#torn quest

since @chainsaw-headache had requested more Jennifer artwork and I also felt like doing some more of my own world and lore building there, I promptly decided to combine just that!

Imagine that she got into the Delorean and somehow ended up like circa at least 1500 years into the future or an alternative timeline of some sorts.

Have here all of them on a white background here (in reverse chronological order of me making them):

Have some transparent images of Jennifer in various outfits along with some explanations here under the cut!

Linn: Damn, I perhaps should really tell my parents about this whole Rever and Torn Quest ordeal. Good thing that I can still use magic to prove it to them.

Linn's parents: (looking awful and exhausted/tired from having worried and grieved about their comatose daughter for circa 3 months)

Linn: ...

Within the waters of the Water union, not too far away from Sirap, there lies an island. Not a small one that could just be governed by a handful of people. No, it's large enough that in the past almost 100 million people used to live there. However a good part of its coastlines has been lost due to the rising sea levels the past one and half millenia, and the swamp areas that have been present before have ever more expanded and grown since.

During the downfall, that Island had been renamed to Myrrey in Rever and I want to talk about two places on it: Nod Nol and Odibor.

Nod Nol is a coast city built up on the sunken ruins of an ancient sapiens city. An with built up on said ruins, it's closer to having overgrown those with a magical cousin of the Mangrove called the Ice Root. And where these grow ice form around their barks at the water surface and spreads from there. The trees have once been created and imported specifically to counteract the increased coastline erosion of Myrrey, which came to be thanks to the increased global sea levels.

Below the surface, among those ice roots, live the citizens of Nod Nol, repurposing the ruins they live among now to their likings and needs. The bridges that once helped sapiens across the very water they've sunken below, have been taken apart and stripped bare for their raw materials. A once infamous tower once erected to show the time in the olden days, has been toppled and fallen over during the sapiens' downfall. Only a single one of the once four giant watch faces at the top of the tower remain intact and above water and this one only does so, because it serves as the solid ground for an above water market place for air only breathers.

I may not have talked about some of the other characters there before, but trust me, they are there and it is in a school setting in our world and they are also plot relevant (later on).

Just know for context that Nazar is basically a new classmate in the first book that ends up becoming Linn's friend and that Kyle here is a longtime internet friend of Linn's from before the events of Torn Quest, whose first meeting irl through a transatlantic exchange program turned... awkward for a few reasons and his jealousy of Nazar is one of them.

Also: Thorn Heart is basically an in universe fantasy franchise/fandom.

Anyways enjoy:

USA EXCHANGE SCHOOL WHOSE NAME I STILL HAVE TO PICK/FIGURE OUT

School hallway, it's Valentines day, so everything is decorated with hearts, roses and pink stuff, couples are kissing left and right. LINN, wearing her Thorn Heart T-shirt, kind of hates how extreme and in your face that all is. NAZAR is tagging along, giving it all a curious side eye, while they talk about the upcoming planned theater play they're a part of.

Linn: Look, it's not like I minded doing Romeo and Juliet back home. It's just... Werther? Really?

Nazar: I guess our co-actors have a thing for tragedies.

Linn: The magic flute was right there!

KYLE approaches them in the hallway with a bouquet of roses with a plastic sword among them. LINN spots him.

Linn: Oh Scheete. Nazar: What? (spots Kyle) Oh, porra. Linn: You don't think he is going to...? Nazar: He is. Linn: Kurwa!

KYLE is almost there. LINN starts panicking at the prospect of getting an unwanted public love confession from KYLE in the hallway.

Linn: Damn it, what do I do now? Nazar: Hang on, just let me...

NAZAR walks towards KYLE and points at the roses before pointing at himself.

To keep the basics short: the Lunar is the name the moon has in Rever. People are also trying to colonize it and there is also a centuries old long invested effort into terraforming it (Like with magic you have cities in there around which it is somewhat breathable and life sustaining, but outside of these magic bubbles you basically still need to walk around in space suits.)

Why are there colonies on the Lunar in the first place? Not to bring mankind forward, I can tell you, even if there are tons of similar official slogans to be found on the moon. No, it is mainly to extract ressources like helium3, silica, alumina and some more that are essentially very useful (raw or extracted or broken down) for building and powering magical tools and gadgets, etc.

And the people doing the work... most of them ain't there by choice. Like, there is a high likelihood of them being there, because they got "recruited" by a Lunar Recruiter. That effectively means getting abducted by them and them messing around with your mind and memories with light magic, so you will be very unlikely to break free and run away. Whom they pick as a target usually depends on whether or not they can get away with it. Like sapiens outside of the opal empire for example or the poor and powerless and generally people that don't have the means to really fight back. Sometimes they also go for riskier more specific people if offered a high enough sum of money or similar, but even then it has to be a reasonable enough risk at most.

Hell, in many in Rever children get taught that if someone asks if they want to go to the moon with them, that they should run the fuck away and find a trusted adult asap.

Why is that possible in the first place there? Well, the first colonies on the lunar were prison colonies and forced labour camps, established by the back then still ruling sapiens (and let's say Onorius Tiena or people like him had a hand in that), and turns out there is more than enough oxygen on the Lunar, it's just trapped within the minerals and you'd need to carry around enough nitrogen tanks with you to keep up the pressure and in short, inmates that escape can at the very least build for themselves a hideout in an empty well hidden lava tube.

And later on, when actual settlements and cities started to form, it became harder and harder for authorities on Rever to really control what's going on on the Lunar or even attempt to enforce any kind of law on it, without making a financial loss. Add to that, that rich and powerful people tend to want even more riches and more power (else they wouldn't be as rich and powerful as they are), so they will of course have a really really strong interest in having a few places where labor laws cannot exactly be enforced, and on top of that the labor being from people whom most at large wouldn't give a shit about.

Yes that means that there is as a result a hidden criminal network and economy going on between Rever and the Lunar, one that is financially strongly supported by a lot of the rich and powerful. And to detract the majority of other people away from that, the rich and powerful make a huge usage of plausible deniability. Like for example blaming faceless for being the main drivers of the Lunar recruiters, since "they're already used to hiding their true face all the time" or "it's just sapiens on sapiens violence, you know how petty those sapiens especially from the opal empire can be, of course they would make such a ploy happen :)" and so on. Hell, they can even keep a cut off opal limb from a victim of the opal virus around with them and even show it around, they just need to claim that an extremely skilled master artesian made it for them.

Or also: Paris but I spelled it backwards. And as I've mentioned, it's underwater. Partially due to climate change having caused the global sea level to rise and because at some during or directly after the downfall of the sapiens, a Meridian general or politician, whose name I have yet to come up with, decided to put the entire city under a dome fully filled with sea water. Who it was is as of now not as important, compared to the fact that it was done so in an attempt to draw or force the remaining Sapiens in the city out of it. Alongside turning the Eiffel tower into a wreckage to lower morale, that is by the time of Torn Quest serving as the foundation for the infamous reef and coral gardens of Sirap there.

Of course that flooding didn't work out. Turns out the real life Paris has a large network of tunnels and catacombs as big as the city itself underneath. With people living there as well and all sorts of stuff going down there.

Disclaimer, I've never been there myself since I've never been in Paris in the first place, but this is too cool of a fact about it to ignore to not make this a place for a Sapiens Colony in Rever. But I do have some friends who have been (at least in the public accessible parts of it).

Anyways, there is a colony, the sapiens hide out in there, both local and those who were on Torn Quests, they end up becoming a real pain in the ass for the government that had overtaken the city and renamed it Sirap. A Meridian Mayor at one point once attempted to get rid of said underground colony by basically banning oxygen tanks of it and cutting off the oxygen supply underground.

And the sapiens in turn ended up putting together advanced air recyclers and water breathing aides (imagine a magical necklace that basically turns the water you inhale into safely breathable air while also taking care of all the compression and decompression forces that would otherwise be putting a toll on your body under all that water weight). They got so ridiculously good at it, that non meridian non sapiens started to prefer buying those aides over the ones made by official manufacturers in the water union.

In short, a real size able portion of the tourism money made in Sirap after the downfall of the sapiens ends up going to the sapiens colony below it, instead of Sirap itself. Money, which the sapiens there in turn can use to get in food and water supplies, materials to make even more breathing aides and air recyclers and also use to fund their own protests against further attempts to eradicate the Sapiens under Sirap and elsewhere in Rever.

But of course it ain't only the sapiens colony that is hiding out underneath Sirap. There are also undead walking around and hiding among the ancient human remains there. And the occasional Lunar recruiters and other human traffickers can also be found there in these catacombs. And unlike the sapiens, the undead at least don't need air to breathe or survive really, so... there kind of is a constant small war additionally going on between the Sirap sapiens colony and the local undead people there.

Or also: the two (main and most common) ways of becoming immortal in Rever.

Somewhat.

Thing is, it is more accurate to frame one as "not being able to die" (Fools) and the other as "being banned from entering the afterlife" (Undead).

And that is because both becoming a Fool and becoming Undead are rooted in soul magic. And as mentioned: an undead soul is one that has been banned from the dead souls in the afterlife for especially heinous deeds and crimes they've done in the living world (for example, they were a nazi or a fascist or were willing to do the same kind of fucked up shit as nazis and fascists do), since that reflects a willingness to continue just that in the afterlife as well. In short it is not in control of the undead one, their bodies start to decompose the moment they do die on a technical level, but their souls stay inside, having to feel themselves rot away at every moment every second for eternity. All while they still can move around in their ever more breaking bodies that fall apart bit by bit, more and more, until the sun explodes and then some more. Of course many undead try to undo this or slow it down by the usage of dark magic (mind you, here it is the biology magic and as a result the only one capable of doing any healing), but sooner or later they too do become unable to continue with that.

A Fool's soul however is... well a soul to which something happened that split it apart. Either through a very intentional (and risky) usage of soul magic (you might easily end up in the afterlife in shambles instead), or indirectly as a byproduct of intense hate and loathing. Either from an external source (others hate and loathe you enough) or an internal one (you yourself feel self hate and self loathing strong enough). The splintered soul as a result is unable to pass on into the afterlife, unless it manages to piece itself together and heal again.

You're getting a fool for this type of immortality because no one would intentionally seek it out. While yes, it's true that you won't age beyond a certain point with that one (because something something, DNA and chromosome ends cannot be shortened during cell division or something), you can also still feel pain and get hurt and put under torture, loose limbs, gain scars, get paralyzed, etc. all that fun terrible stuff that still limits you within your own body. And if you became a fool by being hated by others enough, you're almost guaranteed to be under constant risk of any of that stuff. In short: you're not going to have a fun time here either.

In the first book, Ona Tiena is that type of fool. And so is also Anosrep.

Neither seeked it out intentionally. Ona in fact actively seeks death, but has so far been unable to ever find it. Anosrep in the meantime had seen and witnessed some fucked up shit from before the downfall of the Sapiens that he feels responsible for. So much that he took on an oath (that he cannot break) that he would make sure that all of that would be either stopped or undone before he would allow himself to heal enough to be able to die again.

And it is the very first place Linn finds herself in Rever in. It is the capital of the water union (a union of meridian controlled countries, nations and microstates who tend to either be under water or mostly coastline areas in a cold southern region of Rever). The city itself is as mentioned made out of ice and its overall macrostructure is a snowflake pattern. How does that work out in practise and hold together at all? Magic, idk how exactly, but it's used here and there in different ways, and since I'm not an architect or engineering student, that's something I'm intentionally leaving blank for now.

Atlan itself is a city that keeps itself running through sea trading, sea trading logistics (as most of the water union does, because outside of meridians no one wants to against things such as Glacipuses and wild frost whales swimming around in the wide Ocean) and of course as an artistic cultural center of water union. If you go out on the ice streets on the surface and also underwater (take your breathing aides with you!), chances are that you will find ice sculptures and lots of random street art made out of ice in most places, made by the inhabitants as a show of power, class or skill.

The food is either imported from regional aquafarms (think of fish, seaweed, mollusks, seafoods, algea, whalemilk, domesticated whale meat and so on) or imported from main land nations outside of the water union (think of rice, grains, fruits and basically most land vegetables and cheeses and fermented stuff). Basically the fishfolk are eating mainly fish and algea. And maybe import some stuff from elsewhere to show off.

Water... I mean the city and therefore its buildings are literally made out of ice. Which is kept in shape by magical means and basically magically desalting and cleaning, etc. sea water to make up for missing water in a few strategic places. And for getting rid of waste and urin... let's just say that there are a lot of specialized p-plants are being kept there.

The governing body is of course happening at the center of the city in a building called the Coreconcilenter. How exactly is the government structured, considering it it is the capital of the water union? Well... tbh. I haven't put that much thought into it yet, because it ain't that important for book 1 at least, but I imagine that is basically a combination of city state Hamburg governing bodies and bruessel's multilayered governing EU going going on. In short: There is a city state Atlan parliament and senate, legislation, etc. going on there, alongside a separate Water union parliament, legislation, etc. going on there, to basically avoid making Atlan itself the Water Union and vice versa, though that of course strongly influences one another, but this is where I'm gonna leave another intentionally blank spot for people the imagine the stories going on there. Because none of it is relevant for my main Torn Quest story (at least in book 1).

Atlan is also the place where Ria, Linn's situational foster mom lives at, between her travels at her job as a trading ship's captain (the outfit I've given Ria in my reference drawing of her was on one of her off days, she of course has a captain's attire for the job). Ria's home is located near one of Atlan's major trading ports, so... basically near the outer edge of the city, far away from the city center and the more touristy and artistic areas. It's not as chick or as artsy as the center parts of the city, but it is very functional, the streets reliably sturdy to walk on and fresh main land goods can be gotten relatively quickly directly from docking trading ships there. And there is also a building of the Quest Qasters, who can help Linn out with her little situation there (think of the Quest Qasters as volunteering questing sapiens helping other questing sapiens with each others and their own quests there + also some other people in need of help).

I'll talk about the Quest Qasters at another time, but this is it so far with Atlan.

Wait, what do you mean with "how did it come to be and who founded it?"

Well... uhh...

Ona Tiena did as a kind of small project to have a safe port for sapiens in Rever directly after the downfall of the sapiens, but the full context of that is kind of a spoiler, so...