#that96abomination

The goddess Artemis, beloved of the wilds, favored two animals above all others; the deer whom she guarded and hunted, and the cats who embodied nobility and strength among many of the gods. Artemis declared that these creatures were as grand as the humans that worshipped her, and bestowed upon them intelligence and dexterity to make them mankind’s equals.

The deer, furious about the mistreatment of their kind, waged war against mankind with their newfound intellect. Their loss, however, resulted in their death throughout the world. Mankind knew how important deer were, both to Artemis and their own lives, and begged the gods to forgive their mistakes. The bloodline of the deer was reborn, but stripped of Artemis’ holy gift. Instead, she would honor them even more fervently.

The cats, however, were clever. The humans already saw them as useful hunters, and the two species learned to coexist with one another. Long ago, they even socialized and formed society together (until they lost their gift of voice, but that is another tale). Now the cats of the world form their society in partnership, awe, and fear of the humans who live beside them, silently developing the skills and knowledge their elders honed.

King/Queen/Monarch

Each city that forms the unified body of Chimera's Reach is ruled by a king/queen/monarch (the latter is used for olymp, better known as nonbinary, cats). Each city has a special crown for their ruler: Lion's Head has a taxidermized lion scalp, Goat's Head has a cap with curling horns, and Snake's Head has a spiked band with a snake wrapping around it. Upon gaining the throne, the ruler receives a divine audience from their patron god or goddess. This patron becomes an advisor for the ruler, frequently visiting when they are alone to guide the ruler's leadership in their image.

The ruler of the city is responsible for leading the city from their palace, where the city's Council meets. The Council is a body of cats who discuss important laws and issues and work toward a final decision under the ruler's approval and guidance. A ruler's spouse and legitimate children are guaranteed permanent spots on the Council, alongside permanent residence in the royal palace and other privileges. Sometimes a ruler's parents and siblings also get these rights, but this can vary. For example, Rockfleck's brother Merlinear is on the Snake's Head Council, but Orangemoon is not on the Goat's Head Council.

The three rulers and their heirs form the Reach Council, a body of six that dictates the shared customs, laws, and decisions of Chimera's Reach. Each ruler has an equal vote while their heirs are considered advisors.

Heir

The heir is the second-in-command of their city and the second-most senior voice on their city's Council. Despite the name of the position, an heir cannot be the child, spouse, parent, or sibling of the current ruler. This is a tradition from Artema, designed to encourage a wider range of voices and perspectives in the Council. Each heir also has a special accessory. The Lion's Head heir wears a lion's jawbone as a necklace. The Goat's Head heir has their own cap with smaller nubs for horns. Lastly, the Snake's Head heir has a snakeskin collar.

The heir helps the ruler run the daily affairs of the city and gets to live in a special room of the royal palace with their immediate family. The heir often manages the minutiae of leadership. They navigate issues, make sure tasks are handled, and act as a go-between for the ruler and their citizens.

Priest/Priestess

There is only ever one priest per city in Chimera's Reach. The spiritual matters of the city-state and the communication with the gods is considered too important a task to split among many. This means that the priest is highly protected. For harm to befall a priest means bringing danger to Chimera's Reach. It also makes apprenticeship unique. A priest can allow a kit to train as a priest once they've reached retirement age (10 years old). When the kit finishes training, the old priest must retire immediately, becoming a counselor.

Priests help the cats of their city worship the gods they want to worship in the proper ways. There are few gods considered taboo to worship, after all, and Chimera's Reach encourages worship of as many as feels practical to an individual. Priests interpret dreams, consult on the Council, and conduct most of the city's major events: ceremonies, sacrifices, rituals, festivals, and more. Many priests have special clairvoyant or prophetic powers: some get visions, some get prophecies, and some get visits from the gods themselves.

Healers

The physicians of Chimera's Reach, healers work from their clinics, which are built in the city walls and modeled after human Asclepieion, or temples to the god of medicine, Asclepius (called Vipercure by cats). Healers work and live within their clinics, with visits to those who don't need nest-space in the temple itself. Those with severe conditions who need a constant eye can stay in the clinic.

Healers often consult the city's priest due to the powerful spiritual connections of healing, but they have some spiritual training as well! One of the most common approaches to medicine involves incubation dreams, where the sick sleep within the clinic in order to learn the best treatment from Vipercure or his many daughters. Healers can interpret these dreams and determine the best medicines and surgeries to use.

While these dreams are important, healers are still very well trained on their own! They make medicine from plants and animal products, perform surgeries, and do many of the same medical procedures as their human peers.

Mediators

A well known role to those of you flocking here from classic Warrior Cats tales, mediators act as diplomats, negotiators, and trades-cats. A mediator's key job is to assist in relations between the three cities and to other settlements. They follow the will of the ruler and negotiate toward their goals. This often manifests as trade work. Mediators barter with one another using the city's resources and feline strengths, as cats detest money.

The other major factor to their work is managing disagreements and personal problems within the city itself. Cats should come to mediators to assist in complex arguments, and mediators should try to be called before guards, who will loop in aspects of law and punishment into what could be handled civilly.

Mediators can even assist cats in conflicts with themselves. They receive mild training alongside healers on psychoses, neuroses, and the ways the gods can inflict madness upon cats. They will help family members treat the mad at home, helping them right themselves in the eyes of the gods and come to grasp with their symptoms in ways us modern readers may understand better, such as an awareness of the body, connection to nature, and correction of faulty logic. This is the most stigmatized work of a mediator; some cats won’t go near a mediator following work with a mad patient (a catch-all phrase for mental illness in Chimera’s Reach) until they’ve been in a cleansing ritual.

Artists

A city is privileged when it can have artists. They keep Chimeric culture alive! Artists are dedicated to telling stories, playing music, and creating art in its multitude of forms. They are one of three production-oriented occupations alongside craftsmiths and hearthkeepers, and thus experience some training alongside them. An artist’s work, whether physical or performative, is highly valued and bartered for in trade, making them a major part of city diplomacy.

Artists will typically choose whether they specialize in physical or performative art. They’ll dip into both as needed, but are most valued for their beloved art forms. Performative artists work on storytelling, music, and various forms of direct entertainment for the city. They help with festival and party organization, keeping up morale. Physical artists, meanwhile, produce a wide range of artwork paw-in-paw with craftsmiths. Sculpture, murals, architecture, jewelry, all of that!

Craftsmiths

Craftsmiths are dedicated to the design and repair of tools, structures, and certain materials. They are often seen in forges and workshops, tinkering and smithing. Craftsmiths are trained to divide their work into three categories; artisan work, which partners with the artists; hearth work, partnering with hearthkeepers; and forge work, solely the domain of the craftsmiths. While the lines between categories can blur, especially with buildings and tools, knowing who you’re working with and the intention of the work is helpful.

Artisan work includes pottery, building design, jewelry, fashion, instrument maintenance, and more. Hearth work involves, among a few other things, construction, leather-making, and fabric production. Forge work, meanwhile, lets craftsmiths make tools such as surgical blades, pauldrons, pickaxes, and other items designed for feline use.

While craftsmithing is considered an important aspect of family culture, with strong ties to mollies and their children, craftsmiths work on the highest quality items in the greatest volume. Lion’s Head craftsmiths can make purple cloth, while Goat’s Head craftsmiths are the only ones in Chimera’s Reach who can make parchment rather than trade for it. The cities wouldn’t survive without craftsmiths.

Hearthkeepers

Hearthkeepers keep the city running. They are the last production occupation and focus on maintaining the city and its inhabitants. Their jobs focus on cooking, processing raw materials, maintaining hearths, building, and cleaning. They make dye from plants, strip leather off animals, and take everything they’re brought and turn it around into something usable. This focus on resources makes hearthkeepers the quartermasters of their cities. They keep track of the city’s shared possessions and those of individuals.

Hearthkeepers collectively decide what will be made for the city’s two meals, one at midday, the other at dusk. They take suggestions, yes, but they decide what everyone is eating. If you want something else, you need to make it yourself. This makes them the main cooks of Chimera’s Reach. They also go about and make sure hearths and other such fires stay lit. At the same time, they’ll clean streets and gardens and occasionally work on larger construction.

Seafarers

There is a great world beyond Chimera's Reach, beyond the descendants of the great city of Artema. Someone needs to visit those cities, to meet cats beyond Chimera's Reach and bring back treasures and new citizens. That is a seafarer's job.

Seafarers are trained to be self-sufficient away from the city. They hunt, fight, cook, repair tools, and learn important survival skills. They are to be ambassadors of Chimera's Reach to cats who may have never heard of the great city-state. Whether they head out across land or on a ship from the Chimeric Docks, seafarers leave for months upon months at a time, potentially never to return. When they do, their cities celebrate and collect the treasures they've brought home.

After returning home, a seafarer will typically spend a year recovering, retelling their adventures, and assisting around the city as needed. They are required to rest for at least a season, but some feel the call to adventure and decide to set off early. While seafarers are trained to leave on great quests and expeditions, they often bring other cats from Chimera's Reach with them.

Heralds

While only one herald (Aircatcher of Snake's Head) survived the war against Rizos, the herald position is important to city relations and the survival of Chimera's Reach as a whole. Heralds are the fastest cats in the city-state, responsible for delivering messages and announcements between cities. Unlike other cats, who must ask permission to enter a rival city, heralds can enter all the cities at any time, bringing guests with them. This makes heralds distinctly barred from any conflict that may arise within Chimera's Reach.

Heralds spend their days traveling between the cities with their announcements, documents, and fellow travelers, encouraging the trade and comradery that makes Chimera's Reach possible. A herald should not only be fast, but have a strong memory and good rhetoric ability.

Scribes

Scribes are considered the most intelligent cats in Chimera's Reach. They are philosophers, seeking to understand more about the world. They study the known sciences: mathematics, biology, ethics, rhetoric, aesthetics, astronomy, etc. They learn so that others can learn and thereby improve the technology and culture of Chimera's Reach. Scribes take their studies and their knowledge and try to find practical applications. They use math to better construct their world, biology to understand the nature of the food they eat, ethics to guide their laws, the list goes on. This may seem like a daunting task, but scribes record their information onto parchment and form scrolls, carefully stored and read. This allows them to specialize and reduce the stress of memorization.

The ability to read and write makes scribes the chief historians for Chimera's Reach. They record the happenings of the city for future generations to read and understand. There is always at least one scribe taking notes on important meetings and festivals. Their position as recordkeepers and historians take up the majority of their time, but when they can, they are able to utilize their knowledge to help invent many of the tools and techniques that make life in Chimera's Reach easier.

The last major role of the scribes is as quartermasters. They keep track of what is owned by the city and what is owned by individuals. This allows them to ration supplies and know just what the mediators can trade with.

Guards

Guards keep the peace within their city, monitoring for both external and internal threats alongside the soldiers. Guards do more than keep watch, however; they are responsible for implementing and upholding the laws decreed by the Council. They are highly knowledgeable in the law and investigating breaks in that law. Their daily duties are similar to those of soldiers until an issue involving city law is brought up.

Guards are trained in investigation, finding guilty parties through witness interviews, tracking, and sometimes divine assistance. Upon making an accusation, they arrest the suspect and guard them in the city jail. One guard will be an accuser, presenting the evidence of the crime. Another will defend the suspect at trial, arguing for innocence or lighter sentencing. These trials will be explored more at a later date, but they include a jury with the ruler acting as the judge.

Caretakers

Caretakers are responsible for managing the land claimed under their city’s jurisdiction. They monitor prey and predator populations, do a large share of the hunting, and manage gardens and crops. They are farmers as well as hunter-gatherers, which allows Chimera’s Reach to stay rooted in place and worry less about prey populations running dry. 

Caretakers manage the prey farms owned by each city. All three cities have mice farms as their major staple of easy meat, but across Chimera’s Reach, you can also find rabbit farms and chicken farms. These three animals are the easiest for cats to breed and raise. While herds of the great beasts of man, like cows, goats, and sheep, would be wonderful, cats are simply too small to manage them, and must rely on trade with humans in order to obtain those resources. With the recent war with Rizos, it will be some time before Chimera’s Reach is comfortable trading with mankind again.

Each city also grows its own crops and gardens, each tailored to what their land is most suited for. Greece as a whole can be tricky with agriculture, but caretakers manage rich orchards, fields of wheat and beans, and gardens of herbs, such as sage, mint, and the blessed opium poppy.

Rangers

There are no rangers left in Chimera’s Reach following the war, but the three cities have worked hard to retain knowledge of the rangers in their records, so future apprentices can restore the important profession.

Rangers are responsible for overseeing the wider lands of their city alongside the caretakers. Where caretakers focus their energy on tamed lands like the orchards and gardens, the rangers seek to maintain the natural order in the unharvested areas of their city. They monitor populations of wild prey, keep track of tree growth, note wildflowers and new herbs, and keep an eye out for intruders.

Rangers are also specially trained to hunt big game. This includes deer, elk, boars/pigs, large birds of prey, even some more dangerous predators that form a rare slice of Reach diet. Rangers work together, often with soldiers and caretakers, to track a given beast and take it down. These hunts are especially important in winter, as the rich resources from a single deer can save many lives. Rangers will sometimes prepare hunts against more tamed beasts like sheep and goats, but as these animals are usually part of a human's flock, they risk aggravating the most dangerous mortal predator they know in their hunt.

Nurses

The care of the young, the old, and the infirm can be as daunting a task as patrolling the land or tanning hides for leather. Yet Chimera’s Reach and the cats of Artema before them discovered that those who could not support themselves, who had to lean on the strength of their families, could still suffer as those families worked to support the rest of the city. Cats don’t force mollies to stay in the home like humans do; they may have their own gender expectations, but they never had such odd distinctions of purpose before Artemis’s gift, and find the whole thing rather absurd. As such, the human model of care, pressed upon the female of the home, could not work, and a solution had to be invented; the nurse.

Now, nurses are commonly mollies, largely due to their physical role of child-bearer and nurse (hence the terminology). Many mollies will often take up temporary nurse duties when they have kits so they can contribute to society while still watching over their kits. The position of a nurse is still gender neutral, however. 

Nurses look after kits in the city’s nursery while their parents work, teaching them the foundation of Reach culture and guiding them through development. When they reach apprenticeship, nurses assist in education and monitor the apprentices as a whole group, filling in the gaps their mentors couldn’t fill and helping them explore their passions. They tend to the counselors, making sure they have all they need in their old age, as their family connections pass on and their bodies fade. Lastly, nurses assist healers in caring for patients. Nurses will visit patients in their homes to check in on conditions and help them to the clinic as needed.

Soldiers

In the traditional universe of Clangen stories and the Warrior Cats fandom, these would be your typical warriors. However, as this universe is separated from both IPs in as many ways as possible, the soldiers of Chimera’s Reach are instead a well-organized force dedicated to the protection of their city and combat against all who threaten its interests. While all citizens of Chimera’s Reach are expected to defend themselves, with different positions given different levels of training, only soldiers receive the most advanced combat training, alongside unique tactical training that prepares them for all-out war.

A soldier’s daily responsibilities involve structured patrols along the borders of their land, using traditional scent markers and physical markers more akin to their developed technology, such as the occasional stone wall or travel marker. Other times, a soldier may be assigned walking patrols of the city alongside guards, just to keep the peace. They are trained to run to the defense of their fellow citizens at any moment, whether fighting a cat, a fox, a boar, a human, or some mythical beast. Soldiers form war patrols to deal with threats, stalking out with strategies and heightened combat techniques to defend and conquer. The city Council decides when war patrols are needed.

To both train themselves and entertain the city, soldiers perform in their city’s stadium as the gladiators, fighting off whatever foes will amuse their friends. Sometimes they are smaller predators the cats can capture, like rats or weasels. Other times, they fight one another in both wrestling matches and actual combat, drawing blood. Soldier apprentices rarely graduate without winning at least one gladiator match.

Apprentices

A litter of kits picks up an apprenticeship when they are half a year old. By this time, their minds and bodies are grown enough to handle the stress of training (although kits will often get lessons on skills they can perform in the city itself, encouraging their interests). They choose a field of interest and participate in an important religious ceremony to mark their acceptance into the three oikoi (“houses”/families) inherent to Greek feline culture. These are, in order of importance; the blood oikos, marking family members whom an individual draws resources, strength, and support from; the trade oikos, the other members of an occupation who share sleeping quarters and responsibilities; and the oikos of the city, the shared sense of community and power belonging to all citizens.

An apprentice is neither kit nor adult, but something transitional, dedicated to learning and growth. They move into the quarters of their occupation and take up training under their entire trade oikos. The senior member of the occupation acts as the key guiding figure and guardian for the apprentices of said occupation, but all members assist in the apprentice’s education as part of their familial culture.

Counselors

A citizen is allowed to retire from their responsibilities at the age of ten years. At this point, they become a counselor and live among their fellow seniors, although many will sleep alongside their kin in whatever quarters they wish. Counselors are to be respected and cared for, honored for the work they put in to their city.

All counselors are given a position on their city’s Council. They make up the bulk of it, but still treat the ruler and heir as their leaders. Counselors use their vast knowledge to advise on laws, orders, and diplomacy. These are not the only cats who make up the Council, however.