#worldwanderer

thank you!!!! I am very excited about it too. I have been yelling at @siarven about it nonstop for a week I'm sure they're sick of me by now (thank you quinn <3).

quickly googles magnetic fields because I got a B minus in E&M a year ago during quarantine and don't remember any of it

ok disclaimer all of the ahead is magic-technobabble and only somewhat-plausable theorizing on the part of a chemical engineering junior who should really be doing their mass separations homework.

The earth's magnetosphere is caused by the dynamo effect because the inside our our planet's outer core is made of molten iron and nickel alloy that's spinning really heckin fast and creating an electromagnetic field that encases the planet. It functions as a shield to keep our planet from getting blasted with UV rays and solar winds, which is quite useful for enabling survival and makes pretty auroras whenever they hit near the poles.

The catch is that asteroids don't have cores, much less molten ones. They're too small for gravity to make that happen. But what I am wondering is if the movement of the asteroids themselves (if enough of them were made of metal instead of rock) would generate a magnetic field in kind of a donut shape around the entire asteroid belt following the right hand rule, where the "current flow" isn't electrical flow but the movement of asteroids... If the magnetic field plausibly existed, I could then handwave that the dragons could have the ability to sense it and follow it home. Let me go bug one of my physics friends and get back to you on that.

“Real science” aside, my magic system is already loosely based off electromagnetism. There are 6 main kinds of magic that fall under two groups. External magic means you can effect the world around you but don’t hold any energy/power inside yourself, and includes manipulation, amplification, and nullification. Internal magic means you struggle to control what the magic does once it leaves your body, but you always carry a store of power, and includes generation, storage, and release. Everything has a magical “fingerprint” - most people have one favored type but can dabble in the others in their group with effort and training, while plants, animals, rocks, ect. all default to a “natural state.”

I could also say that each world has it’s own magical fingerprint that’s an average/accumulation of everything living on it’s surface + the makeup of the rock/metal in the asteroid itself. (and oh hey that gives me an idea for my universe as a whole...and names in runaways... maybe this could fix my connection issue)... Memorizing a planet’s magical signal would be kind of like like memorizing a song based only on the frequency waves without hearing it ever. But things that are born on that world share a part of that waveform in their own magical DNA. A dragon could find their way home by finding which planet resonates with their magic!

thank you for all the questions! I'm going to start from the bigger ones to explain the space reasoning and then work inward to societies and riders.

TL:DR: Yes* they live on the asteroid ring, yes there are many planetoids that support life and have cities (actual planets not so much), yes they do know about each other, but only because of the dragons, *riders are a small/rare segment of the total population and they’re more nomadic than most residents of the solar system.

So the habitable zone of a star is the radius that is capable of supporting life - any closer is too hot, any further away is too cold. You can see that in our solar system, Earth is in the sweet spot, Mars is in the “maybe habitable almost too cold” zone, and the asteroid belt is too far away. Every solar system is different depending on the star and a bunch of other factors that are also needed to support life, which all contribute to the fermi paradox about “why haven’t we found other life yet?”. (TRAPPIST1 is cool because it makes music. This is a TED talk about it. 10/10 recommend) That’s mostly irrelevant because this is speculative fiction and we can handwave the science, but it’s cool, and for the sake of argument, lets say my fictional solar system had the asteroid ring form in the habitable zone. There are other planets, but they’re much more hostile. Instead of Earth being an oasis in the desert of space, this system has an island chain in the ocean of space.

NOW, lets still use our own asteroid system as a model because I’m lazy and refuse to do more math than I have to. I’m a chemical engineer not an astrophysicist. Most asteroids are lumpy but we’re going to pretend they’re spheres for the sake of simplicity. According to Wikipedia the vast majority of asteroids are TINY. (SA = 4*pi*r^2) The smallest ones have a surface area of 0.03 km^2, so those are basically parks and wildspace. I’m from Pennsylvania in the US, so I’m going to use a city the size of Philadelphia as my metric. That would roughly fit on a 6-7km diameter asteroid, but it would be a tight fit so you’re probably going to find cities/ on 10km diameter and higher. These would be mono-cultures, since there isn’t enough room to have more than one settlement. Your proper “worlds”, capable of supporting a country or two, would be the major hubs of trade and settlement. Those are called “Planetoids” Our solar system has four: Ceres, Vesta, Hallas, and Hygeia.

Most of the people come from those worlds, but you get your smaller settlements on smaller rocks too. That’s a pretty big population, but consider that they’re spread out around the entire ring. They’re all moving relative to each other at roughly the same pace, but it would still be difficult to reach them in any reasonable amount of time without traveling very fast. Most societies have figured out some spaceship-type way to hop to their next door neighbors so you get segments of city -> suburb -> rural as the size decreases, centered around a larger asteroid, but your average person rarely gets as far as the next city/country/planetoid to interact much.

THAT IS WHERE THE DRAGONS COME IN

dragons are rare, giant, magical creatures that can survive longer journeys through the depths of space thanks to their special adaptations (which I explained here), but they aren’t born and they don’t live in space. They go back to their home planetoids to rest and raise their young, but spend a lot of time moving around to hunt and explore. They’re an intelligent society all of their own, not dumb animals, but you can imagine that the larger habitable planetoids drew the attention of both the humans and the dragons so they had to learn how to live together to survive. Each world only has a small handful of dragons. Even for the largest of the planetoids, I can’t imagine something smaller than Pluto could support more than 2 or 3 dragons plus a human civilization. Hell, even our MOON is bigger than Pluto.

The dragons trust the humans to raise their young until they’re old enough to venture off-world, and they bond with chosen humans to keep tabs over the process. It’s usually a generational thing - a kid who grew up raising a dragon would be old by the time the dragon was an adolescent and ready for space flight, but their kid or grandkid would bond the dragon when they’re ready. (I explain the bond here~) There are only as many true riders as there are dragons, but the large inter-generational families are often looked to as leaders of the society. Riders orchestrate trade runs between the other planetoids, defend their home from any interlopers, share stories from their travels, and their grounded family members run things while they’re gone on trips.

Generally speaking, since there’s such a strong emphasis on symbiosis and working together to survive a pretty tough environment, the planetoids don’t fight often. Each of them have totally different ecosystems and resources, so they need to cooperate and trust each other. That’s not to say it’s completely without conflict because I need a plot, but the societies interact on a pretty regular basis through the dragonriders. They also serve as an official class of storytellers and keepers of the ring’s history. Many of them are trained as bards and storytellers.

Thanks for the ask!

I'm thinking this would have to tie into the magic system? The one I built for Lachoe would fit the underlying mechanics of the universe, so I'm going to run with the idea of every living thing basically having a magical "fingerprint". Forging a bond would be an intentional choice on the behalf of two compatible beings to each change that piece of themselves for the other until they match and their very souls are in sync.

Dragons are intelligent but they cannot speak the same language as humans purely mechanically speaking. Outsiders know that the dragons and riders have Something Going On, but to them it would look like a one sided conversation where the human talking go themself/to the dragon and is just really good at reading the dragon's body language in reply. But the bond would allow them to understand each other, share the magic that allows them to survive in space, know where each other are if they ever got separated, and give each other cool magic power up abilities. It would be a symbiotic bond, like how the dragon population as a whole has a symbiotic relationship with the plants that grow on them, and with the human settlements that help raise their young. Both the human and the dragon would get and give something tangible from the relationship.

There's a passage from The Little Prince where the fox talks about taming, and I imagine that's how the dragons would approach it - not that they're animals who need to be tamed but that they want the companions.

"you see the grain-fields down yonder? I do not eat bread. Wheat is of no use to me. The wheat fields have nothing to say to me. And that is sad. But you have hair that is the colour of gold. Think how wonderful that will be when you have tamed me! ..... “But now you are going to cry!” said the little prince. “Yes, that is so,” said the fox. “Then it has done you no good at all!” “It has done me good,” said the fox, “because of the colour of the wheat fields.”

S P A C E D R A G O N S

S P A C E D R A G O N S ! ! !

I explained some mechanics of how they survive in space in this answer earlier but I've come up with some other brainstorms so I'll yeet those here too.

I've been accumulating WIP names/ideas for several years that all have vaugely similar vibes and would work well together as an anthology or series of novellas - kind of following the structure of Classic SciFi books like Fahrenheit 451. This is up to ten titles now, all of which are distinct stories but connected somehow and connect all my other story worlds somehow. (I don't know how). They're called the Real World Sequence collectively.

Earlier last year, I wrote one of these, called "Matter" for my mailing list. (not to plug myself but if you do want to have more context, the thingy is set up to automatically email it to you), and it's about a Traveller who crashes into a black hole one day at the lowest point in their character arc, and gets some positivi-tea from the Keeper that lives there. It's some weird crossover between magical realism and scifi and I really wanted to do more with it, so I've decided to reuse Traveller!