Game! A War of Worlds

[Vaz]

Hey, no problem bud. I forgot to post a place anyway.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Forgotten Straits lie between two massive statues of the blind god Azatar, each taller than the snowy mountains of the mainland which loom over the Scattered Isles. The rare ship which passes between them always salutes Azatar by tossing a human sacrifice, willing or unwilling, overboard. This unfortunate person usually drowns, but is sometimes devoured alive by dragonfish. Once in a very great while, a sacrifice is who an extraordinary swimmer manages to escape the ravenous dragonfish and manages to reach one of the tiny islands. Such a person's ultimate fate is not something which has been revealed to me, for which I am grateful.

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Saint Anne's Fields

 

[johnnyjet]

Saint Anne's Fields was alternately bathed in golden and lime green light. Named after a saint of the Rose and Violet Order who was known for her great compassion for the elderly and the unborn, it was a place of enigmatic beauty for centuries. When the Carbon Wars ripped through the Thirteen Nations, it instantly became transformed into a battlefield of many-colored blood.

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The Poisoned Sands of Rieger

 

[Coast]

The circumstances that led to the rise of Louis Rieger are still unclear. His demise though, is a tale told around campfires all throughout the Old Kingdom. It was not enough for the Cruel King Michael to scatter the usurpers armies to the winds, nor tear his fort down stone by stone and cart the stones away. Not razing the oasis, nor poisoning the wells satisfied him. It's said the Council of Lords argued against the execution the prisoners, and voices hush when people talk about the families of the soldiers that fought for Rieger. But the King was still not pleased. The caravan came from the north, men with names the victors couldn't pronounce, men with evil eyes. Their carts were overloaded with barrels of something that made the eyes water, and took the breath away. They laced the sands the around the wreckage of Rieger's dreams as far as the eye could see and promised no living thing would abide here for a thousand years. Then, the cruel king laughed.

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Lowside

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

Lowside hangs over Loki, the third moon of Odin, largest planet in the Asgard system. It's parked in a stationary orbit on the side of the tide-locked moon that faces away from its primary, in order to protect it from the giant planet's immense radiation. It's a great place to study high-energy particles, but it's a lousy place to live. No one has managed to stand the boredom of life aboard the tiny station for more than two weeks. Nobody except the fellow who stayed there a year. Of course, he had his reasons.

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The Central Sea

 

[sinister42]

The Central Sea is the sea in the center, as the locals will tell you with a weary eye roll. They'll helpfully show you the LEFT sea and the RIGHT sea, and then the CENTRAL sea right in the middle, see? When the seas were engineered, you see, the engineers hoped everyone would see the seas for what they were, and where they were, and so they made the seas as simple as possible to see.


P135Z-52342-Q-Banana

 

[Glen]

P135Z-52342-Q-Banana was super fun. There is zero-g slides you can ride while yur playing, and like on earth they's stasis fields so you don't need to look where you going. Bananas was a fruit, like you can see on Fruit Ninja, bendy yellow, and they was trying to keep them here to stop them going xtinked, but they died anyway, near the same time people got lots of really gud apps to play. They sell soft candy they say tastes like banans but I've tasted it before. it just tastes like candy.

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Pig Knuckle Creek

 

[sinister42]

Us kids used to bike over to pig knuckle creek to cool off in the summertime, but we had to be very careful to remember the price of admission. You see, there were goblins in that creek, and the only thing anyone could find that'd make them leave us alone was a handful of fresh pig knuckles. So Farmer Tom always kept the knuckle bones from the pigs he slaughtered and put them in a bowl outside his farmhouse, so the kids could all grab handfuls and head down to the creek.

Wompus Ridge

 

[Coast]

Wompus Ridge rises steep from the Blue River, higher than any ridge for a hundred miles. It's rounded tops are bald, and hold snow until well into spring. They chased gold in the Blue, way back in the '90's, and the old timers say they never found the lode. But they all know it was up in the Wompus, somewhere above Smith Creek. Those old timers were tough, but the Blue was too much even for them. The cold, the solitude, the bush so thick and steep you had to carry everything in on your back - it drove them all to quit eventually. But me and Pete, we aren't quitters. We're going to make our fortune out there at Wompus, just you wait and see.

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The Center for the Application of Quantum Force

 

[ErikB]

The Center for the Application of Quantum Force was a humorous albeit misleading name for a Sledgehammer manufacturing and mining supply company founded by the retired physicist Ehiem Schwartz after he saw a need to design better tools for asteroid and inner planetary miners.

Ehiem was rumored to have had a soft spot for some of the prospectors from Krebon, and given the limitations of their physiology he was the first person to ever create crystal wave emitters to enhance rock boring for those with unique needs. Krebonians consider him something of an economic hero and donated a rather strange statue of Professor Schwartz which now stands at the front entrance of his first store.


Kaldron's Bane.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The gray and icy fens of Kaldron's Bane shimmered in the cold white light of the lesser sun. The weed-choked water sloshed against Hamok's leather boots as he trudged through the cursed wasteland. Few travelers came this way. Water serpents and swamp hawks eyed him curiously, with no fear of humans. Hamok's breath filled the air with pale clouds. He pulled a strip of dried fish from his pack and chewed it slowly. The greater sun would rise in nine days and transform this half-frozen swampland into a desert. He had to reach Lamsor before then.

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Station Prime

 

[Stable]

Station Prime took the varied transports of a thousand worlds and made them all welcome. Starships from the void, steam caterpillars from Eiondon, rope-and-sheet sailing vessels. Trains, cars, buses and planes. Camels and taranticular climbers, mountain zippers and coastal funiculars. It took them all, made them all welcome and passed them all on to the same unknowable destination, from where no one returned. And yet still the transports kept coming. Still the passengers kept the faith that they were going somewhere better. Maybe they weren't wrong.

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The Levanthine Float.

 

[Victoria Silverwolf]

The Levantine Float was constructed in 2134, several years after the Union of Eastern Mediterranean States developed a highly efficient fusion reactor, based on the uninhabitable wasteland of Cyprus. (Nearly a century after the One Minute War took place on that unhappy island, it was still dangerously toxic. The Turkish, Greek, Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, and other workers had to wear protective equipment that resembled nothing so much as Mars suits.) As a demonstration of the nearly unlimited power obtained from relatively small amounts of seawater, the Float was built by carving tiny isles with giant lasers and bringing them together to form a "playground for the world," as the hypervids phrased it. Noted for providing a wide range of recreational activities, from hiking in rocky wilderness to cave racing, the Float was selected to host the One Hundredth Modern Olympiad, where many records were broken. The ensuing genetic enhancement scandal did not reflect on the hosts, fortunately.

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The Harvest Road

 

[Glen]

The Harvest Road used to be the biggest trade route on the planet. They said you could see it from space, but I don’t know if that means much any more. It cut through the equatorial plain all the way from Samphamore to the space-port that serviced Empyric-6/x. Twelve lanes all the way. And out on either side, to the north and south, fields so big you couldn’t see the far boundary. Big irrigation rigs kept the crops watered and fed, and drones did the seeding, but they still let the water-buffalo have free run after the harvest though, like they always done.

Since the war, when the Empyric houses was brought down low, things have changed. The Faazon houses broke through our shields and brought disease to the crops. Black mould that turned healthy green stems sour and soft. The soil was destroyed. All the microbes died. Then everything died, even the water buffalo. There was nothing left for them or us.

Now I cycle down the road, for days sometimes, camping on the median strip at night. You need to wear a filter mask, but when the sun is going down, it’s good to walk on the old concrete, as the sun’s last rays light the dead spores and dust drifting over the road.

One day I reckon I’ll see a green shoot, out on one of the fields, or in one of the cracks in the road.

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Faazon-3/z