On a world who’s surface is 90% water and no continents, island clusters dot the blue of the oceans. On these islands live people, human and other, who must learn to share the limited space or die. And they all need to share the waters with the cephalopod-folk who command the blue realm.

(please ignore the terrible quality of this image...)

Consequences of the geography

What to say about Asum? Well, most of the ‘action’ in the story will be taking place on that cluster of islands in the lower right corner. That’s Aidorai (eye-door-eye), currently the most influential ‘nation’ on Asum. But, I’m going too fast, lets look a bit wider for now...

As we can see, not a lot of land to be had on Asum. This has direct consequences on the wildlife of the planet, most of which is either migratory or well-adapted to its home islands. Both flight and swimming are the most common travel forms, with only humans (and some species of arachnids) building ships for transportation. But by far the lifeform that has taken the most to travel and water is fungi. Some of the smaller islands are actually colonies of lots of kinds of fungus and slime molds working in concert to keep themselves together and attached to some island or rocks. Once they become too large, they break away from the islands and simply drift out to sea, releasing spores into the winds to breed as far as possible. Should they encounter land again, they might get a chance to grab on to new territory. This is undesirable to most islanders as they might disrupt the ecosystems of their islands, so most are diverted away from them. But not before they first explore these ‘floaters’ for potentially useful strains of fungus that could be repurposed in a controlled manner. Materials made by fungi is actually the Asumian equivalent to plastic, mouldable and in many cases strong and capable of floating. This makes it an ideal building material for ships and permanent buildings (few as they are). Imagine entire ships and buildings grown in one piece!

The other immediate consequence to the lack of land is that the weather can become monstrous in its power, with storms being true disasters no matter where they go or how small they start out as. Islands with tall mountains or volcanos are therefore prized as much-needed higher ground to escape the storms and tsunamis that hit the coasts, and hit them hard. During a storm, and by mutual agreement by all peoples, any and all ships are welcomed and their crews evacuated towards the mountains. Magic helps a great deal in protecting and transporting the ships themselves to somewhere relatively safe, but the people always get priority. This has essentially become a kind of universally recognized naval law, one where hospitality is a must, or have other people see you as untrustworthy and hurt your trading options (not to mention being denied the same courtesy when you need it...)

Also rare and precious on Asum is fresh water, and it can be viciously fought over by everybody except the Havisiai (have-ih-see-eye)more on these later). Fresh water is actually the most common source of conflict on Asum between human peoples, with everybody sending out ships to retrieve pieces of icebergs that float of towards the equator from the poles. Wars have been fought to settle claims over particularly large chunks and who gets to have them, and various kinds of magics have been invented to preserve them as intact as possible until they can be dragged to an island and broken up for distribution. Competitions over these being as fierce as they are, it has also motivated the creation of a great variety of ship shapes and sizes, as well as strategies to lay claim and gather the icebergs. Some choose lots of small and fast ships while others a few large and intimidating ones. They are as myriad as the people who make them. This may very well be considered Asum’s most popular ‘sport’, the testing of ships against each other...

The Peoples

I mentioned earlier the existence of many peoples, including non-human ones. Asum is an amazing world that has not one or two but four separate sapient species.

-Humans, no different from us save perhaps for much bigger lungs and the chests to go with them (for swimming and diving, holding the breath for longer), better night vision and the occasional partially webbed digits.

-The Havisiai: sapient cephalopods, with six tentacles, 3 genders and a visual-color language that is a pleasure to see even with no understanding. They are also very touchy-feely and have a tendency to taste people to get to know them, as well as having no sense of personal space or knowing when not to talk about any given person’s bodily processes (which they find fascinating and revealing about people). They are more solitary than humans but social enough to cooperate in hunting and building underwater shelters from predators. Their tool-use is rudimentary, but their mastery over water with magic makes them both formidable allies or enemies at sea and makes tool use rather superfluous. They call themselves ‘the Unseen Seers’ (a reference to their camouflage abilities), but are very flattered but the name the people of Aidorai have given them : ‘Havisiai’ means ‘Honored Beautiful People’ in Aidor.

-The Blue Sailors: These are sapient pterosaurs, nomadic/migratory and very chatty. As their name suggests, they are very blue, mostly stemming from their diet on a particular kind of clam that produces a blue pigment. Slightly larger than humans and Havisiai, they are in near-constant travel save for their breeding seasons which they spend on the same island cluster every year (on the map above, on the right above Aidorai, the smaller cluster). Although hey prefer cliffs, they can walk on flat ground perfectly fine on four limbs, and they manipulate objects with their feet and mouth while balancing on their wing-arms. They also have little us for tools but very much appreciate the ones humans give them, especially for grooming as it compliments their own magic-use well. They are very social and have connections between most of their families across the globe. Coordinating between them to avoid overcrowding small islands is a necessity, particularly when human populations are added to the equation. Their willingness to communicate means they can also be asked to send messages between humans, and ‘courier’ is their favorite outsourced job to humans. Their travels sometimes puts them in conflict with the final sapients of Asum....

-The ‘Dragons’ : These are not McCaffrey’ dragons. They do not breathe fire, though they do know how to start them. Nope, these are a kind of giant sharovipteryx, who speak in a combination of sign and whistle-and-clicks language and fly on four wings (their legs are their biggest wings). Communication with them on cordial terms is very recent for humans as they initially only paid attention to the sounds, but since then has improved greatly. They are the largest of the sapients and there aren’t that many of them. They occasionally clash with the Blue Sailors over space on the same island clusters, but since their breeding season is not the same as theirs, these are relatively minor. Unlike the Blue Sailors, who are blue because of their diet, the dragons have a limited chameleon-like ability to control their coloration with pigments in  their scales/skin. Some albinistic individuals lack this ability however, which makes them very visible during hunting and travel, and makes them vulnerable to solar radiation (sunburns and cancers because of it, ow!). The best way to get a dragon to like you is to offer one of the pink individuals some body-paint to cover themselves up with. They will love you all the more if you give it to them in a way where they can apply it to themselves without help. The most common is a water skin filled with paint and tipped at the opening with a sponge for easy smudging. Being that there aren't that many dragons, if you help one, others will hear about it and probably think well of you. No one is sure how capable they are with magic, but most stories about them depict them as very proficient. Only time will tell... 

Its gotten late now, so I’m gonna stop here and continue tomorrow with my favorite subject in the context of Asum : magic! and how it works! bwahahaha!