Anna is the second child and only daughter of Richard Longsun, King of the Santonia province, richest and most powerful of all the provinces of the Rotakan Empire. Known as the "spitfire princess", she's a short temper and fierce fighter. Fiercely independent, she chafes against the requirements of her station, often devoting her time to training.
When not training, she's usually engaged in the normal machinations of the Royals. Yet no matter how independent she wishes to be, she cannot escape the duties thrust upon her...until she does.
Andrea Sands is an orphan of the Ionia slave plantations as part of the same group that Oliver is part of. She tends to be the more level-headed one of the group, preferring caution to risk and often is the one that will play devil's advocate.
Like most, this isn't the first gang she's been in, but it is the longest. She carries issues from a prior gang that was wiped out by a boss, leaving her the only survivor.
She and Oliver often get in fights, as Oliver tends to have a more...optimistic approach to their plans. Despite their contentious relationship, Andrea often goes out of the way for Oliver, something that has spurred rumors amongst the rest of their group.
Dia is a woman preoccupied with tech and for good reason. She has a gift that allows her to understand it in a way no one else can. Consumed with a driving desire to learn and create, Dia often ignores her friends, her own needs, and often just ignores reality itself. She's a woman in her head, but the real problems arise when what's in her head begins to make their way into the real world, a world not ready to handle what she's ready to create.
Oliver Sands is a orphan of the Ionia slave plantations. Abandoned as a child, he's never met his parents. Despite living in the slave plantations, Oliver has never been a slave, which he sometimes regrets—slaves, at least, get to eat every day. He often does not.
Oliver's attitude and mouth do not lend themselves well to authority, which has alienated him from just about any gang he's encountered. Bouncing from group to group, he eventually fell in with a small group living on the fringes of society and stealing to meet their needs.
A slight, short boy know for being very particular about his clothing along with an unnaturally precise sense of time.
Stan was born to a middling merchant family in the port city of Chuazuan, Sutan. By the age of three, Stan demonstrated a troubling trait, the nascent ability to shape graescence. While having a trait is often considered a great boon, Stan's ability to shape graescence was so powerful his parents feared for his life. Faced with the choice of turning their three-year-old son to the Inquisitors, or hiding, they chose to hide.
Tabitha Sands is an orphan of the Ionia slave platations as part of the same group that Oliver is part of. She is a dimminutive person that tends towards quiet and prefers to remain in the background. She rarely relaxes and is often seen cooking, cleaning, or handling daily chores.
Casters generally come in two types: slings and rails. Both are designed to fire some sort of small projective at high speeds with relatively good precision (depending on the caster). Like any weapon, they come in a large number of configurations and styles with the requisite breadth of quality. Generally, the configurations can be divided into two main styles, Handcasters and Longcasters, while the quality of casters tends to be divided into Slings and Rails.
Glass is a term used to describe the effect that occurs when "shaping" graescence into a surface. Since Shapers and Shielders are rare, the term is most often used to describe graetech weapons that shape graescence into pre-defined forms. Those who carry such expensive weapons are said to be "packing glass".
Graescence is the essence of life. It is the lifeblood of society, the fuel for all technology, the bane of the classes, and power incarnate.
In other words, nobody actually knows what it is.
Heating things up with graescence is a rather simple affair, requiring two graescent fields interacting with enough dissonance to heat up the particles within. Two separate coils of Elderin core filament will do it, though there are ways to increase efficiency. The most common way is to split the filaments into spiralled fractals rotating in opposition to one another. The more fractals, the more efficient it will be, and the more costly. High end plates, stove, and ovens will have hundreds of branching, spiralling filaments working together to create heat with as little effort as possible. A low end hotplate, on the other hand, may only have two.
Lights are made by spiralling elderin core filaments around a cylindrical shaft of space. The filament conducts graescence toward the center line and resonates to excite the gases in that space. Lights will have tighter spirals on one end than the other, causing a build up of electrons on near the tighter spiral. This, in turn, creates a potential differential that's directed along the spirals axis by the graescence fields. Depending on how the filaments are arranged, this cause various gases to emit light. The position and arrangement of the filaments is very important and will affect not only the efficiency and potency of the light, but also the color(s) it can produce.
The principle currency of the Rotakan Empire. The Rocsillian takes the form of a small rectangular piece of cloth-like paper about three fingers wide and five fingers long. While other currencies do exist, the Empire actively discourages their use to the point of violence if they believe another currency might threaten the Rocsillian. As such, the Rocsillian is by far the common currency of the world, with others taking only niche applications.
Shaping is a difficult discipline in which a person generates two opposing forces using their graescence, then solidifies them together using a form of resonance between the fields. This creates an invisible "surface" that is often referred to as a "shield", reflecting its most common application. A Shaper can generate these surfaces and manipulate them into "shapes".
A Sled has two (or more, but usually only two) strips of Elderin core filaments (usually called runners) that run parallel to each other. The graescent fields generated will "press" against latent graescence below it, causing the sled to "float" in the air about a pace. Because something floating in the air has virtually no friction, the ends of the runner are curved up, causing them to press outward and provide a modicum of friction.
The Caldonian Rail system consists of a pair of stacked tunnels, each lined with two thin rails upon which sit the railcars. The lower rail moves clockwise, while the upper counterclockwise. The railcars pull graescence from the rails themselves, powering a variety of graetech within the cars, causing the cars to hover above the rails, and providing power to accelerate the cars along the rails. All of this is handled by the driver in the lead car.
Sometimes called a 'gift', a Trait is a rare, natural ability to do something that would normally be either impossible, or take years of study to accomplish. While there is certainly a genetic component involved, Traits are rare enough that most wouldn't consider it worth the effort to breed or create bloodlines to establish Traits in their children. Not that people don't try.
Rotakan politics is a political system balances between three main components: The Emperor, the Chairs, and the Provinces. It makes up the backbone of the Empire's politics.
The Rotakan Empire is a world-spanning empire that operates as the unifying government for the Rotakan world. If propaganda were to be believed, it has always existed. As much propaganda does, this lie contains a certain kernel of truth. The Rotakan Empire has only existed in its current form for about 1500 years. However, before the empire existed an empire called the Rotakan empire. The Empire goes through iterations every few thousand years (soft average), where it will be overthrown only to re-establish itself as another Rotakan Empire under new management. To date, no one has overthrown the empire in order to remove it and virtually no one know when the first empire was actually established or how. A single unifying government has existed for so long it may not even occur to the Rotakan people that another was is even possible. Instead, the Empire is overthrown mostly because some province (or alliance of provinces) believe they have a better way to run the empire.
The Santonian province, ruled by the Longsun family, is one of the most powerful provinces of the Empire for two primary reasons:
While the plantations on Ionia are owned by the empire and worked by slaves, the dynamic between the slaves and the Empire shifted over centuries as the number of slaves grew beyond Empire's ability to manage. After many mistakes and bloody suppression of countless slave revolts, the Empire eventually found it more convenient and cost-effective to allow the slaves to govern themselves and simply extract from them what they needed.
Thus, the slaves have their own (still unofficial and unrecognized) government, politics, and socio-economic system. Entire generations have been born, lived, and died as "slaves", though many wouldn't identify themselves as such. Most simply think of themselves as Ionians.
Ionia is the name of the Rotakan moon, although it is more like a sister planet than a moon. It is habitable, but only barely. It is much drier than Rotaka, entirely subsumed by vast deserts broken up by bottomless ravines and sky-scraping mountain ranges.
There is only one path to Ionia, the Worldgate, a truly massive gate situated in the heart of the Rotakan capital city. Soaring hundreds of paces in height, and sitting over a thousand paces in width, the gate to Ionia only permanent, self-sustaining portal in existence. No one knows who built it, and all attempts to study the gate have failed. Its very existence defies everything known about how graescence works.
The Rotakan world is made of deep oceans and tall mountains with over seventy percent of the world taken up by landmass. The oceans dive hundreds of leagues deep, often straight down from the mountain shorelines. The mountains extend far higher, beyond the line where air ceases to sustain life.
Rotaka orbits a twin planet, Ionia, which is of similar size. Except whereas Rotaka is a lush planet full of life, Ionia is a desert planet. The proximity of the celestial bodies generates large tidal forces on both planets. As such, Rotaka has extreme tides, pushing the ocean hundreds of paces in some places.