#gotta love this country for its unexpected weather lol

[winterwrites23]

Me, the last two weeks: “Ah, it’s getting warm! The snow is all melted, the birds are chirping. Guess I won’t need my boots anymore!”

Me, this morning, staring at the 15cm deep snow: “… I should’ve known. It’s Québec we’re talking about.”

[planet4546b]

can't remember if i asked this before but (whenever u have time) i would love to hear about the world beyond present-day continental u.s. in s/n ?? idk if you've thought much about that tho lmao (also gotta be honest that screenshot u posted once of one of ur discord notes that's like "the astronaut's mission control moved so they couldn't communicate w them anymore and they died in orbit". extremely fucked up i am in love with the concept) <3

omg yeah of course!!!! to be TOTALLY honest i havent actually done a lot of thinking about it outside of the most vague ideas and its something i would want to do a LOT more research to be able to talk about confidently, but also would be so much fun to develop one day tbh!!! what i can say are some general rules of the worldbuilding that would affect what the rest of the world at this time looks like:

the nature of the resonance is that it's an apocalypse that is neither hugely destructive of infrastructure or particularly deadly. the reason that in the continental us most large cities are nearly completely uninhabitable is because of how the spire placement sort of worked out, which is different in the rest of the world - so there are probably at least some places where cities and infrastructure are still mostly standing, and are still inhabited!! (i actually really like the idea of just an absolutely MASSIVE city out there somewhere - the original city was preserved, and then everyone in the surrounding area just started going there because it was safest so now it's just a single city the size of like conneticut)

complete and utter randomness is the name of the game, down to a geographical level (ie. the ocean in the middle of the us lol), so pretty much anything goes. lakes, rivers, mountains, even things like climate and weather are likely to be COMPLETELY unexpected and fairly fluid until a spire is established. once a spire is established, it'll stabilize one way or another, but there are new mountain ranges in places made of strange stones, places once divided by rivers that are now next to each other, whole forests full of prehistoric plants, new cities that are originally from other worlds, etc. borders in many places (but likely not universally) become pretty meaningless, and thats only IF you're in a place that attempts to/is stable enough to try to define itself as a country at all

spires are found around the world, and the sort of worldbuilding rule for their placement is that spires are often found at 'liminal' spaces or spaces specifically associated with travel (in the continental us, it's SPECIFICALLY airports). spires are, for whatever reason, responsive to a sort of collective understanding of what places could be definied as liminal for different communities, so this rule changes around the world but there will always be at least SOME spires. how people use the spires changes too - again, i would want to put a lot more thought into exactly how spires are used worldwide, but it's fairly universal that people figure out how spires can make things more stable and can use that in SOME way, but it's not always 'put a radio observer at the top of one and see what happens' (this is the reason that the spire network that sam is a part of isn't particularly connected to other people on other spires around the world, because they're just used in different ways). maybe people build cities straight into the stone of the spire, maybe they have digital equipment recording from the top that people log, maybe they have a sort of reverse thing where people on the ground stand close enough to the spire and observe it, maybe they anchor it in place physically to their community with something meaningful - the rules of this world and how spires work are loose enough that all of these things and more would work in some way!!!

travel without the protection of a spire is INCREDIBLY dangerous. the rules of spire placement above mean that the only place on the planet that truly will have NO spires present is the open ocean (the morganic is a pretty big exception because it's a sea that wasn't always there, and travel across it is still INCREDIBLY difficult), so there is next to no travel/communication between places divided by more than like, 100-200 miles of water. along with changing geographical features, it's spire placement that will determine what other travel is possible, and where and what communities are able to be in contact. this isn't a hard and fast rule!!! technology to negate the dangers of traveling outside of a spire's range exists, so if you're in a place that has developed this technology, travel looks entirely different, in an entirely different set of ways (is it a series of radio beacons and checkpoints across an expanse that still has to be walked across? is it a train that by moving along a single path every day stabilizes the world around it? is it ships that move in fleets around a central ship that somehow protects them? is it people moving in large enough groups that the sheer number of them begins to act like a mobile spire, a huge fleet of observers that can therefore stabalize the world? careful journey planning? extensive mapmaking? lots and lots of options!) BUT the range of spires still shapes the HISTORY of places and their interactions in a huge way

technology is difficult to use both becuase of collapsing infrastructure and because technology very often just sort of acts unpredictably (it's better within the range of a spire, but still not completely reliable). for this reason, access to and development of technology is HUGELY variable, and the sort of radio age that the continental us is in is by no means a universal thing (this is why somewhere out there there's a space program even though the cities we know are just getting electric light). it's also pretty dependent on access to knowledge, how knowledge is preserved, and if those places are accessible (are libraries/colleges/reserach hubs/etc in safe areas? is it important enough to a society to try to reach them anyways?). and also it can and should get WEIRD. cities powered by impossible perpetual motion machines and probability engines and communication through other universes and wifi through light etc. the world no longer works by our rules, so the technology doesnt either!!

while a large amount of societal/governmental collapse happens after the resonance, cultural collapse ABSOLUTELY does not, and cultural traditions familiar to our wold persist alongside new ones. as an example, in the areas of the continental us that ive developed, there are a handful of new religions, but existing religions are ALSO still around, and you'll find churches, mosques, and synagogues in pretty much every major city - this theory and concept carries over pretty much everywhere!!

as an overall, final rule places in this world very very often look unrecognizable at a surface level - new technologies, new cities, new mountains, new structures of society and types of government, new names for things, new environments, new animals and plants, new fashion and architecture and art - but are rooted in the familiar, and should still, in some way, feel familiar, homey, and recognizably human in one way or another to the viewer. this has been my overall goal in the worldbuilding ive done for the cities i have made, and is the single most important guiding factor for worldbuilding in general!!!!

which is an incredibly, incredibly long answer for me to essentially say 'i dont know' but still. what i love most about worldbuilding is just going absolutely ham within a loose set of rules so if i end up developing places outside the continent s/n is on it would get SO weird and SO fun!!! thanks for the question as always love you <33