#debatably fantasy

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

I have been thinking about canals lately. I have a soft spot for them. At some point, I started wondering what a canal in the air might look like. Which is somewhat silly, because it would be like putting a canal in the ocean-- the air is just there to move through. But I’m stubborn. So what would necessitate an air canal and what would it look like? I have to admit, for this one I kind of started form first and derived the function from there. As you can probably see from the picture, my idea of an air canal is basically two parallel mountain ranges very close together with a gap in the middle for the “boats” to pass through. So why would this need to be built? The obvious answer is wind. Mountains block wind, so if there was a very windy place where airships couldn’t otherwise travel, an air canal would allow them to pass from place to place without harm. The bottom of the canal would of course be a desert, since there’s no wind to blow rain through to it, but commerce must go on!

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

A Theory

So everyone knows iron hurts fairies and all that. Here’s a (not entirely serious) theory as to why: A lot of fiction portrays magic and science as opposing forces, but I’m gonna go a little more specific than that. What’s at the core of most of modern technology? Electricity. What’s at the core of magical workings? Some unidentifiable force called magic. It doesn’t make sense to have Technology as a concept opposing Magic as a concept, because where does one end and the other begin? Is magic repelled by two gears? What about a potato battery? But what does make more sense is electricity, one of the four fundamental forces, having an opposite: magic. That means what conducts electricity insulates magic and vice versa. Why is iron so repellent to the fair folk? Because like us, they have nerves that carry signals. But unlike us, those are magical signals, not electrical signals, and they have more control over them than we do. They can use magic to “feel” things outside their bodies, but iron, as an insulator, is like a dead spot. How would you feel if there was a substance that caused a blank spot in your vision? Not too good, I’d imagine. Scared, confused, and maybe even repelled. Of course, more conductive materials like copper would work better, but they weren’t around in medieval times so we get iron in popular literature as the repulsive material to magic.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

This is just a world(s) I’ve been thinking about for a while. Basically there’s two planets that rotate around each other closely enough that their oceans are pulled up due to the other planet’s gravity and connect the two. This is not possible by science but whatever I want to explore this very specific scenario and no one can stop me. The people in outfits and a kayak are from a semi-nomadic culture near the connecting bit of the oceans on both planets. These are pretty much the only people that really cross the water bridge, and a lot of their culture is focused on it. The crossing is long, hard, and only really attempted by younger people, similar to how many people move away from their homes for college, people in this culture are expected to cross the water bridge and spend time on the planet they weren’t born on. Part of what makes this crossing so harsh is that as one gets towards the center, the air becomes thinner and much colder. Since there are no animals close to the water bridge with warm furs due to its equatorial location, the people crossing bring many layers of cloth which over the course of the journey they wrap around themselves for warmth. If a person is disabled or otherwise unable to make the crossing at the expected time, they can choose to create a work that they symbolically put their soul into and entrust to someone close to them, who then makes the crossing in their stead. These crossings are dangerous and sometimes fatal, but still undertaken by almost every member of the culture at least once. Although the first crossing is undertaken alone in a kayak, subsequent journeys are usually with multiple people in canoes, both because extra people makes the crossing safer and because there is more space to carry materials for trade.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Okay this is another thing caused by me thinking about caves too much. More specifically, who would very much benefit by living underground? People whose job involved producing light. SO here you see the entrance to the Candlemakers’ Guild, all shiny and imposing as befits their status. You see, they have a monopoly on all candles produced, and therefore on light in this underground city. As a result, no one wants to offend them, and what aboveground is a normal merchant profession is a powerful and dangerous mercantile force here, with an entrance befitting a religious institution. In fact, they do have quite a bit of mysticism within their ranks, but they remain first and foremost a financial institution, to the chagrin of anyone who has to buy candles from them.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

Okay, so this originated because I was thinking about all those cities called City of ___.” So I googled a random noun generator because I wanted to make my own city of something. After a bunch of obscure and frankly ridiculous nouns, I decided to take the nouns as suggestions and just use synonyms and came up with the City of Songs and Silence, because sometimes I can be a little dramatic with my names. The city is in the north of a very cold planet, and is often bitingly cold. As such, the city is almost entirely underground and sealed against the elements, leaving the outside almost completely silent, save the wind. However, the first settlers in the caves underneath the city found that the caves, through some trick of nature, echoed quite a bit. As such, the citizens quickly became used to constant noise, and over the years, superstitions sprang up about quiet corridors. Nowadays, most successful shops hire musicians to play by their stores so that the area never falls entirely silent.

[mapmaker-mapmaker]

how about a world with floating islands?

Here you go! Floating islands with a bit of a spin on them-- literally. Arana spins so fast that the only thing that prevents these islands from zooming off into space are those chains attached to them. Interestingly enough, the centripetal acceleration means that unless you want to fall off, you have to live on the bottom of these islands. Both the tops of the islands and the surface of the planet itself are populated only by plants with roots strong enough to hold on to the ground and arboreal animals that hold on to the trees. No one knows how these islands came to be, or why the acceleration hasn’t ripped the planet itself apart by now, but hey, it’s there, it’s livable, there’s probably people on it. We’ve lived in dumber places.