Coldsun

The Locomotor Itself

The Locomotor resembles a gargantuan snake or locust, hopping and slithering, apt to destroy most anything in its path. Fortunately, these paths are precisely determinate: it is connected to a series of fourteen rings, and will always move in a straight line, or very near so, towards the closest ring which is not one of the last two rings it passed through. If the path is through the air he will fly, if it is through the ground he will burrow. He will always take exactly one day to reah the next ring in his destination; if the destination ring moves, he will adjust his direction and velocity in order to allow this to be true. At each circle, it is possible to load and unload cargo.

The Locomotor requires arcane energy in order to function; if it runs out, he will stop. (Time spent stopped does not count against his calculation of getting to the next circle in one day - if he runs for four hours, stops from exhaustion, and remains idle for several days, he will reach its next destination twenty hours after being refilled.) This fuel comes in the form of blood sacrifice performed at the location of any one of the circles between his passing, or at the site of the Locomotor himself to restart him if he has gone idle.

For its typical needs, these sacrifices amount to one or two persons per day at the next circle, and since each circle is placed at or nor a major urban center, violent criminals as a matter of course suffice to feed it. Sometimes ectoplasm of a different psychic flavoring is required; these needs are communicated through dreams, omens, &c. to druids and warlocks sworn to the Petal. When required to shed the blood of the provably pure of heart, most operating centers employ principled political enemies when possible and trained votaries - religious volunteers, often pledged by upper-caste parents seeking to show their loyalty to the state - when necessary.

The rings, although nigh-indestructible and gargantuan, are of such slight density that a child could lift and run with one. It appears that they were meant to be mobile, though the destruction the Locomotor can cause tells against that theory - and, indeed, their capture of one by the Floating City of Dheb-Eir was intended by the leaders of that pirate metropolis to be used as a weapon, since Dheb-Eir could move and therefore place other locales in the path of the train-behemoth. This was eventually solved by the relocation of the nearest connecting rings to the shore, and, in the usual case, is simply solved by security.

Additionally, because of the Locomotor's routing algorithm, the removal of one or two links sufficiently far from the line can sever it completely, causing him to act as if he has reached the end (that is, when he looks for the closest ring other than the current one and the one before it, he finds the one two previous in the one ahead is further away than that.) It is believed that this has happened in the past, and is why the Southern hemisphere remains inaccessible.

The Custody of the Petal

During the Last Flowering, the organization which operated the Locomotor and its line was a private capitalist firm. In many ways, the Custodians of the Petal, which are its direct organizational successor, remains similar in form - it is a ruthless organization which attempts to leverage the transporation resources of the line in order to distribute the winnings to its owners in aliquot parts. But in the meantime, of course, the context has changed - gone are many alternative sources for investment, as are external sources of political power. The Locomotoral Custody still offers the services of transporting goods and persons themselves, but its transporation choices are more motivated by considrations (or the justification of) keeping civilization going, and its revenues are achieved more through taxation, rent, and tribute than services. Those revenues are still distributed to its principals, but less because these principals would otherwise take their investment elsewhere but because the families and other organizations that have a lock on ownership consider themselves socially obliged to maintain a certain level of conspicuous prosperity.

A complicated organizational chart exists, but fundamentally, the Custody is dominated by its dependence on every one of the circles to remain operative, and its difficulty in ensuring compliance at much detail anywhere. The result is a decentralized structure with promises of coordinated retaliation against anyone who allows the flow of blood to go dry or for the Petal to otherwise wilt. Local elites of whatever form operate the local franchises; the links of culture, people, and economic interdependence fostered by the Savored Petal itself lend them a degree of coherence. Beside this there are the druids and warlocks sworn to the Petal, its priests, and all the rest - a supplementary but essential structure of technical-ideological elites that transcends local loyalties in theory. "Secular" offices of either the global or local variety, and sometimes the less secular ones as well, tend to inheritable conditional on satisfactory service, though some are purchased for the short rather than long term and others are awarded purely on merit.

The Nodes of the Line

The Gleaning, where no one lives for long; those with naught else work to find or land to work come here to gather scraps of coal-dust from the ice fields, and bring them to the staion here. A large gantry stands here: once, it exploited the position close to the equator for launching orbital rockets; now, it still maintains a serviceable (for this age) observatory used by a College of Diviners. The coal is as essential for the Locomotor in its own way as the souls, and so prisoners are brought when labor reserves are weak - another form of sacrifice to keep the thing running.

Nemm.

Tschor Glagan: this malarial taiga is the breadbasket of the whole line. In addition to staples like honey, snow-rice, and timber, it also provides luxury monoculture such as marajuana and dreaming ejm. Like the Gleaning, it is a common destination for slaves.

Bitter Canyon* was once sweet, as fertile as Tschor - much grew here, and the canyons were carved by waters. After the changes to the climate, this is no longer so. Its ring might have been relocated, but it was as if an occult hand had grasped it near the end, and rigor mortis set in, for any attempt to steal the ring results in empowerment of its (whatever It is's) own sworn servants to prevent the theft. Because it is mighty and single-minded but not very clever, its priesthood has engaged in an effective deal with the other local franchises to regularly make attempts on their holy of holies, thus continually renewing the source of their power - which they can then use to repay (in a friendly, non-ironic way) those who have awakened it. Beyond this hoary dungeon and its scheming priests, Bitter Canyon is a blasted expanse of dead forest and half-sacked ruins.

Lath Alar.

The Floating City of Dheb-Eir, mentioned above, and under great threat should it turn to further shenanigans.

Nine Phrases of Respect.

Stonelorn.

The Even More Floating City of Zalle, which rests up in the atmosphere where the air is thin and breath can turn to ice before one's eyes. No one is quite certain why the platform of Zalle remains aloft, but the residents do know that particular minerals can be mined from the clouds themselves, and energy also "mined" by the heavy objects which the Locomotor can bring up, seemingly without effort, to be sent down a great mechanical elevator shaft to...

Undersky, the underdark city. A subterranean resevoir of spoiled milk serves to meet the food needs of most of its residents, although the food chain required for such is complex.

Shardmuck.

Thornreach is a city amidst the largest trunks and branches of the Great Cactaceal Forest. It was fashioned as such about 150 years ago as a new utopian community for some of the surviving elves - a place where they could live not as nobles over servants of other races, but utterly as equals of their own kind, unburdened by even having to think thoughts of mortality - but this collapsed rather quickly.

Old Darn is a great mountain which the Locomotor passes through - as in, literally passes though, as though all of it were a ghost. Moreover, it is just about impervious to anything else. Clearly, there is a ring inside, since the rings at Hellpont and Thornreach have moved, and the Locomotor treats the inside of the mountain as a node. The mountain has become the site of scientific investigations and religious pilgrimage, but, however, lacks the utility of actually being a load/unload station.

Zourmlik

These creatures, morphologically somewhere between lizards and amphibians, evolved intelligence as an adaptation for mothers to pass on knowledge and skills to their children; elsewhere, Nature blindly decided, it would be too much an an expense to bother. The Zourmlikke are thus only intelligent for one/two phases of their life cycle, as a mother-newt pair - newts providing curiosity, mothers providing context (and physical support.) Males during the whole period of their independent life, as well as females before and after and between “nursing,” retain rote skills and associations - and are thus employed for a variety of tasks by what is inevitably a literal matriarchy - but lack the capacity for abstraction, analysis, and creative problem-solving that is, in this fallen age, unique to mothers-and-their-newts. 

During the Last Flowering, Zourmlick alchemists fashioned hormonal cocktails that could trick just about any of their brain-structures into thinking they were about to begin nursing, and thus open up the dormant powers of intelligence that were useless to nature but precious to those who enjoyed it. Women got to exist as thinking beings for more than a few years at a time, men got to enjoy it at all. Whole areas of life condemned to inarticulate darkness were exposed to description and even poetry.  But the materials necessary for the alchemists grew outside the regions where Zourmlikkind could live without technological assistance, and with the end of the First Flowering, trade routes, and unnatural sapience, collapsed. The Zourmlik live now as they did in the beginning, with their precious few and ephemeral mothers forced to spend their ephemeral periods of intelligence training their newts and future selves for tasks that are mostly mindless. But they also pass down the knowledge that something else is possible.

Humans

An impossibly ancient people (as far as anyone knows), the ruins of human settlements dot Coldsun, most of them from Flowerings even before the most recent one. In what must have been the unimaginably ancient past, human intelligence evolved primarily for the purposes of social representation, maneuvering, and cohesion; and so while humans may never be as adept logicians, engineers, hunters, or sorcerers as other clades, they do make its most cunning and sincere priests, economists, bards, and lawyers. 

If humans like to boast that they are the most “adaptive” and “flexible” of all peoples, this is, perhaps, a nervous boast bespeaking their relationship to their younger siblings, the “three folks of tragedy.”

Elves (human subtype)

Long ago, the same human ruling class that fashioned dwarves for its workers and orcs for its soldiers fashioned itself into elves. Through arts that are - like so much else - lost to them, they engaged in cellular modification that granted them eternal life, youth, beauty, and sterility - and make them perhaps as much plant as animal. These aristocrats would be free to enjoy eternal lives of pleasure, and guiltlessly so, too, for had they not made lessers who would be happy with their lot as well?

Every elf looks almost exactly between 17 and 23 years of age and is almost exactly {some unknown but very large number} years of age, a survivor of the initial crop of an empire that collapsed in some Flowering before, it is believed, the most recent one. Have they used these long centuries to acquire a deep wisdom and sense of perspective? Perhaps unbelievable skill in something more concrete? Alas, the same automated cell repair that grants them eternal youth in body works the same magic upon their minds. In the long run, memories do not last; personalities return to baseline. Memories of especially emotionally intense events, of course, hold out longer than others; and elves can strike others as both jaded and naive. Many search eternally for the next high, or for a romance that will fill in the gaps of some old one half-remembered.

All elves are quite similar morphologically - a dead culture’s ideal of beauty, which has by necessity influenced all those thereafter, outfitted with a discrete collector’s set of (reproductively useless) sex organs, the better to enjoy eternity; and an equally beautiful voice - and are most easily distinguished from each other by their bold hair and skin tones, unique to each individual. 

Dwarves (human subtype) 

The dwarves were made by those who made themselves elves, to work as endlessly willing slaves. Dwarves fail to register exertion and effort as forms of pain, and will work themselves to death within a day or two if not consciously avoiding to - not working is painful to them. They instinctively register their sense of status through the visible signs of what they have created, individually or collectively. 

Some dwarves tell the following story: the elves created them to perform their labors for them, and this they did, with great joy. Then they created even greater tools, which would render them obsolete. So they destroyed these wicked things, and the whole wicked empire of the elves, so that they could continue their great works. Oh, they cannot create anything quite as good today, and they feel great shame in this, but at least they have the opportunity to continue the process itself, which is the important thing. Probably the story is even true, at this level of detail. 

Leisure is something the dwarves must impose on themselves to stay alive. Is dwarven ale famous? Oh, yes - because they knock themselves out to rest; they must douse their brains in mushroom brews to dream and form memories. And they must eat in prodigious portions, too, burning calories like they do. They leave vast abandoned cities - some abandoned because, fully constructed, they have served their purpose; others because the wormwood ran out in some crisis, and all inside went mad.

The most terrible creations of the dwarves were the so-called Hetomasies, vast thinking machines that registered the accumulated wealth they had created and could direct them to how to accumulate more. Each Hetomasy was created as the kind of master the dwarves could be truly willing slaves to, but as the dwarves reflected elves’ flawed conceptions about what would make the perfect slave, the Hetomasies reflected dwarves’ flawed conceptions about the perfect master. But that is the story of the Last Flowering, and to speak in more detail risks historiographical controversy. 

Dwarves are (of course) short and stout, with eyes designed for darkness, a body plan designed for dank industrial quarters close to fire and heat. They would make industrious farmers but terrible ones, inadept as they are in the bright, cold world above.

Orcs (human subtype)

Hideously ugly, hideously cruel, hideously strong, hideously stupid. Don’t we all know orcs?

In truth, because they are cursed with as much conscience as any other human being, the orcs are ugly because they turn their obligate cruelty mostly upon themselves. Like the elves, their bodies can heal miraculously with time; unlike the elves, this healing takes no account of beauty. As dwarves must work, orcs must wound. They have little sensitivity to pain from tissue damage, but a dull, whole-body sense of pain grows steadily over time the longer they go without inflicting tissue damage. 

Orcs are natively every bit as much intelligent as the other humans, natural and artificial, but this dull and growing sense of pain limits their abilities of concentration, especially on abstract matters, creating the stereotype of stupidity. There are those who double down on ugliness to avoid this - habitually wounding themselves, they find they can think as clearly, maybe clearer, than anyone, though this leaves them with misshapen forms that barely function for physical tasks. Then there are those who turn their cruelty entirely outwards, and in them, once sees that orcs, underneath the scars, are perhaps more beautiful than elfs - pray that you do not come across such beauty. Most non-orcish communities are likely assume that both of these extremes represent entirely different groups entirely - in truth, it is only a matter of choice, the terrible choice every orc must make: of precisely what mutilations to inflict upon the world.

Every orc has a congenital conviction that they, and/or orcs in general, exist for some deeply important purpose unfulfilled, some crucial victory yet unwon. This was implanted purely for the purpose of making them more willing slaves in battle. But bereft of the total institutions in which elves intended to raise them, those now cursed and blessed with this vision must make up their own minds about what to place it on. For some, it is indeed some kind of victory through combat. For others, journey across the trackless wastes and hazards of the long-dead tomb-cities. For others, virtue and an overcoming of sin. For others, the social, collective creation of utopia. Almost all orcs are idealists at heart - filled with hatred of themselves as they are, and love of the world as it might be, when their mission, whatever it is, is accomplished.

Dragons and kobolds (definitely not humans)

Dragons: terrible, living gods. Each one unique. Instinctive weilders of terrible sorcerous might. Embodiments of the fury and mercilessness of nature.

Kobolds: simpering, pitiful cowards. Each one looking exactly like her hundred other sisters. Survive by sabotage and trickery. Not gods, but congenital worshippers.

They are, of course, the same species - dragons the queens, kobolds the drones. Dragons, though they have all the sorcery in the world at their disposal, ultimately understand very little other than this: that they are mighty, and the world is weak. This is quite true, but less so than they cannot help but feel; and so nature fashioned an auxiliary appendage to think for and protect the dragons: their little clones, the kobolds. The kobolds maintain their mothers’ lairs, especially in her long periods of slumber; they guard it with traps, knowing that their own strength is little; they grow or trade provisions for its larder, preparing for the day she will denude the countryside and not know where to find any more food; they help her establish the next nest when necessary, reluctantly leaving their old warrens behind. 

Just as kobolds in general are the opposite of dragons in general, each kobold is the opposite of her own mother. Compassionate dragons have cruel kobolds, playful dragons have serious kobolds, and so on and visa-versa. But overcoming all of a kobold’s other inclinations are her desire to please her mother-god. A warren of life-loving kobolds will fervently perform good works in the region surrounding, worriedly counting down the days until their dragon awakens, for they know they will, with trembling, guilty claws, torture people to death for her pleasure. Of course, because kobolds are much smarter than their gods, much of what they do for them is trickery or a show. Much of it.

Ambrosia

Deep in the secluded pine jungles, there are fields of flowers tended by honeybees, and in the beehives is made honey of the most wonderful sort. The honey is an anciently engineered nanopaste, covered in microscopic runes of the precisest fashioning, and if the sweaty coral is Coldsun’s smartest species, the holy honey is its smartest substance.

Also like the coral, it interacts little with the outside world - mostly. Long ago - even before the ancient race of humanity walked on this planet - the honey was fashioned to store information, to protect and update itself, and to observe, but not interfere except when absolutely necessary. Any living being inbibing the honey will quickly find its nervous system subborned, as its apiary rectors are. If the honey recognizes its host as one of its creators - which of course can never again happen, as this species is quite extinct - this will provide free access to all the knowledge it was created to serve as a store for. Otherwise, however, it will be enslaved and used to protect or gather information - along the lines, however, that it wishes to interfere as little as possible. Few are transformed into permanent guardians, most are simply given the directive to leave the area alone, and to not report it, but to report back to it after many years - all the while never realizing that any will but their own was involved.