THE MAJOR FACTIONS
The political environments of this world are bitter and complex. Everyone seeks to support only themselves, and do not care who they must tear down to climb higher. The main political powers are listed below, along with their current affiliates.The Cities
The Cities themselves. They influence the Wastes in overt strokes. The Cities are of course the dominant players in this battlefield. With the power of the Dragons at their back, the Cities have an advantage in sheer strength alone. Add to that their population, knowledge, size, and histories and the image is created of a trio of violently undominatable opponents.Details
As a united front, they alone could claim the entire world as their playground and everyone else would simply have to bow to their might- or be crushed under the wave. However, infighting plagues the Cities. Distrust and pride burn fiercely within each City's governing bodies, poison wells growing ever larger with the smallest slights only adding to the rot. A silent arms race has begun between the trio, a cold war of growing weaponization and unspoken anger. They hate even as they trade, sell, and create. This is in no way limited to the Cities themselves. Boarate owns the oceans, the Black Seas. They have several hundred stations established in the depths of the untamed sea, and regularly send exploratory teams out to scout and locate good places to expand into. Boarate mines from the seas to get fuel for their factories and vehicles, and also to collect metals to create their products with. Boarate doesn't want involvement with the surface and doesn't have any ground troops actively deployed outside of the walls. Gullaxian is largely separate from the surface as well, being a skyward city. The mountain the City spills onto is their territory alone and falls within their jurisdiction, with walls built to keep the Wastelands at bay. However, recently the City has been sending small teams into the Wastelands. Nobody's entirely sure why. Naturally, the teams are met with distrust if not outright hostility and are often killed. Their City status offers them little protection in the Wastelands. Interestingly the most recent team went directly to the Plains Union and is currently in communications with them, something both the Undergrowth and the CotB are watching with keen interest. Viperalm has a huge involvement with the surface, being built directly into the earth. The City has frequent excursions out into the Wastelands and has a fair amount of mines and military bases established in the Wastelands, as well as a presence in many settlements. The City has relations with the Plains Union and are rather intrigued by the attempt by Gullaxian to gain rapport with the Union as well. Their view on the CotB is wary, but they are not particularly interested and do not believe the CotB will pose a threat to them- even knowing that their own creation heads the organisation.Corporations
Each City has its own companies that number in the hundreds to thousands. None can rival the Corporations though. The Big Three founded the Cities and are still heavily involved in their runnings. Their influence is such they are a political entity of their own.LAWRIK
Lawrik is the corporation based in Boarate primarily focussed on machines.
They made the steel soldiers. Human bones and viscera integrated into steel and iron casings, cells coated with tungsten, brains carefully sheathed in a complex nest of crystal, wires and flesh nerves. Steel soldiers were made from the unwilling- they were scrounged from refugee camps, prisoners of war, even soldiers whose bodies couldn't serve anymore, and turned into machines, their souls acting as the CPU. Parts of their flesh were inbuilt into the machinery- after all, human souls need some form of living material to cling to- but as the technology improved less and less of the original bodies were needed until eventually only the brain remained, encased in metal flesh. Steel soldiers do need to breathe to provide oxygen for their brain, but have filters pre-built into them, and can withstand most of the Wasteland toxins.
Steel soldiers weren't made for looks and generally look very inhuman- the face reflects a skull, the eyes are replaced with deeply-sunken cameras, the mouth is a grinder that can crush a lot of shit. Early soldiers still retained a human based form, as their bodies were largely organic, but as the years and models went by and improvements were made the human form was warped and twisted into something still vaguely humanoid but not quite human.
Many were made, but once the wars ended, they were abandoned like the cheap machines they were. Left to wander the Plains. As they aged, their life-support gave up, and generations died out in the Plains from organ failure.
Lawrik's current project:
CYBER-BLUE
Cyber Blue is a collaboration between Lawrik and Eris to create the most efficient security system for Boarate. A hidden army of robots both to fight enemies and pacify their people.
The robots started off human-like- much like the original Steel Soldiers, Lawrik's first forays were human tissue machinery. But this was an outdated build, and imperfect, and the tissues still malfunctioned and died off.
And then Lawrik was sold information by 0UTRUN that was a game changer for the Boarate city defence program. But Lawrik doesn't specialise in Contract-based work.
So Lawrik once again approached Eris with an offer. And Eris accepted.
Akin to past experiments with Viruses, the new robots were entirely machine. Based on animals in form, they had no human weakness. But rather than being run by a program, they're run by souls.
Using the information discovered by 0UTRUN, Eris successfully created a procedure that bound a soul to living tissue that wasn't it's own. They did it with fish, since that was the only thing that worked every time.
Eris then pioneered a way for the souls to travel beyond their hosts- using Draul as a conductor. Draul is technically a form of life, and therefore a soul can feed off it to supplement itself. By building machines that ran off Draul, and then mutating the fish hosts to have Draul energy within them, Eris & Lawrik successfully created a system that allowed a soul to travel as far from its host as it liked, limited only by where its machine could wander.
Eris also added an inbuilt A.I. to all the machines, that automatically saved and sent any data processed by the machine (anything the user sees, smells, hears, touches, tastes, does, has done to them, etc). The soul can access this data but cannot delete, edit or in any way override this dataflow. They can send the data to other machines.
The A.I. only transfers between two places- the machine body, and the central control server.
A total backup copy of everything that machine does is saved to the central server. Everything a soul sees is saved to the server. All machines are linked intrinsically to this one gigantic server.
Souls can communicate with each other via the server, and can: look through each other's cameras, send each other a live feed of what they're experiencing, send across data, & even fully swap machine bodies- however this last one requires administrative influence. Generally a soul is assigned 2 to 6 machine bodies, and can control all of them simultaneously (multitasking), but this can be detrimental to the overall performance.
The machine designs aren't all animal based, nor even mobile. Most are simply security systems, cameras, wires etc. Others computers, sitting unnoticed in every computer and device in Boarate, observing their citizens.
Since the new technology was tested and built in Boarate, the Draul it ran off was the blue blood of Mikha'el, hence the name Cyber-Blue.
ASCENT
Ascent is the corporation based in Viperalm focussing most on bioengineering using both Contract work and biotechnology.
They produced the Angels, genetically-modified humans that are designed down to the very cells to be the ultimate streamlined soldiers. Unlike the other companies, which use already-developed humans, Ascent makes their humans from scratch. The egg base is human, but the fertilisation and subsequent editing during growth isn't strictly limited. The Angels are grown in surrogate mothers who are given regular shots of potent chemical cocktails that influence the developing child significantly. Angels grow much faster than normal humans- once born at just six months, they are placed into rapid-ageing pods, which increase growth rate tenfold and enable the constant production of adult soldiers for the Viperalm army.
When they come out of those pods they come out knowing inherently, instinctively how to fight, to use many guns and handle many vehicles and order folk and take orders and make snap choices and so forth. Although they're mentally around 20, they have the mental absorbency of young children and can take in information and learn extremely fast. This also means they have the naïvety and blind trust of children. They're trained for a day, then screened to make sure they're perfect- any who do not suit the criteria are quickly discarded (used for other experiments instead). They're naturally stronger and more physically powerful than the average human, and can last longer in extreme environments.
But the real trick's in the brain. They're bred to withstand their own delirium strength- the same frenzied strength that allows people to pick up cars- and can actually voluntarily turn on their hysterical strength. However, just like with normal humans, hysterical strength still takes a toll and can't be abused.
Ascent's current project:
ANGHENFIL
Anghenfil (lit. monster) is the collective name for a legion of man-made monsters that Ascent is building. Despite the Cities' anti-monster policies and prejudices, Viperalm sees no issue with using them as soldiers. Failed Anghenfil (Jean-Claude, Drunkard, X) are only the smallest snippet at what the successful monsters are like.
Built to serve, these monsters have been refined into the perfect soldiers via a mix of genetic engineering, Contracts, and conditioning. These creatures are biological patchwork creations, made of parts that should and could never exist naturally. Bones stronger than titanium, skin more bulletproof than kevlar, claws sharper than knives. The best part? They repair themselves.
The most well-known Anghenfil are the Jays, therizinosaurus-esque monsters that are often used in place of dogs for the police, army, and general protection. The most famous of these Jays, and the reason behind the nickname, is Jean-Claude, the legendary Anghenfil who gained a human mind and broke out of Viperalm to begin her own powerful army in the Plains. However, Viperalm have many more monsters the public haven't even dreamt about, kept hidden and obscured far beneath the ground, watching, waiting, ready and pacing.
ERIS
Eris is the Gullaxian-based corporation focussing largely on Contract work, computer engineering, & Draul.
They produced the viruses. These are people-turned-programs, running in several war machines at once. Viruses are made with ghosts- Eris after all is the corporation specialising in Contract-based cyberware. Computer programs are written integrating powerful binding Contracts, attaching ghosts permanently into being part of the coding. Viruses were primarily run on machinery built by others. In fact, an alternate type of steel soldiers were built wherein they were entirely machines, with an embedded computer instead of a brain. An Eris-brand virus would then be put into the OS and become a steel soldier. These were shortly discontinued though as Lawrik found viruses to be inefficient and cancelled the contract. These early forays into entirely computer based brains would eventually offshoot into Cyber-Blue.
Viruses have no physical form of their own- they're just coding with a deceased human mind attached.
They are impervious to any physical damage- a virus is essentially immortal as long as it can jump between computers and can exist in multiple computers at once. However, they are prone to deterioration of the mind and mental faculties and often fall to the same fate as ghosts- mere shades of emotion or memory clinging to Earth unable to die.
Eris releases anti-viruses pretty regularly to wipe out the "outdated" older viruses, but outside of Gullixian very few use these anti-viruses and many viruses still exist. Hell, in the Plains it's weirder to own a device that isn't possessed by some ex-soldier.
Eris' current project:
CONTRACTORS
The forgotten art. The skills sealed away with the closing of the Rift and the death of the Gods. Contract work- the literal rewriting of reality- is surely impossible without the Rift's energy, and that which remains on Earth is far too unstable to be used.
Except, Rift energy is everywhere. In every being, every cell, every soul. And it just so happens those who have walked the Rift, or who saw the Rift, or who witnessed the Rift's closure- those individuals are filled with that energy. Harnessable. Controllable. Powerful. Gullaxian is on a mission. They seek those with the blue blood of knowledge. They take them. They teach them.
The thing is, a Contract can still be edited, still be duplicated. While the ability to make and delete Contracts (or write new lines of Contracts) vanished with the Rift, Contracts on Earth that are actively known of and researched on can be changed. Snippets from Contracts can be cut and added to other Contracts. Those with blue blood have an ability beyond the regular human's to see and decipher these Contracts and as such Gullaxian has teams researching current known Contracts. Unfortunately this information was leaked- Viperalm managed to create a mimicry of the Slipskin contract by hiring a blue blood who ran away from Gullaxian.
But Gullaxian's research wasn't entirely compromised. A phenomenon was discovered. Shatterpoints. Shatterpoints are places where the other dimension did not separate cleanly from ours, where the Rift cracked and leaked and split its energy across the land. A Shatterpoint can be used as a stand-in for the Rift to rewrite a Contract, or create new Contracts entirely. Creating a Contract drains Rift energy from the Shatterpoint, with energy drainage proportional to the complexity of the Contract. Once drained, a Shatterpoint is made moot. Rift energy is a finite resource. Only a few Shatterpoints have been found so far, so Gullaxian is beginning to send teams into the Plains to search for more. This means they may have to begin making deals with the Union, the CotB, and the Undergrowth to walk on their lands, or risk starting conflicts.
The world does not just revolve around the Cities, however. Other players of course partake in the political landscape. Upon the surface, two political powers exist in mutual dislike.