I can't fix you, but maybe I can still help

[powerispain]

He's trying to kill us--could ruin him--worry about that later--grab your sister and go.

Comments

[alicornucopia]

It is widely agreed to be pretty repulsive. Its neighbors take refugees.

[powerispain]

Good for its neighbors. Why hasn't anyone tried doing anything about the place, does it say?

[alicornucopia]

Sometimes people overfly it and collect refugees who haven't made it all the way to the border. It seems like nobody wants to, like, conquer it, and you can't issue trade sanctions when there's no trade.

[powerispain]

How come no one wants to conquer it?

[alicornucopia]

Then they'd have to administer a bunch of people who hated them and wanted to kill them. By squarewide standards the place has no useful resources, natural or labor. If somebody wants land that would require annoying amounts of cultivation to be pleasant to live on they could just go to the bottom of the world, also perennially unpopular. (Someone has written an entire book about Why Nobody Conquers Ryganaav.)

[powerispain]

That's hilarious. Goodness these people are non-expansive, the humans in her world would have been crawling on every available square inch of surface area this place has.

[alicornucopia]

Nobody lives on the moon, either!

[powerispain]

...Presumably the moon is harder to get to. Right?

[alicornucopia]

Well, you can't walk there, but you could take a scoot or get a dragon to fly you there or an air mage. And once you'd visited it you could teleport.

[powerispain]

Say, how does down work on the moon, since it's a hemisphere for some crazy reason.

[alicornucopia]

The flat side has down and the round side does not!

[powerispain]

This place is bizarre. Can she find any physics textbooks?

[alicornucopia]

Not as such!

[powerispain]

...Chemistry? Biology?

[alicornucopia]

Yes, although chemistry seems obscure and biology seems to be principally observational - taxonomy, animal behavior, etc.

[powerispain]

...Well, if doing magic doesn't hurt then they probably don't need to leverage it as much. Still. They--do they even know about underblood?

[alicornucopia]

They don't call it that, but yes. Comes up discussing plant and animal breeding, the design of conception spells, identical twins, etcetera.

[powerispain]

What do they call it? And how much do they know about how it works?

[alicornucopia]

The Vansalese for it translates as "descent" and they had to figure out sex chromosomes for conception spells (apparently lesbians can only have girls) and have a solid grasp of simpler inheritance rules where they apply.

[powerispain]

She should ask the wizards if they think anyone would be interested in having science imported. Although probably the physics people would have to kind of start over here.

[alicornucopia]

Probably, what with the whole "gravity's not a thing" thing.

[powerispain]

What the hell even causes down here.

[alicornucopia]

Magic!

[powerispain]

What kind of magic?

[alicornucopia]

Down magic! It is speculated that any sufficiently large flat surface will have a down at it.