Eidecia

Eidecia (also sometimes spelled "Eidoecia" or "Eidœcia"; pronounced /aɪˈdiːʃə/) is a collection of cities connected to each other but jointly spanning multiple worlds and cosmoi, each city, or eidopolis, apparently representing a particular concept or object, such as beauty, sleep, or statues. Though in principle nothing prevents people from traveling into and out of the cities to and from the worlds where they're situated, in practice most people of Eidecia spend their lives there, and are much more likely to travel to another eidopolis than they are to the surroundings of their own home city—though, indeed, many eidopolitans never leave their home city at all, spending their entire lives within a single eidopolis.

Except for pediologists, residents of the cities seldom use the word "Eidecia". To them, Eidecia is merely "the Cities"; they rarely have occasion to refer to any others, since the worlds outside the eidopoles play little or no direct part in their lives.

Connections

Though each of the eidopoles may be located on a different world, and indeed in an entirely different cosmos, nevertheless it's relatively easy to travel from one eidopolis to another, through glomungular pocket planes known as pathnodes. The pathnodes are seldom more than a few hundred kilometers around, and vary widely in contents and conditions. Generally, there are well-maintained roads connecting the eidopoles, but the parts of the pathnodes away from the roads could contain virtually anything. Many parts of the pathnodes are put to good use for growing crops or other economic purposes, while others remain dangerous wilderness, or are claimed by petty tyrants as their private domains.

The pathnodes are not, however, the only connection between the eidopoles, though they are certainly the best known and most frequented. Certain rivers, too, flow in places from one eidopolis to another without passing through a pathnode in between, though in other places they may go through pathnodes. There is evidence that the sewers of some, if not all, of the cities connect directly to each other, though the reasons for this are still very unclear. Perhaps the most significant extranodal connection is the Heartsea, a vast ocean that borders a number of eidopoles without actually lying in any of them—some pediologists try to classify the Heartsea as a pathnode, but its sheer size, far larger than any known pathnode, militates against this, not to mention the different topology of its connection to the eidopoles. The fact that all of these connections involve water (though the sewers perhaps somewhat tenuously) has not been lost on scholars, though the reason for this, assuming it's not just coincidental, remain unknown.

Life

Because the cities of Eidecia span so many different worlds, they are populated with a huge variety of different kinds of life forms, drawn from many different planes and places. Not all these entities' homeworlds are known, and in fact it's possible that some of them may be native to Eidecia—though it's at least as possible that they're not, and that Eidecia has no native life at all, not counting artificial creatures created there. Still, native or not, many different species can be found in Eidecia's cities, including rats, cats, pitis, quuds, marglas, flies, shills, wols, and liacs.

Even among noetic species, Eidecia has an enormous diversity. Intelligent beings of many vastly different forms and outlooks mingle on the streets of the eidopoles. Some are more common than others, but the marginally most common—humans—still makes up only a little over seven percent of the population, and even that is true only if one counts mostly-human beings of basically human appearance among their number; counting only pure humans the percentage is less than half that. Other prominent races of Eidecia include the xekkoon, the iorx, the fask, the tage, the tswc, the jujai, the pallacan, the scapic, and the trome. The xou were created in Nime as servitor beings, but have since spread to other cities, and some few xou have, by one means or another, escaped servitude and forged lives for themselves as independent individuals. The same is true, to a slightly lesser extent, of the bak of Gehor and the bugel of Yssibal, and (to an even lesser extent) of a number of other races. Then, of course, there are those "races" that originated as other species, transformed, such as the farthel and various kinds of astite and undead.

Physics

The physics of Eidecia is rather complex; at least nine independent fundamental forces have been identified. Still, some of those forces only apply on the microscopic scale or under very specific circumstances, and in any case, despite the details, on an everyday scale most of the physics doesn't appear all that different from that of most terrestrial worlds. The most noticeable force is that of gravity; Eidecian gravity is not a force of attraction between two objects, but rather a force that acts in a fixed direction at every point in space. Things fall downward in (most places within) the eidopoles not because they are drawn to the ground or to anything else below, but because that's the direction in which the gravitational vector points.

Some of the eidopoles also share some physical characteristics of the world or cosmos where they are located. This is not consistent, however, and must be learned on a case-by-case basis.

Time

For the most part, the eidopoles share the timekeeping system of the world in which they are located. The number of days in a year, the length of a day, and so forth, depend on the eidopolis's surroundings, although the definition of more subjective units of time not dependent on the environment (hours, months, and so on) may differ in the eidopoles from their definitions in surrounding societies.

This means, of course, that different eidopoles may be on entirely different calendars and daily cycles. While this poses no problem for schedules and appointments within an eidopolis, when it is necessary to communicate times between eidopoles, some standardization may be helpful. No such generally accepted standard, however, has yet been adopted. Usually, in cases encompassing only a handful of eidopoles, times are given according to the schedules and calendars of all eidopoles involved. For events of broader compass, perhaps the closest thing to a general calendar in use throughout Eidecia is that of Ereod, which as City of Time may be considered to have something of a superior claim to this position. However, Ereod's dominance is very marginal; other cities whose schedule is sometimes used as a de facto standard include Talade, City of Clocks; Gathen, City of Law; Rasacad, City of Measurement; and a number of cities each sometimes considered the center of existence, including Aeol, Iang, Nime, and Yy. In all, the cosmopolite who traffics with many different eidopoles generally must learn to convert between the different schedules and calendars of these few cities, at least, and probably with any other cities with which he has particular association.

As for the pathnodes, most of them have no particular schedule at all, with no years or seasons and no daily cycles of dark and light. Those few cases that do have such cycles are mostly of artificial origin. For this reason, time in pathnodes is usually reckoned according to the calendar of a neighboring eidopolis—usually either the nearest eidopolis, or the largest, though it's entirely possible for different people in the same pathnode to use the calendars of different eidopoles.

Magic

Eidecia's magic system is as complicated as its physics, with at least five separate arcana in operation there, each with its own spellcasting system as well as various forms of paracarminical magic. One, Uthyc, is a system of magic words, speaking which can bring about various effects. Another, Uutaina, taps into some sort of numen called pape that flows in various directions and densities; the local flow of the pape is important in tapping it to cast spells and perform other magical effects. Low magic resides within various objects in different forms, and must be gathered in proper proportions to use it. High magic, on the other hand, seems to depend much more on the caster than the environment, and requires no numen beyond the caster's own exertion. Finally, urban magic draws upon the mysterious forces of the eidopoles themselves.

As with their physics, some of the eidopoles seem to borrow certain principles of magic from their surrounding worlds. In many of the Cities, magical principles operate that apply to the particular worlds where those cities are located, but not in other eidopoles, or in the pathnodes. Again, however, this is something that must be taken on a case-by-case basis.