Chaos Trims My Beard: A Fantasy Noir, page 32
Months are a different story, and I don't think anybody has any idea of exactly how long a year is after the Burst rocked Lumos in its orbit. Still, day-to-day, the weeks look right, and astronomers can have fun figuring out the rest.
CHARM:
A bit of canned dwarven magic. Small tokens that can only be forged by a dwarf wielding an ancestral hammer. There’s more to it, but it’s nothing I’m going to write down.
Charms are reusable and always do the same thing when called upon. I keep mine in a pouch hidden in my beard, and I haven't had much of a chance to ask other dwarves if they do the same.
COBALTIC OCEAN:
The large body of water to the east of the Sketlin City State. I’m not one for boats and have never been out past the breakwater that defines Cobalt Bay. They say if you go far enough east and a bit north you’ll find the giant blue crater that used to be the Fount. And then you’ll probably die for a dozen different reasons.
CRYSTAL TECHNOLOGY:
Crystals are dust constructs that serve as the primary building blocks for the technology of Lumos. They can be almost any shape and size and still fulfill their intended function, and as such are often conjured to be as small as possible. They primary trick of crystals is their ability vibrate on an almost unlimited number of frequencies and tune into the vibrations of any other crystal. Really expensive, well-made crystal devices can transmit and receive on thousands of different frequencies at a time. No, I don't know how it works, and I stopped being impressed about the time I hit puberty.
Crystals are used for almost everything, from communicating through resonators and projectors to coordinating the control of ornithopters. Essentially, with enough crystals and enough elements to manipulate and dust to power everything, devices of almost any form and function are possible.
DENOM:
The basic currency used in most cities. After the Burst, paper money fell out of fashion when no one was around to run the mints. People started trading pretty much any coin as equal value for any other. As time went on, that system became frustrating, especially when large purchases required multiple buckets of coin, and a new standardized system was put into practice. The highest value coins, worth hundreds or thousands of denoms each, are pure summoned spellsteel and consequently weightless. This makes them stupidly easy to lose.
DIAGRAMS:
Dwarven religions texts. Part practical instruction manual and part allegorical fable, the Diagrams detail the process behind something as straightforward as making your own pair of tongs and then go on to sing the deeds of Ignisar the Bellows Wench or Maerkaen the Hammer-Flinger. Each dwarf picks a forge patron whose example he will follow and to whom he will dedicate his major crafts. My dwarven side is pledged to Hemoack the Blood-quencher, though I’ve never had a full copy of the Diagrams at my disposal and have never been inclined to seek one out. This probably means I am a shoddy disciple.
DUNESNAPPER:
One of the many interesting and deadly creatures that has evolved since the Burst. A dunesnapper looks like a fat tube of a reptile that lies about an elf-and-a-half long. They have wide, unhingable mouths and can swallow a ratman whole, though they're found of using their multiple rows of teeth and there's generally some ripping and tearing before the swallowing. Dozens of clawed, muscular legs circle their torsos and allow them to borrow or skate across the sand at surprising speed. The legs themselves are also considered a delicacy and many restaurants serve them as "Dunesnapper Wings".
While dunesnappers might be the most dangerous non-sentient thing in the Allemain Desert, the flora and fauna of Lumos is almost always intimidating, interesting, or both. More pedestrian things like birds and dogs still exist where they can find a niche, but Dust got into everything, and there were consequences. Sailors tell tales of sea creatures with thousands of tentacles, and hunters return from the deep swamps and jungles with wild eyes and talk of beasts that are both tiger and spider, or of lakes that are alive and walk upon their own shores. Stuff like this makes me glad I live in the city.
DUST:
Concentrated magical potential. Generally looks like glowing blue sand or powder. Tastes like raw kale. Harvested from naturally occurring sources of elements. Almost everyone regularly consumes dust, usually sprinkled onto food or dissolved into drinks, for a variety of reasons. Inherently magical humans and elves need enough free-floating dust in their bodies to pull elements. Less magical races such as ratmen and ogres owe their sentience to the stuff. If a mage runs out of dust, he can't throw any more fireballs. If a troll runs out, he falls into a coma and eventually dies.
DWARVES:
Dwarves are walking, talking beards. Every single dwarf, from grizzled old men to newborn girls, has at least some kind of facial hair. Little kid stories that I read as an adult implied that if a dwarf were to completely lose his or her beard she would die, or at least get very depressed. It’s not something I've tested on myself.
When the Burst sent magic over the planet, the few dwarves that had been living and working deep in the heart of the world’s great mountains found themselves energized and their beards sparking and, for the first time, made their way to the surface. By the time most dwarves broke through to the sunlight, they found that elves, humans, trolls, or ogres had already claimed any desirable land nearby. These revelations were usually followed by violence.
Dwarves would describe themselves as a strong, sturdy people dedicated to their trades and of unwavering focus and devotion. In reality they’re closer to heavy drinkers with a bit of slant towards racial intolerance with some craftsmanship thrown in. Almost every full-blooded dwarf will dress far too fancifully for any given occasion even though his only drive will be to close down the bar and thumb his substantially reddened nose at anyone who doesn’t conduct themselves in such a way.
Actual dust pulling and spell slinging is beyond a dwarf, but they can make charms that allow for the same canned magic tricks to be preformed repeatedly with very little effort beyond the initial forging. In any other world, without mages, such abilities would be amazing. In the world we live in, they’re just kind of lackluster.
ELEMENTS:
Earth, air, fire, and water. The base forms of magic. In our walking-around world there's lots of elements where you'd expect to find them. Water in the bay, earth in the desert and so on, but mages can also pull large concentrations of elements from some ethereal source to direct into an insane variety of magical effects.
ELEMENTAL SIFTER:
A rare type of item that can take the naturally occurring elements in an object and direct them with mage-like control. The few I’ve seen look like old guns and do things like turn rubies into fireballs.
While I'm sure that scientists and engineers have hundreds of uses for sifters, for most of us, a sifter represents an equalizer. While most of them run on expensive, precious stones or other hard to acquire items, even a temporary or limited ability to match a true mage's potential is priceless. Aside from orcs and their axes, the idea of a weapon, something that can generally only be used for fighting and inflicting harm, is outdated. Mages themselves are weapons. The rest of us just try to keep up.
ELVES:
Beautiful, practically immortal, and inherently magical. Elves are the picture of privilege and enjoy being the richest, most attractive, and most capable person in whatever room they find themselves. Elves are generally taller than most humans, and you’ll never meet one that’s out of shape. Their bodies passively draw so much dust from the environment that their eyes glow with all of the extra stored power. That's my explanation for the glowing oculars, at least.
Elves were the ones who tended to the Fount until it exploded and as such are the ones to blame for magic getting everywhere and into everything. They have a tendency for social dramatics and self-importance and are always planning hundreds of years into the future.
As humans ran for cover from the destruction elves and their Fount had caused, the elves themselves sheepishly left their ancestral forests and quietly declared themselves the rulers of all of Lumos. It’s a collective position that they’ve managed to hold now in some way or another for more than a millennium.
FOCUS:
A stone that forms inside of a mage's body after the mage has pulled an element. These stones are likely made of spent dust or some magical residue, and in almost all cases are so small that the mage's body can process and pass them out as waste. However, if a mage pulls too hard or too much over a period of time on a given element, the focus can grow, and as it does, the mage runs a higher and higher risk of being overrun.
Oftentimes, the only things to mark the passing of a mage that has been overrun are the patch of destruction they've wrought, and a cold dead stone on the ground in the shape of whatever element took them.
FOUNT:
The unlimited source of energy that the elves managed to destroy thereby causing the Burst. It originally existed in the middle of a forest. Now that forest and the surrounding continent are a giant blue-glowing crater.
The few bits of scholarship done on the actual Fount hypothesize that it was some kind of elemental checkpoint that let the pure, magical forms of things like air and fire into our world in manageable amounts.
HOPTER:
Abbreviation for ornithopter, but only the New Sketlin Department of Conveyance calls them that. A ludicrously expensive vehicle consisting of one or more seats and four or more dust-powered engines. They belch rainbow colored exhaust in the shape of wings, hence the name. An almost exclusive toy of the rich and wasteful. Still, they're pretty fast and incredibly fun to fly.
HUMANS:
Short-lived and kind of mad about it. Humans were by far the most populous race before the Burst. After that particular cataclysm they found themselves stuck between the effects of having their entire race—or the survivors at least—suddenly capable of incredible feats of magic, and the emergence of every other walking, talking type of creature that inhabits the planet today. With only 80 or 100 years to live, most of the immediately post-Burst humans spent their entire lives watching their brothers and sisters accidentally light themselves on fire or get eviscerated by a clan of marauding orcs.
Today humans live in the elves' shadow. A highly successful human will spend the first half of their life getting a handle on their inherent magical abilities and then manically ascend through whatever career path they’ve chosen until they run into the filigree ceiling. It’s impossible to get promoted when the person above you has been doing the same job for two centuries and never dies.
Despite this, they are a race defined by their motivation and privilege. A driven human need only study the subtleties of food summoning for a decade or two and he’ll live out her decades as the executive chef for an elven-run restaurant chain. A lazy one will end up as the most valued and capable enforcer in some Sketlin Proper gang just by virtue of his inherent abilities. A dwarf might be afforded a few extra centuries, but nine times out of ten a human will leave a bigger mark. Running the planet for so long before everything went all magical seems to have imparted within them a sense of importance, deserved or not.
HYBRID:
Anyone with more than one race in his or her ancestry. Sometimes the mix is easy to spot and is socially respectable, like a half-elf. Other times it can be downright impossible to puzzle out as it is with most of the residents of Sketlin Proper. There are a lot of orc-troll-ogre blends down there. Employment in New Sketlin for hybrids is often contingent on being "certified" as a certain mix with quantifiable magical abilities.
Mages can get nervous when they don't know what the help is capable of. Hybrids are more prone to take on the physical traits of their mother's race than their father's. Considering most uncertified hybrids have a bit of orc in their ancestry somewhere, it’s usually not prudent to ask too many invasive questions.
LUMOS:
The world we live on. Not the original name for it as every race has its own idea of what it should be called. We ended up defaulting to the elves’ version because—as they often remind us—they were here first.
MAGE:
Strictly speaking, any human or elf. In practice refers to any person inherently capable of spending dust, pulling elements, and conjuring an infinite number of ostentatious, dangerous spells. If someone is naked with empty hands and they can still launch a fireball at your face, they're a mage.
MAGEROCK:
Fake stone summoned by mages. White with blue veins of imbedded dust. Incredibly resource intensive to create. Certain configurations are advertised as having anti-magic properties, though the effect is either not well understood or not widely discussed. Used in both security checkpoints and as a symbol of wealth.
OGRES:
Gigantic slabs of meat with two heads. Every ogre goes by a body-name, like Crum, and then each head has a self-name, which can be almost any combination of vaguely intelligible sounds. Most ogre heads will butt in on their self-brother or self-sister’s conversations anyway, so asking for Crum’Sell will probably draw the attention of Crum’Rek as well.
Ogres came from the swamps and there’s still a nation of them out there somewhere in the middle of the continent. Their House of Muds is the only body of government I know of that still practices representative democracy. Overall, they’re generally good people.
ORCS:
What aggression would look like if intangible concepts of interpersonal behavior could have faces. I don’t know how long they live, and I don’t know where they originally came from. It would be a surprise if anyone had actually taken the time or risk to figure it out.
Orcs range in height from dwarf to troll and I'd venture to guess that more than half their body weight is made up of muscle. An orc’s most defining feature is his axe. Every toddler is sent from their home at some point and told not to come back until they have fashioned their own axe. As such, most Sketlin orc children usually end up with almost-sharp rocks shoved into a piece of driftwood.
They then spend the rest of their lives killing for a bigger axe. If an orc defeats another he is entitled to his victim's axe. Maybe they swap out the blade on their own axe, or take a trophy from the haft. Sometimes they'll just abandon their old axe and claim the new one. Orcs will also hunt big game or just bash a tree in with their head until it falls in search of a means to upgrade their weapon. As such, 'axe' sometimes becomes a suggested term rather than literal description. Regardless if their racial hallmark is made from shark teeth and an ornithopter handlebar or classic wood and steel, the bigger the axe, the more capable the orc. With a big enough axe an orc can write his own ticket into any job that requires the judicious application of intimidation or force.
OVERRUN:
An impolite topic at best. Refers to both the act of losing control of one's spells, and the rampaging remains of the mage whose magic got away from him. An overdose of any one element in which the mage's body is completely consumed—or transformed maybe—into whatever power they drew too deeply from. To be overrun by water is to drown from the inside out and then completely liquefy. To be overrun by fire is worse.
Some science types have argued that overrun mages retain a sense of self after their body goes completely air or fire or whatever. Not a thing I like to think about.
PULL:
The act of a mage doing magic. Elements are redirected from whatever incomprehensible source they spring from and are channeled through the mage. The mage then conducts these elements into our walking-around world in some combination that produces the effect they'd planned on. Any human or elf can pull a blob of fire through and put some rushing air behind it to conduct a fireball. And that is horrifying. Pulling requires the expenditure of dust.
RATMEN:
Formally known as the urudaen, but I call a spade a spade. Two feet tall or so, numerous, and possessing a race-wide aversion to first person pronouns. To hear it told from people who were there, one day everything was fine, the next day the Burst happened, and then the day after that there were ratmen everywhere. Aside from being ubiquitous, they’re also highly inscrutable, resourceful, and fiercely loyal to whomever has earned such a thing.
Given their entirely non-human like appearance, ratmen consume a large amount of dust just to maintain consciousness. A well-fed ratman spits blue sparks when he speaks. Such magi-physiological needs play a large role in their somewhat mischievous interactions with other races. I don’t know a more diplomatic way to explain that they just steal a lot.
Ratmen live the shortest lives of any race, topping out somewhere in the teens. Most of them live out their lives in sprawling underground dens and see to the continuing existence of their race. Given their size, ratmen are the only sentient race that still has to deal with predation as an actual threat. Those that live in the city spend most of their time scavenging and drinking. One of them is a pretty good cop and doesn’t really do either of those things.
TRANSCIEVERS AND PROJECTORS:
Crystal-based bits of magical technology. In common usage, a transceiver is a portable cluster of crystals that can receive messages and allow voice communication with pretty much anyone else who has their own transceiver. A projector is a larger installation usually found in bars and homes that can produce both sights and sounds. Many different organizations make a lot of denoms and spend a lot of dust to ensure that these things are always spitting out new content.
According to the history books my mom left for me, these two things essentially just crystallized versions of "portable telephones" and "televisions". I'm a huge fan of projectors, and have lost many an hour to them. The idea of always being tied to a transceiver is not something that sits well with me, and I don't have one.
