#yeah!! sirpaverse is urban fantasy babyyy!!

[fishyfishyfishtimes]

Sirpaverse overview

I want to talk more about the world Ahti II inhabits, but to do that it needs a brief introduction! This is that introduction. I don’t really have a name for the world, so I’m going to be calling it Sirpaverse; that's the name I refer to it with my friends, who are funnily enough most familiar with Sirpa rather than Ahti II.

The Context

I have pretty out-there dreams. If you've kept up with every post that starts with "I had a dream-" then you'll be familiar with that fact already! I often explore and see strange animals, places and people, occasionally with names, even. I like to remember my nightly adventures, so I tend to write and draw the things I’ve seen. Eventually, since I'd gathered quite a roster, I made a big lineup of characters from my dreams in 2021, and liked them so much that I decided to compile them and a bunch of things I’d seen in dreams into one world. That's Sirpaverse! Worldbuilding is a fun exercise for me so this is mostly just for fun :)

The very basis of the world is based on Karl Popper’s theory of three worlds and Plato’s theory of forms, I’ll go through them briefly. Popper’s three worlds indeed consists of three worlds of being in our one universe: World 1, the objective reality and physical world, World 2, the subjective perception of the world done by conscious living beings, both conscious and subconscious processes involved, and World 3, concepts, theories, stories and creations formed by humans. A stone and gravity are of World 1, love and dreams are of World 2, and Donald Duck and the theory of evolution (note: the theory itself) are of World 3.

Plato’s theory of forms meanwhile ponders that there exists these basal ideas or forms that are more real than our subjective perception of the world — they are the essence of everything we see, for example an apple can be red, green, small, shiny, half-eaten, or rotten, but we still recognize it as an apple. The idea of apple!

The World

The world is made up of three realms: the physical world, the idea world and the spirit world. The worlds are technically separate but occupy the same universe and influence each other greatly. The spirit world overlaps with both the physical and the idea world, which has given rise to sentient life in both. 

The Physical World

The physical world is… our universe. You already know all about that. There’s the Earth and it’s a pretty nice place to live, with such reoccurring guys as Enchytraeidae worms, bristlemouths, beetles, common yeast, parasitoid wasps, Lokiarchaeota-archaea, basidiomycetes, beetles, lanternfish, giant tube worms, tiny tube worms, tubeless worms, cyanobacteria, beetles, and also humans! Everything is made up of atoms, they are tangible, real, concrete.

Along with the physical building blocks, every single object and being also has nonphysical idea/concepts hanging on (just like Plato said!). The concepts are less like actual building blocks — no one actually put the ideas together deliberately — they’re more like unspoken instructions, a consequence of the object existing! Living beings meanwhile have ideas/concepts in their DNA which influence how we look in tandem with our physical DNA. I’ll get back to that later. When us sentient animals die, our soul separates from our physical body and it’s left hanging out in the world. 

The Idea World

The idea world is a realm where the basal ideas of everything exist. Everything there is a shifting, infinite, intangible soup of those basal concepts from the physical world! It’s a world where the idea people reside. The idea people are as varied as there are things in the world, they have a “core self”, which takes the form of eye(s), and to build upon that they pull concepts into their own selves. They can look very abstract or very normal (what is normal to them is somewhat different to what we find ordinary: this just means they look like a thing that we know) depending on their tastes, and oftentimes an idea person looks a bit different to every observer because of their lack of a physical form. They also have supernatural powers innate to their being, which they find as easy to use as blinking (each one has two!).

The idea people are not bound by bodily needs like hunger or tiredness or thirst, although they can have social needs — idea people are sophont creatures that more or less match the intelligence and awareness of a human of the same age… of course, the idea people do not die naturally and can live forever if they want to, and so their intelligence grows with age until they become very difficult to understand by human standards. Idea people tend to get bored of existing after a few hundred thousand years at which point they can decide to die and “recycle” their bodies. Whether the soul of the idea person immediately moves into an afterlife or the same soul remains but forgets all their past memories, the idea people don’t really know. All they know is that in the exact same spot, a “baby” with one additional eye appears, and that baby will grow up to have their own unique personality. Occasionally one-eyed baby idea people will also spontaneously appear, but again, ehh… the idea people don’t actually know why or how that happens. They think it might have something to do with things happening in a different inaccessible world. 

The Spirit World and Related Beliefs

Spirit world is the final world! And uh… sadly nothing is known about it. Supposedly souls go there when they pass on, but no soul that has gone there has ever returned. As a result there are lots of different beliefs about what happens to a soul when they pass on, religions often seek to answer this very question! There’s several, I haven’t come up with all of them yet, but two major ones are Muffyism and the Children of Sun and Moon.

Muffyism teaches that a godly semiaquatic bird, Muffy, dove into the endless dark primordial sea for a beakful of mud, with which she shaped the earth under our feet. Muffy laid down on the barren land to lay her eggs, and from these eggs hatched the stars, the sun, the moon, the moss, the trees, the fish, the animals on land, and finally, birds. Muffyists believe that once you die, your soul returns to her nest under the care of her wings — after all, we are all her children.

The Children of Sun and Moon/Moon and Sun worship the very celestial bodies, or gods that control them, depending on the creed. Sun and Moon are closer than lovers, closer than any living being could be, and in their shared joy they created the Earth (and the rest of the planets) and every living being on Earth as their children, friends, witnesses of their eternal shared existence, a bit of all of the above. When you die and pass on, your soul leaves into space, and becomes a star. As a star you can influence the world still, like grant wishes to your offspring!

Belief in reincarnation is also very popular in the Sirpaverse, but I don’t have any specific religion whose main belief is that — yet. In older times, worship of magically powerful people who were described more as gods than human in myths was pretty big also! King Ahti the First is one of such figures: the Sea God of Fish and Seals, who fell into the waters from the rainclouds to unite the Osmerian Kingdom so many centuries ago. The rule of Ahti the Second’s family relied on this divine right principle for the longest time! After all, these people are obviously demigods, they deserve to rule. Now, uhhhh…… it’s certainly much less popular. Historians agree that Ahti the First did exist, but his godly powers have come into some question! The Osmerian monarchy stays pretty quiet about that whole deal...

Ghosts

 The interesting part about living in Sirpaverse is that people know for certain that they will become ghosts when they die! Unfortunately it’s not all too interesting. Death is a very big change and to cling to any semblance of normalcy the mind comes up with self-imposed rules, such as “gravity is a force that impacts you” and “you can’t see ultraviolet”. These take a while to unlearn. Ghosts are often impacted by the world around them even when they can’t interact with the world themselves, which can lead to lots of stumbling and hitting your head on objects and people swaying their arms around. Fortunately ghosts have one power, they are able to possess objects and living things and use them as vessels! It does still take practice and skill, taking control of something physical can be tricky indeed… but they can do it, and are even somewhat able to get briefly close to a feeling of normalcy via having A Body of any kind. Ghosts often describe that their senses shift with each object, some amplifying or even adding new senses or dampening others.

Ghosts, ownership and the law is pretty complicated. In times of old people would usually pass on from this world immediately, often due to beliefs that the longer you stay the harder it is to leave, and so there was no confusion about wether or not stuff should be handed to relatives or if the ghost can still keep them, etc.. I haven't really ironed the whole ghost thing yet fully, but I think ghosts are considered a non-person in the eyes of the law and have been for a long time (the decision of what to do with a dead person's possessions is up to the closest relatives or previous agreements made while alive), which there is and has been pushback against. After all, why should a person immediately leave, when their life might've been cut short of all the potential joys!?? Can't they hang onto their possessions for just a bit longer????

Magic

Is it really a fantasy world with merfolk and crazy weird animals if there’s no magic? 

Magic or applied physics as it is known formally, is, at its core, altering the physical world by changing the basal ideas behind everything. Or, that’s how it actually works! People in-universe don’t actually know that, so shhhh... all doing magic seems to require is a soul, so all kinds of sentient animals enjoy the added benefits of magic, including people. It’s an extremely handy way of doing work, making items, altering the self, anything really, the issue is that it’s also very hard! To perform magic, one needs to focus on the thing they want to change or make, and fully concentrate on it, feel it in their soul —  doing simple tricks is easier, but the more complicated you want something the trickier it becomes. It’s one thing to turn a brown toad blue (change the “brown” into “blue”) but it’s a whole other thing to change a brown toad into a blue, long-legged and bird-winged toad creature! The usual learning curve that people expect with other skills is much shallower and really kicks in much later with learning magic, so if you want to learn to be good at it, it pretty much ends up being your trade and life’s mission. Most people only know one or two “mandatory” spells and leave it at that. 

Fortunately it’s not all horribly inaccessible or an impossible skill to acquire. Magic is easier if you use phrases, items, symbols or do poses that help you return to the correct mindset and feeling — beginners are often taught “magic words” for this reason. Magic spells (long strings of magic that each does a specific thing, think code) can also be put into physical vessels and activated using much less demanding spells — sometimes no magic at all! Ironically the invention of electronic machines brought magic closer to the average person’s everyday life than ever before, even if people know less magic on average than centuries ago. 

And there you have it! Hopefully this serves more as an explanation for how certain things are rather than as further confusion (after all, I just revealed that there are powerful nonphysical beings in another realm), I will build upon this information more, you'll see! :D