Echo (a revival)

[Weave]

ECHO

The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.

- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

[ooc]I actually never gave up on this. I just needed time to determine what I wanted to do with it. It's been a long time waiting, but I have some material. Some of it is the same as before, some of it isn't. It's inspired by Stephen King's Dark Tower series and the game Hyper Light Drifter, with smatterings of China Miéville's Railsea and PROBABLY Numenera, though I've striven to create something entirely distinct from the latter, and well, everything former as well. I didn't want to make a cake only to have it taste like the flour I baked it with. Here's my attempt at a "way after the end" world that isn't mired in its own pessimism. As always, comments and critiques and crooning sentiments are welcome.
[/ooc]
The Eld World ended. What follows is so beyond the end that it is, unto itself, more a beginning than anything. It cannot be a continuation; it is too alien to what the world once was.

"I once fell prey to those dead gods, those machines beneath our feet. Never again."

DISSENSION
And he held the world before him in his glass, and his machine swallowed the ocean and set fire to the air.

- Unknown

The world has moved on, but the echoes of the past still haunt us. The inexorable tide of time, like a great leviathan of the depths, has swallowed and forgotten the very things that broke the world so many epochs ago. In the time after, wars were fought off the dregs of what remained of the times of Eld (such as they were called), and in their unrelenting endurance their purpose was forgotten. Amidst this Dissension hung the algid torpor of civilization, lost and fretful in such darkling times, where the fragile artifacts that held their memories were shattered and powerless, crushed underfoot by the march of war. The last bastions of civilization were blasted from the earth beneath the hellfire of Eld weaponry, devouring the land in its process. The world was a scarred, shattered thing, broken and smoldering, and the Eld were cursed with every breath of those remaining. But like all things, time has a way of healing, and in the cosmically minute lives of the sentient things that live on this world; folk have a way of forgetting.

MENDING
"History seemed meaningless here, or at least bewildered."

- China Miéville, Railsea

Time passed, and old wounds began to heal. Folk crawled out from beneath their hidden places and began anew. In the heat of this convalescence, ruins and artifacts (those still with working power) gave rise to flash economies and minute-empires purporting protection and power, buoyant on their unknowingly vanishing resources. Claims of clean water, transair, electricity (or something similar) surged across the world, each eventually fading as quickly as they came about. Warlords whose hydrocore engines went out in the heat of battle, kings who threw themselves from their towers when their wells of cerulean godsblood ran dry, cities whose lights winked out, one by one, as they beheld their own cataclysmic destruction when each of the cables that suspended their aerial turbines came crashing down to the earth in fire and molten metal; such was the fate of these petty empires. Stories of the Dissension and the Eld World before it fell further into legend, at first a bitter remembrance only whispered of in the cover of shadow, eventually so far flung into the past that its own mystery stifled any emotional weight it may once have held; the past was grand and great, the now was naught but a hollow echo.

NOW
"...There comes a point where coherence breaks down, and narrative flow, and any real sense of how things are going. These matters are re-created by historians later on. The need to re-create the myth of coherence may be one of the reasons why history exists in the first place."

- Stephen King, The Dark Tower

Times have changed. Stability has crept uneasily back into the land. People rebuilt, slowly at first. Settlements have grown large, protective, and controlled (at least superficially). Countless generations have passed since the Dissension, since the Mending even: folk have forgotten the ash-burnt faces of their ancestors; of the graves they build their world upon, and of the Eld World itself and the machines the Now rests upon. Artifice is the natural. Amidst the overgrown carcasses of warmachines that blend so seamlessly with the landscape around it, across fields whose craters and debris can almost be viewed as hills and valleys, the world looks almost at peace amongst its own ruin. But there is a tension in the air, like that of a spring wound too tight. Folk have settled enough to lift their heads from their once ceaseless work and look around; to take in their surroundings and, having established what is necessary for them, to dream, to wonder, to scheme. The world begins anew.

Artifice
In fending off their own imminent destruction the Elden Folk drew upon the last natural reservoirs of the world and drained them dry. There are no more oceans, nor are parts of the sky fully whole. The ground is a hollow crust, riddled with cavernous sprawls that open upon impossibly deep, yawning fissures riddled with the ancient vaults and laboratories of the Eld, but the folk of the Now would not see these things as unusual having lived so long amongst ruin. In their failing world, the Eld forged artificial forests, machines that would make water for their desolate oceans, and devices that would generate weather in a semblance their ancestors were familiar with. True works of nature are exceedingly rare when self-replicating bioplast trees span the landscape and automated aquifers provide irrigation on a continental scale, but while the loss of such naturalness might make the world seem a cold and lifeless place, the Eld were nothing if not determined to make adequate replacements in lieu of their exactness. Nevertheless, flora are still prone to the occasional glitch, growing branches in unnaturally precise geometric angles, or assembling themselves into half-finished structures at the dictation of errant programming. Weather machines, designed with the intention of being semi-predictable, occasionally spawn erratic storm cells that wrack the same lands at the exact same times each year. Some aquifers have lost their functionality and render parts of the landscape arid and uninhabitable, or overflow to produce swamps and wetlands.

[ooc= Interlude]
I wish I could speak less of the Eld; it makes them seem so relevant. They are only relevant in the most peripheral of senses – which is to say, not very in regards to the big picture. Most people don't know of the Eld nor would they ever speak of them. The world to them just is, but in explaining how it got to is I need to elaborate on what was, which the Eld were. I presume you to accept much of what I say as fact without much elaboration on why, because even I don't know that much, but I would do my best to set the table before the meal, so to speak. I do not know by what bizarre dictation certain artifacts and ideals and peoples were chosen to survive and carry out their antiquated existences in the modern age, but in the starkly contrasting Now (compared to the alien world they began in) such things that survived are uniquely unfit and thus shoehorned some way into culture without much reason as to why or how they got there in the first place. This is the basis of most things lesser minds would call "magic," or at the very least wave their hands dismissively and label it some ancient artifact that they know little and less of. I want to elaborate on one particularly prominent artifact of the Eld, one that might as well be magic for what little else is understood of it.[/ooc]

The Echo
"It's a terrible gift to be sensitive to the Echo. It's like there's this shimmering surface in front of our faces, like that of rippling water, concealing the true depth of the world. I know of those who have pierced this preternatural thinness, who have peered beyond the veil of reality and into the Echo. There is treasure there in the form of vast knowledge, and power beyond measure, but between these islands are gulfs of horrid deepness, where old information and power has deteriorated and depressed the fabric of the Echo, and such derelict nothingness pries into the vulnerable mind of those wandering and, at best, destroys them, or feeds them such corruption that they can never return to their physical bodies while weighed down with impossible knowledges. And do they call to you – oh, do such tempting fragments of maddening illogic call to you."

As if to preserve their own dying world in something that their own weaponry couldn't destroy, the Eld created an invisible spectrum of higher thought, a cache of information that blanketed the world. Each creature is born with an innate ability to tap into this network (known as the Echo), though preternatural algorithms set in motion through anciently engineered genetics, as well as training, vary the degree to which they can access it – one human might be born with a powerful knack at tapping into the Echo and accessing ancient banks of information and images, while another might only be able to barely sense the presence of the Echo at all. To say that the Echo connects all things would be a lie, for while the lowliest sparkweed to the mightiest warlord might be accessible via the Echo, things untouched by the Eld's artifice remain incurably unconnected, few though they may be (they being the last truly natural monuments, like living trees and plants, or the tenacious insects and vermin that survived the Dissension).

The Echo is not just a cache, however – and those with the time and dedication can often find the looming figures of other's thoughts and, if skilled enough, tap into them: a talented person can sense nearby presences by feeling them first in the Echo. A truly skilled person could use this skill to pinpoint the location of hidden people or objects, perhaps even across miles of terrain. A monster could be powerful enough control said person. Legends speak of those who could enter the machines of the Eld and operate them for themselves, or of those who could use the Echo and unlock the innermost secrets of telekinesis or empathic communication. Others could even control the bioplast flora as if they were extensions of their own body, or physically travel along the Echo and appear elsewhere in the world.

What are you?
Probably some text should go here.

Human
The legacy of the Eld has changed humanity in strange, eldritch ways. Capable of manipulating the very fundament of human design, the Eld evolved in whatever manner they saw fit. While such manipulative capabilities have atrophied with the passing of time, their legacy lives on. Blurring the line between the biological and technological, most humans have some degree of artifice born naturally within them. Such augmentations develop with time, be they complex integumentary patterns that unlock psychic capabilities or biosteel endoskeletons that provide enhanced durability and strength. Very rarely do such modifications develop into features that render the human body unfit, fusing their legs or enclosing their heads, for instance, but such "defects" aren't unheard of. These inborn augmentations are carried on through bloodlines, and as such lineage is incredibly important in most human societies, with arranged marriages extremely common in the hopes to create "optimal" offspring.

Krisa
Krisa are the most populous species of the world. Were it not for their unusually short lives (krisa don't typically live long past 20 years; 80 seasons for krisa), they would dominate every known region. Krisa lack any of the biosteel augmentations that humans and scions possess, but make up for it in their incredible biological adaptability, able to evolve to suit their environments.

Krisa are short (males about 3' to 3'5'', females 2'5'' to 3'), often wiry creatures that stand atop two sinuous, muscled legs. The head of the krisa is rodent-like, with two massive eyes dominated by red pupils, a "wet nose" rhinaria for acute olfaction, and a wide mouth set with powerful incisors. Though the variations of krisa are exceedingly numerous, most healthy krisa have thick fur along the back of the arms, front of the legs, top of the head and along the back. Krisa otherwise have hairless, leathery, pale yellow or pinkish skin, always with a long, thin tail, typically with a thick tuft of fur at its end. A krisa without its tail is crippled and cannot balance itself during travel without significant assistance.
Additionally, krisa have digitigrade, elongated feet that allow for incredible leaps and quick bursts of speed. A krisa will typically utilize small, short hops, but when necessary adopt a longer, controlled series of leaps to move over long distances or to sprint.

Krisa live astonishingly short lives – the average krisa lives only to about 20 years of age before their bodies begin to give out. As a result, krisa reproduce remarkably fast, and females give birth to many litters in their lifetimes. Krisa typically measure time in smaller increments than most other sentient species, using the passage of seasons to measure time.

Scion
Like humans, scions are born of engineered physiognomies, but unlike humans, scions were created with one predominant focus: war. Superdermal plating, enhanced physical capabilities, and an instinctive ability to use any weapon they come across has given them legendary air of power. Scions, save for their multifarious physical augmentations, are very similar to humans. They stand anywhere from 8 – 10 feet tall and have bodies that manufacture muscle almost effortlessly. Scions have such an inborn predisposition for combat that they are drawn to it with their every breath. They are not overly aggressive, but their bodies have been engineered to release endorphins when they fight, so most of their time off is spent battling or wrestling.

Scions do not reproduce and are sterile. Instead, scions are born indistinguishable from human children, but upon reaching puberty undergo a rapid and painful transformation whereupon their bodies grow to nearly double their size over the span of a few weeks. It is during this time that most physical augmentations take shape and produce themselves in a similarly painful process. Their growth continues at a slower but steadier rate as they age, and while their human kin would age and grow frail, scion bodies remain strong and agile. Scions are still beholden to the limits of the human lifespan (often around 150 years of age) where their bodies promptly deteriorate and break down, and within days pass away.

Automata
[info incoming]

Volk
[info incoming]

Where are you?
From the sun-seared, desiccated hardpan of Vanlear, where the sky was blasted away by greater weaponry long ago and the sun bears down upon the land unrelentingly, to the maddening heights of the labyrinthine Omniopolis, where it is said the still-boisterous soirées of the Eld carry on deep within the half-lit depths of infra, unaware that the world ended eons ago; such is the New World, ripe with the variegated ruins and scars of the Eld.

The New World is one of rare temperance: the world was broken, and that which failed to adapt died out long ago. Extreme weather, berserk machines, and rampant mutation are in no shortage of supply, and life in the various habitable zones of the New World must be nothing if not determined. The world as a whole is a mystery; whatever lies beyond the airless peaks at the border of Vanlear is unknown, the constant blizzards at the Melori Terminals deter even the hardiest of travelers to the southernmost edge of the world, and the Omniopolis, thanks to its mindless, still-operating Architects, is so vast and dense that no one knows what might be on the other side of the city, but the New World can be more easily broken up into known parts.

Neo Sol Fara, the Omniopolis
"There are no stars above the Infra. They're only out along the Great Blue, or in stretches along the dead parts of the City. Gran says they're the glow that's gone from lamplights and colored fluoresces in those dead parts, that they up and left for the sky ages ago when the Architects never came back to fix them for some reason. That doesn't explain the ones over the Great Blue, but I think it's the opposite. They're just lights waiting to come down when another City is built across and over it, looking for a home in the lamps."

Like an apple, it was the core of the world, the City, where its corruption began, ushering in its age of Dissension and spreading rapidly without. And, also like the apple, did it leave behind a gutted pit, a bleak echo of the past. It is here in the Omniopolis where the last vestiges of the Eld World still hold sway, where the divide between men stems not only from the divide in money/prestige/power but from genetically predestined holdovers from far more ancient times – those few of perfect physiognomies, who carry on their engineered bodies through rapacious inbreeding, rule over the imperfect.

Geography

Though not truly all-encompassing, the Omniopolis spans thousands of miles, composed of towers that reach high into the sky and penetrate deep into the ground – the fundamental concepts of "up" and "down" take new meaning when the city is layered with subskies and false bottoms, but one should not mistake the presence of architecture to mean anything civilized; certainly some sections of the city harbor inhabitants of their own, but in the often lightless depths of the infra, more sinister creatures dwell.
Travel across the Omniopolis is treacherous; it is as much a wilderness unto itself as a forest or mountain. The layout of the many bridges, rails, and walkways hints at a design once systematized, but the process has long become something random and chaotic, all thanks to the still operating and rarely seen Architects. The Architects come in many shapes, all machines of some sort, some large enough to fabricate entirely new towers within their eerily silent hulls, others smaller so as to service and construct smaller creations ("infra," as it is colloquially known) such as bridges and branching adornments to existing towers. In their mad pursuit of perfection, Architects have built sections of the city so dense and sprawling that only a contortionist would be able to fit through them, while other sections of the city remain mysteriously untouched and left to disrepair. These spots, known most typically as Cityknots, are frequent across the entirety of the City.

There are cities within the City (as Omniopolans are wont to call their realm), places of brief, purported civility amidst the jungle of fabricated transteel monoliths, oftentimes as principalities governed by the Prim.

Power Groups

The Prim– Humanity, in the wake of such dire eras, has changed both physiologically and cognitively. The remnants of an ancient, genetic caste system has given a spectrum of abilities to modern humankind, and while no one truly remembers the caste, the vestigial aftershock of it has left its mark on the world as it is now. Such are the Prim – the "perfects" of their own kind, flawless of feature and the pinnacle of physical and cognitive ability (second in strength only to the Scions, though the Prim do not consider Scions truly Human). They stand at a regal 6 feet, are thin, and hauntingly (daresay uncannily) beautiful. Though renowned for their haughtiness and almost vampirish lust for elegance, they are incredibly smart, which has allowed them to secure themselves the highest seats in the Omniopolis, a place rampant with Eld technology. Their rudimentary understanding of the ancient machines led them to form the Corpros, the organizations that ensure the circulation of Eld technologies, which in turn loans out its machines to the rest of the world. The Prim are nearly immortal and capable of superhuman feats, though their inbreeding (an attempt to maintain the purity of their lineage) has led to a subtle dilution of their power over the ages, and possibly other imperfections that the Prim have taken great pains to cover up. As is, the Prim rule the majority of the cities within the Omniopolis, and while the City itself is far too vast a place to claim sole ownership of, the Prim do so wholeheartedly.

The Corpros – The Corpros are a vestigial flicker of what they once were in the times of Eld - grand, empire-spanning organizations that, ostensibly, ruled the world. When that world broke so too did the Corpros, but even now their fractured remnants hold a tight grip on the modern world. Old secrets of synthesis, duplication, and fabrication are at the core of the remaining Corpros, nestled deep within the ancient factories and monolithic ordinators that serve to keep even the most antiquated technologies in some form of circulation. The productions of the Corpros have long since drifted from carefully calculated understandings to something more arcane – the semi-autonomous monstrosities that churn and fabricate old technologies are lost on the folk who operate them; the act of inputting codes, deciphering the glowing hieroglyphics, and activating relays fosters a certain divinity through its own mysteriousness, though any corpros would prefer to act as if they alone understood the vast inner workings of their great machines (and to some extent, they probably do).

Each major Corpros cannot be operated independently; time has seen to the demise of their autonomy via war and destruction. Even the most powerful Corpros must maintain a series of subjugated workers to operate their machines, wrangled by roving press gangs either from their own personal armies or outsourced to one of the many mercenary companies looking for good pay (and the promise of Corpros technology). Once captured, the subjugated are branded and then forced into labor. The most reliable and loyal of these have the opportunity to rise in the ranks and become official representatives of the Corpros, known as the Prim, while those left behind remain part of the workforce until they die. Those subjugated might operate parts of the great machines that had fallen into disrepair ages ago. Worse still, some might have their bodies crudely augmented to serve better purposes: piston-like replacements for muscles, metallic integumental plating to protect them from high temperatures or chemicals, additional mechanical limbs to better operate complex devices, and so on.

Locations of Note
Kal Kanta, the Mad Quarter: While there is no rhyme or reason to the Architect's ceaseless maintenance of the City, some have gone too far and run for too long on deteriorating algorithms, leading to the creation of bizarre architectural quirks like upside down stairs or doors that open to walls. Nowhere is this more prominent than in Kal Kanta, where the very layout of the City is festooned with Cityknots and convolutions. The infra there grows like vines, choking the architecture around it until it becomes nothing more than a dense mass of City.

The Railways: The Railways span the entirety of the City, perforating existing cities and bridging the vast infrascape between them, typically in a less-than-direct fashion. Locomotives of varying design travel across them, some as passenger or freight cars, others as pirates and smugglers.

The Great Blue: There is a place where the infra stops, where the land molts and roils and becomes amoebic and fickle, and the cityscape is not supported. It stretches, untouched by spires and bridges and balconies, to the horizon, uncannily flat. Certain vertigo seizes then of such emptiness, of such an expanse of nothing, and those who see it the first time are not easily unshaken. During the day it is stained blue, but as the light bleeds from the world so too does its color, and the Great Blue descends into a black deeper than the deadest catacombs of the infra, horizon merged into one dark mass, like a gaping, fathomless maw.

Ships carved from the derelict infra, hollowed out tower tops, half-broken balconies, repurposed railcars, bridges buckled and bound into sailing shapes clamor to the waters of the Great Blue festooned with eager explorers, salvors looking to plumb the salted depths, and philosophers looking for answers across the water.

The Great Blue is the last ocean - a shallow, desolate thing devoid of life, briny and thick. Pipelines that once sucked the oceans dry loom just above the waterline, built into the chalky cliffs that surround the ocean, their machinery either gone silent or still wheezing in empty air.

Gardens: The Gardens, like the infra and so many other things, have always been, but Architects do not maintain them like they do the infrascape. They are placed of wild greenery uninterrupted by infra, some several hours across, others mere footsteps in width, bursting from balconies and overhanging bridges. The biggest Gardens are claimed by the cities for food, mostly; the little ones tended by hermits and what few independent folk reside outside the cities and amidst the infra. The largest Gardens are terraced in a series of rings, open to the sky and sunlight.

Strange things grow in some Gardens, things whose roots merge with the electronica they're grown upon and produce frequencies and echoes and pictures. Some Gardens aren't close enough to the sky and are grown around sparklamps or mirrors, others exist in shadow or darkness and grow bioluminescent things in the lower strata.  

The Red Spires: Far across the City lie the desolate Redspires, where the Architects no longer go. Dunes of their russet, bladed sand blanket the canopy floor, littered with islands of citystuff caught halfway between sand and something solid. Still-great city spires protrude defiantly from the oceanic waste into a considerably thinner canopy of collapsed bridges and disintegrating mezzanines until, farther out still, the Red Sea dominates imperforated.

Even the slightest breeze gives the spires trailing flags of rust and detritus, as if the colors were leaking from them into the wind. Stronger gusts conjure red storms that strip flesh from bone. Only savages and beasts that breath the rust-wind dwell in the Red Spires or along the Red Sea.

[Weave]

[reserved]

[Weave]

[resreved]

[Weave]

[resrereved]

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[severed]

[Weave]

[rsevrededs]

[Steerpike]

Scions do not reproduce and are sterile. Instead, scions are born indistinguishable from human children, but upon reaching puberty undergo a rapid and painful transformation whereupon their bodies grow to nearly double their size over the span of a few weeks

I am slightly confused by this. Does this mean Scions are born (at random?) to human parents due to contact with the Echo or recessive genetics? Or are they grown in labs?

[Weave]

Scions do not reproduce and are sterile. Instead, scions are born indistinguishable from human children, but upon reaching puberty undergo a rapid and painful transformation whereupon their bodies grow to nearly double their size over the span of a few weeks

I am slightly confused by this. Does this mean Scions are born (at random?) to human parents due to contact with the Echo or recessive genetics? Or are they grown in labs?

At random, mostly, though a certain line of women are predisposed to give birth to scions. I've left it intentionally vague as to how or why this occurs, but off the top of my head it's probably genetic. Scions were originally just part of human augmentation, but I thought they might deserve their own little "racial spot." The more I think about it, the more inclined I am to either put scion as a subsection of human (which is really nothing more than a semantic change but damnit it matters to me) or to further flesh out more human augmentation-related bloodlines... and maybe nix the concept of "human" entirely. Depends on how bizarre I want to get, I suppose.

[Hibou]

I am unfamiliar with the latter of your inspirations, but I am LOVING the HLD vibe I'm getting out of this.

Absolutely loving it.

The quotes are all excellent for developing the atmosphere here. I look forward to hearing more about the other races.