Ecemere
Ecemere (pronounced /ˈɛsɪmɪər/)—more formally the Ecemerese (/ˌɛsɪmɪˈriːz/) Alliance —is an empire spanning several hundred mounds of Piobagh. Ecemere has made remarkable advances in clockwork chamulcy, its cities—and often its citizens—covered with gears and piping and glistening with magical and material exudations. The ultimate source of power for these chamulci is partly magic and partly from slowly burning oils and chemicals within their hearts; the accumulation of these vital chemicals, and the search for new sources, are consuming interests for the Alliance.
Among the best known of Ecemere's chamulcar creations are the hacus, creatures part technology, part flesh, and part magic made to serve their owners. Essentially, the hacus are a strain of clockwork theders, comprising at least three hundred common breeds. Hacus make up an important part of Ecemere's armies; all, or nearly all, Ecemerese soldiers have a number of hacus under their control, and many battles are fought entirely by hacus, without their masters ever putting themselves at risk. While among the best known to outsiders, however, the hacus represent just one example of Ecemere's chamulcar skills. Chamulci permeate every aspect of Ecemerese life, from microscopic sticarders that cure diseases and disorders from the inside, to artificial worlds, the most famous of which is Yhazhax.
Like all the great empires of Piobagh, Ecemere finds itself frequently at odds with the other great empires of Piobagh. While it has at one time or another come into conflict with virtually all the other empires, Piobagh has a special enmity with the Rijkzee and the Guesederach. The other empire that is perhaps the closest to being an ally is the Quiadrin, though this isn't to say that the two empires haven't come to blows at times.
History
The civilization that would become the Ecemerese Alliance began on the single world of Lomare, now in the heart of the Alliance's territory. While Lomare was then not the chamulcar juggernaut that it is now, even then it had considerable advancement in the field, especialy compared with some of its rather backward neighbors. The Alliance had its genesis when Lomare made treaties with two of those neighboring worlds, Yudis and Aralamare, offering to share its higher standard of living with them in return for certain concessions. The leaders of the major nations of Yudis and Aralamare signed these treaties rather too eagerly, without reading them as carefully as they perhaps should have, or considering all the repercussions, and soon Lomare activated certain clauses of the treaties and claimed Yudis and Aralamare as its own protectorates. Due to the terms of the treaty, however, it had to retain at least the nominal pretense of their being independent, so rather than overtly absorbing them into the Lomaran government it formed an alliance, named after the site where the treaty was formally ratified.
The burgeoning "Alliance" continued this pretense as it spread to other worlds, gaining some by treaty, some by trickery, and some by outright conquest. As the empire's power and territory grew, so too did its chamulcar skills—and so too did Lomare itself, as almost every succeeding leader as a sign of his power added more structures to Lomare, over time completely covering both sides of the devare with many layers of artificial additions. This process has reached the point today when the effective diameter of each side of Lomare has nearly doubled, the world itself having become a largely mechanical construct more artificial than natural.
In time, the Alliance finally met a rival it could not easily overtake, when its territory butted up against that of the Rijkzee. By then, however, it had grown to the point to have become a powerful empire on its own, and able to engage the other Great Empires of Piobagh on a more or less equal footing.
Inhabitants
Though humans are the most common race of Ecemere, most of them are no longer purely human anymore, having supplemented themselves with chamulcar enhancements, some temporary and some permanent. Those who have made over themselves with these enhancements to such a degree that they could no longer survive without them are known as gearies; on many worlds of Ecemere, gearies far outnumber unmodified individuals.
Aside from humans, other races common in Ecemere include erdels, crauns, slouriacs, aegials, and shallatim. Just like humans, members of any of these races may (and frequently do) have chamulcar enhancements, and may (and frequently do) become gearies. For the most part, with one exception, these races exist on a more or less equal footing throughout Ecemere; though individual prejudices may certainly arise, overall no one race, including humanity, has a particular advantage or disadvantage in the Alliance. The exception is the shallatim, who have risen to a position of unacknowledged dominance in the Alliance—unacknowledged in that shallatim enjoy no official rights or perquisites not available to other races, and few openly talk about them being advantaged, in practice shallatim are disproportionately represented in Ecemere's positions of governmental and business leadership, and tend to favor their homophyles.
Culture
Officially, in the Alliance all are equals, or potential equals; all citizens have equal rights under the law. In practice, however, Ecemerese society is highly stratified, though by culture and tradition rather than by law. Those who were descended from aristocrats in the past, for instance, are aristocrats today, regardless of their present impoverishment—though due to their fellow aristocrats' tendency to help their own, they may not long remain impoverished anyway. Ecemerese society has no formal castes, no official designation of social levels, but the social levels are there nonetheless, and an Ecemerese can judge the social levels of his fellows by their speech, their dress, and other almost invisible clues. Of course, clever Ecemerese can emulate the mannerisms of the higher classes and pass outside their social level, but if they're caught it will result in ostracism at best, and vigilante justice at worst. This is not to say that Ecemerese can never pass outside the social level of their ancestors, but it takes either great deeds (anything qualifying the individual as a hero would do it) or great misdeeds. Marriages between individuals of different social classes are not condemned and not even uncommon, but the social class of the children may be that of either the mother or the father, depending on a detailed complex of factors bewildering to outsiders.
Ecemerese of all social classes take pride in their empire's mastery of chamulcus, and take full advantage of it in their daily lives. While foreigners know hacus best by their omnipresence in Ecemerese warfare, they are not just used in battle, but around the house as well, and all but the poorest citizens of most Ecemerese worlds are likely to own a number of hacus. Drastic chamulcar modifications up to and including being made over into a geary is considered no more unusual in the Alliance than cosmetics in other worlds.
As a culture, the Ecemerese place a high value on intelligence, and are lovers of riddles and brainteasers. Novel puzzles are valued by Ecemerese societies, and periodicals made up entirely, or almost entirely, of puzzles are common and popular. Indeed, a very frequent Ecemerese entertainment, among high and low society alike (though differing in the details), is the Puzzle Party, or Enigmarade, where the entertainment involves the guests' solving puzzles formulated by their host or by each other—which puzzles may in some cases include each others' identity, or even the location of the event itself.
Government
The Ecemerese Alliance has a byzantine and bureaucratic system of government, with layers within layers of agents and officials of diverse titles that have to be dealt with to get anything done. Offices and ministries exist devoted to seemingly trivial and highly specialized areas of concern, and finding out exactly which office one must deal with may be more difficult than actually dealing with the office.
At the heart of the government, however, and overseeing its megameters of metaphorical red tape, is a body called the Council of Worlds, with one representative from each world of the Alliance. Not every representative of the council had equal voting power, however; the relative weights of the representatives' votes are calculated by an arcane formula that takes into account the population of the world and other factors—and which inevitably leads to the vote of the Lomaran representative being worth far more than that of any of his fellows. Nowadays, however, the question of the council members' voting power is largely moot anyway, since the council rarely, if ever, has the opportunity to vote on anything meaningful. While in the early days of the Alliance, the Council of Worlds was the ultimate authority in the Alliance, and made all its decisions, it has since been superseded by an enormous clockwork chamulcus called the Ezengat, a vast and constantly growing expanse of gears, tubes, and chemicals that is now the overall leader of all the Alliance, and its final court of appeal.