Post by Gaea on Feb 1, 2017 16:36:26 GMT -8
Rather than a country of a kingdom, the three great towers of the Taygete form a stark contrast to their icy surroundings; three massive towers, spiraling and interlocking with each other as they pierce the sky. While they are said to represent the three Great Spheres of magic, in practice there is no such divide and all three are host to countless unsafe experiments, entire magical academies swallowed by the titanic towers, and of course an unending list of smaller individual research laboratories. Complicating matters, the intricate system of magical teleportation networks is sometimes unreliable despite regular maintenance due to the colossal quantities of magical energy interfering with its operation, which has led to a series of 'shortcuts' by mages who don't want to take several thousand flights of stairs... and which sometimes drop travelers off in the middle of the Nether or even Aether without warning.
The towers themselves are built of materials said to not be from this world, strange metals and alloys, and reinforced with countless warding spells, defensive magic, seals against all forms of magical, dimensional, and (in theory) demonic interference such that the entire construction is an eternal Pandora's Box of mystery and occasionally terror. Not even the highest ranking members of the mage council that ostensibly run the asylum have any idea what is happening throughout much of the towers at any given time, and rumors of labs abandoned for years, decades, even centuries abound. These tales, and the horrors lurking inside, are often used to scare new initiates, but there is more than a kernel of truth to them. Given the near total lack of oversight on 'appropriate' magical research, everything from temporal magic to anti-country weaponry to the field of biogenesis are (probably) being researched from a dozen different directions by teams who don't even know each other exist at all. Sometimes the results of experiments gone terribly wrong are found, entire teams dead and horrors unleashed in their wake, and combat magi or mercenaries are employed to investigate and clear out the area.
Despite its relatively poor reputation among the less reckless individuals of Elibe, the Pleiades Taygete does offer aid to nearby countries as needed to ensure stability, completely uninterested in politics but cognizant of the value of stability in its surroundings, so nearby residents generally tolerate the blight in their skyline with a mixture of distrust and resignation. At least they tend to be safer from monsters than their outside neighbors.
The towers themselves are built of materials said to not be from this world, strange metals and alloys, and reinforced with countless warding spells, defensive magic, seals against all forms of magical, dimensional, and (in theory) demonic interference such that the entire construction is an eternal Pandora's Box of mystery and occasionally terror. Not even the highest ranking members of the mage council that ostensibly run the asylum have any idea what is happening throughout much of the towers at any given time, and rumors of labs abandoned for years, decades, even centuries abound. These tales, and the horrors lurking inside, are often used to scare new initiates, but there is more than a kernel of truth to them. Given the near total lack of oversight on 'appropriate' magical research, everything from temporal magic to anti-country weaponry to the field of biogenesis are (probably) being researched from a dozen different directions by teams who don't even know each other exist at all. Sometimes the results of experiments gone terribly wrong are found, entire teams dead and horrors unleashed in their wake, and combat magi or mercenaries are employed to investigate and clear out the area.
Despite its relatively poor reputation among the less reckless individuals of Elibe, the Pleiades Taygete does offer aid to nearby countries as needed to ensure stability, completely uninterested in politics but cognizant of the value of stability in its surroundings, so nearby residents generally tolerate the blight in their skyline with a mixture of distrust and resignation. At least they tend to be safer from monsters than their outside neighbors.
