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Aerah
The people of this quietly industrious planet have always discovered clever, yet minimalist, solutions to the most adverse problems. Therefore, when, sometime thousands of years ago, a terrible cataclysm occured on the surface world, the people of Aerah survived only by clinging to a chain of mountains that began to uproot and fly into the air. They soon left those anomalous havens and set out to rebuild their civilization.
Today, the pristine, floating clockworks are a testament to the Aeran and their careful intuition. The gigantic whirring gears, propellers, and steamstacks are kept in constant motion, and are under constant watch as they keep now great cities afloat.
The fringe town of Hinden is not a great city, however. It is a small islet built about two centuries ago on the foundation of a great drifting piece of a luftshroom stalk, the huge, wood-textured fungi that fill the sky as lush floating forests. Luftshroom have ever been the ally to the Aeran, as Luftshroom typically takes best root on prime specimens of Viator crystal.
Viator crystal is the lifeblood of the Aeran society. These shimmering shards begin their life on the blasted surface, naturally absorbing the lighter-than-air gases that seep up cracks in the smoking ground. They begin to rise almost immediately from the surface, filled with the compressed gas, continually absorbing it and coating it in the minute particles that waft up with it. Always the crystals are growing and absorbing these light gases, purifying the air as they go.
The practical upshoot of these crystals is that they burn a clean fuel, producing only a small amount of wasteful soot. Along with the tendency of luftshroom to grow on its surface, eating into it to use the gases as expansion for itself, and the natural contractions the crystals have in response to drops in air pressure (signalling a storm), the Aeran have lived only by carefully cultivating Viator to support themselves.
Hinden is one such farm town, primarily concerned with collecting crystals they themselves help grow. The town's massive propellers fight the eternal wind currents and keep it squared over regions emitting vast quantities of gas that will expand the Viator rapidly, in yearly-harvested crops. Of course, luftshroom forests grow unsurprisingly thick from the large amounts of crystal, and the wood and other products from the forests help day-to-day life needed on the main platform of the town.
The people of Hinden are simple folk, who go generation to generation teaching their children to carefully consider their options, as their parents and grandparents did. A cultural intuition, sudden little bursts of insight, more than tradition, are what fuel the minds and spirits of all Aeran.
Now, however, the peaceful life of Hinden is being disturbed by an untold calamity, which has not occured in living memory, and only rarely in written history. The town's leaders have convened on the issue, and determined that a request for aid must be sent to the Capitol City. As luck would have it, a group of young adults, all coming of age, are awaiting their final trials. Normally, each student is given a specific trial based on their concentration to determine what profession they will ultimately take on, but this desperate issue requires a specialized group of individuals, and there is no group more suited to the task than these young people, unique in talents but used to working together. After this, their last day as students, they will be called into the town hall, expecting their seperate assignments. Little do they know that they will be working together for some time still.
That last paragraph is the beginning of the story. Assorted information about the world:
Everyone who signs up is a part of this "crop" of students, graduating into their particular job.
Typical Aerans are tall, and lanky, and have ruddy, coppery skin complexions, with dark eyes and hair. It is uncommon, but not unheard of, to have paler skin and hair, that comes from an archaic bloodline. Note that I only want one person, if any to sign up with this pale complexion.
Clothing is made from the skin of ahrwals (huge stealth-bomber shaped jellyfish that fly), the moss that grows on them, fibers from the forests of the luftshrooms, and leather made from the tanned and softened carapace of kriffid (domesticated bovine-like crabs), and is very frontier-style.
Cultural intuition is the theme of the Aerans, and they run on being easygoing, but with sudden bursts of insight. They care very intensely about family and people, and only use the machines around them to go about their lives.
Speaking of the machines: the structure of the town platform is that of a huge amount of gears and whirligigs and propellers underneath a fully terraced, park-like top, with various huge machines jutting out here and there between the foliage, and houses of the platform inhabitants.
The buildings are all family owned, and are multi-tiered longhouses with a minimum of three floors. The standard house has: a first floor is the place of business for the owner, the second floor a combination porch and bath, and the third floor the living quarters. Each floor is only one room, with most of the utensils along the walls about an vast, multipurpose middle area. Winding staircases on the outside of the houses are covered in wind-manipulating tools, and these staircases are the only ways up.
Larger families build additions to great complexes vertically (up or down, depending on how close to the edge they are), but it is not strange for smaller families to own the houses independently.
Hinden is built structured around the machinery that was originally used for its manual control, a smaller portion to the platform that has no terracing, and is just machinery. The original additions for homes were built upon huge luftshroom planks, and from there, the platform has expanded. From the original center, there is the town hall, and out from that, the mechanics' clan building, and then a wide space of terraced land for cropland (mostly fruit orchards and grazing territory for kriffids to produce their dew) and houses for the various farming families on the edge of the platform.
You guys' characters are from these families.
Your sign-up is a post explaining your character, in-character, in the world. Like, the beginning of their typical day.
In this introduction post, be sure to go into detail about your character's opinions, looks, clothing, likes, dislikes, their surroundings (how it relates to them as a person). All the things they are before the adventure. The point of this is to get the need to describe how awesome your character looks out of your system, so we might focus on the emotions, actions, and reactions of the character in subsequent posts as they change from their experiences in the story. This is called character development. I like it. c:
This intro post is set just before the beginning of the story, so it won't have a bearing on what your character is doing the day of the town meeting!
You have one character, their exact age doesn't matter, as for the most part, you'll all be 18-24.
PM me if you have questions surrounding the details of your sign-up, cultural inquiries, etc. Most of ya details won't be too off-world, I figure.
Stipulation: no super-geniuses constructing super technology, please. If you were that character, you'd be able to figure out the problem and there would BE NO STORY. The occasional nerd good at the basics of their craft above the norm is okay.
Keep your characters and skills diverse! Ensemble! Ensemble!
Also, BEFORE YOU SIGN UP, if you have some serious chutzpah, and pizazz, BEFORE YOU SIGN UP, PM me if you want to be the in-game character moderator, BEFORE SIGN-UP, because you have to have some specific qualities to your character. Less choice in who your character is, more power. Thems the trade-off.
_________________ Bleedcomics Staff Writer/Editor,  , and Keeper of the Jar Brain of Secret President. RIP Ku Ku Ku \(-^.^-)/ U Wuz A REAL N***A!!!!!!!"We're quite aware of this. BR is no happy rainbow face man. He is simply our neighborhood best fucking poster." ~ WarbearPuff Most Epic.
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