Setting: early 20th century magic world. The country in question, Efeya, has partially industrialized using machines powered by both mechanics and the arcane. The arcane came from quartz, and guided through sigils and Arcan lines. In this plane, it seems that quartz stores a force often called Arcan.
Arcan, like quartz, is united with six sides/faces: heat, force, growth, dream, transmutation, and tempering. Arcan can only be used in two ways. The first is the destruction of a quartz crystal, which will cause a burst of Arcan energy of at least one of the sides such as dream causing hallucinations, force a kinetic burst, heat the ignition of flammable objects, etc. The second is inscription which through inscribing sigils and magic lines can in a sense program the release of one or more faces of Arcan energy. Arcan lines guide the Arcan, while sigils give it directions. Arcan lines are typically carved into the quartz and the surrounding material, such as stone or iron, before being filled by copper, silver, and/or gold wire because they do not react with the faces unlike iron which rusts into dust, thread which grows, etcetera. Of course one doesn’t need to fill the carved lines with wire, but then the Arcan is prone to spilling. Typically the larger and the clearer the quartz the more faceless Arcan it holds. If it is colored such as amethyst the Arcan will already have a face, in this case dream.
Heat: Red/pink. Self explanatory, but can be used to heat and cool things. Inverse = Order, where things affected will, by the face, go to order from chaos.
Force: White. Self explanatory, but can be used to impart kinetic energy to things. Inverse = Storage, will store kinetic, electric, heat, and other forms of energy and convert it into Arcan
Growth: Green. Causes things to grow and/or shrink. Inverse = Decay, causes things to decay, rust, rot, etc.
Dream: Purple. The most mysterious side, causes hallucinations, illusions, nightmares, emotional manipulation etc. Inverse = Reality, turns mind into matter.
Transmutation: Yellow. Can change one thing into another both in substance and/or in essence, typically the least efficient use of Arcan. Inverse = Revert, will return the subject to a previous state.
Tempering: Blue. Increases/decreases the toughness, density, and/or the purity of something. Inverse = combination, allows the subject to combine with other subjects.
Efeya is a burgeoning capitalist country that is made up of five broad classes, the nobility, the clergy/scholarly class, the capitalist class, the working class, and the peasantry. The nobility is marked by the blessings of divine entities which also bestow the clergy with power. Said divine entities can not directly interact with the plane, so use the clergy as their representatives. The clergy have some access to those entities' powers then. Mainly through blessings and curses and knowledge. The scholarly part of the class has also found out how to manipulate the soul to perform blessings and curses. Blessings cause beneficial effects to its target, while curses the opposite. They both require either direct or sympathetic contact with the target(s), and cause damage to the soul and body of the caster. The stronger the curse/blessing the more damage. If the curse/blessing is narrowed through conditions it can lessen the amount of damage. Typically the clergy tend to have less damage to the body, at the loss of ego, while the scholarly tend to do the opposite. The capitalist class owns the land and factories which hold Arcan technology and gain their power through using that ownership to exploit their workers for a profit. They currently want to eliminate the nobility and replace themselves as the head of the state, while diminishing worker power. The workers gain their living through giving their work to the capitalist class in return for a wage. When workers unite together they can form a union which allows for collective bargaining. Currently, although some people are, the great majority lack class consciousness. The peasantry is made largely of three groups, farmers who own and make their living from farmland, farmers who must sell their produce to their landlords(serfs), and farmers who rent the land they farm. For the latter two, they desire to eliminate the landlords control over the land they work, while the first wishes to raise into the capitalist class.
The Hydra: The spearheaded of the invasion. Tasked with distracting the plane's residents from seeing the tear to their world, and stabilizing the connection. They are planted, like a seed. The ‘seed’ is a wormlike entity that can burrow through the planar shell. Once it goes through, it will find a populated position and plant itself. It then disrupts the emotions of the surroundings. The trunk grows after the seed drinks the blood of sacrifice. The trunk will grow a mouth and start chanting. The chanting creates an illusion. Hiding its form by manipulating memory, and gaining better control over manipulation of emotions. It lures intelligent beings to its trunk and manipulates them to feed the mouth. After the mouth is fed, a new mouth is grown, but the chanting stops when the single mouth eats. Thus it can be seen. With two mouths this weakness disappears. It will continue this process until it has three mouths. One for chanting, one for feeding, and the final for spawning. It will bite and inject a parasite that will turn its host into a Terror. The Terrors will sacrifice to their progenitor and the trunk will grow ‘branches’ around the mouths. As the branches grow, so too does the hole in the planar shell. The trunk will shrink as it grows roots that will bind a portal to the hole in the shell. The branches will grow mouths that can grow into sub branches, and so on. But, as it grows its ability to manipulate memories and emotions weakens to the point that earplugs are enough to stop its effects. Each mouth can either eat, chant, or spawn. As it grows, the size of its influence grows too. The chants have a secondary use, teaching the Terrors how to contact the progenitors.
The Terrors: The Terrors are the primary force of the invasion's vanguard. They are created when the Hydra’s parasites infect an intelligent being. The first change will be that the skin of the victim will turn purple and grey. This will take a week. The second step would be that the host will lose their senses of sight, smell, hearing, and touch, at the same time the host body will grow sharp talons. This will take about 2 weeks. Gradually the parasites will eat and replace the host's brain with themselves. They will fuse together in the brain cavity, and create their own intelligence. This intelligence can connect to the Hydra, to learn its purpose and how to start the ritual to contact the progenitors. It is also at this point that it can be said that a Terror has been born. This can take one to five days. The Terrors body will start replacing all orifices with mouths. The mouths of a young Terror can taste the air to detect its surroundings, and chant to disguise itself as an unremarkable member of the previous host's species. The young Terrors are fairly weak. They will search for victims to kill and then carve out and eat their victims nervous system. They can taste thoughts, so they tend to target more intelligent creatures. The young Terrors will grow the more they eat. As they grow more mouths grow upon their bodies, their sense of taste becomes more and more accurate, and they can change their chant to make all who hear it become paralyzed by fear. Eventually the Terror will become a mature Terror, where they will be able to sense and communicate with the world around them with their minds. At this point they can invade the mind of paralyzed victims, and modify their chants to update their illusions to be the guise of their victims. At this point, they feel drawn to the Hydra. The Terrors will create a base there and prepare for the ritual to contact their progenitors. At the same time, the Terrors will start investigating the plane they are in, to make an invasion of it easier. If the Hydra is killed, the Terrors will disperse to try to summon another one. They will also gain the ability to spawn parasites themselves.
Big actors:
The Efeya Parliament: The head of the government that is made solely of nobility whose bloodlines have been blessed by the gods. They recently deposed the royalty, and prevented the rise of the capitalist class with the help of the church of Severn.
The Church of Severn: Made of the followers of the god Severn, who wishes to enter the plane by eliminating the other churches and gaining egoless followers. Currently the biggest church in Efeya due to their help in deposing the royalty.
The Group for Landowner Democracy: A group of capitalists, landlords, and big peasants who wish to gain state power. They believe that they can gain power through protest at the moment. Although calls for revolution are growing.
The Factory Workers Unions: A bunch of local unorganized unions which are trying to improve local working conditions.
The Cult of Knowledge: A group of scholars who bless and curse each other with knowledge, in the hope of seeing divine truth. Their founder is the person who created modern sigils. They are currently being pursued by parliament for treason.
History of Efeya:
Efeya was a small kingdom for about 300 years known for their production of quartzite weapons. 150 years before the start of the story Efeya started expanding and became known as the Empire of Efeya. 70 years before the start of the story, the burgeoning capitalist class managed to eradicate the monarchy with the help of the scholarly class, and gunpowder weapons. A bloody civil war that lasted 15 years ensued before the cult of knowledge, from the neighboring empire of Nadafa, started publishing their findings on sigils and magic lines. The nobility had a stockpile of quartzite weapons that were quickly modified with the new methods. At about the same time more peaceful regions of Efeya started to industrialize. As the burgeoning proletarian class started to stretch, the capitalist class and the nobility came to an unsteady peace. Efeya is now currently run by a parliament solely made of the nobility. 20 years before the start of the story, people figured out how to artificially grow quartz. Seeing the potential, the capitalist class of Efeya quickly set up mining and refining operations in the northern desert. This created towns that quickly began to urbanize as the artificial quartz industry grew. As this industry grew, so too did other industries, such as glass production, steel refining, inscription factories, and machine factories. The biggest is Tseyan, which is right in the center of various quartz sand and iron mining towns, as well as being on the Ahil river.
Tseyan is where the various raw materials are processed. Tseyan has a population of 1.8 million people, 86% are working class, 5% are clergy class, 5% are capitalist class, 3% are scholarly class, and 1% are nobility. The conditions for the working class are poor in Tseyan. The average apartment has 5 occupants, the building is often made of wood, and plumbing is rare. The average worker works for 11 hours a day, and sleeps in work barracks which can hold 200 people each, with a public latrine outside. The average worker lives in a work barrack. With 55% of the workers in Tseyan living in one, 35% rent a room, with the rest being various other types of housing or unhousing. Oftentimes workers must go days with little to no food. The drinking water is of an extremely low quality, streets are often filled with excrement, and diseases are common. There are 7 hospitals, 40 pharmacies, and 27 clinics in Tseyan, and the costs of treatment are often more than most of the workers can afford. The staple foods consist of wheat, barley, and potatoes. The biggest industry is Quartz growing, followed by Steel production, inscription, and glass making. There are 2 train stations in Tseyan. Tseyan is governed by a mayor elected by important citizens of Tseyan, who is then subordinate to the local marquee. Roads in the city are typically made from brick, although dirt roads are not unseen. Roads are often lit by quartz lamps in richer areas, and vegetable oil in poor areas of Tseyan. About 10% of residential buildings have quartz lights, 7% have indoor plumbing, and 5% have heating/boilers. There is one academy of scholars, engineers, and scientific researchers.The police force has 12,000 people, and is often armed. Gun ownership is somewhat low, although not completely uncommon. Unionization efforts are often violently crushed by a combination of the police, and outside mercenaries. Arcan pollution is not well understood, but, at the same time, a growing issue.
The quartz sands has always been a dangerous place, strange creatures, weird storms, random explosions, cancer orbs growing on flesh like cacti, etc. It has always been the job of those north of the Ahil river to prevent the creatures of the sands from invading the rest of Efeya. The main way of doing so was the use of quartzite weapons, long after the Bronze and Iron Age, quartzite weapons have played the role of a cheap strategic source of weaponry. quartz studded weapons were more effective but also more expensive. It was the weaponry of nobility. Quartzite weapons could unleash a controlled shock of its color when impacted, or when shattered or chipped a more explosive blast. It was also relatively safe to turn into weapons. Quartzite arrowheads were the most common, followed by daggers and clubs.
Arcan pollution is often the worst near industrial areas and factories. Arcan pollution is typically characterized by the inverse face of what is being used. I.E. Order, Storage, Decay, Reality, etc. It manifests as strange incidents and many strange things have been happening around Tseyan as of late.
Plot:
Dann Davon is an inscriptor, his father was a quartzite knapper before industrialization. His fathers shop went bankrupt when Dann was 12, and since then he has worked in the quartzite industry. First as a chimney cleaner, (14) then as a miner, and then, after an accident left him with three fingers on his left hand, (17) as an apprentice and later (22) master inscriptor. When Dann was 23, people started randomly disappearing, at about the same time inscription machines had been introduced. The machine allowed for less skilled workers to create simple inscriptions, thus tightening Dann’s and other inscriptor’s income. A local noble's son goes missing and the city grows tense as no one knows who is next. Dann is forced, due to poor income, to join an inscription factory. Here he works as a vice planner, where he is tasked with figuring out how the inscription machines will be organized to create the most amount of heating crystals possible. Once he comes up with a plan, the head planner decides to remove the laying of the copper wire from the plan, making the crystals more likely to explode. The machine workers unite when Dann tells them what has happened, and they formed a union to demand better working conditions. The factory workers won after a week of striking when news of a rival factory catching fire because they ignored adding wire. The union however didn’t dissolve, and the workers elected Dann as the leader. At the same time an unsteady hum echoed throughout the city. People of the city started becoming paranoid as their memories started to become spotty. More and more people start to go missing as the hum grows louder. Factory bosses start to unite as they start increasing workloads, they send the workloads on carriages whose drivers never return. The factory workers throughout the city come together, and form a grand workers syndicate. They start investigating the disappearances and connect it to the insistent hum that permeates the city. A few of them decide to cover their ears for a moment, and memories come flooding back. The memories gradually start to fade as they lower their hands, but they don’t forget that covering their ears is important. And so earmuffs and plugs are fashioned as workers gain control over their workplaces. Before following the carts to the city center where the hydra lied. Six snakes whose tails met like a tree trunk sticking out of the ground, each scale was fashioned from a human face, each mouth chanting. The workers piled up the warming crystals before crushing enough of them with tossed metal weights. A chain reaction burst out, killing the hydra breaking the illusion. The giant closing hole in the sky. The hydra was the vanguard of the invasion. The hole closed, but forces are trying to reopen it.
The workers start their war against its children and the many forces of reaction in Efeya.
Characters:
Dann Davon: Starts the story at 12 years old. Is the son of Aut Davon. He likes to play with the neighborhood kids, and dislikes being in one place for a significant period of time. When he was 5 his mother passed, his father has gradually grown more and more distant as his business starts to fail. He has gone through 4 years of schooling and is literate and can do simple math.
Aut Davon: Starts story at 38 years old. He loves to create things, and dislikes being disturbed. The job of quartzite knapping has been passed down father to son in the Davon family for 5 generations. He is desperate as quartzite weapons are becoming outdated with ‘modern’ firearms and gunpowder weapons, and the rapid industrialization of the quartz growing industry.
Stoss Setz: A 16 year old who signed up for mining the sand. He is quiet, and likes to hum. Is illiterate and sending money to his 3 younger siblings.
Jan Mit: A 13 year old who signed up for mining sand. He is average, likes to play, but is serious when the time calls for it. His parents sent him here.
Fwer Akn: A 15 year old who signed up for mining sand.
Kidori: Is 20 years old and is the supervisor/instructor for the 5 boys. He is stern, but caring. His father was head supervisor 3 years ago before he retired.
Chapter 1
Scene 1:
Characters: Dann Davon
Setting: Monologue
Goal: Dann describes his childhood and important moments before setting up scene 2.
Scene 2:
Characters: Dann Davon, Aut Davon.
Setting: Aut Davon’s quartzite workshop
Goal: Aut Davon takes Dann by the shoulder and tells him that they can’t afford the school anymore.
Scene 3:
Characters: Dann Davon
Setting: Monologue
Goal: Dann describes how his father’s business started to fail and how he had to start working so they could afford their future.
Scene 4:
Characters: Dann Davon, His Aunts and Uncles, a priest of Severn, and a handful of his dad’s friends.
Setting: Funeral at home
Goal: Bring the reader close to the present.
Scene 5:
Characters: Dann Davon
Setting: At his home.
Goal: Dann receives a letter saying that his house is being repossessed due to missed payments and the death of the owner.
Scene 6:
Characters: Dann Davon
Setting: Recruitment office
Goal: Have Dann describe the sand mines, and have signs up.
Chapter 2
Scene 7:
Characters: Dann Davon, Stoss Setz, Jan Mit, Fwer Akn, and Kidori
Setting: Train Carriage
Goal: Introduce the vibes of the newer characters
