Hello Citizens!!
You have been with me for several weeks now, and I thank you for spending time with me while I build Allazar brick by brick.
I’m sure that you have questions about the place where we find ourselves meeting every now and again. The first is “What is Allazar?”
The Planet and State of Allazar
Allazar as a planet is a theocracy run by the 5 [or 6, depending on who you ask] Houses of the Conclave. Etherian, Agnon, Praina, Deveron, Tillerian are the official Houses with land holdings, territories, schools, traditions, festivals and sanctioned ways of using majiera. Sanguine is an unofficial house within Tillerian that deals with the most dangerous and powerful majiera, bloodmagic. The word ‘magic’ is associated with bloodmagic and has a bad and evil connotation.
Allazar as a Fictional Universe
The Allazar Series has a style I like to call “magic punk”. All the technology you can find in the modern world is here, but it all fueled by magic (such a naughty, naughty word in Allazar), which is referred to as ‘majiera’.
How much technology that’s in any specific is based on two things:
— the strength of the majiera (how many and how powerful the majiera users are in that location) and;
— the amount of a substance known as milam, which stores majiera, in that area (Either natural or imported). Think of it as a natural battery.
This substance is important because while everyone has the innate ability to use majiera, but how much that can be used varies from person to person. This ranges to folks that have just majiera to light a cigarette at regular intervals to folks that can cook and clean without breaking a sweat, to those who can fight without use of an weapon. If a person attempts to do something that is above their majiera grade, they will tire out, grow faint and require sleep, or to be able to use majiera again.
Milam allows anyone to use majiera without getting tired because the majiera is drawn from the stone and not from the person. Milam can also be used to draw majiera out of a item or person and can be stored in the stone, but only extremely powerful majiera users (or the Sanguine) can do this.
Areas with low innate ability and low milam reserves tend to look like your typical high fantasy, D&D small village or a small third world village. There will be huts or small houses, farms, and a tavern, inn and pub where local congregate, use the Internet and can recharge their milam in various ways.
Areas with higher innate ability and milam levels are modern small cities (think Abilene or El Paso, Pasadena, etc) and the areas with the highest ability and milam are huge cities with any and every advantage and modern luxury (think New York, Tokyo or Paris).
It is not unusual to see cellphones, but those with more ability use mental links. Tablets and computers are also used all the time, but few people have enough to power them for more than a few hours at a time, so they are milam powered. Those with higher ability can process and view information on self generated Comm Screens, which is basically producing a 3D image of the information with their hands.
Next week, I’m going to go into the goverment and cultural features on the universe.
See you then!