The World, 2100+

The World at Large

Magecraft and Technology have been supporting each other ever since the cataclysm. This caused humanity’s technological progress to skyrocket, thanks to the assistance of Magecraft which made the ‘impossible possible’.

Due to the difficulty of locating all the cities/ships scattered across the globe, it takes monumental effort to conduct research on a global scale. The following are information extrapolated from the census conducted between 2095 and 2100, thanks to the continuous effort by Alexandria and affiliated archive cities.

Warning:

Cities who have lost contact are not included in the census. As such, the following data is only an approximate representation of the state of the New World.

Total World Population	Around 1.3 billion
Number of Stars (Cities)	~800
Landforms	The world has been completely flooded. The water is only a few thousand meters deep, yet for some reason, even the tallest mountains have disappeared from the surface. The water itself remains nigh impenetrable past the 1000 meters mark.
Natural Resources	Scarce. The natural generation of resources such as ore and fuel remains a highly specialized craft. Cities that have successfully manipulated their leylines and foundations to do so are highly coveted.
Vehicles	Traditional vehicles and machines are severely limited in scale and availability. Most cities that aren’t Stella Maris tier only have public transportation available. Compared to ships, airplanes are a rare commodity. Rental services are available, though they are usually reserved for the most influential persons and cities.
Communication	Communication on a global scale is slow and severely limited compared to the Old World. Emails are no longer instantaneous, and intercity calls are expensive. Refer to the rest of this section for details.

The most important takeaway is that humans now live in nomadic cities floating on the ocean, and cities usually keep to themselves. Some cities are fully developed, while others struggle for resources.

Communication

City Wide Web (CWW/Citynet)

The World Wide Web has fully collapsed due to the flood. Radio and phone signals also became a thing of the past as humans were forced to restore their world without having these tools at their disposal.

However, once the nomadic cities finally found their footing, so did magi and network specialists. They cooperated in an attempt to revive these lost arts of humanity, and succeeded with the development of the City Wide Web, known as CWW or Citynet for short.

CWW functions similarly to the internet, except that it is tied down to a nomadic city instead of having multiple data centers across the globe. As such, humans can only access data from their city, meaning that they cannot obtain data from neighbouring nomadic cities easily. It is possible to send data to other cities and access their data, but the further away a city is, the longer it takes to receive a response.

Sending an email from one city to another city on the opposite of the globe, for example, would take at least 2 hours. This is because the signal would need to pass through numerous cities in order to reach its destination, due to the lack of fiber networks in a world filled with water.

However, some resources are shared between all cities. Important resources such as Servantpedia™ and old world data are stored inside special hard drives belonging to the network managers of each nomadic city. These drives are periodically updated with new data and constantly monitored by the city network. Every city owns at least one of these special hard drives. This allows even the average citizen to be able to access these resources through the city’s own search engine.

But this only applies to events from the old world or news that is more than a few months old. Recent events, in comparison, are usually kept under wraps and limited to the city in which they occurred. Most nomadic cities usually keep to themselves, unless their information is incredibly useful and needs to be accessed by another city for political or financial reasons. In these cases, an exchange of data between the two cities usually occurs, or in the worst case scenario, negotiations break down and nobody walks away with anything.

Cities that take smaller cities under their wing also take advantage of the CWW. When two cities form an alliance and merge into a single city, their data centers are usually merged with each other, resulting in both of them sharing the same CWW and allowing citizens from both cities to access each others’ resources. Said data centers are also constantly synced and updated with one another. Of course, this doesn’t apply to allied cities that haven’t merged into one entity.

Radio Towers and Phones

Just like the CWW, magi and network developers united forces and managed to restore radio and mobile towers to the world. These towers are bound to nomadic cities and manage to transmit a signal that encompasses areas that go beyond the city, allowing the signal to reach even people outside of the city. This is incredibly helpful for contacting neighbouring cities or nearby travellers.

Every tower in a city utilizes its own network, meaning that travellers with phones will have to change SIMs at every city in order to be able to make calls. As such, some make it a habit to carry multiple SIMs on them, especially if they often travel from city to city.

Of course, dead zones are far more common in this world than they were in the old world. As such, phones are mostly only used in the city, and rarely used outside of it.

Transportation

Nomadic cities are capable of moving on their own as the name implies. The movement is necessary to avoid the Grail Mud’s gradual corruption of the surrounding environment, along with allowing cities to constantly travel to new areas in the search of resources and neighbouring cities. This process is slow, and it could take months or even years for two cities to dock with each other.

Intercity transportation instead mostly relies on ships. Ships are commonly used as cargo transport as well as travelling transport. Most nomadic cities have at least one arm (since they are star shaped) that functions as a dedicated docking zone, allowing for ships to arrive and depart with the greatest of ease. This facilitates trading in the New World and allows the nomadic cities to thrive even in this harsh environment.

Jets and planes are also sometimes used as intercity transportation, but are incredibly rare and inefficient due to the costs involved. Planes usually require their own, specialized airport islands in order to even take off in the first place. Only incredibly rich people, usually members of important organizations, are able to afford such luxury items.

Domestic travel is a bit more subdued. Public transport is a lot more common in the current year, with some cities having trains, railways, funiculars, subways, skyways and so on. However, what all of these numerous systems have in common is that they are linked to leylines. Without leylines, transportation systems simply do not work, hence why nomadic cities value them so much.

Mana Rails

In many cities, Mana Rails exist as an additional mode of transport. They are built on top of a city’s leylines and resonate with specially crafted footwear, enabling the rider to hover slightly above the Rails and travel at a fixed speed.

The effect isn’t so different from that of a maglev train. However, due to safety concerns, the speed imposed on each mana rail differs from district to district, and are overseen by the Mana Rail Management offices in each city.

Weather

Most nomadic cities are outfitted with weather domes, thanks to the blueprints for them being present in every nomadic city database. It is unknown who first inserted them there, but this person has long since been forgotten by even the oldest of ancestors.

Regardless, weather domes have become a common necessity for nomadic cities. These artificial blankets make the cities almost look like snow globes, with the domes capable of changing the weather gradually or rapidly. A day can have rain, but can immediately have sun just a few minutes later. It all depends on the will of the city’s leaders along with their current power output.

The weather domes are surprisingly efficient and do not require too much power to remain operational. However, their functionality is reliant on the leylines, so destruction or malfunction of the leylines could permanently damage the weather system.

Currency & Trading

Traditional paper money lost its value after the apocalypse, with cities starting to value resources and materials instead. However, the rulers of various nomadic cities would be surprised at the existence of hidden tokens inside their respective city databases.

All city databases come with a limited amount of NAT (New Atlas Tokens). The tokens generated for each city seem to be dependent on the city’s size, with Dhruva type cities having only around a few hundred million tokens while Stella Maris have trillions.

Initially, these tokens seemed to have no purpose at all. However, further analysis revealed that the amount of tokens a city held directly impacted the city’s overall power output. The more tokens a city had, the more efficient it was, and therefore, the longer it would last.

It didn’t take long for the rulers to turn NATs into a uniform currency that was utilized worldwide. The rarity of the tokens, coupled with the inability to produce any new tokens, meant that gaining new tokens relied on trading with other cities. It is therefore not uncommon to see cities trade NATs with neighbours in exchange for goods like crops or clean water.

Even common citizens are capable of using NATs. NATs are what most citizens receive as their salary for their work, and it is a universally accepted currency in most nomadic cities. Of course, due to NATs directly impacting the city’s functionality, citizens are taxed on a monthly basis by their local government in order to keep powering the city.

Alternate Currencies

Some cities find NATs far too valuable to be traded, due to these tokens directly affecting the city’s performance. Therefore, they only trade via goods and exchanges. It is not uncommon to see two cities trade not through tokens, but through a simple bartering process. A city that is lacking meat, for example, is willing to trade crops with another city in exchange for meat.

Large organizations, like Republic and the Neo Holy Empire, have also attempted to introduce their own currencies into the business. Cities under Republic’s control commonly use RES (Republic Ensured Salary) as their main currency and ask for their citizens to use that currency for all of their transactions. Likewise, the Church uses DAD (Deacon’s Ascendant Denar) as their currency of choice.

Both RES and DAD are digital currencies, but the organisations behind them also allow for the printing of plastic currency for ease of transport and added security against hacking. This has actually contributed to the resurgence of banks in certain business orientated cities.

Laws & Enforcement

Despite humanity’s struggles and the nomadic cities trying to band together to survive, there will always be selfish individuals who value themselves above the rest. While this certainly applies to the ruling class of certain cities, it can also apply to the underbelly. Criminals aren’t an uncommon sight in nomadic cities and will usually steal, rob and murder any unsuspecting victim just to survive.

Due to the lack of resources to provide proper jails and containment cells, criminals are treated harshly in the new world. Those who commit minor offences, such as theft or robberies, have their properties and goods relinquished and are forced to start back from ‘zero’ as a low class citizen. If they lack goods to seize altogether, they are instead given a debt to pay back and are forbidden from leaving the city until they do so.

Those who commit murder or severe crimes are exiled from the city altogether, usually denied even basic supplies such as food or water. It is considered to be the same as a death sentence.

The law enforcement in nomadic cities varies, but most of the time it is controlled by the ruling class. Aristocrats, businessmen and governors will commonly elect a group of trusted Magi to serve as their watchful dogs that monitor the city. While this can lead to citizens being protected, it can also lead to abuse from those same enforcers. It isn’t a rare sight to see cities be filled with corrupted law enforcement.

Church controlled cities have their own, unique brand of law enforcement which is composed of Executors that have failed the Executor exam. Despite lacking the aptitude to be an Executor of the Church, these ‘failures’ are far more capable than the average Magus and are unconditionally devout to the Church, resulting in low corruption rates amongst Church affiliated cities.

See Also

• Nomadic Cities
• Global Services