Luratos

Imagine a lush field with wild horses happily grazing on the luxurious grass, sheep bleating and hopping, and fat cows giving loud, happy moos. Now imagine on the other side of this field, 2 km away, you see the most dastardly of sights. You see no green, no lush, no life. Only mud, wind, and the occasional stubborn twig of a tree that has not quite given up on life yet. This dichotomy of conditions compose most of Luratos, why you ask? That is a good question, but unfortunately no person will be honest with you as to why this is the case. You see, the blame is constantly shifted onto other parties, “Oh it was the darn Tulats! They brought bad luck on our world!” or “Curse it all! The blasted Grestans angered Yat!”. As you can infer, this world is not a unified one. Most conflict in this world is derived from a specific species on this planet. They go by numerous names, because they don't share a unified tongue. Some names that identify this creature include: Tula, Greta, Puni, etc. It can get pretty confusing, so let us just call them Grugs for now. Now what exactly are they and what do they look like? You ask. They are a curious species, you see, unlike most creatures on this planet, they walk on two legs upright, they lack fur, and most interesting of all is that they are able to get it on at any time of the year. For a while they were not much different from the rest of the wild life of Luratos, but over several eons, they had accomplished the impressive act of sharpening a stick, lighting a fire, and building traps. At this point they were what you would call hunter gatherers, but after a blip of history later, they had started planting crops, writing, and subjugating each other. This was not a very fun situation for the average Grug, but the wild still remained mostly intact despite certain species being hunted a lot. But not for long, because the Grugs had discovered a tool of great power in their early years of civilization, this power is what you would call magic. No one knows who first discovered magic, it is just like trying to figure out who first discovered fire, except worse because numerous Grugs claimed to have made the discovery during these times and that the other Grugs who claimed this were liars (this was mostly royalty, they enjoy their own lies). Now what is this ‘magic’ i speak of? It is quite the curious little quirk of this universe that Luratos inhabits. The way it works is quite difficult to explain, but i will try. The way it works is that if you have a weird family of materials called Urnat for special particles in the air to be attracted to, you can store a constant charge inside of there indefinitely, and a specific thought of a specific thing you wish it to do, and it will happen within reason. If the material you want does not exist, or the phenomenon you want to happen is an abstract idea, it wont happen, because the way it works is that the thought is processed by the particles in the material and they will make it happen by ejecting their charge in a specific way to make it happen through the conversion of energy to mass. If you wanted to make a fire blast, for instance, you would think of the fire blast and the material would then eject a fire blast by ejecting a stream of flammable liquid created from the ball, and then igniting simultaneously. Strangely enough, this process does not cause a planet smashing explosion, despite the fact that energy is being converted to a large amount of mass, and the Grugs should be thankful for this. The way the Grugs have been using and abusing this power throughout the ages is that in the early years of Grug civilization, the kings of the various Grug settlements of Luratos have established academies for the nobility to study what they call Alchemy, the way Alchemists approach this study is that they pray to some god for power, and most miraculously, despite their unscientific approach, they do occasionally create what they call ‘spells’, a spell is a written down chant that informs the caster to think of the thing that the Alchemist intended in order to cast the spell. Of course not everyone will understand what the hell the alchemist meant in the writings, so the spells have a high failure rate during this time period. The magic of this time was mostly used to scare the trousers off of disobedient peasants, this is mainly because the type of Urnat used in this time was crude, but easy to take out of the ground, but it did not have much storage space, so making fire ball was out of the question, only making flashes of various colors of light and assortments of weird noises was possible at this time, so it had no wide scale application in warfare. It was only the time when they had figured out how to make bronze tools did they have the means to dig further for more Urnat, because before this time they could not get much Urnat from the soil of the surface, so they did not have enough to experiment with to find ways to refine it. The way you somewhat refine Urnat at this time is that you dissolve the Urnat into clean water (impurities float to bottom) and you scoop off the floating Urnat into a pan. Next is that you then melt it by placing a clay cup of the Urnat into a hot pit of burning coal and put a clay lid on the pit, and wait 2 hours. It should be a liquid at this point, and then you add silica to the mixture, and stir it up. The crude Urnat that is an ugly brown goes to a rich baby blue color, this is low-enriched Urnat. This Urnat is capable of more damaging spells such as fire ball, water beam, ice dagger, acid jet, etc, this addition to the bronze age arsenal was a stepping stone to what we see today, and you can only guess as to how these were utilized for unspeakable horrors. Nowadays, the Grugs have figured out how to highly enrich the Urnat, thankfully this is an expensive process that is not used often, so only one of them exist currently. Urnat has truly been a scourge on Luratos in the hands of the Grugs, but only so much judgement can be passed on the Grugs, because a lot of them dont wish for things to be this way, it is only their kings that are bringing destruction to Luratos.