2018-12-06 19:28![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
redthedragon
redthedragonbe warned: this is a long post.
warnings for: implications. all kinds of not nice implications. dubcon all around but its never actually touched on
warnings for: implications. all kinds of not nice implications. dubcon all around but its never actually touched on
djfalloutwolf said:
wait whats closerverse????
Red replied:
AHA.
see.
Closerverse was originally a one off dream universe that wound up having a concept interesting enough to me when i’d woken up that i decided i was actually going to write it, namely “fuck or die but neither character wants to fuck but it has to be those two characters, now gimme aftermath.
(I never said it was a particularly pleasant dream. Lots of body horror. Oodles of body horror. Closerverse could be easily described as me spinning a wheel to see whose body I’m going to absolutely ruin next. After all, this is the universe that spawned Deinar. (More on him later. I have made reference to him before and trust me none of it is good.) But yeah it was, certainly A Lot. Had enough emotional impact that I cried when i woke up and had a headache all that day because of it, lmao)
It sort of, windmilled out of that, and now Closerverse is a massive sprawling post-apocalypse post-rebuild early industrial society with three major ‘species’ of people:
- humans, who are like bog standard humans, except sometimes not, when they’re divided into
anyways theres gonna be multitudes of these so hang tight and or mute the closerverse tag
wait whats closerverse????
Red replied:
AHA.
see.
Closerverse was originally a one off dream universe that wound up having a concept interesting enough to me when i’d woken up that i decided i was actually going to write it, namely “fuck or die but neither character wants to fuck but it has to be those two characters, now gimme aftermath.
(I never said it was a particularly pleasant dream. Lots of body horror. Oodles of body horror. Closerverse could be easily described as me spinning a wheel to see whose body I’m going to absolutely ruin next. After all, this is the universe that spawned Deinar. (More on him later. I have made reference to him before and trust me none of it is good.) But yeah it was, certainly A Lot. Had enough emotional impact that I cried when i woke up and had a headache all that day because of it, lmao)
It sort of, windmilled out of that, and now Closerverse is a massive sprawling post-apocalypse post-rebuild early industrial society with three major ‘species’ of people:
- humans, who are like bog standard humans, except sometimes not, when they’re divided into
- shaidbinders: people who can magically attach shaids to things- unshadowed: people who are, for whatever reason, not in tune with the dimensional crack and therefore invisible to unbound shaids
the reason that the entire world Ended, and the reason that the shaidbloods can get in, and the reason that dragons and shaidbinders exist, is all because of one thing, and that thing wsa the Cataclysm.
The Cataclysm happened when someone in the first dimension managed to punch a hole straight through to the second while attempting something interesting with physics that i don’t know enough about physics to talk about, and this hole managed to collapse both the first, second, and third dimensions into one another to create a plane that is, sort of, superimposed on top of itself. For a while, physics were broken as the denizens of each of these dimensions were forced into other places; this basically became the apocalypse. Dragons appeared out of seemingly nowhere (read: graveyards, corpses, etc) and spontaneous first-dimension proto-shaidbloods started happening. Now, most of these uhhh died, but the apocalypse spawned a new religion out of a cult that arose around a demagogue who, riffing off of christianity and some other random traditions that had cropped up by the year 2500, denounced the dragons and such as demons and declared that there was a holy obligation to murder them all. being that dragons could transform into giant fire-breathing lizards and appeared for the most part at this point to be shambling corpses, uhm, this was pretty fucking believable. the Warist movement gained traction, and within like, four years, there was some significant social stratification going on. it didn’t help that the dragons spoke Radasyx, their own language, with no exception– there was not a way to communicate, at least at first.
Dragons, however, have advanced healing, and they healed, and then they had kids, as any significant group of people are wont to do, and then their kids had kids, and they were all dragons, and so on and so forth. dragonhood is a dominant trait.
Later, the actual shaidbloods started coming through; and the actual shaidbloods joined the dragons as demons in the Warist cult.
and that’s the bare bones of the Closerverse.
now, naturally, this kind of took off.
A lot of europe is a smoking magical crater; the christians and the warists found that a lot of their ideals were in opposition and a war sparked, culminating in shaiden weapons being used to make massive fucking bombs that sort of, reacted with things unpredictably and wiped most of the continent off of the map in a nasty concussive wave. East Africa, India, and parts of southeast Asia are all thriving as the new center of culture and industry, as aided by the shaid ‘game administrators’ (read: meddlers), who have decided to split up the ‘game’ into different kinds of genres for reasons of convenience. ‘mods’ will go into the game as shaidbloods and subtly or unsubtly create areas of different kinds of games to play with, you know, people’s lives.
most of the story that happens in the closerverse happens in north america, because that’s where i live. 99% of it happens in upstate new york, around the long-buried ruins of Syracuse, now known as the human city-state of “Seracks,” and there is a moderately small dragon clan (clan Oserisades) wandering around in the general area because that’s where they are. Seracks is an autocratic nation with intense censorship and control of the people through fear and hatred, whereas clan oserisades, under the leadership of the somewhat miliatant ath Velan ket’Oserisades and her trustworthy sylaths, is significantly more liberal.
However, this is not the only human or dragon settlement. To the east, in modern day arizona and california, is the massive expanse of the Ever-burning City and their empire, whose influence reaches all the way to New York. The Everburning City creates the train line, using solar panels and windmills; and the Everburning City defends equal access to that for a special class of individuals known as the couriers by uhh, salting the earth sorts of policies when they find out that someones been intentionally blocking couriers from one group or another. (Couriers are basically just mail people; in this universe, their email functions are also just referred to as ‘courier.’) The EBC is a sanctuary city, which just means that the laws are equal for everyone in them.
To the north is the Canadia Confederation, a loose handful of states from Oregon to British Columbia that focus largely on trapping and farming and are surprisingly populated by a fairly tolerant group of people.
The middle of America is a constantly-shifting sea of insecure city states under varying amounts of EBC rule, which tapers off somewhere around Kansas but continues to police the entire continent for courier abuse.
And then, the only other relevant place n the map, is Hudson.
Hudson is the worst city.
Do you ever create a setting just to be awful, and spend all of your time activley making it worse? Do that for the course of a year in the dystopian image of a Gilded Age city while trying to impress a friend who usually one-ups your terrible concepts, and you might come close to what Hudson is for me.
Hudson is the worst city ever and this is why.
There are three parts to Hudson: the skylayer, the midcity, and the Undercity. Probably 20% of the city lives in the skylayer, 60% lives in the midcity, and the remaining 20% lives in the undercity.
only the rich can afford to live on the skylayer, and only the genuinely devoid of emotion or morals can be rich in Hudson, because any sort of success if required by the way that the city is ruled to be either illegal or sitting on the backs of the weak. Crime runs rampant in the city– or at least it would, if it were actually criminal to do most of the things that the Hudsonian laws permit. Lord Deiya, ruler of Hudson, is not only a legitimate ruler but also the biggest crimelord this side of the entire world; their fingers are in every single pie. They don’t care if they hurt anyone. They’re a mod and they’re a shaidblood. None of these people are real to them.
The midlayer is the place with factories, with less upscale shops, cheaper food, chiper houseing, cheaper stuff, and most of the recreational activities that people go to. Skylayer people wouldn’t likely slum it in the midlayer, but they might send slaves or servants to do things there for them. (Have i mentioned that anyone who lives in Skylayer is most likely scum? Because they are.) Most of the people in Hudson live in the midlayer and do either service or factory jobs. or they’re grunts in the elaborate criminal machine. But not truly grunt-grunts, not the disposables, because those live in the Undercity.
The undercity is the worst place to live.
There are restaurants in the undercity, and there are recreational activities; but many of those ar unpleasant and illegal, and either cheap or inordinately expensive. No one in the undercity has money, but many of them do have debt they don’t mind selling out. Once you get stuck in the undercity, that’s… usually it for you. The undercity is full of nasty bacteria, chemicals, wildlife… it is hard to leave because it will stick to you, and it will make you sick, and it will make you injured and it will weaken you and it’s so hard to make money in this city anyway that it’s just about impossible to get any real upwards motion. And any smart, sane individual would rather be miles in debt in the midlayer than a rich individual in the undercity. crime gangs run it, since the police don’t bother coming down. Massive lampreys that prey on unwary travelers, parastitic tiny fish that burrow into the flesh of their unwitting victims, eels that eat small children, all live in the Undercity’s perpetual puddles. Being that it’s well below sea level and not amazingly sealed off, it’s always damp, and the factory runoff from the midlayer is always either toxic or just generally nasty. and there are no environmental safety laws, of course.
There are very few laws at all, honestly, and they’re class based. Dragons are second level citizens, as are shaids, and they get very little protections under the law. Humans are further stratified by economic class, and the laws are skewed to protect the aristocracy.
All in all, it’s a shitty fucking city.
- dragons, who are like, mini shaidblood, except that they all come from the second dimension, which broke into the first dimension. They look like humans, sort of, aside from different eyes and ears and nails (usually of radiant color; their eyes glow and are reptilian, and their ears are either pointed or stunted but never round); however they can also transform into dragon forms that are like, leggy snakes, and adult dragons can easily get between forty to sixty feet long, barring issues with health or whatever
- Shaidblood, who are…. weird.
- Shaidblood, who are…. weird.
- the shaids are actually extradimensional beings who can ‘touch” the earth dimensional plane due to, reasons, which i’ll explain in the later spaces, but the people who figured this out were uhhh enterprising individuals, and they proceeded to market the entire dimension as an immense, sprawling, open-world video game.'
- most shaids have to talk characters into doing things, but shaidbloods are those who don’t mind a bit of unpleasantness to be able to get into the game (read: world) itself. Some shaidbloods are nice. some aren’t.
- but due to the nature of going from one plane to a totally different-shaped one, shaidbloods tend to forget things until they go back to places where they can think in, for example, harmonic frequencies that visually manifest in their second-dimensional sight and leave third, fourth, and fifth-dimensional sight alone. for example. but so they’ll forget like, their names, or their goals, or something– but it’s always significant.
- most shaids have to talk characters into doing things, but shaidbloods are those who don’t mind a bit of unpleasantness to be able to get into the game (read: world) itself. Some shaidbloods are nice. some aren’t.
- but due to the nature of going from one plane to a totally different-shaped one, shaidbloods tend to forget things until they go back to places where they can think in, for example, harmonic frequencies that visually manifest in their second-dimensional sight and leave third, fourth, and fifth-dimensional sight alone. for example. but so they’ll forget like, their names, or their goals, or something– but it’s always significant.
the reason that the entire world Ended, and the reason that the shaidbloods can get in, and the reason that dragons and shaidbinders exist, is all because of one thing, and that thing wsa the Cataclysm.
The Cataclysm happened when someone in the first dimension managed to punch a hole straight through to the second while attempting something interesting with physics that i don’t know enough about physics to talk about, and this hole managed to collapse both the first, second, and third dimensions into one another to create a plane that is, sort of, superimposed on top of itself. For a while, physics were broken as the denizens of each of these dimensions were forced into other places; this basically became the apocalypse. Dragons appeared out of seemingly nowhere (read: graveyards, corpses, etc) and spontaneous first-dimension proto-shaidbloods started happening. Now, most of these uhhh died, but the apocalypse spawned a new religion out of a cult that arose around a demagogue who, riffing off of christianity and some other random traditions that had cropped up by the year 2500, denounced the dragons and such as demons and declared that there was a holy obligation to murder them all. being that dragons could transform into giant fire-breathing lizards and appeared for the most part at this point to be shambling corpses, uhm, this was pretty fucking believable. the Warist movement gained traction, and within like, four years, there was some significant social stratification going on. it didn’t help that the dragons spoke Radasyx, their own language, with no exception– there was not a way to communicate, at least at first.
Dragons, however, have advanced healing, and they healed, and then they had kids, as any significant group of people are wont to do, and then their kids had kids, and they were all dragons, and so on and so forth. dragonhood is a dominant trait.
Later, the actual shaidbloods started coming through; and the actual shaidbloods joined the dragons as demons in the Warist cult.
and that’s the bare bones of the Closerverse.
now, naturally, this kind of took off.
A lot of europe is a smoking magical crater; the christians and the warists found that a lot of their ideals were in opposition and a war sparked, culminating in shaiden weapons being used to make massive fucking bombs that sort of, reacted with things unpredictably and wiped most of the continent off of the map in a nasty concussive wave. East Africa, India, and parts of southeast Asia are all thriving as the new center of culture and industry, as aided by the shaid ‘game administrators’ (read: meddlers), who have decided to split up the ‘game’ into different kinds of genres for reasons of convenience. ‘mods’ will go into the game as shaidbloods and subtly or unsubtly create areas of different kinds of games to play with, you know, people’s lives.
most of the story that happens in the closerverse happens in north america, because that’s where i live. 99% of it happens in upstate new york, around the long-buried ruins of Syracuse, now known as the human city-state of “Seracks,” and there is a moderately small dragon clan (clan Oserisades) wandering around in the general area because that’s where they are. Seracks is an autocratic nation with intense censorship and control of the people through fear and hatred, whereas clan oserisades, under the leadership of the somewhat miliatant ath Velan ket’Oserisades and her trustworthy sylaths, is significantly more liberal.
However, this is not the only human or dragon settlement. To the east, in modern day arizona and california, is the massive expanse of the Ever-burning City and their empire, whose influence reaches all the way to New York. The Everburning City creates the train line, using solar panels and windmills; and the Everburning City defends equal access to that for a special class of individuals known as the couriers by uhh, salting the earth sorts of policies when they find out that someones been intentionally blocking couriers from one group or another. (Couriers are basically just mail people; in this universe, their email functions are also just referred to as ‘courier.’) The EBC is a sanctuary city, which just means that the laws are equal for everyone in them.
To the north is the Canadia Confederation, a loose handful of states from Oregon to British Columbia that focus largely on trapping and farming and are surprisingly populated by a fairly tolerant group of people.
The middle of America is a constantly-shifting sea of insecure city states under varying amounts of EBC rule, which tapers off somewhere around Kansas but continues to police the entire continent for courier abuse.
And then, the only other relevant place n the map, is Hudson.
Hudson is the worst city.
Do you ever create a setting just to be awful, and spend all of your time activley making it worse? Do that for the course of a year in the dystopian image of a Gilded Age city while trying to impress a friend who usually one-ups your terrible concepts, and you might come close to what Hudson is for me.
Hudson is the worst city ever and this is why.
There are three parts to Hudson: the skylayer, the midcity, and the Undercity. Probably 20% of the city lives in the skylayer, 60% lives in the midcity, and the remaining 20% lives in the undercity.
only the rich can afford to live on the skylayer, and only the genuinely devoid of emotion or morals can be rich in Hudson, because any sort of success if required by the way that the city is ruled to be either illegal or sitting on the backs of the weak. Crime runs rampant in the city– or at least it would, if it were actually criminal to do most of the things that the Hudsonian laws permit. Lord Deiya, ruler of Hudson, is not only a legitimate ruler but also the biggest crimelord this side of the entire world; their fingers are in every single pie. They don’t care if they hurt anyone. They’re a mod and they’re a shaidblood. None of these people are real to them.
The midlayer is the place with factories, with less upscale shops, cheaper food, chiper houseing, cheaper stuff, and most of the recreational activities that people go to. Skylayer people wouldn’t likely slum it in the midlayer, but they might send slaves or servants to do things there for them. (Have i mentioned that anyone who lives in Skylayer is most likely scum? Because they are.) Most of the people in Hudson live in the midlayer and do either service or factory jobs. or they’re grunts in the elaborate criminal machine. But not truly grunt-grunts, not the disposables, because those live in the Undercity.
The undercity is the worst place to live.
There are restaurants in the undercity, and there are recreational activities; but many of those ar unpleasant and illegal, and either cheap or inordinately expensive. No one in the undercity has money, but many of them do have debt they don’t mind selling out. Once you get stuck in the undercity, that’s… usually it for you. The undercity is full of nasty bacteria, chemicals, wildlife… it is hard to leave because it will stick to you, and it will make you sick, and it will make you injured and it will weaken you and it’s so hard to make money in this city anyway that it’s just about impossible to get any real upwards motion. And any smart, sane individual would rather be miles in debt in the midlayer than a rich individual in the undercity. crime gangs run it, since the police don’t bother coming down. Massive lampreys that prey on unwary travelers, parastitic tiny fish that burrow into the flesh of their unwitting victims, eels that eat small children, all live in the Undercity’s perpetual puddles. Being that it’s well below sea level and not amazingly sealed off, it’s always damp, and the factory runoff from the midlayer is always either toxic or just generally nasty. and there are no environmental safety laws, of course.
There are very few laws at all, honestly, and they’re class based. Dragons are second level citizens, as are shaids, and they get very little protections under the law. Humans are further stratified by economic class, and the laws are skewed to protect the aristocracy.
All in all, it’s a shitty fucking city.
Send more asks if you want to know more— i haven’t mentioned Deinar’s disaster biology or jesse’s hivemind of mango-worm-esque self, or Brin and Deva’s life-sense and polymorph abilities, respectively, or even the sources of their names– send asks blease
Followup reblog: i never even explained why it would be fuck or die, did i.
well. someone WAY BACK got the brilliant and woefully misinformed idea in their heads that since dragons existed, they had to eat people, and this was unacceptable, so they would curse dragons who ate humans to lose their ability to be like humans unless they got true love’s kiss from a human.
They were working with a shaid. Their shaid had a nasty sense of humor and a mind for math.
“What constitutes eating people?” Any consumption of any human flesh or blood, excluding dust, but including accidentally getting blood in one’s mouth.
“What constitutes ‘not being disguised as a human?’“ Turning into a mindless, raging beast against one’s own will while being trapped in one’s body, and trying to kill and eat anything in sight. (Told you the bastard had a sense of humor.)
“What constitutes true love’s kiss from a human?” Sex. Specifically, sex, where the human consents. This distinction is important. For the record.
Because of reasons, and also because humans are shitheads and can and will come up with whatever depraved ways they can to control people, this gets leveraged against a dragon who really doesn’t deserve any of it. And who had zero interest in sleeping with, uh, anyone, really, but there we go. that’s what happened there.
anyways theres gonna be multitudes of these so hang tight and or mute the closerverse tag
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