The world of DeSync is one I’ve spent too much time working on without sharing. For this month, I will be talking about the world of Cadrei, the rebuilding ruin planet. The inhabitants, known as Vicra, are essentially magically infused creatures from earth. The resulting subspecies can be described as magical monsters that casually inhabit the world, and human idolizing creatures that use magic to become bipedal like them.
The world is dotted with destroyed and decaying settlements from when humans originally abandoned the world. Imagine a futuristic world with empty and broken buildings with plants overtaking them. That is your average city on Cadrei. The Vicra are in the process of rebuilding it and letting their habitat exist alongside the unnatural ruins. Other such cities are on places called drinefre. These are points in the world with a strange magical effect and a geological anomaly with it. From a hot ocean of solid water (not ice), to a forest of unusually large plants, magic can do strange things to the world and the people.
This being said, one city has outlawed the practice of magic in all forms and hid it from everyone using such magic. The story of this planet is about a group uncovering this secret and getting them out of the isolation they’re stuck in from the rest of the planet. Also uncover a few secrets from the humans and out of place ruins like a large one way door and a tower descending from the sky. Welcome to magical furry hell.
Way back when, there was just earth doing its earth thing with people doing their people thing. Eventually, magic was discovered and spread across the land. People didn't fully know what to make of it. Someone soon made a discovery as they found their being, their soul, linked to the items they preformed feats with. That's when things went south.
They discovered that this was a very powerful resource that could be used to try and learn more about the myths of the land. One such myth was the spirit world, a land where your soul takes priority of the body and is said to be where the dead reside. If they could gain access there, they could find a way to bring the dead back and achieve a form of immortality. But there was no such item that could simply bend the rules of the world in such a way. A few people got ideas though.
One tried using a door to create a gateway to this other realm. He and his door vanished after the experiment. A month passed and his town was devoid of doors and many people. Another thought to try using ponds and swim to the other side. The spring he used dried up and a large feather was all that remained. The final user thought to use a mirror and shift the reflection to create a portal. The scene was a fragmented mirror and room. The wooden lab had various element of a cave jutting out in various areas. It swept the town as more mirrors shattered with the rooms they were in and magic users across the land vanished with them.
It was if magic as a whole had vanished from the world as the old lessons were lost in time.
I’d just like to preface by saying that void is just a massive cluster fuck that’s gone through so many shifts in what it does. This is the most recent and probably the most stable way that it works. I’m not sure if it’ll be the final way that this will work because I’ve said that before and I have officially lost track of how many times I’ve just done it over so whatever.
So void powers have been separated into three different sects, each sect being a different category as to how void manipulates the world. They lack proper titles as of now but the essential way that it works is that one detaches space, one alters spatial properties, and another bends space. For now, I’ll just give a brief explanation on each.
Detaching space affects things in a way that makes them less linked to reality. Take the Schrodinger’s Cat experiment for instance. Something could exist or not exist when you aren’t observing it. Say you were able to change that probability and make it so something could not exist more often. That’s detachment, making things exist less because with void, that works on a slider gradient. On one end is total existence, on the other end is never existing in the first place.
Altering space is one of those things that seems very loose and probably shouldn’t work. With the fact space is synonymous with reality in this world, it means that altering space is really altering properties of reality limited only to making things not exist. What does this entail? Well imagine if a book sucked you into a new pocket world or if a laptop let you hack properties of the world. Essentially, you change something in the world to make it more magical while only able to barely touch the other elements. No clocks that make timelines visible because that’s a time thing, not a void thing.
Bending space is a more utility based thing. You can’t just erase something and you can’t make something less realistic so what’s left? Casually bending space into itself or finding a way to splinter it without making a break. I’ll have a video and more details in the later explanation but for now, think folding space into itself and occasionally making tears.
Time in this world is strange as it not only has been made around dealing with various time travel shenanigans, but also has been given a metaphysical realm to grow. Now, timelines are strange things in this world with two types existing. The Temporal Sun or main timeline that works to keep events flowing in a stable way on the universal scale and the personal timeline that does so for who or whatever it is within. Anything made within the main timeline has one and cannot have it removed.
Now what is a timeline? A timeline in the conceptual sense would technically be called timelines as it accounts for the thing that keeps track of each and every event that has happened or will happen in time. It has the alpha timeline which dictates the main path that your actions will lead to and the various splinter lines that go based on missteps or things that go against how you normally go. The difference between the two in this sense is very hard to explain as no one really can judge what is the alpha and what isn’t simply based on the events unless they’ve already lived it. Now accounting for the metaphysical sense makes things a bit more strange but easier to handle. Imagine you had a single seed. This is the starting point in time. It grows a root stem with a bunch of tiny little root extensions splitting off from it. The stem is the alpha and the smaller ones are the splinters. Now imagine that stem with a seemingly infinite amount of splinters covering it up and going all over the place into a massive ball with instances of splinters growing into or through each other. That’s the metaphysical sense of this thing. Easier to find the alpha because you know what it is. Downside is, it’s congested and near impossible to actually get to or track. Splinters don’t exactly have any indication as to what each event is on the inside so that’s also a bit of a shot in the darkness.
Timelines aren’t meant to be simple or set in stone. The alpha sometimes twists around within a timeline as well as the splinters sometimes joining with the alpha making the timeline just the alpha. Something with that is a constant and only exists in the alpha timeline, free from most to all time bullshit. But the main thing is that time is not something that you can casually tamper with or track. The time is meant to be a mystery and a world on its own. I like to imagine that time travelers are explorers mapping out their personal timeline world things. Sometimes they find that golden alpha they’ve been searching for and sometimes they end up royally screwed over in the process. Time is unpredictable. We’ve never really read the future truly, just made some really good guesses.
Okay for the sake of having enough room on this paper, I’m going to focus on the stuff that primarily relates to this species as opposed to stuff like their first world war with something like tereson nazis taking out anyone with elemental power. So let’s see... this world isn’t their first one actually. It doesn’t belong to any of the three species on this world. Wait, four. There’s a fourth that’s really isolated and shy. Anyways, their old worlds actually got destroyed from various magical mishaps that contributed to how their religion came to be. Each one had something happen that more or less caused their planet to become inhospitable and gave them powers as a result. They call this an Elemental Flux Shift. With their past, they thought that they always destroyed the world that it happens on. Then there’s earth surviving because humans are just hard to kill. Thanks popular media for making us super difficult to eradicate.
For these guys, it was science. Just about everything is science for them so of course someone would get to properties of the universe and dark matter and all that stuff. We’ve been studying it recently as well but here’s what separates us and them. There was a team of four dolacer that found a way to detect dark matter and dark energy and used that to control it. It seemed pretty good at the start, I mean they had something that could bend space. So what went wrong is that someone took that bit of concentrated dark energy and tried to use it to make a portal, because using something that can bend space to break it is a good idea. The result created a portal, meaning that it sort of worked. It’s just that this portal stayed open for a few seconds before condensing into a blackhole with the life of about three seconds and killed them all and destroyed the lab in the blast.
Story over, big blast on the homeworld and killed a bunch of people. Well fun thing about dark matter, that stuff is already everywhere but now it’s just more concentrated and it started bending more space and the world started dealing with shifting physics. First thing to start, physics broke. Forces didn’t have that opposition anymore and energy was seemingly limitless. Sounds useful until you realize that almost everything relies on these properties. Next was spatial structure. Some parts of the world started going flat and others edged to fourth dimensional stuff. Then time broke. Time breaking is pretty bad. I’m not even going to go over the fact that history was showing up again in the relative present and vice versa as the history books shifted. And as the last sign of the EFS apocalypse, the world started to condense from its new overly powerful gravity. It looked like the end until the figures of power showed up as a last resort.
It was the spirits of the four scientists that caused this. They looked over their destruction and knew that they needed to fix it, but how? Coming back as ghosts is already enough of a stretch so something must have happened. Apparently the universe has some sense of sentience and it brought them back with different abilities to fix everything. The flux couldn’t be entirely fixed but it was held back by them for long enough until they started to fade. By then, the dolacer were about to flee save for a few choosing to stay behind. No one’s entirely sure why this was the case but no one was really complaining.
The spirits met the group staying behind and finally relaxed as everything started to break at this world again. But someone had an idea, what if the spirits just took over one of them? Everyone was confused as ghosts were not a thing in this world but hey, any idea is a good idea at this time. The one to suggest this was taken over by the time spirit and started to fix the temporal flow with great ease. The same happened with each one as physics were fixed and space was rectified, however gravity was not responding to this shift and the world continued to collapse. There were still a few left and it was clear that the void spirit needed more energy. He asked for a boost from the energy dolacer and it still wasn’t enough, so he told the space, time, and energy infused beings to just teleport away while they could and to take the bystanders too. Only a void infused dragon remained with two stubborn followers and no escape to the impending compression.
An idea popped into the heads of one of the three remainders and he said, “let’s just ask the disembodied sentient reality.” Of course, scientific race suddenly going to religion is weird but this guy didn’t care. He did so anyways and the universe gave him and his friend a new way to use void. The spirit had the bare bones with bending space like gravity, the one who asked could fracture and mend reality at his will, and the final one was allowed to live free from all effects of normal space. None of them could do anything, but the preacher was able to get them all onto the escape ship by way of portals. Their world was gone and they were going to be off towards a false hope as the universe expanded as they traveled, but the newly infused dolacer had other plans. Using their new magic, they were able to skip the gap and landed in a new cluster where the lupex had lived. And thus ends the start of the saga of where magic had originated for this species. There’s more but this entry is long enough and the others go into the other four species so I’ll just stop there.
So I just found out that those fluffy things all over the place are the same things outside the outpost limits. They’re another sentient race on this world and just keep their territorial struggles outside of everyone else’s affairs. That’s polite of them. Why do I bring this up? Well they’re everywhere in the world. I’m in the northern outpost by the Tereson and I see all kinds of them across these frigid towns. They’re called Lupex and they seem to just be across this whole world being helpers. They’re not necessarily a work force as they just go about their day and help out when they feel necessary. Good thing the big powerful dragon overlords don’t enslave the small feral tribal race. Things could’ve gone dark fast.
Now how this relates to the big winged science lizards. Most of the grunt work is done by the lupex and gives them time to focus on what they find important in life, acceleration of their technology and science. They don’t see the point in “wasting their time or resources with pointless splatters or sounds.” The same goes with their significant lack of ways to really spend their downtime other than thinking of new ideas for them to test later. Maybe this constantly productive mentality and long lifespan is how they got so advanced technologically.
What else is there... they all walk around in uniforms with some sense of utility like temperature regulation and durability. I call them uniforms as it looks exactly like that, outfits that look exactly the same save for minor flairs from the occasional creative dolacer. There’s a lot more of these “cultural defects” in this part of the world. A lot of them have taken a liking to the tereson culture and live near them as a result. There’s also a few that have interrogated us to learn of our culture. Apparently they’re going to be sent to our world for the same reason we were sent here. Of course, they have some way to disguise themselves and start further back to watch things play out. One of them especially seemed interested in our prior knowledge of time travel in media. I’m sure that she’ll enjoy Dr. Who or Back to the Future.
The Dolacer seem to be really tall and really smart dragon things that live for a long time. They constantly have that overbearing demeanor that you see from elves in most rpg settings save for a rare few that appear to have studied other cultures. As I’m writing this, I’m getting things set up in their northern outpost and I’ve met a few that have adopted the culture of this elf-like race known as Tereson. I’ll probably get sent here again to study them later. For now, we focus on the dolacer.
Based on what our biologist has studied, the females stand at 7’3” and the males at 7’5”. The main way to really tell the two apart is to see if they have an extra claw on their wings. If they do, then they’re a guy. They have a lifespan of 400 years on average and heal exceptionally fast. It’s not necessarily fully healing but really scabbing up fast enough to stop the bleeding or set their bones. Unlike the lizards at home though, they don’t seem to be able to regrow limbs. They are cold blooded and hatch from eggs like normal lizards and start off looking much more feral and eventually learn to walk and continue with that on digitigrade legs for the remainder of their lives. I think I saw one or two adult dolacer out of the corner of my eye on all fours but I might be imagining things.
What else is there? Claws, sharp teeth, can’t breathe fire like dragons from our mythos, primarily carnivores. Oh right, they also don’t have ears. Their horns seem to be the equivalent of our auditory nerve center. That weird snail shaped thing in our skulls. For these guys, it justs out and gives them a much larger range as they more or less act like antennae with much more room for each individual pitch sensor. It seems that the only real way to make them go deaf is to hit the horns a bunch or to break it off. Either is highly ill advised, they do not like it when you touch their horns. That’s not from personal experience, that’s from knowing that people touching your external ears is a bad idea.
It seems that today we were allowed into the observatory orbiting the planet today. Our geologist was flipping out over the land shapes and seeing it in person. He wants to go to check out some of the mountains in the northern region for some mineral samples but apparently there’s another race there that is very territorial. Like, there’s a lot of stuff that has to be done otherwise they’ll attack on sight. Other than that, it was pretty uneventful.
They did give us this nice map to translate and use for future reference. We’re apparently staying in the Eastern Outpost as it’s the most hospitable to us and also the least dangerous if we don’t leave. I don’t know who the Ignis Clan are but I’d rather not meet whatever territorial monsters live out there. I’d rather stay in here where those large fluffy rabbit things being the only issue.
We did ask about the different land marks and what those places were. Apparently they don’t really see the point in learning the names to places they never go to. They just need location and they’ll just fly or teleport there. Freaking space dragons and their magic. Though, we do have to be a bit thankful for it.
Apparently that star on the map is a black hole with gravity based magic preventing it from doing anything. They say that they don’t really know how to deal with it or what to do so they kinda just use it as a garbage dump when they need to. It’s not like there’s some snake monster or whatever on the other side.
So about a few months ago, a new planet from some other end of the universe or something made itself known. They showed up here through a giant hole in space because apparently that something they can control and no one can really understand them. What’s to expect from an alien race? Not all of them speak English. It wasn’t long before someone realized that the grammar was similar to that of Latin, making it even more difficult to learn. On the plus side, I can communicate with these weird dragon things and was eligible for the research project of the world.
I am the one who will basically keep track of everything that the team learns of this race in the month that we will be spending there. Thankfully, we can go there without space suits and minor difference in gravitational forces. Food seems to not be poisonous as well and they are able to keep track of any creatures that could possible be hazardous to us. This idea is actually kind of exciting. I mean, I’m one of the first few humans to not only experience going across space, but also to live on a foreign planet for a month.
So far what we’ve gathered is that they are about 7'6″ on average, they can heal really fast, and they have powers similar to gods. They were able to make a damn portal across the universe and some of them seem to be able to get really close to the death zone of a black hole. Thankfully, the reality warping dragons are smart and patient.
