him how dare Sadde say he's a jerk".

This would also be the first Tobias that has died so far.

EDIT: Added a few bits to the OP.

Sequel Worldbuilding
So Final Fantasy X actually has a sequel, Final Fantasy X-2, as well as a novel set after that, Final Fantasy X-2.5 ~Eien no Daishō~, and an audio novel set after that, Final Fantasy X -Will-, and those have some more relevant lore and worldbuilding answers.

• Spheres can be used in a magical girl-esque form to change your outfit and to which powers you have access. Those are called dresspheres. A Sadde in Spira would use that to gendershift;
• Dresspheres are associated with Garment Grids, the relationship being many to many, and mechanically a character equips one such grid and can change between adjacent dresspheres during battle;
• Amongst the kinds of magic that don't appear in the original are song magic (songs that buff and debuff), alchemy (creating items out of thin air or from combinations of other items), and "psychic" magic (like telekinesis, flight, time and space manipulation);
• It's said dresspheres were invented after Sin was defeated but the worldbuilding is inconsistent so I'm ignoring it;
• Apparently not literally anyone can become a summoner, you need to be particularly sensitive to pyreflies, but what that means or how that's determined is not explained;
• Before the Machina War, there was a polytheistic religion, and when someone became a summoner they'd adopt a god's name while they were active;
• Stone fayth to pray to were invented by Lady Yunalesca. Before the War, summoners used their loved ones as fayth to power summoning. This was, unlike the yevonite ritual, not a destructive process, as Yunalesca apparently used her husband Lord Zaon as her fayth and he lived as long as she did - rather, the emotional connection between summoner and the designated fayth powers the summoning and the resulting Aeon. There are many ways of making someone into a fayth, at least one of which including having sex with them;
• Two years after Sin was killed, Lord Braska's daughter Yuna saved the world from a spirit consumed with grief that was trying to destroy the world with Bevelle's superweapon. As thanks for that, the fayth brought Tidus (who was a summoning like all of Dream Zanarkand) back. After that, people gained the ability to "beckon" the dead back when they felt very strongly about it. This had the unfortunate side effect of bringing Sin back, too.

Are you going to add in X-2 worldbuilding to a potential FFX fic? Or just the fixes.

I'm totally up for something in FFX but X-2 is quite iffy, and I have no idea of any books or whatnot. I most definately want to be a Blitzball when I grow up! (Blitzball is also awesome. Don't you dare forget it.)

Did I forget to add any worldbuilding from X-2 in this last post?

IRC poked over the last message;

[14:45:06] <RoboticLIN> I actually have not much idea about X-2, I was really just asking how much X-2 you are going to add into FFX
[14:45:51] <RoboticLIN> Dresspheres are fine, and totally acceptable if it allows Sadde-Yuna. :P
[14:45:51] <pedro|work> all of the lore/worldbuilding i can get to make sense

Blitzball
So, it has been helpfully pointed out to me that I didn't elaborate on Blitzball. It's basically underwater handball, more-or-less (FFX's opening video is Blitzball). There are two six-person teams, a weirdly-shaped ball, people grab the ball and swim with it and can pass it to teammates, other people can intercept passes or the people with the ball, if it's the latter they can try to tackle the person with the ball and steal it. When you reach a goal with a ball you have to let go of it and then kick it rather than throwing it with your hand. Sometimes people use magic, too.

The interesting thing, though, is the cultural significance of it. Most people spend their lives in fear of the GIANT WHALE MONSTER, and the generalised lack of technology means they're somewhat limited in the kinds of entertainment they can create. Blitzball tournaments are the event of the year, and every city and village in Spira has a team that competes. The Ronso and the Guado have teams, even the Al Bhed are tolerated there, Yevon Maesters (and the Grand Maester, basically the pope) attend, etc. It's very big. It also makes Luca (where the tournament is held) the second most technological city in Spira, and also the second best protected, because it'd be a horrible tragedy if Sin destroyed the Blitzball stadium, and rob many people of the one good thing they have in their life. It's taken very seriously.

Also, the main religious greeting Yevon uses, which involves extending one's arms away from one's body, then bring their hands together around an imaginary ball in front of their chest, and bowing, was used in the distant past as a good-luck gesture before Blitzball games and co-opted later.

I'm gonna do some supplemental worldbuilding for stuff to make sense. The following will contain unmarked spoilers. Canon bits will be coloured dark red. There's some repeated stuff here, elaborated upon.

Pyreflies
Pyreflies are nonsentient units of magical/spiritual energy which people can manipulate or shape. They're pretty much everywhere, but usually in low enough concentrations that they don't react to anything; places with very high concentrations of pyreflies act like giant thought magnifiers, conjuring representations of people's thoughts and emotions, sometimes having events imprinted on them and replaying them over and over, sometimes just serving as a feedback loop on emotions. Souls are made of pyreflies, and the farplane, in the centre of the planet, is chock-full of them, and it's where the souls of the dead go (if they don't hang around and become fiends or unsent). "Summoning" isn't really summoning, given that the things one summons aren't necessarily located anywhere, nor do they even exist. In fact, most summonings literally conjure things that don't exist at all, and have never existed. Summoning is more like conjuring stuff via pyreflies.

Magic
All magic happens via pyreflies. Casting a Thunder spell amounts to getting pyreflies to make thunder appear, casting Waterga is turning pyreflies into lots of water, casting Haste is getting pyreflies to alter the way time acts around you, casting Teleport is getting pyreflies to fold space and transport you somewhere. They sometimes coalesce into specific kinds of magical spheres, or can be manipulated to manufacture these kinds of spheres, which then can be used in known ways to improve oneself or learn new kinds of magic. It's not enough to just possess these spheres to use them, however; you need to actually use the benefits they give you and get experience with it in order to make room in your soul for them to change anything. The most straightforward way of doing this is through battle, but that's not the only way, and if you just do lots of non-combat magic all the time, you can make enough room to activate more spheres and become better at things. What it looks like when you do this is that you hold a sphere of the relevant type (they're roughly billiard ball-sized) in your hand, concentrate on it, and it dissolves into pyreflies which then enter your body. These magical spheres can improve your physical strength, agility, endurance, and resistance, your magical power, capacity, and resistance, and can teach you magical spells.

Summoning
However, there's only so much you can do via rote use of magical spheres, especially given that pyreflies are most reactive to emotions. Yevon-style fayth are made of people who felt so strongly about defeating Sin and helping summoners that they laid their life for this cause, and the strength of this emotion (plus a pyrefly-infusing magical ritual) attaches their soul to a rock, puts them to sleep, and gives them the ability to grant summoners the power to summon their dream. When a summoner prays to the fayth, they demonstrate a similar desire, which they can then draw upon in order to conjure their aeons. Before Yevon, the emotions drawn upon to summon aeons were those between the summoner and someone they cared for deeply. The stronger the emotional connection, the more powerful the summoned Aeon, and that's why the Final Summoning is so powerful: in addition to using a strong emotional bond it also uses the devotion that led the guardian and the summoner to give up their lives for it. When the fayth is a live person instead of a dead one inside a statue, the summoning process requires active interaction between summoner and fayth. The ritual to turn a live person into a live fayth involves very strong displays of whatever the emotional bond they're drawing upon is (so if it's romantic love, having sex could be a part of it).

Souls
Visiting the Farplane in Guadosalam allows people to conjure illusions of their dead loved ones out of some of their pyreflies, but not enough to actually communicate with them. The summoned illusions are so unpersonlike that there's actually disagreement on whether the dead are even in the Farplane or whether the pyreflies aren't just reacting to people's memories. The Al Bhed mostly believe that the dead are actually gone-gone and that the Farplane just has lots of pretty lights that react to thoughts, Yevonites mostly believe that the dead are actually in the Farplane but just not strong enough to recoalesce.

A person's soul consists in pyreflies that exist inside their body and are given form by the person's constant thoughts and personality. As such, its causal relationship with a person's mind is reversed: minds create souls by existing, and the soul can be maybe best thought of as a "copy" or a "backup" of the mind that occupied that body. Upon death, this soul tends to lose coherence, because it's no longer tied to their body and doesn't know how to keep shape without it. The soul, then, is a collection of pyreflies that became self-aware because of constant interaction with a person's brain, effectively becoming an intangible continuation of that person's subjective experience.

When the soul pyreflies are sent to the Farplane, they're pretty much completely dissipated, spread across it, and it's very difficult to make the soul coalesce again into that specific person. A very strong incentive, usually in the form of some unfinished project or a promise or higher purpose, can be enough for a dead person to learn how to put themself together and become the physical ghost that is an unsent. In fact, a strong enough incentive can cause even a dead person in the actual Farplane to coalesce into a body, but that's much more difficult and the most likely result is missing a few bits of your soul when you try it. Most people, however, upon death are consumed by confusion and fear and grief, and the pyreflies that make up their souls coalesce into fiends, monsters that haunt all of Spira's wilderness. Upon being killed, fiends dissolve into pyreflies, which go to the Farplane. Summoners can prevent people from becoming fiends by performing a Sending, which guides their pyreflies into the Farplane.

Once in the Farplane, pyreflies are pretty lost, and finding their way back to Spira is basically impossible. Once the fayth (which were more coherent by default because they never really died, they just abandoned their bodies by becoming fayth) bring Tidus back to life for Yuna, other pyreflies go with, having found their way out, and this gives people the ability to beckon their dead back to life by wishing it very strongly; but the greatest problem with that is that bodies created by pyreflies aren't really made of matter but rather "solid magic," and can be dispelled by a Sending or sufficiently strong trauma, and each time this happens there's a chance the dead person won't be able to coalesce back. On the bright side, unsent and beckoned people can learn to have some pretty fine control over their own shapes and be much stronger, magically, than the living.

It is also possible to summon the dead back to life. If you had a very strong connection with a dead person, they can become your Jūshin, something like an aeon but person-shaped. The simplest way to become one is by dying while protecting the person whose Jūshin you want to become. They can, however, summon and dismiss you at will if you're their Jūshin. But beyond that, it's theoretically possible to reembody the dead, given that pyreflies can in fact be trapped into spheres made of actual matter or, more relevantly, human bodies. Summoning the dead in general would be hard due to a lack of an emotional connection with them, though, and a visit to the actual Farplane (rather than the balcony into it available in Guadosalam) would probably be necessary. Another difficulty would be that souls are generally caused by brains, so a suitable way of doing it the other way around would be needed for reembodiment.

Other worlds
People who come from another world very soon get a Spiran soul of their very own, as the pyreflies start reacting to their brain and creating one. People from Spira who go to other worlds effectively "infect" it with pyreflies, who at first are few and weak, but start multiplying and growing as they are influenced more and more strongly by other people's thoughts. Without access to the Farplane, however, a dead person somewhere else would be almost guaranteed to either just fade, become a fiend, or remain unsent.

Main Characters

• Tidus: normal 17-year-old boy who is also Zanarkand's best Blitzball player. His neglectful father Jecht disappeared ten years ago and his mother lost the will to live. He never forgave Jecht for this. Somewhat wilful and arrogant, but a good person who tries to cheer everyone around him. Sin attacks Zanarkand one day, he ends up in Spira and swears he's from Zanarkand and wants to go through the pilgrimage to show everyone it;
• Yuna: 17-year-old daughter of High Summoner Braska, the last person to defeat Sin (ten years ago), is now setting off to go on a pilgrimage and save the world again. She's very quiet and determined, and will do whatever it takes to give the people of Spira hope, which often includes lots of self-abnegation. Has resolved to defeat Sin at a very young age, and so is pretty much resigned to her own death;
• Auron: mysterious samurai dude who showed up in Zanarkand soon after Jecht disappeared to take care of Tidus. Is in fact from Spira, and was Lord Braska's guardian. The reason he can reach Dream Zanarkand is that, after Jecht turned into Braska's Final Aeon, he got pissed off at Yunalesca because Sin came back, she explained Sin would always come back, he attacked her, she injured him gravely, he died in Bevelle after extracting a promise from a ronso dude to take care of Braska's daughter and raise her in Besaid. Became unsent, went to Zanarkand because he promised Jecht he'd take care of Tidus. All silent guardian type, lots of secrets, doesn't talk much, is very task-oriented, pissed off at his younger self's failures. Used to be a warrior monk for Yevon with a promising career, lost favour when he refused to marry a high priest's daughter;
• Kimahri Ronso: big horned lion dude who has taken care of Yuna since she was seven, is one of her guardians. Is actually in line to become Ronso Elder, but lost in a contest of strength that cost him his horn. Also the silent type, but more in the bodyguard role than the mentor role;
• Lulu: black witch, one of Yuna's caretakers, sort of an older sister to her. Served as a guardian to two other summoners, and became Yuna's guardian to try to ensure Yuna would follow her own path but also to overcome her previous failures. Tries to be the rational person of the party, seeing everything through an objective lens and questioning the teachings of Yevon, but also serving as its defender. Is covered in a layer of dry humour and sarcasm a mile thick;
• Wakka: raised with Lulu and Yuna, also one of Yuna's guardians and captain of the Blitzball team Besaid Aurochs. Very cheerful and enthusiastic, tries not to think too much about stuff and see the bright side in everything. Easily the most pious of the party, especially since his younger brother (and Lulu's old lover) died in a fight against Sin with the Crusaders, particularly dislikes the Al Bhed;
• Rikku: Yuna's cousin from her mother's side, is an Al Bhed, and also one of the first people Tidus meets in Spira, when he's found by an Al Bhed party in Baaj Temple, before washing up in Besaid. Like most other Al Bhed, thinks summoners shouldn't go through the pilgrimage and die pointlessly in an endless cycle and that there must be some other way to fix the problem. Is incredibly smart and a very technically achieved engineer, and her father Cid is the leader of the Al Bhed.

I might write something about antagonists and other minor characters later if the mood strikes.