#just for the kind of yuck description lol. anyways | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

safarigirlsp · 2 years ago

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First of all, I had to read the last couple scenes of the preceding chapter again, and omg I love Clyde throwing drinks in Mills' face and having to be stopped before calculating how long it's been since Mills got laid!

The opening is great and it strongly resonates with me that she's pleased that her contrariness was still intact! I love the description of Mills when she first sees him too.

He looked right out of superhero central casting, the kind of ruggedly good-looking that was reserved for Brawny man commercials and bodice-ripper front covers. You gave him your name and extended a hand. Julian looked at it oddly. It felt like offering a starving man a juicy steak. When he took it, his hand large and pleasantly warm, he held it for a long moment.

God, she was quick on the uptake. It had taken Mills hours and a long bout of sleep to even get his brain working again. She was quick and smart and beautiful. And he loved her so much already.

How nice it would be to have such a hot bastard so thoroughly obsessed with you!

It's so well done how you write Mills feeling like a guilty dick while also balancing being head over heels, and no doubt as horny as a teenager lol. That sort of depth and nuance is something you do so well! I don't even see that in most professional writers and you nail it every time!

He battled with feeling impressed and smitten, and having to watch emerging hopelessness and panic grip the woman he loved. He would spend the rest of his life happily paying penance now that she was with him, indulging her until his dying breath.

I of course love the canon we've created about Mills and his bad luck! It's so fitting, and he responds so well under the duress of it!

Mills and Clyde are always great and I love their exchanges. The one with Clyde being blissfully bereft of morals is particularly fun! I'd love to have that asset programmed into me lol!

Omg this was my main thought while watching Passengers because although I have no real issues with Chris Pratt, I just don't find him attractive at all, and what a motherfucker it would be to be woken up by him as your Prince Charming! There would be no such issues with AD or Mills, of course, but I love that he's thinking it anyway! And the short blonde dudes with nipple rings cracked me up. I love this line about it!

He could be as much not her type as she was perfectly his.

I love this too! It's Both dark and sexy, which I always love! And I think it makes a man infinitely hotter when he knows how hot he is and how to use it. I hate those shy shut-in wallflower types so much, or when you see these wimpy timid 'subby' types. So much yuck. Give me a hot cocky alpha male any day! And you write them to perfection!

How long, then, before she was ready to give in? To touch him like he craved, even if she didn’t really like him at all? It seemed an inevitability, even if he hadn’t known, from the earliest memories as a boy breaking hearts on the playground, to his exploits as an adult, precisely the kind of effect he had on women. What a sick thought, and one he kept having despite himself, counting greedily down to it.

This is a great little scene and I am eager to see what sort of mayhem is coming! It will be extra fun to watch them having to work together while being both attracted to and murderous toward either other.

Behind you, there was a failure with the greeter holo. Its blue light blinked erratically and powered down, the blue circles along its crescent base turning black as they died one by one. You were too frustrated to look back and Julian was too distracted by you. He walked up to your side, eyeing the small of your back and the swell of your ass under it, hand tingling with desire to rest.... on either one. He missed how the sphere flickered and shut down. Deep in the bowels of the ship, red letters flashed warnings on screens before guttering out. No burial was had and their ghosts were snatched piecemeal out of the ether by other systems, carrying on some of their work, while the other bits, both crucial and banal, stopped like broken clocks.

I love this line from Mills!

“I’d love to be regarded as the first and biggest failure in something,” he had a delightfully sardonic wit and you smiled for the first time in days.

The scene of them walking through the pods is such a great mechanism to show both how they view intuition and 'love at first sight' as it were the same, and also how much she frowns on having no say over her own destiny and the foreboding of Mills getting into some serious trouble. What a great and well-written scene!

I love thinking about Mills' misadventures! Rasputin Mills is of course a favorite mental image of mine. But Nudist Mills is also a riot and the roomba Olympics is just hilarious. All the background you've worked in here adds so much to him.

I love the way you end it with them dancing and trying to remain neighborly while the sparks fly! I love this story and am totally hooked! Each installment keeps getting better and better, and I love the interplay between the characters. It's so natural. As is all the inner turmoil and conflict in Mills. It's nice to see a cocky toxic man who knows just how hot he is and how to use that to his advantage, but who is also enough of a decent guy to feel guilt and remorse over his shitty behavior. I'm sure he'll do a first class job making it up to her!

[Starship Icarus] IV

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Summary: Mills finally meets his sleepin' gal.

WC: ~5.8K

You woke up as if from a grumpy nap as a child. Had you been a teenager, you would have rolled over, wrapping your blanket around you like a burrito and asked for five more minutes. Followed by trying to sleep for an hour or more.

The screen rose into view as your pod tilted. Your body gradually became accustomed to weight and gravity again, in a way that made you aware of the endless vessels carrying fluids all throughout the landscape of your flesh. You shuddered at the sensation and only listened to the voice greeting you and guiding you out of stasis without opening your eyes.

“We have nearly completed the voyage from Earth to Homestead II, where you begin your exploratory mission. Homestead II is the second planet outside Earth’s solar system to be colonized and the first in the Bhakti system to be explored,” she spoke in her serene, mechanical voice and you started testing out your newly awakened body. Deep breath, balling up a fist, swallow, blink, neck pop. The pod, cracked open like an egg from which you were meant to hatch, wheeled you to the door.

“…the Icarus is on final approach. For the next four months, you’ll enjoy space travel at its most luxurious.” You huffed an unimpressed little laugh and you were satisfied your contrariness was intact after a century in deathlike-sleep.

“…let’s get you to your cabin where you can get some rest.”

You remained in your cabin only long enough to follow the protocol, drink some resurrection juice and receive your luggage. It was nice and spacious in there, and you were gratified your Moroccan leather pouf was already waiting. You could immediately tell you’d be taking it easy and resting for a day or two until you were feeling more like yourself. A relaxing bout of reading with your feet up on the pouf and some fragrant tea steaming in a mug sounded heavenly.

As soon as you were out of your stasis gown and dressed in your own clothes, you went out in search of the other passengers. It was a little eerie to be alone, with only holos and machines for company.

“Hello?” you called out softly, voice still croaky from disuse. “Anybody around?” you asked casually, not wanting to come across as too eager or discombobulated. Silly thing to worry about in the face of colonizing a new planet.

A figure of a tall man shimmered behind a fountain and you stopped for a moment. Still groggy, you wondered if you weren’t just seeing weird shadows. Surely, the polite thing would have been to respond if he’d seen you. “Hi?” you offered, prepared to feel silly if you’d just greeted a mechanical ficus or a waylaid coat rack.

“Hi,” he responded in a gravelly voice and finally came fully into view as you passed the fountain. You watched each other in silence for a few moments. On your end, you were trying not to give him blatant elevator eyes or burst into girlish giggles. He looked right out of superhero central casting, the kind of ruggedly good-looking that was reserved for Brawny man commercials and bodice-ripper front covers.

Gingerly, as if he might scare you off, he took a few tentative steps closer. You did the same and stopped when there was a friendly, but polite distance left between you. “Are you passenger or crew?”

“Passenger. Julian Mills,” he was looking at you without blinking. He was probably just as disoriented as you.

You gave him your name and extended a hand. Julian looked at it oddly. It felt like offering a starving man a juicy steak. When he took it, his hand large and pleasantly warm, he held it for a long moment.

“I didn’t see anyone else from my row wake up yet. What about yours?” you asked, still more sleepwalking than awake. He stopped shaking your hand, but still held it.

“Same on my end.”

Thoughts were slow to crawl through the fog of your brain. It was increasingly frustrating to feel yourself sluggishly process information that should be received instantly. “The crew is supposed to wake up a month before we do,” you observed, looking around, somehow already knowing you wouldn’t find anyone else. The reassuring sheath of his hand around yours slipped away as you twisted around.

God, she was quick on the uptake. It had taken Mills hours and a long bout of sleep to even get his brain working again. She was quick and smart and beautiful. And he loved her so much already.

“I haven’t seen anybody else so far,” she added, confused, but hopeful.

His heart squeezed guiltily. He knew living with his actions would be difficult, but it felt worse in ways he could not have anticipated. “The crew is still asleep.”

“Are you sure?”

“Positive, ma’am.”

“Miss,” she corrected and he wanted to smile at that. It was the snippy tone he recognized from before and his chest melted like honey. “That makes me feel ancient.”

“Miss.”

“Um, back to the topic at hand,” she still felt loopy and it showed. “Who’s going to land the ship? We’re arriving in a few weeks.”

To make short work of it, Mills took her to the observatory. The same little panorama showing how screwed they were informed her of their whereabouts, now approximately two years closer to Homestead II than when he was there the first time.

“The others aren’t late waking up,” he said when he saw the same rejection in her expression that he felt initially. “We’re early.”

Her mind was beautifully clear and logical, so he led her down the same path he stumbled down many months before, without even needing to suggest the next steps. He battled with feeling impressed and smitten, and having to watch emerging hopelessness and panic grip the woman he loved.

The crew were in their inaccessible area, messages took decades to travel to and fro, it was impossible to break into key areas, impossible to get back into the pods.

Finally panic set it and he let her run off, in search of her pod. He gave her time, appreciating that she would want to have whatever breakdown was to ensue privately. It was the smallest bit of decency he could afford her.

When he eventually decided he should look in on her, she was still looking for a way back in feverishly. He indulged her, letting her try to convince him there had to be a way, as desperate and incoherent as she was being. He would spend the rest of his life happily paying penance now that she was with him, indulging her until his dying breath.

He led her past the wreckage in front of her crew room, where he had been unsuccessfully trying to break in with every implement he could think of. She agreed to take a seat in and some deep breaths, a sedative if need be. He half carried her as she slumped into his side, knees wobbly from over-excitement. She paused and took in the marks of a labor than had clearly gone on for months.

“How long have you been awake?” she looked up at him and frowned. Realization sharpened her gaze and he looked for any signs of accusation, of pulling away. None yet, he was momentarily relieved.

“Close to two years.”

Her hand lifted to her lips in horror and he could swear she was about to cry.

“Come on, it’s right through here,” he secured a firm hold around the curve of her waist and directed her towards a lounging area of the Grand Concourse.

“You remember the facility you had to go to? Where they put you under? The procedure has to be done with special equipment, pretty much only in lab conditions. It’s multi-faceted and it takes a long time. There is no such equipment on the ship, or anyone with expertise to do it. The pods we were in are just designed to maintain stasis for a certain length of time and wake us up.”

She listened, despite all the effort it took, and Mills could see her try to stave off more fits. Her body was tightly coiled, rocking back and forth in a tiny orbit, teeth chewing anxiously on her thumbnail. She was quiet for a long time, occasionally shaking her head, in disbelief or refusal.

“I don’t want to condescend in any way, but I’ve been through what you’re feeling now. You should believe I’ve tried everything I could think of.”

“Two years…” she shook her head. Her eyes were full of pity when she looked at him again. He couldn’t stand to meet her earnest gaze for longer than a moment.

“You should sleep,” he suggested gently. “It will clear your head, I promise. You probably feel like it’s full of cotton wool now.” She wouldn’t confirm and he decided not to tell her anymore about what ‘she must be feeling’. “Drink that freaky pink stuff from the water dispenser, it’ll feel good. In the morning, you’ll… I can’t promise you’ll feel much better, but you’ll be more yourself.”

She was still too shocked to cry, as he had been at first, so she just looked defeated. Still, she stood up and opted for the correct corridor to make her way to her cabin, which was impressive.

“I can walk you to your cabin,” Mills suggested as casually as he could, even as his heart climbed into his throat and choked him. “The layout can be confusing,” he fumbled, losing confidence when she didn’t nod vigorously or give some other indication she wanted him. He should have just said I’m taking you - in fact, I’m also holding your hand. And I’ll be there first thing in the morning when you wake up.

“It’s okay, I’ll be fine,” she said out of some self-sufficient, considerate habit.

She didn’t want his company. He tried not to spiral out. Sure, she’ll want to process this unimaginable calamity. However, he would have given anything, anything at all, to have someone with him on that first day. God, that first night, how awful it was, in endless solitude. And there she was, bravely walking away, sure that she would find a way to fix it.

“Almost two years…” she repeated, this time in a sigh that made him weak. “I’m so sorry you were alone for so long. It must have been torture.”

“It was,” he choked out, wondering if his face looked as guilty as his thoughts.

She shared a convivial silence with him before surrendering to her exhaustion. “Goodnight.”

Mills knew he would not be getting a wink of sleep that night. His blood felt like stinging electricity in his veins, shocking as it pumped through him.

“What’ll it be, Mills?” Clyde greeted in his subdued way.

“The usual.”

“How’s yer day been?” he asked just to make conversation. Mills’ paranoid brain detected a non-existent tone of accusation.

Mills swished the bourbon for a long moment, gaze lost in some private distance. “You know I have the worst luck in the world?”

“How’s that?”

“My prom date broke her leg after I asked her out – never made it to actual prom. I once gave CPR to a guy who’d been in a car crash. He sued me for fracturing some of his ribs. The company I worked for was the only one in the colonization business, right up until I was supposed to embark on the first mission. Then they went under. The one woman I’ve been unable to get out of my head is right under in front of me, right under my nose forever… and I can’t get to her.”

Clyde countered with his own programmed backstory – how his pa lost his diamond, how his uncle Stickley was electrocuted, how his ma got sick after she got their daddy’ settlement, how his brother blew his knee out and ruined a promising sports career, how he lost his hand…

“She’s awake,” Mills interrupted the story he had heard many times before, half-compunction, half-defiance.

There was only one she Mills had mentioned in all these months, so Clyde did not need to ask for clarification. “Congratulations,” he offered and Mills stared back, face not displaying the usual markers of happiness or satisfaction around the eyes or mouth.

“That’s whatcha wanted,” Clyde prompted, as though Mills’ circuitry failed for a moment and he was trying to get it back on track.

Mills could have strangled him. For the crime of being completely right.

“Ya don’t look happy,” the bartender noted and waited for an explanation.

“Can androids keep secrets?” Mills asked, realizing he should have wondered about that much sooner.

“I dunno ’bout androids, but gentlemen can,” Clyde responded solemnly, “and I consider myself one.”

Mills nodded. “Don’t tell her.”

“Don’t tell her what?” Clyde asked back earnestly. To him, borrowing her pen and waking her out of stasis were probably on par and he needed explicit instructions as to what to keep from her.

“Don’t tell her that I woke her,” Mills hated saying it out loud. “Let me do it in my own time.”

“’Course,” Clyde agreed all too easily, blissfully bereft of morals.

What if she likes short blond dudes? Mills wondered as he lay sideways on his prison cot of a bed. Still wide awake, he had his hands folded behind his head, eyes staring unseeing into the creamy ceiling. Some Aryan ideal? Maybe a British accent? A long coke nail? A nipple ring? He could be as much not her type as she was perfectly his.

It had been years since you woke up crying. The last time had been from a nightmare when you were still a teen. You’d forgotten it was possible to wake up already sobbing and salty with tears.

That next morning, you’d arisen, implausibly, even more desperate and disconsolate. If it even was morning. If time was reckoned the same way out here, or reckoned at all. If it was, then it was inexorably ticking down to your death, hurtling towards you like those glittering, burning stars sprinkled around your charging ship, dragging you into oblivion and making your fleeting existence truly pointless.

“No hibernation pod has malfunctioned in thousands of interstellar flights,” the holo assured you.

“I’m telling you, mine has!”

“Hibernation pods are failsafe,” it responded contentedly and Julian recognized the same conversation he once had as he approached.

“And yet, I’m awake! What a conundrum, hm?” you planted your hands on your hips, as though scolding. He took in the pose and smiled sadly.

“Dumb machine,” you muttered when you realized you’d get nowhere with that piece of junk.

“Happy to help!”

You gave it the middle finger as you turned to leave and join Julian on the way to the mess hall.

“Have you eaten?”

“No. And I could eat a horse,” she said unselfconsciously and he nodded.

“Gold class breakfast,” the dispenser announced when he was already seated. The unfamiliar pronouncement made him crane his neck curiously.

She carried over a tray laden with food and tucked into it as soon as she sat down. They ate in silence until she had to come up for air. It was then she noticed his soylent beige and black coffee. “Yeesh. I feel like a glutton,” she muffled, a big bite still filling out her cheeks.

He shrugged. He was enjoying the sight of her delighting in her meal too much to care about having the same gruel for the millionth day in a row. “Don’t worry about it. I’m just not a gold class passenger.”

“What?” she frowned and her hand shot up in front of her mouth in case some food came flying out. Mills was amused to see her eyes widen as the information soaked in. “No way! Are you kidding me? What is this wannabe class bullshit?” she was outraged and he ached at the fact that she could muster this emotion for him in the middle of all her turmoil.

He just shrugged again, trying not to grin around his spoon of bland soylent. He should have realized this revelation would incense her proletariat spirit.

“Have you been…eating just that? This whole time?” she tried to ask evenly, not to make him feel bad.

“For breakfast, yeah,” he said. It had been so long that he just couldn’t bother being upset about it anymore.

She, however, shot out of her seat. “Let me get you something! What do you want?” she entreated, flustered with the desire to do something kind for him. It was such a genuine compassionate act that guilt overwhelmed him again. What would she do if she knew, he wondered while she made her way over and examined the menu.

“Nah, I’m fine,” he protested half-heartedly. He had never been much of a fruit and veggie guy back home, but over a year in, he would take kale and rambutan and kumquat and fucking chard, just to remember how much he didn’t enjoy any of it.

She slid a tray heavy with food in front of him, from crispy bacon and hashbrowns, to scones and cut up papaya and dragon fruit, with some foamy coffee that smelled overly sweet. But he’d be damned if he didn’t down that odious concoction all the same.

He stabbed some dragon fruit with its Dalmatian dots embedded in the white flesh, chuckling at the sight.

“You like dragon fruit?” she asked, slowly recovering from her mortification.

“I hate it!” Mills proclaimed happily and popped it into his mouth.

During the day, and the next several ones, you kept suggesting different options. Checking out the infirmary, the cargo hold, the comms room, building your own pods…

We can’t do that, Julian would reply, or that didn’t work, I already did it, as he shot every idea down.

“You’re not even considering—” you snapped, losing the battle to frustration.

“I’ve considered all of it,” Julian assured, effortlessly patient. “I’ve tried it, I promise you. Everything you can think of, and then countless other things.”

He seemed ready to settle down and give into this trudge into the void. The mere thought of it made your pulse skyrocket and sent you hyperventilating.

“I’m not ready to give up,” you said unsteadily as your breath kept sliding out of your lungs without ever oxygenating you.

For the next few days, you consciously avoided Julian as you put your ideas into action. You tried and failed, just like he said you would.

Eventually, to keep yourself busy and try to make sense of some of your thoughts, you started keeping a log. Whether it would become a personal diary or a document you would try to submit in order to detail what happened to you and Julian to the company, you were not yet sure.

“Why did you do it?” you asked as you approached the desk where he tinkered with something that looked like half of a set of binoculars.

He looked up like a TV frozen on an uncanny distorted image.

“Join the mission,” you clarified as you pulled out the notes you’d been keeping for your log. “I hope you don’t mind, but I’ve been thinking of making some notes… Not sure for what yet, but I was wondering if you’d let me interview you?”

“Sure,” he became warmer again and put down what he was working on without complaint. “But what do I have to say that would interest anyone?”

“You are the first hibernation failure in the history of space travel. The first recorded one, at least,” you added with your distrustful tone and he smiled at that. He really could be distractingly handsome and you had to consciously hold back from trying to tease out more of those rakish smiles. “That’s major news.”

“Mh,” he nodded, “I’d love to be regarded as the first and biggest failure in something,” he had a delightfully sardonic wit and you smiled for the first time in days.

“You’re not in bad company.”

“Oh, yeah?”

“The Wright Brothers,” you supplied and he leaned his head side to side, weighing your words.

“Henry Ford, Albert Einstein...”

“You’re making me blush,” he gave a coy flick of the wrist, so at odds with his classical masculinity.

“Thomas Edison,” you added the last name that usually followed on that list.

“His fortune turned, I believe, when he started stealing,” he noted with a shrewd look on his face.

“Yeah. Forget that asshole,” you conceded.

“I take your point,” he said and added in a smaller voice, “it’s very kind of you.”

You interviewed him and learned not just about his life, but the hushed up history of the mission to Homestead II. Julian relayed how he was first advised to take a demotion, and after the company was almost bought out by some deranged South African autocrat rich off his parents’ blood diamond legacy, suddenly the old crew were no longer eligible. He also detailed the many months of solitude, replete with a vacillating mental state and copious misadventures. Although he didn’t pity himself or linger on the details, he was candid and you felt comfortable asking whatever question came into your head.

“And do you think you’ve, for lack of a better word, resigned yourself to this situation?” you couldn’t look him in the eyes as you asked that. You were too conflicted and that look would surely hurt him to see.

“I’m not entirely sure. A lot can happen in a day, let alone a year or a decade. So I can’t say I’m resigned. But I understand how it can seem that way to you,” he said kindly and waited until you looked back at him. “You don’t have to accept any of this. You’ve just woken up. It must be irreconcilable and unthinkable to you now—”

You shook your head. “I’m scared of accepting it, and doing it so effortlessly. It’s actually so much easier to give in than I anticipated. I expected... I had more fight in me than that.”

He leaned in closer, moving with urgency. “It’s not ab-,” he started passionately, but then rephrased, “I don’t’ think it’s about being brave or strong. You also need to see sense and recognize reality. And you seem to be… scarily good at that.”

You gave a bitter laugh. “Reality is something I can’t wrap my head around. To be traveling, until the end of my natural lifespan – which is effectively forever – and never arriving. I’ve never… conceptualized futility on such a stark level.”

Julian let the angst hang in the air, giving it the respect it demanded. Then he sighed and tried to approach you from another angle. “A wise android once told me that you shouldn’t get so hung up on where you’d rather be and squander the chance to enjoy where you are.”

You pursed your lips and considered.

“I’m sure it sounds like a platitude now, but it’s helped me in some ways over time.” Julian didn’t press for any answer or acceptance out of you, placidly returning to his work and sitting with you in companionable silence.

“Thank you,” you said after a while.

“What for?” he scoffed, sounding amused.

“For everything,” you didn’t want to embarrass him and enumerate all the small kindnesses and comforts he had provided to you as you woke up and realized the situation you were in.

It was obvious in his expression he did not think he had helped much. You hoped to change his mind. With any luck, he wouldn’t begrudge you avoiding him earlier.

“I should meet this Clyde,” you shifted to brighter topics, “he sounds like a character.” You had yet to meet the android bartender. Drinking or sitting in some simulacrum of a bar didn’t sound very appealing before, but you might as well check out more of the ship, you reasoned.

“Let’s go for a drink tonight, then,” Julian floated the idea. You couldn’t tell if he really was as nonchalant as he seemed, or if his eyes were trained on the object in his hands strategically, to give off that appearance.

You decided he probably wasn’t thinking of it as a date, but you could still feel the intent of him, filling the space around you. His presence, heavy and commanding, even when he didn’t mean to exert it over you.

“Yeah, sounds good,” you responded, suddenly preoccupied with your pad. You thought you felt him steal a glance as you looked away and it took great effort not to smile to yourself.

In her absence, Mills had noticed one of the little roombas repeatedly run into a corner as he walked by it on one of those lonely days. He didn’t think much of it. Its sensor could have broken or he himself could have been fucking with it too much out of sheer boredom that it somehow malfunctioned. After pondering whether he should bother trying to repair it, he decided not to since there were enough of those critters crawling around.

As they walked towards their cabins, through one of the pod rooms, he noticed two roombas rolling on as normal and was satisfied with his earlier decision.

“So now that all of this happened, do you still think sending large numbers of people on such missions is a good idea?” she probed. He was thinking about the same thing, watching them clustered together in their life-sustaining coffins.

“I think they would say yes,” he evaded the question, “you can’t categorize people into yes’s or no’s, ones and zeroes.”

“Homestead can. Into zeroes in its account.”

“I don’t dispute that. But you can’t know all these 5,000 people and their reasons to participate. Some of them could be very good.”

“Maybe so, but I know people at large really well. And I’m good at seeing when they’re being exploited.”

“But what about who they are? What drove them to be here? This guy?” he picked out a familiar face. “Can you tell anything about him? Is he a banker, teacher, or gardener?” he asked playfully and she accepted the challenge, peering over the lid.

He looked stern, with defined, robust features, austere even in repose. “Banker,” she guessed as he thought she would.

“Gardener.”

She frowned. “Probably gardens some gnarly, mean looking plants.”

“Madison, Donna, or Lola?” he covered the information plate on another pod and cocked an eyebrow at her.

“Donna. That fits a redhead.”

“Madison.”

“No way!” she peeled his hand off and checked her name. It was true. Mills was grateful she took some time to look on, taking in her face and reading the information about her because he was still reeling from feeling her skin on his again. “Midwife,” she said wistfully and her face fell. “Right. Some babies are bound to be born up there.”

He could feel them both carefully avoid the other’s eyes. Babymaking was an unhelpful thought to linger on just then. “Another sucker selling a useful profession?” he guessed at her thoughts.

“No. I mean, yes, it’s useful. But I was just thinking… It’s silly. But it occurred to me how we probably would have been friends.”

“You think you can tell these things?” Mills asked, living and dying a hundred times in the space it took her to respond.

“Of course. You know these things instinctively. Call it what you want, intuition, ancestral wisdom, something you carry in your bones. We’re still humans, even if we’ve soared among the stars. We’d gravitate to each other,” she concluded and he felt lightheaded. “Besides, my grade school best friend was also named Madison,” she shrugged, “it would have been an easy point in her favor,” she tossed a smile over her shoulder and moved to keep going, but a glance to the pod next to Madison’s rooted her to the spot. He almost bumped into her and felt a cold sweat dew on his skin at the idea of touching so much of her body with so much of his.

“Alicia,” Mills sounded out her name. A-lee-see-a, he pronounced it in the correct Spanish way.

“I know her. She had a rather severe change of heart and wanted to stay back,” she double checked her information just to be sure.

“Why didn’t she?”

“I‘m not sure. I lobbied for her contract to be voided and for someone to be taken off the waiting list and take her place. But they decided not to for some reason.”

“Or she decided.”

“I don’t know… She seemed pretty adamant from what I’ve seen,” she huffed, still bothered by the situation. “It doesn’t seem right, you know? To make that decision for her. Force her into something she didn’t want.”

“It doesn’t,” he agreed and crossed his arms over his massive chest, determined not to fan the guilt her words ignited.

“You’d know all about that,” she muttered.

His heart stopped. “What?” he felt his shame was written plainly on his face when she turned to him.

“With your pod malfunctioning and having to deal with it alone for so long. It’s the last thing you wanted. At least she’s asleep.”

She sensed he didn’t want to talk about it, and he let her fall quiet. Then she rubbed his arms in support and he felt even worse.

Mills was already waiting at the bar when she came around the corner. The still unfamiliar rhythm of her steps as they approached through the Grand Concourse folded a thousand origami cranes in his gut and they all soared, pulling his heavy body with their flight as he turned to look at her.

She had on a simple outfit of black turtleneck and high-waisted checked skirt, with a pair of what his onetime fiancée would refer to as sensible heels. She was breath-taking.

He smiled as he got up to greet her, like a proper gentleman, and offered his hand to help her hop up onto the stool. “You look wonderful,” he tried not to sound licentious and make things awkward.

If she was flustered, she didn’t show it too badly. “Well, I packed this. I thought I might as well wear it.”

“Sure,” he nodded slyly. He wasn’t about to let her reject the compliment. “And you look wonderful in it.”

Finally, she relented and tried not to smile too broadly. “Thank you. You both look very handsome,” she glanced from him to Clyde with a hint of humor in her voice.

“Clyde’s a sharp dresser for sure,” Mills joined in and Clyde accepted the compliment.

For a time, Clyde was prompted to recount some of Mills’ notable misadventures over the last two years, including his nudist period, his Rasputin phase, and the mini Olympics he staged with the roombas. When the laughter died down, what swam to the surface was the awareness that all of these stories took place owing to his unfortunate circumstances. He felt both himself and his awoken girl beset with a feeling of emptiness.

Mills looked over at her and she let him look for a long moment. “I can’t think about all of this anymore, Julian,” she sighed and his name on her lips felt like a kiss as it floated to him. “I’m hitting the same walls a thousand times… It’s too sad.”

“Let’s not talk about it for a while, then?” he leapt at the suggestion and offered his hand in a deal.

She gave his eagerness a smile and took his hand. When she shook on it and squeezed, it was confident. “Just… be my neighbor,” she asked amicably.

Mills nodded to himself, considering. Still holding her hand, he leaned over the bar and Clyde came close to hear him.

The song that was playing on the jukebox scratched to a halt and after a few beats of silence, a new, familiar melody tinkled its lullaby tune on a glockenspiel. Then a marimba filled out the tinny sounds and a piano joined smoothly.

It's a beautiful day in this neighborhood, the song started and she bent over with a laugh.

A beautiful day for a neighbor, the sweet voice went on and Mills tugged on her hand, inviting her to dance.

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

She relented and followed him a few steps away from the bar. He placed a hand in a respectful, neighborly spot on her waist, and she did the same, on his shoulder.

It's a neighborly day in this beautywood

A neighborly day for a beauty

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

They swayed together to the melody that was equally as sad as it was sweet. It fit the mood better than anything he could have planned for in advance.

I have always wanted to have a neighbor, just, like, you, she tap-tap-tapped to the beat into his chest with her index finger and he watched her fondly.

I've always wanted to live in a neighborhood with you, he mouthed the line, watching from her eyes to her lips, down her neck, and then he hit the brakes, before he got too un-neighborly.

So, let's make the most of this beautiful day,

Since we're together, we might as well say,

Would you be mine? Could you be mine?

Won't you be my neighbor?

Even Clyde tore his eyes away from his little glass as they danced, recognizing the image before him as one of classic, universal romance.

@thegrislady @safarigirlsp @lumberjack00fantasies @queeniebee @vedavan @house-of-cadwyn

#best #fic #65

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lucalicatteart · 6 years ago

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Avirre'thel : Climate, population & local country info (+ a bit about language)

Just an informational post about the climate (temperature, weather, etc.) of Navyete (where a majority of the Avirre'thel live), some general population info (how many members of this species exist, how the population is distributed, etc.), and some maps and short descriptions of Navyete and it's surrounding areas on the continent of Aviinine. (info under read more)

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((NOTE: Anytime I mention ‘Elves’ in this, I am specifically meaning Fanyin Elves (but just not wanting to spell it out every time lol), which are the main group of Elves in the lands of modern day Fanyin, and the modern day evolution of the same group of ancient elves that the Avirre'thel/vampires originated from, the ones who have lived on the same lands for thousands of years and have a history with them. There are plenty of other elves in other places in the world who have no history with the vampires and etc. The use of elf/elves/elven here is specifically in reference to only the ones on this continent, not elves as a whole)) (*also since writing this, I decided the thing about how to refer to groups of elves (name of homeland + ‘iri’ at the end), so the Fanyin elves can just be called ‘Fanyiniri’, which I may use in updated sections, but I wrote some parts of the text a long time ago so they may use differing terminology lol)

(ALSO NOTE: I try to give some estimates here and list stuff like percentages and temperatures and the amount of square miles that make up a country or etc. etc., but just be aware that I am bad at math and I know absolutely nothing about stuff like how big a country would usually be or how many people would live in a place or etc. etc. , so some estimates may be really unrealistic or off or maybe don't add up with other measurements listed. I'm trying my best to be thorough but don't get annoyed or something if i accidentally estimate a population incorrectly or something lol..)

I'll start with the maps and stuff first, since it's the longest part, and I guess is also the most broad information, so I can kind of start zoomed out and then gradually focus in (from the whole continent, then to just the population of one country, etc.)

This (above) is a full map of all of Nanyevimi (the entire world), I might change some things but this is I guess just a quick initial outline.

From this, we'll hone in on just one continent, Aviinine, loosely meaning ‘home of elves’ in ancient elvish. Though they did not actually originate here, the land has been home to some of the oldest elven societies and at some point was entirely inhabited by them and flourishing, even though today out of the four main countries of this land, Fanyin (and the "technically separate country but basically is just an extension of Fanyin" country, Mippya) is the only one which is still dominated by elves, with Asen having lost elven influence and becoming a diverse global city, Nanebae still being mostly barren, and Navyete now being the central hub for the Avirre’thel since their creation/split from the elves years ago. The name is still used though as it stuck around and most people (even modern elves, who’s language has evolved very differently and doesn’t share many similarities to ancient elvish anymore) don’t know the literal translation.

Here’s a really bad close up drawing of Aviinine (hopefully it looks similar enough for you to tell which one it is on the more zoomed out map lmao but it’s hard to take small things and scale them larger and make the outline look the same…lol.. it's up near the northern right side of the larger map), where you can see the individual areas outlined.

(though the shape is more accurate on the larger map.. on this on directly above, Fanyin is a little too far up, as it should be mostly below Navyete, since Navyete kind of sticks out above the rest of the continent with Asen and Fanyin being fairly even with each other kind of, if that makes sense? So the shape is more accurate in the zoomed out map, but this one can at least show the area divisions lol)

I’m just going to list places (I guess they’d be like countries technically) and then talk about them because I have no idea how else to organize this

This first one is going to be a bit long and the most detailed because it’s the main place that’s important to me currently (since I’ve been focusing mostly on the Avirre'thel recently and these are their lands)., but the other ones will be shorter , so hopefully this whole thing won’t be too long of a read lol

- -

Navyete:

in the past was originally named ‘Naviyethe’, but due to language changes* and also the vampires wanting to make the name more theirs and separate themselves from the old elves, the name was changed when the land was ‘taken’ from the elves.

The population in Navyete is about 98% vampires/Avirre'thel, with about 1.6% being of various humanoid demon species, 0.3% being humans (when I mention humans, I mean humans from Nanyevimi, NOT earth humans... Nanyevimi is an entirely separate fantasy realm and has nothing to do with earth lol), and 0.1% other, including maybe a few elves from Northern Fanyin who fled due to being targeted by the elven government or etc.

(also there's only about 2,400,000 Avirre'thel in existence, with 2,254,000 of them living in Navyete (98% of 2,300,000), meaning there's really like, not many Avirre'thel living outside of their native country at all lol. In the 20,000 years they've been around as a species they really haven't branched out much or settled other areas)

Originally vampires were mostly around Nanebae (like… hiding out in the mountain range after being forced out of Fanyin) and Asen (to some extent, though again, they weren’t allowed in major cities and there’s a huge hub of major cities on the coast of Asen, so they were still only in the parts of Asen most near Nanebae really). Also this is the Avillthe vampires I'm talking about, as of course the other "races" did leave this area and resided in a few other places (the Avleste were in the major cities in Asen, the Avesi were actually the first vampires to be in Navyete since they moved more up into the north to one of the islands there, the Avlethre somehow trumbled their way over into the isolated human territories, the Avan I guess technically would still be near where the Avillthe were, the only difference is they lived isolated inside the caves near the mountain range and the Avillthe didn’t, etc.), so the Avillthe were mostly the ones leftover and roaming around the Nanebae mountains for a while).

After a series of issues with the Elves, the vampires demanded an area of land in the north from the elves (since living in the coldest climate would be most suited to vampiric intolerance of heat lmao), who initially fought them about it, but then realized it would look bad on their ~~peaceful beautiful elegant image UwU~~~ so they decided to just give the land to the vampires at no cost (it’s all gross and mountainy and freezing anyway! yuck! not beautiful and flowery UwU), and actually gave them much more than they asked for (the entire country of Navyete instead of just a little section of northern land or an island). ..

After which the elves proceeded to aggressively frame this about how good they are and what a generous people they are to have given land to the vampires and how barbaric the vampires were to demand it from them in the first place, and to support the ideals of ‘Elven Kindness’ (as if they weren’t the ones who originally kept the vampires from even owning land in the first place), which did mostly improve their public image the way they desired it to, boosting tourism and people who idealized the elves or wanted to live in elvish lands. To which the vampires mostly just thought, ‘Thank god we are not them’, then sold some of the land around the border so that their land would no longer have any fraction of an area that is close to touching the lands owned by the elves, (originally Navyete and Fanyin were touching and shared a large amount of bordering land, but the vampires intentionally sold that land to people in Nanebae so that there would be plenty of space between them and the elves lol).

The whole continent of Aviinine is about 650,000 square miles, with Asen taking up about 172,000 sq mi, Fanyin & Mippya being about 220,000 sq mi, Nanebae being 102,000 sq mi, And Navyete being like 156,000 sq mi. The population of Navyete is about 2,300,000 or roughly 15 ppl per square mile (if it were evenly spaced) , but like a majority of the cities have a wAYY higher population density since like a majority of people literally live in a small belt in the middle upper part of the country and thats all lol.. most of the country is actually just wilderness and areas that aren't very inhabited.

Pretty much every city in Navyete has some sort of physical border around it, usually also with some type of guards, or fences, magic barriers, or other security measures. This is due to a past of Elves sneaking in across the border to cause trouble and spite them (like “well, we’ll give you this land but will still be assholes about it and occasionally set fire to things or sneak into your homes and burn them down even though we know you’ve hardly even been here long enough to get your footing”), which is mostly because the elves began to get paranoid of the vampires moving in so close to them after mistreating them for so long , so elven leaders felt it ‘necessary’ to occasionally send spies and others just to “make sure the vampires weren’t up to anything”.

(And also because it was a profitable tradition. Like part of it definitely was 'Oh no there's people developing into a powerful cohesive group right next to us and we’ve treated them horribly in the past so I bet they hate us, what if they rise against us, we should be defensive by… making them.. hate us more,, i guess". But then there was also an element of "Hey, we all hate the vampires right? Well guess what… for only a small payment of a huge amount of money, my “"tourism company”“ will offer to help sneak you across the border so you can go on the funnest adventure of your life! Have you ever wanted to burn down homes, rape, steal, and violently assault members of a small village as a fun upbeat weekend activity? Just pay me for the trip and you can have fun with all the destruction you’d like, and you’re guaranteed to be back and safe before the week even starts!".

So the frequent elven attacks were both like, out of utterly unfounded fear/guilt fueled paranoia, AND also out of certain groups (especially the government) realizing they could charge rich businessmen and lower down government officials and military leaders and etc. huge sums of money for the access to just,, go be shitheads in another country and harm innocent people that they felt deserved it (because "Avirre'thel are just gross corrupted elves who abandoned their magic and are weak and gross but also are like apparently fearsome and barbaric so we've got to get them before they get us!!").

( Some elves also justified this with the knowledge that Avirre'thel are incapable of dying, and just end up regenerating back to a healthy state no matter what you do to them (you could crush all their bones and cut off their arms and behead them and they'd be back to a normal state in like maybe a month or less), so going in and burning down their homes and brutally beating the hell out of them in he middle of the woods ins't like, something they can't recover from. They'll be back to full health within a week or two probably, and can always rebuild their flimsy little houses, so what's the harm? It's not like permanent death or anything. It's just a little game with no serious life threatening cost, obviously! (nevermind the trauma of constant violence and the drain on resources it takes to constantly rebuild everything)).

Which of course sometimes didn’t work out so well for them... If you gave the vampires a chance to fight they weren’t hesitant at all to kill the intruders, many entire groups of them were murdered on multiple occasions,for trespassing and trying to invade small settlements in the middle of the night. It was just that much of the time, the Avirre'thel were overpowered or disabled. You can’t kill Avirre'thel/vampires due to the whole immortality thing, but if there’s 40 of you and like 15 of them and you jump in and first thing cut all their limbs off, they’re not going to be able to have the mobility to fight you well, so you can take your time in the destruction from there, as long as you’re fast with initially getting them in a state where they cant fight you back, which the elven invaders usually were, since they could do magic , which the Avirre'thel, a non-magic capable species, usually had pretty much nothing to defend themselves against it. So a majority of the time the elven trespassing groups were very precise with their planning and would intentionally target groupings of people with little defenses, like small unprepared villages in the middle of the woods with a lot of children or physically frail or other individuals who would be less able to put up a fight and are too unconnected to the rest of the world to be able to quickly call on others, etc.

The attacks on the Avirre'thel (both the shitty tourist group attacks and the deliberate elven military ones, which,, honestly were functionally the same thing) went on a very long time only growing in frequency and eventually became a hugely pervasive problem, which is part of what led to things like the cultural focus on children being trained in evasive combat techniques and self defense early on (like age 8), everyone migrating to live inside of or right next to large cities (for better community defense), and also the beginning of a lot of organizations of demons who existed solely to travel with and protect vampire communities from attack (as demons are generally stronger than elves magically, and could defend them with strong magic, since vampires are inherently not magic capable), and of course, (back to the actual main topic of this series of paragraphs lol) the start of the traditions of building huge border walls around cities all the time with night watchers and stronger defense and etc.)

While they could have put a huge border around the entire country, or part of the country, so much of the land is mountain-y, or permanently frozen, or difficult to use in other ways, so they figured it would have just been too complicated and used up too much resources to have a solid border around all of Navyete. Instead, just opting to build it around “wherever there were people”, since the Fanyiniri and other elves/associates of theirs were really only coming in to attack people and their homes, so as long as border areas protect them then, who cares about having them way out in the middle of nowhere protecting trees or something.

This was made a lot easier by the fact that ancient elves (and thus the avirre'thel who directly came from them) were excellent at working with stone and metal, so it was fairly simple to build pretty sturdy walls around most larger cities at least, and even in smaller settlements or rural towns, it would be pretty easy to carve or build a basic wall and then find one or two villagers (or a few demon political activists working to overthrow the elven government that have formed a defense squad ) to keep watch at night.

Though some people have always preferred to live outside the walls, on their own in the forests/frozen beaches/mountains/complete middle of nowhere, or sometimes just perched right on the outskirts of the city walls so they can still feel more isolated yet maintain the convenience of city resources.. A good majority of the population had come to (and mostly still do) live in cities or smaller gatherings, pretty much all of which were walled in or guarded somehow. This could possibly have also contributed to the somewhat more community focused than average culture of the Avirre'thel, given that even though you could travel freely from place to place at any time, you were still usually kind of literally living in a closed off space with others, which even in largely spread out areas like huge cities, can make you feel closer.

In recent times, they don’t receive much trouble from the elves, but have security up regardless, due to still being quite on guard for them, though they usually use other means of security rather than just, building huge ass walls around everything all the time lol. Today many walls are not upkept anymore and are only around for aesthetic or cultural value, but it’s still extremely common to see cities with tall stone walls spanning the entire border of the city, they’re just probably not actively guarded as much and don’t serve the same purpose. Invisible walls or barriers made with enchantments are much more common now as well, though they used to only be used in addition to physical walls, now people simply use them on their own. It's still kind of been integrated though into traditional Avirre'thel architecture as just a Thing They Do, even if they don't use the walls for defense any longer, they may still build a decorative and elaborate wall around a newly constructed city, or implement smaller wall-like barrier looking structures into normal buildings and etc.

They do also now have a partial border wall going along certain popular areas close to Nanebae and Fanyin (which is like , just about the only sort of border thing that doesn’t have a city directly inside of it, but then again it still is connected to living areas and buildings, like at some points the 'wall’ is more just like, a fence that connects multiple housing and health buildings lol). Not to keep people out, but due to the increasing amount of individuals fleeing from the current state of Fanyin. They’ve set up like a whole connected string of watchers and help centers and special medical buildings and etc., so that when like, random teenagers show up malnourished and ill and traumatized having just ran through the freezing woods for 27 days to escape torture and slavery, they are sure to have adequate resources for them and people waiting there to help them get on their feet and find them food and shelter and etc. But this like 'fence with a bunch of medical facilities and stuff alongside it' is really the closest thing they have to an actual border wall for the country as a whole, and still usually only do walls for cities and etc.

so ANYWAY, ,

ALSO in southern Navyete is usually a lot of farms, since that’s the warmest land they have (like up in the north north it’s iced over and snowy nearly all year around). Though vampires don’t necessarily HAVE to eat (as long as they consume blood when needed, they’re fine), majority still do, and while a small amount of the food is imported from other places overseas or taken in from Asen (though lol they don��t use routes through Nanebae because they never want to run into elves, stuff from Asen is usually moved from coast to coast rather than on land. and this is really only foreign/non-traditional foods), they do still vaguely try to grow some food of their own and farm when they can, especially for specialty local dishes and herbs and spices and etc. that are unique to vampiric/Avirre'thel cuisine.

It's less populated and much more rural in Southern Navyete, but all of the farms and little towns and etc. still usually exist within a wall and have plenty of connection to their own and local communities. Farming towns and such usually exist in little clusters along popular southern roads and trade routes, so they still have connection with the rest of Navyete and easy travel access. Though of course there are some people who live completely in the middle of nowhere far out in the woods outside of the walled boundary of any town (and are pretty much just left alone to do their own thing), most people living in southern Navyete are just inhabitants of small towns/cities that mostly work on growing or harvesting food. Though you could also count the people who live in small cities right on the border, who usually do more medical or government aid work (as these border towns only exist to stay along that fence (which is technically in southern Navyete) and help fleeing elves) instead of farming stuff.

The middle of Navyete (including most area of the islands) is where a majority of the population lives. As mentioned, all cities have a defined ‘city wall’ , though today it really depends on the city as to whether there are actively employed people who watch guard of it. 55% of the population of Navyete as a whole lives in the various main cities in the middle of Navyete. With the rest mostly living almost directly outside the city walls (this is by choice, it’s not like there’s not enough room inside or something, they just, idk, maybe prefer the type of housing (larger homes usually) on the outside, or in smaller rural towns (still with a wall but, just, smaller, more sloppily constructed, or in modern times possibly without one since walling everything off isn’t as popular anymore) .

(So like the population would maybe break down something like: 55% of people live within the walls of one of the various cities in the middle of Navyete, 8% live in areas directly outside of the city walls (still in the middle of Navyete), 12% live in smaller towns in between the major cities (in the middle of Navyete), 22% live in other areas like southern Navyete or the middle of nowhere outside of towns and etc., and 3% live in actual northernmost Navyete on the islands or far up in the top north (which like 1,000 of those people would be those who serve on the council (the government of Navyete) and all of their advisors and etc. , since their main meeting area and living spaces are for some reason up in permanently frozen hell mountains in the very furthest north lol). But generally yeah like, 75% of people are all in the middle of Navyete, which is where most resources are clustered and etc.)

Like anywhere, there’s still of course a few that live out in the middle of nowhere but a large majority of the population is concentrated in a few specific areas. Navyete has a ton of unused forest and wild land (partially because it’s uninhabitable/dangerous and partially just because of vampires focus on having a strong community, and also from preferring a very particular climate lol) that mostly just has a few travel routes and maybe a small town every once and a while but not much there. The grouping of cities in the middle portion of Navyete is essentially where everything is. I’m not really sure how to describe exactly what the buildings usually looks like so I’ll give pictures -

(NOTE: All images are just taken from random google image searches, and aren't exact, they're just the closest approximations I could find for the type of aesthetic I was thinking of, without having to sit down and painstakingly draw a bunch of buildings to have them exactly as I envision them lol)

Basically all of the buildings in vampiric cities look something similar to this style:

(minus any modern looking glass buildings in the background of these images lol)

Sometimes newer buildings may look a bit more clean, but have a similar aesthetic, like this:

Housing in city areas usually looks something like this -

or sometimes larger apartment buildings and community home type places (nobody is technically homeless (unless it’s by choice like in the case of travelers/wanderers/adventurers/etc.) in Navyete, everyone is provided with at least basic housing and food, but basic housing places are usually kind of like large community homes where everyone has their own room but there’s a shared dining hall and public areas and etc (due to how much most vampires are used to sharing kitchen spaces or public bathrooms or etc. with others, this really isn’t seen as a bad thing to them)) will look something like this (below) and are always located in cities, rarely are in more rural areas

Homes outside of city walls, usually look more like this -

And really tiny homes in the middle of nowhere are probably more like this -

(( AND Of course there are some ancient buildings, like the main government hub where the council meets far in the norther mountains, and many of the main areas of cities or the walls built around them will have the more distinct and older traditional ancient vampiric architecture style, but... I have to finish my drawings of it so I can actually make a post about it lol, so for now I'll leave that part out. Though traditional architecture does incorporate very similar elements, though the style is a bit different, the same ideas still stand in terms of everything basically being made of stone or glass with little wood, and there being a ton of metal working and everything being fairly ornate. ))

But yeah in general, whether in the city borders or not, most all Avirre'thel buildings include like.. lots of stones.. rocks..bricks. plain kind of dark colors, lots of grays and whites and dark shades with a few muted accenting colors. Often a lot of details or elaborate patterns.. a lot of windows (they just dislike the heat itself for reasons previously mentioned in the species outline post, but are totally fine with sunlight itself, they actually like natural light and the sun, just as long as it’s still pretty chilly temperature wise).

Except, in addition to the above aesthetic, they also have heavy focus on metal, especially fancy grates and windows with metal and etc. , I couldn’t find example images in the same style that featured these things but (and this will be more clear once I eventually create the main post about traditional vampiric architecture), as a left over thing from their very early building styles they’ve always used a lot of metal with the stone, so just like, imagine the stone buildings above as the base but pretend there’s a ton of fancy metal working and metal light lanterns or something hung on the outside of every home -

(Kind of like below, not exactly though, since Avirre'thel metalwork usually has it's own distinct patterns and repeating designs it follows, but again, these are 'close approximations' from google image searches, not exact replicas)

And imagine that all the windows (not just decorative statement windows like, every single window in the house/public building/etc.) look kind of similar to stuff like this -

(or some places have windows without glass that are just metal grates kind of, like metal windows to let light in but just metal without glass in them like this, (but having glass is way more common especially for public buildings)

and often featuring random metal stuff like these built into the walls or hanging outside or covering windows or etc. -

and especially stuff like this (which i couldn’t find many examples of, the one in the image is kind of plain for them and would probably be more elaborate, but the idea of metal decor in doorways that hold lanterns is very much something they’d have)

or like these for front doors to houses/public buildings or even usually doors to rooms within a house (except have the wood part be plain metal lol,, they do,, use wood sometimes,, but like, most of everything is just metal, glass, and stone/brick/etc. Though doors are the most common things to use wood for, and can be pretty common, many doors have been metal and glass only,, its probably about like 50% both ways, with half of all buildings having wood + metal+ glass doors and half just being metal + glass (except maybe a few of JUST wood or just metal etc., and in some more ancient buildings, stone doors of course, though those are heavier and less convenient lol ) -

and fences that are just plain metal, or plain stone, or like this (pretend the pattern in the middle is metal instead of cement lol ) -

and especially stuff like these (like, metal detailing around roofs and etc. They like to add excess metal everywhere they can basically, just for the sheer Drama And Aesthetic i guess lol) -

SO ANYWAY, basically the styles listed above in the buildings but add onto them,, a lot of metal stuff, since something they’ve always done, especially in their more traditional architecture is lots of metal detailing with stone as a base (so the house may be carved stone but all the windows, doors, some of the interior walls, etc. are all fancy metal work) , even though the designs in these pictures are not exactly the same patterns they would use , again all of these are just kind of an estimate, the most similar-ish things i could find on google since i am awful at drawing actual buildings,, but like, in general, just think… a lot of kind of muted colored stone and brick and rocks and stuff,, usually ornate and kind of fancy,, but also with a ton of metal everywhere all the time lol

Even when new buildings are made they’re created to mimic older styles, since they feel like everything should be uniform (not exactly the same, but uniform in the sense that there is a theme, you wouldn’t have some fancy ornate dark colored stone building right next to a modern flat square-shaped apple-store-esque glass-front white building.. which this does mean… yes… they are modern and have stuff equivalent to McDonalds but all of them still are in fancy looking stone buildings lmao.. they’ll have like a three story building with an elaborately carved stone staircase and shit when it’s just a neighborhood grocery store like a Walmart or something. Though they do occasionally have more modern looking storefronts in cities , they're always in the bottom of fancier looking buildings (kind of like in the fourth image of city buildings above. ). It doesn’t matter what it is, it usually has to fit a general aesthetic for it to be approved because of them wanting everything to have harmony and aesthetically pleasing surroundings. Though each city may have it’s own differences and little elements that have changed, it will generally have a similar look.

In the lower half of northern Navyete right past the middle of the country is where most of the council families live, since northernmost Navyete is where the city is located that is the major hub for politics and government and the meeting place for the families (where they go every 3 months to decide on things).

It depends on the size of the family, but ‘royal families**’ usually have quite massive homes, with 30+ family members on average, including usually about 35 + various workers, from maids to chefs to scholars that are hired to live there and give continued information and council to the council members in that family (like they’ll often have a resident scholar just in case old texts need deciphering or if they need someone to help find connections to information on a particular thing that someone in the family is planning on presenting to council during the next meeting, etc.).

It depends on the family, but usually if you work for someone in that sort of way , then you live with them as well (especially since they’re a bit away from the main cities, so a staff member is not going to travel miles and miles back and forth all the time when they could just live there at their place of employment), so some homes of Council Families have like 100+ rooms on average. Staff/hired scholars/etc. very very rarely live separately, they usually have a room in the main house just like everyone else, as they are required by law to live with the main family and dine with them and use the same areas and etc. (unless they choose not to of their own will, but like, a family can’t legally force the maids or scholars or mages working for them to live in different conditions than they do, or give them smaller rooms or different food or etc., especially since council family members (basically government workers who make decisions in a huge council) are held to a vaguely higher standard than the general population, given they literally have people’s lives and well being in their hands, and even smaller scale (in the sense that it’s not murder or something) things like underpaying your staff or mistreating your children or etc. will get you kicked out of the government immediately and permanently). So they can end up having pretty large houses depending on the size of the staff and the family itself, the size of the property, and what sort of resources are needed . These can be in the style of mansions or sometimes look more like castles, though they’re usually similar in architecture to most buildings in the cities and etc.

(** They’re called ‘royal families’ sometimes by outsiders, as their style of government is uncommon and most outside people think that if there’s like, family lineage ruling stuff involved that it must be some sort of royalty system or etc.. But it’s not like they really have much of a title. There are no kings or princesses or anything, main government leaders just have the title of ‘council member’ (or ‘Arra’te tu jyasa’ , literally ‘Important person of the council’), and they’re usually collectively just called ‘jyasa vata’ (council families) instead of ‘royal families’ or something (there are like..almost 600 of them so they use pretty general collective titles) ..

Though when speaking to outsiders or explaining their government system to them or sometimes when vampire affairs are reported on in other countries' news or etc., they are referred to as ‘royal families’ or will be called ‘princes’ or etc. But that’s more just like how they similarly allow people to call them ‘vampires’ even though that’s not actually how they refer to themselves, it’s like a thing that they’ll do or let it pass with outsiders even if that title may not be exactly accurate (BUT more about them when i actually explain the government system lol, not here). I just wanted to explain that even though they're referred to that way by outsiders who don't understand them, there isn't actually a legit system of royalty in Navyete and they would never consider themselves with those titles personally. )

((Also, another note: Most of the general population branches off from their family and owns their own homes or apartments in the city, Council Families are really the only group who still have the tradition of living with your entire extended family for your entire life (which used to be more common when the vampire population was smaller and tiny concentrations of communities were essentially how you lived, like 3-5 families all centered in the same area with about one home each, working on a community farm and stuff). It may be done to a more minor degree sometimes in larger homes right outside the walls of major cities, and it is actually uncommon to live alone (most have at least 2-3 roommates, family, friends, etc.) but for the most part, everyone prefers to have a smaller group they live with, sometimes friends or maybe one generation of family, but never really to the same extent as the council members. Council families will have like, aunts, grandparents, great grandparents, like EVERYONE all on the same property lmao, which is why they're usually such huge collective living spaces. ))

These estates are kind of arranged in a network of areas, there’s three main ones, with 5 homes each being organized maybe a little closer to each other than the others, and they usually distantly connect to a sort of small park with a local school and maybe a transport center (so their kids can go to school in a place a little closer than traveling all the way to the nearest major city, and also so that goods can be transported and left in a sort of middle area, like you can bring a large amount of goods to the little central hub area, then those can be split amongst the families who are concentrated around that area, and taken on the main path back to their estates, rather than small amounts of goods being taken the whole distance individually all the way back and forth for each family).

like this... kind of (very sloppily made in paint in 3 minutes but, this kind of shows what I mean in that they all live in one area, sort of)

There’s also usually an inn here and maybe a local general goods shop, for workers or people who are travelling back and forth (like scholars who come from out of town to temporarily meet with the family but maybe decline the offer to stay in a guest room and would rather stay in an inn, or weird family workers who refuse to live on family grounds for some reason and would rather travel like an hour to work everyday instead of just living with the family. etc.), and usually one or two homes may be in the general area, mostly of members of a council family who wanted to move away and have their own much smaller property but still stay kind of close, or for workers who were visiting one of the families so often they decided to just relocate their home near them (like a visiting alchemist who keeps getting called to them for council every few months and is tired of travelling all the way out there, but also doesn’t want to live on their property because they want their own privacy), etc.

So anyway, most of lower-north Navyete is like.. just... council families. The weather is more inhospitable further up and the terrain is also rocky and frozen and harder to build on, so most people always have just kind of preferred the middle of the country. The council families really only live in the North because their main meeting city is in the very very northernmost mountains. If the council had been established in recent times instead of like 15,000 years ago, then it probably would have been build more centered in the middle of the country instead (basically, council families only live there because they have to lmao, everyone who has a choice has already moved out of the north bhbb) -

In northernmost Navyete, there is hardly anything, other than the city where council meetings are held, which honestly is just called a city but isn’t really a city it’s like, literally just one massive.. structure?? With a wall and guards around it just like any other city, but it’s only one place ( carved out of basically one large constant bit of stone, like they just carved into the side of a mountain lol). Everything is literally connected and basically made out of the same bit of stone, so it's not really a city but more just like “large house with thousands of rooms and huge dining areas and meeting rooms and etc. all built into one place along the same circular levels of hallways.")

It’s like a five story stone building with probably well over 1,200 different rooms, (there’s around 600 main family council members in total, plus the entire staff and guards, plus sometimes they have to invite outside advisers if they’re discussing a matter that none of them have experience with somehow, PLUS all council members are technically allowed to bring one single “personal staff member” (usually people use this to bring their trusted scholars , or maybe their favorite chef, basically if you feel someone on your personal staff at home is important enough to need to have with you for some reason you can bring them, despite them not being an actual council family member, though they’re usually kept away from important secret discussion and also are extremely screened before being let in) if they choose, so it ends up being a ton of people who all basically get their own room when they come to stay there every few months, and there’s also like 100 different meeting rooms and then bathrooms and dining halls and libraries and rooms for the staff to wait in when they’re not allowed to be around to overhear a private conversation and etc etc etc.

There are a few small homes outside this one area, but this is really the only thing in northernmost Navyete, just a one huge ass walled in stone structure with practically a mini-city inside of it except it’s all connected as one building, where people come to meet every 3 months (and there’s always others there keeping guard in ‘off times’), then a few shacks maybe… the rest is just.. ridiculously cold mountains and ground that has been iced over for hundreds of years and varying levels of endless frozen landscape stuff with nothing else around lol. There's sometimes a few trees or plants but this is also the type of area where there stops even being forest and it's just.. plain white landscape all around as far as you can see (though the flat blankness is disrupted a bit by it kind of being rocky so you see hills and mountains and stuff which adds at least a little variety to how barren it is.).

Beyond this, there are some small fishing communities that live on the Northern coast of Navyete, and the islands right off of or around it, but due to the climate it's not a very popular place to live, even amongst generally cold-loving vampires. like.. generally.. everywhere in Navyete is pretty cold, it's just that northernmost Navyete is The Most Cold Of All The Other Coldness Permanently Frozen Winter Fun Time)

- - -

Nanebae:

The one name that has kind of stayed the same over the years, aside from being shortened into ‘Anba’ occasionally by foreigners from Asen (which was started by the elves though because they have the need to shorten and give cutesy easy to say names to everything UwU, meaning most vampires downright refuse to call it ‘Anba’ and would rather fucking rot than play into the elves' constant remodeling of e v e r y t h i n g ..anyway lol) .

Nanebae is also the collective name of the mountain range that takes up most of the middle of the continent, though many individual mountains will have their own names as well. Due to how mountainy and interrupted it is, not many people live there, and also not many people are too interested in the land. Though it used to belong to the elves, it was sold many years ago so that the elves could fund some of the things they were working on to ‘further the elven species’, so it’s currently owned by an outside government of another country to the south. It’s commonly thought of as an in between point, despite how large the land is, it’s conceptualized as more of a place between places, that you may stay for a while but you’re likely heading somewhere else. There are many inns and food places and touristy things, and A TON of trade routes and stuff where food or goods are transported back and forth (since Nanebae is right in the middle of the three major countries of the area), but doesn't have many actual homes and hardly any actual cities, mostly just scattered trade towns and rural communities. Most all traffic in Nanebae is people coming to or from the Elven lands (and sometimes vampire lands but… they don’t really have many outsiders) from Asen.

There’s not much of a government or enforcing body around Nanebae, due to the low population, lack of people who actually settle down there, and the fact that it’s technically owned by an outside group who don’t live on the land themselves. Most law enforcement or people who decide things about the land are sent from other places, such as a few ‘watchers’ from the Fanyin Elves to keep tourists safe and ensure quality of their travel, and some government workers sent overseas from the country that actually technically owns the land.

Otherwise, it’s mostly people looking out for themselves, and there’s no official president or anything, and if something legal has to occur it’s usually moved to larger courts in Asen or Fanyin (like if you had a land dispute with your neighbor and you couldn’t work it out in just the council of the other few people in your community and you actually wanted to sue them or something, you’d probably have to travel to somewhere else for them to take care of that).

Though it would be thought that this would make the land a good area for crime, and sometimes it is, the few groups that live there do harshly protect their lands, so if outside people come looking to just do crime and get away with it, they’re often confronted/attacked/punished by fierce civilians themselves rather than any law enforcement body (kind of like a "Hey there fucko you think you can just come into MY lands and use them for whatever weird shit you want to do??? not gonna happen lmao, how about you and the three people who work on a farm with me go have a little chat,,, you know the good thing about not having laws is it works both ways,, you think anyone here is gonna do shit right now if we kill you? that there’s some sort of court we’re going to 'fairly’ try you in before we rip your limbs off? get away from that person you’re trying to rape and get the hell out of my country right now before we show you how a society without laws is allowed to handle criminals like you, there’s no police to protect you here, bitch! " sort of thing).

So Nanebae in general is kind of just in a weird situation as a country, it's very "anything goes". Over 60% of the people there at any given time are just travelers or tradesmen on their way to somewhere else or to popular merchant cities and trading points in the area. And out of the small amount of permanent residents, its usually a pretty mixed bag.

Of course there are many elves since the entire continent used to be ran by them, but they're usually rogue elves escaped from Fanyin, or ones who never even were a part of the Fanyiniri in the first place because their group split off from them long ago before they started all this dictatorship stuff. A few Avirre'thel that never went with the rest of their people back to Navyete and have been chilling since the early days when they first got kicked out of Fanyin, and maybe some Jhevona who originally came to the area to help the vampires in wars against the elves but didn't like how cold Navyete was so they settled down in the warmer part of the continent, even though it's really rocky, etc. And because it's such a traversed area, you of course get tons of random people, children who are going to be sold to the black market in Fanyin and end up escaping whilst on the trade route and going to hide in the woods, random people from thousands of miles away who are fleeing responsibility and drawn to a place that's so diverse and unstructured that they don't think they'll ever be found there, merchants who fall in love with one of the permanent residents who works at an inn along a trade route and they end up staying around for good, etc. etc.

But despite this each community generally has good unity, despite them all coming from different walks of life usually and generally any trade city (or even small residential towns in the middle of nowhere) being made up of completely random people who wouldn't have had much in common otherwise, the general sense of lawlessness and lack of care that any outside group has for Nanebae kind of fosters a stronger group mentality for people to take care of each other and give out free medical care and take criminals into their own hands and etc. etc. The people just create their own structure, regardless of whether outside governments give them aid or invest in their infrastructure or etc. or not, they'll do it all themselves, together.

(Though like obviously there is some outside interference. The random country from the south that actually owns the place does use the land for resources mining (they've attempted to collect tax from the citizens or like, tell them to follow their country's religion and kings and etc. but everyone in Nanebae was just like "You guys live like 300 miles away, what the fuck are you gonna do about it? have you ever even set foot here? if you want to enforce laws upon us then actually come the fuck over here and do it, cowards." to which the royalty of the country was just like 'okay... uh.. allright just keep doing your thing I guess as long as you don't bother our resources.. have a good day"),

and of course Fanyin can't keep it's grubby little elven hands out of shit so you see Fanyiniri soldiers and stuff along trade routes a lot to protect their cargo or just hassle random locals when they feel like going on a power trip (though, again, the locals are very out for one another and have been known to kick the complete shit out of an elven guard lmao, like... your laws don't apply here, fuck off ),

and Navyete has positive relations with the area in the sense that occasionally groups in Nanebae will come to ask something of the Council (like asking for money to repair damaged bridges or medics to help at a local village or etc.) and they pretty much always offer help to them. Especially with court cases and stuff (like out of all the outside legal systems someone in Nanebae could go to, Navyete would be the best choice since the Avirre'thel legal system is generally very fair and forgiving and un-corrupt, Asen would probably be second since they're pretty good but because of all the huge cities there and what a broad area it is there is some corruption with local merchants or politicians tampering in things, Fanyin (& Mippya by extension) would be the absolute worst because all of their laws are conditional on what class you fit into so you get shit like 'murder is technically legal if the murderer was higher class than the victim, no other context needed" bhb)

Likewise Asen is usually open to helping people in Nanebae, though they can tend to be a bit more busy and bogged down with their own problems since Asen is such a populated area with like multiple global cities and etc. to worry about.

SO ANYWAY, like.. it's not like the surrounding areas refuse to have any contact with Nanebae or anything, they're not ENTIRELY on their own, it's just that like.. largely they very much function that way and still handle most of their local laws and etc. entirely internally without any realm form of centralized government or etc. in the area. )

The high mountain areas of Nanebae are also a common area for outcast or hunted elves to live. It’s not uncommon for the Elven Government to come after it’s own people, usually for stupid shit like ‘you went on international TV and talked shit about your own people’ (basically 'you said something factual’) or ‘you wrote a history book that accurately portrayed how much we’ve fucked with everyone else, especially the vampires, and we are definitely in the wrong about it but how dare you point that out and Attempt To Tarnish Our Beautiful Reputation UwU’. Though some of them flee into vampire lands as they feel more protected there, many feel they’d rather stay on their own or in small groups with each other, and utilize a lot of the seemingly uninhabitable landscape, usually with magic , to make very hidden areas they can live in peace.

- - -

Fanyin & Mippya :

Previously all of which was just one country named ‘Vanyen’, before language changes made by the elves (like the V becoming F) , and the addition of their newest country Mippya. Fanyin (or ‘Vanyen’) about 18,000 years ago used to cover most all of present day Navyete as well, as in ancient times the land was just either Vanyen or Yansha Vanyen (New Vanyen), with the Nanebae mountains in the middle. Now it’s much smaller as elves have sold or “”””””graciously given away”””””” their lands to various people and governments, but the land of Fanyin (and Mippya) is still prosperous.

(side note: The Avirre'thel, mostly in protest to the new form of Fanyiniri government and the changes made by the elves in the past 15,000 years or etc., generally will refuse to call the land 'Fanyin', and still call it 'Vanyen' (or will call it 'Fanyin' in a derogatory or sarcastic way), and also generally don't recognize Mippya as it's own country. )

Mippya is a newer separation, only established in the past 800 years, mostly as land for foreigners*. The Fanyin elves are very welcoming (or at least like to give the illusion that they are), and rely a lot on their image. They love spreading their culture and beliefs and systems to as many people as possible, and wanted a more exclusive area where foreign individuals are doubly welcome, where there is adequate housing and signs in multiple major languages and better things in place to make others feel at home (so they can get that sweet sweet tourist money to support the extravagant lifestyles of the government workers while over half of the population dies in cramped underground prisons basically.. i mean.. uh,,, because they uh,, they 'love to share their culture and definitely value tourists very much').

This is also thought to be part of their whole thing about spreading the elven way of life and etc. and maintaining high public image of elves being benevolent and superior and positive, kind of as if the whole land were a giant advertisement for the elven people (at least those within the alliance). They want to be seen well, and they want the public's only idea of them to be like 'those perfect people who live in complete paradise', so part of the entire purpose of Mippya is also kind of just like, "Hey foreigners, come over here to these vacation lands specifically catered to you and see how great we are!! Look at how luxurious and clean and perfect everything is!! Support the elves, by the way.. I mean just look at the prosperity we bring to everything we touch!" etc.

(( *This is similar to the original purpose of when they first separated off Navyete (or ‘Naviyethe’ at the time). It was supposed to be a nice property where they could build a lot of fun things, since they saw the northernmost Fanyin lands as cold and gross and inferior, not as Beautiful, and they had plans to reshape the landscape with their magic and etc. But this was just around the time that the Avirre'thel retaliated against them for some prior antics, burning three of the major cities in Fanyin among other things, so they totally dropped the project to instead rebuild their cities and focus on starting a shitty pseudo war with the vampires, and ALSO were investing a lot in Asen at the time, so they just left it. Additionally, they kind of also recognized that their plans to reform the landscape and change the climate wouldn’t have worked on a broad scale anyway, even with their very strong inherent magics, they wouldn't have the power to do that unless they called on like a group of ancient demons to help or something which They’re Not The Nasty Vampires so they would never even dream of doing something as awful as communicating with The Bad Ole’ Demons lol. So after all their plans for the land falling through, Navyete was literally just empty land for a long time that elves hated** and were afraid to go into because they saw some mysterious creatures there this one time. Mippya is like them trying the same thing again, except under better circumstance, and also using their Already Best Land, rather than trying to modify existing land into a different climate))

(**thus, despite them framing it as a generous sacrifice out of sheer Elven Kindness, they were actually pretty glad to give it all away to the Avirre'thel because they just saw it as stupid shit land that they could never do anything with since it's just cold barren ice lands or rocky mountainy woods, and apparently no elf would ever want to live in such a place. They were just like 'oh thank god, now the fucking vampires can deal with trying to make this idiot land inhabitable and we don't have to think about it anymore' lol)

Mippya is the Fanyiniri government's biggest project to date (it's kind of where they put all their money and resources once they realized that their investment in Asen wasn't working out because Asen wanted to establish it's own government rather than just being an extension of Fanyin), and it is like, extremely beautiful and likely one of the most idyllic places on the entire continent of Aviinine. I guess it would be kind of equivalent to if a theme park or whatever spanned an entire country? Like everything is extremely maintained, pristinely upkept, to the point that even "wilderness" areas or "natural" parts of the land have a strange artificiality about them. It's generally very modern and clean but also pretty "artisan" looking, in that there's flowers climbing up like every wall, elaborate colorful wall murals, bright patterned stone walkways, elaborately designed silk curtains in every window, etc. etc.

It's also very technologically advanced generally, with almost every single element of the country being run by specialized magical technology unique to the Fanyinri (or not really, but I'll explain all that later when I talk more about them, their utilization of magical technology is one of the main things that brought them to power as a group in the first place, and now what they're most known for, though they didn't necessarily invent it themselves lol). So many things are magically automated (doors open by themselves, etc.) and also just many weird things exist, like being able to ride around on floating platforms and restaurants where the food seems to make itself, etc.)

The reason many people consider Mippya to be an extension of Fanyin rather than a country of itself is just because, like.. it functions that way? Mippya does have it's own government and 'elected president' but, usually the people who run the place just coincidentally end up being close connections of elven royalty in Fanyin lol. Mippya also has different laws than Fanyin does, and a different legal system than Fanyin, but any important case (or just something that the royal class in Fanyin might have an invested interest in) usually ends up being exported to being handled in the Fanyin courts instead because "Mippya doesn't haven enough legal resources, as a small country ; ) " , or etc.

Additionally, Mippya itself basically produces like.. nothing, and has no resources or exports, and basically just pulls in money from tourism industry type things and different attractions for outsiders. There's not even a native population of Mippya (aside from tourists who settle down permanently and vacation forever or whatever like how it is when some people retire), or any jobs for outsiders in Mippya (aside from opening your own shops or bringing business there.. but like you can't get a local job that you didn't create yourself, it mysteriously just lacks a local population and local economy, as if it doesn't really even exist outside of the tourist shops and attractions, there's not much evidence of non-tourist housing or local traditions or family owned small businesses or something.).

Which is because most everything in Mippya is exported directly from Fanyin.. The resources for the magical energy used there are gathered and produced by people (usually prisoners) in Fanyin, the staff who work in shops in Mippya are not native to the area (like they pretend to be) but are just working class children trained from a young age and brought from Fanyin, all resources for building and etc. are harvested by laborers in Fanyin and brought to Mippya, etc. The only exception to this is that there is plenty of farms and food produced in Mippya, mostly double utilized as a tourist attraction ("Come see the happy local farmers pick apples! Look at the culture! they've definitely lived here their entire lives for generations and weren't just shipped here a few months ago! wow! want to buy some fresh picked apples? you're so connected to nature!"), and the ones that aren't "touristy farms" are generally kept in the hidden part of the country where tourists/outsiders aren't allowed (most of Mippya is open but maybe like 30% of the land or so is basically blocked off from all outsiders since it's stuff they don't want them to see, similarly to how no outsiders are allowed in most regions of Fanyin either, and anyone who enters the country is extremely controlled in where they're allowed to go).

So anyway, Mippya is generally very cool and amazing and a great touristy place for outsiders to go and get a taste of luxury and how great elven culture is, but there's also some controversy about it not even really being it's own country and kind of just being like.. a giant country sized amusement park owned by Fanyin that only gives the illusion of being independent, considering that it's entire native population and resources and culture are pretty much just manufactured by Fanyin. But considering that the elven alliance (which Fanyin is a major part of) is one of the most dominant political forces in the world, and journalists generally aren't allowed to investigate anything that might make them look bad, Mippya has been widely successful in raising positive sentiment for the elven people (and making Fanyin a lot of money), as people generally just go there and have a fantastic time and don't ask too many questions lol.

Now about Fanyin,,

In northernmost Fanyin the farther up you go, the more “”disagreeable”” people you will find (aka.. elves that speak out against various systems in Fanyin , or who are “disgraceful citizens” by elvish standards). There isn’t really a solid border between north and south Fanyin, but there is a big forest, with many many many signs saying things like “Keep out! It is too cold up here, and very easy to get lost in these woods!” or etc. and a pretty reasonably sized group of guards making sure people don't sneak in who aren't supposed to be there (like normal elves fleeing from cities or something). Pretty much the only people who are here are troublemakers that the government doesn't feel like dealing with but has some reason they can't simply be killed (like they're the son of a noble or something), or those who are too disabled, old, or young, to really get much use out of labor-wise, but they also don't want to make themselves look bad by killing children or people with disabilities or etc..

Most often it's like children or etc. who are being too disruptive in school despite discipline (thus too unruly to be placed into typical societal labor roles), who are too ugly or weird (by elven standards) to sell off to some forigner for marriage or whatever, don't have enough magic to simply be killed and have their soul harvested for energy, and who are too unskilled to be purchased by nobles as entertainment or servants and etc., so since there's no productive use to them and people can tend to get angry if they find out about you killing kids, they usually just , out of "Mercy and kindness" , send them like, up into the snowy woods to randomly fend for themselves with all the other "useless" folk who aren't capable of serving a concrete purpose to the government (though of course the propaganda assures the population that they're merely being sent to live in nice apartments in the north with caretakers who will help them "outgrow their difficulties", as obviously it'd look bad if they were like "yeah we just threw them into a pile of snow in the woods and said 'good luck'" lol).

Usually by the time you're an adult you've been through "schooling" and already have been assigned your role in society, so it's more rare for adults to get sent there (it's also much more acceptable to randomly kill unruly adults or send them to prison than it is to do the same with children), so typically people are brought to the woods as children, since early childhood is usually when the staff at the boarding school education centers would begin to pick up on the traits of students, and weed out the ones that they can tell just "aren't going to be successful".

So most of northernmost Fanyin is just small rural villages or tiny shacks in cold wooded areas. It’s mostly empty land with a very scattered population, and not many modern things. Usually people are just left in the dividing woods and told to keep going north, so it's totally random when and where they'd end up stopping to settle down. Some stay at the egde of the woods for a few days crying and asking to be let back in until eventually they realize they guards aren't going to help them and they just wander out somewhere (though occasionally the guards sneak them food, or even try to take the children home with them, but it's something a guard can lose their job and be sent to the prisons (or killed) for so most of them have to just stay stoic about it.).

It’s common for people to live together who are not family (like two random 10 year olds come across each other in the deep woods and pair up because the’re both scared, then someone who’s like 18 happens to find them and starts travelling with them as well, to keep them safe, etc etc. Kind of how small groups and communities start. It’s rare for a whole family to be sent all at once into northern Fanyin, it’s usually just scattered individuals. Most all small villages in northern Fanyin are made up of elves who were once complete strangers or just happened to come across each other somehow in the woods looking for food or a safe place to sleep. There are even some pretty settled areas, small self-sufficient towns with like 100 town members, who regularly send out scouts back to the main gate area, to kind of wait around for new people to be sent into the woods and welcome them when they get there, telling them "don't be scared, I can bring you back to a place where we have food and everything and you can live with us", but even despite this some people don't trust the already established towns and would rather fend for themselves and just build themselves a cabin and live alone for the rest of their lives, or just out of bad luck some end up never crossing paths with anyone and dying alone in the snow unable to hunt food for themselves or etc.

The middle of the country pretty much exclusively houses boarding schools (children are not raised by their families, they're usually taken straight from hospitals upon being born and directly into large schooling centers where they'll be raised by staff and taught skills and etc., rarely ever even leaving the grounds of the facility once until they're about 14-15 and can be assigned a societal role based on the personality traits and skills they've displayed and enter the labor force), so this is where all children live basically. You will rarely see a child in the southern part of Fanyin unless they belong to upper classes or royalty, as a majority of children aren't allowed to leave to the broader world until they're at least young teens. The middle of the country also houses most of Fanyin's prison facilities, though obviously they're kept separate from the schools. This is mostly because there are more natural resources in the middle of the country, so it makes sense for the people doing most of that type of labor (prisoners) to be located closest to their work.

Though of course because it's the Fanyiniri, everything still looks incredibly nice and clean and decorated, even prisons have flowers growing on the ceilings and etc. (since they don't call them prisons at all, and instead frame them as just alternative housing centers for at risk citizens), and the school facilities are always beautiful. Despite all this decoration though, it still is probably the most barren and boring part of the country (aside from the north I guess), since there aren't any actual cities, businesses, housing, etc. It's like.. JUST a bunch of school centers a few miles apart each, and a bunch of prison facilities on the other side pretty evenly spaced out near mining operations and stuff. There's barely even any roads since the only places you'd be going are schools or prisons, and it's pretty much empty land aside from this.

Further down to south Fanyin , you will find beautiful examples of traditional elvish architecture, well kept streets and homes and city buildings, and happy elves prepared to welcome you to their great lands. Modern luxuries and technology and beautifully landscaped constantly maintained areas. Governmental and official districts are mostly located in south Fanyin, along with most areas for the richest elves, and the closed off spaces exclusively for the royalty. In the main city areas there are plenty of businesses and a lot of nice clean professional centers, alongside bright cities and homes for the foreigners and higher middle class elves, and then a few smaller (still well maintained) communities for lower class elven workers kind of farther away.

The nicer homes are closer to the main cities in Mippya, "lower class" people usually live farther out because they have to live in sections based on classification, and thus may have to travel farther for work (at least for the ones that get assigned homes, many of the primary worker class can get taken to prison over very minor things so that the government has an excuse to not pay them for labor but, usually some of the workers can live in homes, especially higher level ones (idk i can elaborate Fanyiniri societal levels and etc. later but, for now just know, while there are homes for average people in these places, there’s really not as many as you’d expect there to be, as most of the living conditions and areas for workers are tightly closed off from the touristy side of things and kept out of view so nobody suspects anything bad may be going on (or moreso, just so they don’t have to see it face to face)). Farms are usually after these communities, right outside the border of cities but still close for local produce and ease of transport.

The ‘public’ (those who are non-native to Fanyin, and even some natives) is only allowed in specific areas of cities and specific cities themselves, usually larger southern cities where royalty and business mingle. Smaller towns of workers and etc. outside of cities or more in the middle of the country generally are barred from outsider access. Despite a majority of the land in Fanyin being blocked from anyone ever seeing it, it's still largely neatly maintained. Obviously if people's government assigned housing was just shitty moldy shacks or something, the people would be more likely to rebel against the royal class, so even in lower classification areas everything still follows the typical elven style of being clean and perfect with flowers everywhere and beautiful clean streets and etc. Though it's definitely amplified in city areas that outsiders are allowed, as they have to show off more for them lmao, it's still present even in the more rural private areas for workers.

Similar to Mippya, Fanyin has practically no un-maintained land. There are some rural not-close-to-any-major-city farms kind of in the middle south of Mippya near it’s border with Nanebae, but even those are still looked over. There’s no extra land or unkept country backroads, literally everywhere is constantly landscaped and perfected, even areas that appear to be empty natural open space are not, they’ve just been manicured to look that way. The elven cultural focus on beauty and perfection and image and ignoring or pushing aside all bad to immediately replace with ‘good’ has kind of led to a surreal hyper maintenance of everything.

Everywhere is supposed to look perfect. Abandoned homes are immediately attended to within the week, and either torn down or cleaned up and resold to a new property owner. People can be evicted from their homes/businesses/properties or punished if they don’t keep up with the standards and Guidelines Of Property Ownership, which mostly outlines things about maintaining the area and keeping it Beautiful at all times.

There are also no open lands left that aren’t monetized or turned into something touristy in some way. If there’s a forest in the middle of nowhere, they immediately fence it off, clean it up, give it a name, add some park benches and some bathrooms and luxuries, and proclaim to everyone ‘Here’s the new nature park!! Isn’t it beautiful? Come visit!!’ , like basically nothing is left alone and despite the size of the land there is no ‘Wilderness’ necessarily. All 'wilderness' is really just areas maintained to "look natural yet still beautiful" and is owned/monetized by the government (probably as a tourist attraction of some sort) . Of course Northern Fanyin is the only exception to this, past the dividing forest there is nothing but unkept wilderness lol. But everything to the south of that is meticulously maintained.

- -

Asen:

previously ‘Yansha Vanyen’ (or ‘New Vanyen’), before it was shortened into Asen by foreigners (and the elves who talked to the foreigners) a long time ago when it first was growing as a major area. 7 out of 10 of the biggest cities on the continent are in Asen, mostly around the coast.

Asen’s cities are very similar to many of the more Global or International cities in the supernatural realm, with usually a highly mixed group of different people and business from all different species and countries and realms kind of coming together for good business opportunities or the amount of resources and things there and etc. A very different and much more diverse and modern culture, when compared to more specialized or group specific areas (like lands predominantly inhabited by just one species or etc). Usually have many different styles of buildings and stores and restaurants (unlike places like most cities in Navyete for example, where the building style is very specific, restaurants are mostly specialized in vampiric food, etc.) and provide access to many things you wouldn’t find in more specialized or group specific cities/countries.

You can still see heavy elven influence in some of the architecture and city planning, and elves (though really only groups with in the elven alliance) still hold a lot of political and financial control over most major cities in Asen, as they originally were the ones who put so much into building the cities and making them popular. But today, the Fanyiniri are not the majority population of the major cities of Asen, and are much less involved than they used to be, now focusing more on their own lands and tourism to places like Mippya.

Though elves (mostly of Fanyiniri origin) are the largest group of the population that inhabit the lands in rural areas outside of the major international cities. With again, a few small pockets of vampires or demons or humans or other groups, but mostly fanyin elves. Also this is one of the few places that other races and cultures and groups of elves live as well, coming back to these lands to live in the major cities of Asen after splitting away from the elves of Fanyin in the past, and living in other areas. These elves are usually quite different in appearance and culture from the Fanyin Elves, but are still recognized as members of the broad elven species. Though a few may like visit Fanyin or something they usually don’t stay long because they “feel oddly unwelcome there”, so major cities of Asen are still like the only places on the continent you can really find other types of elves rather than just the Fanyiniri.

Because of all the global cities and trade and etc., Asen is the most diverse country in the entire continent (with Nanebae being second, Mippya being 3rd (if we count it as a country, since the population is mostly foreign tourists), Navyete being fourth, and Fanyin being last).

The government in Asen is generally pretty good to it's citizens, kind of in the middle I guess. Navyete would probably have the most freedoms and comforts (free healthcare, housing, food, everyone has a lot of rights and the people have an extremely heavy say in any law that is passed and etc., a mostly collective community based government by the people, even though they do have the council member families, they mostly serve as negotiators and diplomats and people who help communicate the competing needs of the different groups and provide structure, rather than people who actually have the ultimate final say in anything), Nanebae could be good or bad depending on your view (it's also pretty collective and everyone has a say but also very uncentralized and with little infrastructure often leading to resource struggles or inability to handle larger scale things when needed, though there are no actual laws so for people who value absolute freedom above all else it could be worth it, though you're still beholden to the "laws" of the people in your local community and they'll beat the shit out of you if you go around stealing or something lol), Fayin & Mippya are obviously the worst for reasons that have probably already been gone through in the text lol, rights being entirely class based and the government (royal families) having complete control of everything in the most oppressive and unhelpful way possible, while also being as corrupt and financially motivated as possible, etc. So Asen obviously isn't as bad as Fanyin, but may also not be as beneficial for the people as somewhere like Navyete.

To explain it in a very very simplified way, basically, there are 16 established districts in Asen, which are pretty large and are meant to have an even number of people in them (1 million people per district). Every 8 years the people will vote to elect a leader for their district, then all 16 of those leaders work together on making important decisions about other parts of the government or handling concerns of the people and etc. everyone has pretty good rights, especially since there are multiple global cities in Asen, meaning there are like probably at least 100 different species groups there at any time, all with different background and needs and etc., so there's a definite focus on people being treated equally and fairly. But due to all the massive cities and business and etc. in the area, there are still plenty of opportunities for corruption (merchants trying to influence things in their own interest, etc.), and despite trying to allocate some resources to help, there can be issues with economic inequality and people (especially outside of the main cities) living in pretty poor conditions. Law enforcement is also pretty varied, so in some areas there may be way too much of it (everyone living under really tight controlled and restrictive rules), and others there not being enough of it (people being able to like trade illegal goods or beat children out in the open with nobody doing anything about it). Asen is a "newer: country, as it hasn't been too long since the Fanyiniri let them develop on their own, so especially due to the massive population, there's still a lot of things they have to balance and work out.

Otherwise though it's a pretty good place to live, especially in terms of having such a wide variety of occupations, lifestyles, and educational environments available. Additionally if you're a member of a persecuted species or just part of a rare group who wants to be able to like.. not be attacked by random people, some of the global cities are a good place to go where you'll be fairly protected and safe (though some people who collect blood or bodies or rare species tend to loiter around global cities for this reason, so you'll still have to look out a little bit lol). Especially anyone looking to start a business, as Asen is a really primary place for trade and exchange of various goods, especially in the cities around the coast, where there's easy connection to other continents in Nanyevimi. So aside from a few housing/income problems and the government being kind of weird and not really figured out uniformly yet, it's a decent global and business/trade minded place to live (certainly much better than some of the other places you could choose to settle down on the continent lol).

- --

CLIMATE/WEATHER IN NAVYETE

Despite going over the other areas in the region, this post is still about the Avirre'thel and their land lol! So lastly I'll just put a little bit about the weather there and stuff, since I guess that's also related when speaking about land. I'll go over some of this more when I make a post about their holidays and calendar (like specifically how many days are in seasons and what they're called and etc.), but here this will just be pretty broad. (also, I know absolutely nothing about climate/weather and what the official names for these climate types would be called or if they can all exist next to each other or etc. etc. , this is just how I imagine their country being... it's.. a fantasy realm.. just pretend it all makes sense lol)

Pretty much anywhere in Navyete is going to be... very cold lol, but there are some differences between parts of the country. (also sorry I use Fahrenheit instead of Celsius lol, it's just easiest to use what I already know when writing things like this really quick rather than looking up conversions). Also I'm going over three areas as if they're all entirely distinct, but obviously there are like transitional areas between them and etc. , it doesn't just go sharply from one to the other as soon as you pass some arbitrary land line or something lol.

Southern Navyete has the most variation in weather, it can actually get up to like 75F in the warmer parts of the year (though it hardly ever goes above that), and in the coldest parts of the year can get down to about 10F, or sometimes in the negatives (but rarely). The average temperature usually ranges from about 20F - 55F, give or take it being like 10 - 15 degrees colder or hotter depending on season (Navyete doesn't really have much of a fall or spring, even in the south they really only distinguish like 'vaguely warm-ish season' and 'colder season' (basically like if somewhere just had summer and winter, with just short transitional periods in between)). Warm seasons in southern Navyete are usually pretty rainy and humid, and they get a good amount of snow in the winter (maybe 2 - 4 feet every other week or more on average), but not as much as they get in the middle of the country. The forests here are also less dense, and there's more plant variety than there is up further where barely anything grows due to the cold, especially since the snow actually fully melts here and there are some short times of year it's not on the ground. It's also generally flatter with some decent land for farming in the short period of warmer months, as the mountains that run through the middle of the continent kind of curve more around a lot of southern Navyete, so it's not as rocky and uneven as the ground in some of the rest of the country is.

In the middle of Navyete it's usually just pretty snowy uneven land with mostly just thick forests of cold hardy trees and a few other plants. It usually doesn't go much above 60F in the warmer season (though it can be 65 sometimes, maybe), and can get to -10 in the coldest seasons, but average temperature most of the time is around 10F to 35F, give or take some depending on the season. They usually get 3 - 8 feet of snow when it does snow, and even though it snows less often here than it does in the south, the snow and ice tends to stay around longer (since it just doesn't usually get warm enough for it to melt, even in 'summer'), so despite the longer period between snows, because of how much they get and how cold it is, there is snow or ice or something on the ground basically all year around. The snow in the south is also usually more in shorter bursts, but in the middle of the country it can snow for multiple days sometimes.

In northernmost Navyete there aren't as many trees or plants, it's pretty much just barren mountainy snow lands. The ground is permanently covered in snow and ice and deeply frozen all year around and really doesn't change very much at all. It doesn't really ever go above 35F in the warmer months and can get down to -45F or more in the colder months. The average temperature is usually -20F to maybe 10F or 20F or so, give or take a little depending on the season, but a lot of the time it's pretty low or in the negatives. It doesn't snow as much as other places and is a pretty dry area in terms of not having much precipitation of any kind, but there are fairly occasional snow storms where it snows for days with harsh winds and will end up accumulating like 10 - 12 or more extra feet of snow on top of the already always snowy frozen layer of ground. It can also sometimes seem like it's snowing when it's not, because it's fairly windy there, and the surface layer of snow can end up blowing around and making it seem like the snow is moving.

On the northern coast and beaches (and islands off the coast) it can be a bit warmer, but is still pretty icy and snowy. It's pretty much the same as what I wrote for the rest of northernmost Navyete, but is maybe about 10F - 15F degrees warmer on average. They also get more snowfall generally, and the coasts are probably the windiest place in all of Navyete. The ocean around the islands and on the coast and etc. is generally at least partially covered in a thin layer of ice for much of the year, and is completely covered in a layer of ice in the coldest months. People are still able to do different types of fishing and harvest things here though.

(also, it's pretty windy in Navyete as a whole (though it's most windy in the northen coast and other northernmost areas), so it often feels colder than it is because of wind chill and blowing ice/snow into your face and shit lol)

They used to have slightly warmer summer months in Navyete when they first arrived there (like, it still got just as cold as it always does, but it used to warm up more in the summer, so they'd have long cold winters but would at least have decent summers that can thaw stuff), but for whatever reason summer seems to just get colder over time (obviously not dramatically, it's not like they used to have 100F degree summers and now it's gone down to like 30F degree warm months, but over the past 15,000 years or so summers have gotten like 10F - 15F degrees cooler than they used to be, even in the northernmost areas).

Also, just for reference Navyete is considered the coldest place in Aviinine as a whole. Though in some parts of Northern Fanyin and Nanebae and Asen you may see temperatures closer to those in Southern Navyete, it's generally warmer in the more southern parts of the continent. Though Aviinine as a whole is still pretty far north so it would really never get too hot or anything, it can be a bit more moderate and warm with more seasonal variation in the lower parts. In places like southern Asen and Mippya and lower Nanebae it can get to maybe 30F or 35F in the colder parts of the year, and is generally around 70F or 80F in the warmer months, with it usually being like 55F to 70F on average. On the southern coastal areas you may even find like prolonged 75 - 85 degree weather or something with actual summer months, but again it'd be rare for it to EVER be over 90F or 100F or something. In northern Fanyin and Asen and upper Nanebae (especially in the high parts of the mountains) it does often snow and they have reasonably cool winters, but definitely not to the degree seen in Navyete.

- -

*(Now a tiny bit about the aforementioned language changes that went into naming stuff :

(note: I'm of course planning to make an actual updated post about Avirrekava specifically and like go over basic sentence structure and how to pronounce their language and etc. etc., but this is mostly just old text that I wrote like over a year ago as part of the original post about the different countries, because I wanted to explain why the names of the countries had changed lol, so this is really just a short simple language difference explanation, rather than an actual in depth look at Avirrekava itself or etc.)

A majority of Avirre'thel natively speak Avirrekava (their own language), but they additionally may know other languages, like some of the various jhevona languages of from the main cultures of humanoid demon that now live in Navyete. Many of them have some form of understanding of some ancient elvish words, given that that is where Avirrekava originated from, and the vampirirc language is actually more similar to ancient elvish than ancient elvish is to modern elvish**. And some Avirre'thel (especially those in government or business jobs) may also know or have knowledge of modern Elvish too (mostly referencing specifically Fanyiniri elvish), as due to the influence of the Fanyiniri in the areas around Navyete, it’s one of the most common trading languages in areas like Asen and Nanebae.

(**like with many things, the Avirre'thel pretty much in a lot of ways are more similar to ancient elves overall than the current day elves (specifically the Fanyiniri) are, due to lifespans and the rate of evolution of culture. Like there are still some Avirre'thel alive today that natively spoke ancient elvish, and likely remember the first hundreds of years the vampires were even around, whereas no elves from that time exist, not even the great great great great grandparent of the oldest living elf was around at that time. The elves forget things and introduce new things and move on from historical periods much quicker than vampires do, since due to the not aging thing, time just kind of almost moves slower for the Avirre'thel. Similarly to other extremely long living species, they kind of just operate on a different scale)

Jhevona in Navyete usually know more languages than vampires, due to having many of their own languages as well. Though the Avirre'thel do place a focus on usually making an effort in school and etc. to learn multiple languages, many of them may just know like, Avirrekava (vampiric, native language of all vampires and main language used on everything in Navyete), probably modern Elvish, maybe some form of Jhevona language depending on their job, etc. Whereas Jhevona usually know like, their native cultural language and possibly one or two other demonic languages (vampires are a very homogeneous group at this point as they’ve hardly spread out (and even when they did once they all,, came back together eventually lol), but many other species like demons/jhevona have A LOT of different cultural groups and sub-species and different variations to their culture and etc. so it’s not uncommon for Jhevona to speak a few of the niche distinct demonic languages that there are, some culturally mixed Jhevonacities may have like 4-5 different languages from different groups spoken all at once, so depending on where they lived before moving to Navyete the person may already know like, multiple languages just from growing up) , then they’d likely learn Avirrekava , probably Elvish as well, etc. etc.

So like, average for a native vampire would be maybe 2 - 4 languages, many demons in the area know like, 5 - 7 or more lol

And now more about the actual language changes referenced in the part about the different countries:

So, I don’t have much planned out in terms of languages yet (I’m only working on the vampiric language (Avirrekava), the stuff I have for the others is literally like, me working backwards from what I have for Avirrekava (to get Old Elvish) or me working backwards and then forwards again from Avirrekava (for Modern Elvish)) so this is really just an early idea of things, I may still change some stuff (like the writing system or especially some grammar stuff (since I’m really bad at planning grammar lol) or etc.).

But, some of it is relevant in the context of Avirrekava and also in terms of planning places and place names, such as like obviously the places on the map would have names from Old Elvish, or maybe some were modified over the years, or etc etc etc.

SO! anyway

This is one of the short examples I made for myself just as a reference of Old Elvish compared to the modern languages of the vampires and the elves. The sentence is “Thanks. He was probably not reading”. I wasn’t really sure how to write the individual parts, which is explanation for the odd more literal part by part translation at the bottom.

(note: the sentence orders have changed a bit since i originally wrote this, and I also changed what some of the characters in the Avirrekava writing system look like, but for the most part the image below is still accurate enough for it’s purpose, like it shows enough of what I’m attempting to show in terms of comparison, even if no longer exactly correct lol)

(( The structure of all three is mostly the same (at least in this example.. in some others with more complex sentences there are a good deal of grammar differences kind of), which is basically: (The word for thank you) + (The word for ‘He’) + (a base verb for ‘read’ and then the ending that makes it in a past negative tense***) + (a short thing that indicates an unsure or questionable mood to the sentence, used when making uncertain statements or to hint the idea of ‘probably’ ‘maybe’ etc. Instead of having a direct translation for a word like ‘Maybe’, they all use an general uncertainty indication instead ).

(also in this photo I have ‘Q’ written but I actually mean 'k’. Years ago apparently I wanted to find some excuse for them to use a Q for their K sound when , I guess writing 'romanizations’ of their words (like.. whatever it would be called to, not translate it, but just write the sounds of their words with the english alphabet instead of their own), but I just wanted to use Q because I thought it looked cooler lmao but like, practically there would be no actual world lore reason for it so I changed the K sound back to just… being represented by a 'K’ .. but yeah thats why in the photo it foolishly says 'qyevaena’, it should be 'kyevaena’, officially (see… I said… i would probably end up changing things around a million times before settling on stuff lol)) )

*** A note about the verb thing: I don’t know how to describe this or what it would be called in like… advanced official terms, I’m just explaining very basically and I hope it’s understandable lol. Like you start with a main verb (in the above example ‘kye’, for ‘the act of reading’) and it can have six different endings depending on whether it happened or not and when,, so for example if you wanted to make it that he WAS reading, you could instead do : ‘kyevae’ (’-vae’ as an ending meaning: 1. it did happen, and 2. it happened in the past, like past positive, basically “did read”), or like if you wanted to say he WILL read, you would do ‘kyevaeri’ (’-vaeri’ future positive, “will read”), or you could do ‘kyevaeka’ (present negative, “Is not reading’”), and etc etc etc. Anyway I don’t know what this is called or how to talk about it in linguistic terms but I know the listing of ‘”read-wasn’t” possibly seems odd, so this is the simple explanation for why it’s written that way. All these languages have the same sort of mechanism it’s just the actual word for the verb and attached endings vary. )

The previous photo might be too big but I’ll provide smaller more zoomed in examples when I talk about the languages individually.

Here’s close up of old elvish, I don’t have much to say about it since it’s more a comparison (like I would talk more about how the newer languages differ from it than about this language itself, nobody speaks this anymore). The writing is a bit ridiculous because I can’t make cohesive clean looking lines to save my life and my hands are just too shaky and i always draw too sketchy but: 1. just pretend in your head that they're a little bit neater , 2. the ancient elves didn’t write much and their writing system mostly existed for ceremonial or special occasion things, like writing down key moments in history or writing spells or words during an important event or religious celebration or etc. so they can be overly complicated and impractical to write quickly or simply since, they didn’t use them daily and didn’t need to be able to read or write fast, and 3. ancient elves are ridiculous so their writing system can be ridiculous… And those are my excuses for being utterly horrific at text design but still trying to make it make sense in lore lol

(also note, they really wouldn’t even be called ‘Old Elvish’ , ‘Modern Elvish’ and ‘Modern Vampiric’ because elves and vampires don’t even use the term ‘elf’ or ‘vampire’ unless speaking like, with foreigners who have lived in places where they’ve been culturally influenced to refer to them as elves or vampires. Though it is a popular name for them to be called in pop-culture and from outsiders, and they recognize that, they would never actually call their language ‘The Vampiric Language’ or something, I’m just doing that shorthand bc 1. it’s easier for now, and 2. I don’t have a name for their language as a whole yet lmao ( year later update: I do now, it’s named 'Avirrekava’ ) )

Then here’s closer for modern elvish and modern vampiric. I’m going to do them together and just kind of go over differences for both in bullet points

Vampires (Avirre'thel) have lost sounds in their language. Old elvish has stuff like ‘la’, ‘lu’, ‘lo’ and ‘yan’, ‘yin’, ‘yun’ , a lot of which current vampiric has dropped. Also things in old elvish that can be shortened into one sound have been , kind of like ‘ni ye’ just becoming ‘nye’ and ‘vi ye’ becoming ‘vye’ in vampiric. Also old elvish has ‘the’, ‘thi’, ‘thu’, which has been replaced in vampiric (except for in the case of some old family names or city names where it may still be spoken that way) by just plain ‘te’, ‘ti’ , ‘tu’ etc. (though the ‘th’ type sounds can still be made in vampiric, they no longer have separate characters to represent them in the writing system and etc. and they’re kind of not used in the same way anymore but it’s hard to explain lol, like it’s still a doable and minorly common sound combination but it’s… used and written.. differently???? ahhHHHH. I can go over that whenever I make an actual post about it lol)

Modern Elves haven’t lost much, if anything they’ve added things, and changed a few. All of the ‘v’ sounds in old elvish have been changed to ‘f’ sounds (so like ‘viti’ becomes ‘fiti’). They also dropped the idea that every word ends in a vowel, and now have a lot more plain consonants that can be added together in things. Vampires only have 3 independent consonants and they can never be added at the end or beginning of a word, only in between consonant-vowel pairings. Plain consonants don’t exist independently in vampiric or old elvish, and are only there to be added to other things but never alone (though a word can start with a consonant it just has to be in the pairing, like a word could start with the pairing ‘Ka’ but could never start with JUST ‘k’ . You could also take one of their single consonants (h) and add it in the middle of a consonant-vowel pairing (ge) to get 'Ghe', but you could never have something like 'Geh' (since it has to end in a vowel). But modern elvish has adapted away from this feature of ancient elvish and instead has many single consonants you can place wherever you want. And also modern elvish now doubles certain consonants, which both old elvish and vampiric never do (other than ‘Rr’ i guess but idk if that’s even a double as much as it is just rolling out the regular r for a bit longer, but is way different….) In modern elvish you actually pronounce both of them, so ‘Mippya’ wouldn’t be ‘Mee-pya’ it would be ‘Mee-p-pya’, and like ‘Bbani’ wouldn’t be ‘Bah-nee’ it would be ‘B-bah-nee’, almost like someone stuttering or something. Modern elvish doubled consonants like this are something totally unlike anything in old elvish or vampiric (and some Avirre'thel do make fun of this of course lol, they think pronouncing modern elven words like 'Mebbyippine' (meh-b-byi-p-pi-neh) sounds silly like you're trying to beatbox or something).

Elves also have dropped the whole weird middle added consonant thing in their writing system (like, in the word ‘klu’, how it’s actually written ‘L KU’, but it’s understood that the ‘L’ goes in between consonant and vowel in ‘KU’ , making it ‘Klu’. Both old elvish and vampiric use this, like they have a few consonants that you can write before a consonant-vowel pairing, and it’s just understood to go in between them, even multiple (though vampiric only has 3 consonants that can be added like this, so not many), like if the symbols for ‘H’ and ‘Y’ were written directly before the one for ‘Te’, it would be spoken like ‘Thye’, they get added right between ((you can see this in the vampiric text sample where the stuff is written out below the symbols, in ‘vye’ and ‘kye’ it’s actually written like ‘Yke’ and ‘Yve’ but moved in between))). So of course in an effort to simplify their language and writing system, this is one of the first things modern elves got rid of, which also means they’ve modified many words, and in some ways expanded them (like ‘Vla’ would instead be ‘vi la’ so they don’t have to have a consonant in the middle (or actually ‘Fi la’ since they no longer use ‘V’)) .

Vampiric is actually more similar to old elvish than modern elvish is, in terms of words sounding more similar and being written more similarly and etc. Elves have a much much more open culture, and significantly lower life span (they only live 200-300 years whereas vampires can live indefinitely), so things are being cycled out or introduced or changed much faster, and there’s also a wider variety for them to pull from (since they trade everywhere, and integrate other groups into their culture , and are also a larger population meaning that there may be elves in one place who speak one way and elves in another who speak differently, etc.) But vampires are largely closed off, and isolated (and widely disliked due to elven propaganda), and also live much longer (so like someone who spoke a certain way 1200 years ago is… still going to be alive, speaking that way), so there’s not as much change. Though all three of course have distinct similarities (mostly in structure) and differences (mostly in the form of sounds and writing), it’s still the case that vampires can understand old elvish much much easier than they could understand the modern form spoken today, and for those who speak modern elvish, both vampiric and old elvish would seem nearly equally strange to them, though they might have a slightly better understanding of old elvish, they’d be just about the same.

In terms of writing, i guess old elves had a lot more time to just sit and write (writing also wasn’t necessary for communication for them, they only really wrote on special occasion or for artistic things), since their syllable characters (+ a few random consonants lol) are a lot more complicated, whereas both elves and vampires have simplified. Elves writing became more squished (like it would fit perfectly in squares, but old elvish and vampiric could fit in long rectangles (though it can sometimes be stylized as more square)) and more simplistic, but kept a lot of the rounded swirly elements of old elvish. Writing is really one of the only areas that current elvish is actually more similar to old elvish than vampiric, or at least appears to be, as they kept the traditional spirit of elf things, which is to focus on the pleasant, to have things be magical and artistic and interesting looking, to avoid anything that could be considered too harsh or too abrupt, to focus mostly on lightness, and in writing to keep mostly rounded and light very soft swirly looking things. Vampires on the other hand really elongated the writing, and made it jagged and simple. Though the sample alone doesn’t show it really (they have like 80 or so characters in the writing system, much more than is presented above), they do still have some of the swirls and loops of old elvish writing, but in a largely simplified way, and most of the writing is just straight kind of simple looking shapes, with a few curves and loops or jagged points in certain areas. Being able to write quickly and efficiently is important to them, so they didn’t like the idea of all the swirls and etc. Modern Elves’ writing sort of evolved the way it has a little naturally (with some intentional changes), but vampiric writing was mostly deliberately modified, as a simplified and faster to write version of the old elvish writing (at least the characters that they used at the time, some had gone out of use already). Even with loops and such included, there’s hardly any character in vampiric that can’t be written in a single stroke, maybe two or three for some, but the majority can be done very quickly.

ALSO note lol of course there’s various dialects and accents and changes within these languages themselves, but I’m speaking very generally about like their standard language, as it would be used and understood in most all settings broadly.

Okay i think thats mostly all for the language background thats necessary, idk lol i might be forgetting stuff but there’s a vague amount of context for when I speak about places on the map and old names and etc. I really don’t want to like get super heavy into language stuff yet since it’s still the beginning planning part and I still have a lot to work out lmao, I’m only giving what’s like necessary at this point to understand a few of the names I mentioned in reference to locations. Which is.. probably unnecessary since nobody cares about why precisely a country name dropped a vowel or something but, lol.. I love... useless details

#Avirre'thel #worldbuilding

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