Categories: Lore
Geography
The geography of the continent.
(You can find information on the geography of each country on their respective pages!)
Contents
The continent, artfully named "the continent," is where all of TIR takes place. But the entire world of TIR isn't much bigger.
The world is a flat rectangle, slightly longer on the north-south axis than on the east-west one. On the edges, the earth crumbles into the void, forming many floating islands of various sizes. The central continent is, in fact, just a giant floating island itself. The corners of the world range from famous tourist attractions (the northwestern one) to unexplored dangers (the southeastern one). At the bottom, all that drop down will be consumed by the merciless Voidspace.
Voidspace
What if you fall over the edge of the world? You die. No one had ever explored Voidspace and came back to tell the tale. Every submarine, every task force, every hapless tourist, consumed by the vast blue emptiness below where the visibility is less than a dozen meters below the lowest island and having people lose sight of you means they'll never see you again. You can lean over the railing and watch the sun rise up from below you (well because the sun and moon revolves around the world too why the fuck not), but you must take care to not fall.
Modern science has speculated that the Voidspace mostly consists of an unidentifiable substance they named "void gas." It vaporizes everything it touches, and assimilates the resulting vapor into itself. It's impossible to study it or utilize it, as it would just burn through any vessel that tries to contain it. The most people could do was measure how far down void gas starts becoming deadly, by dropping a long measuring tape over the edge, pulling it back up, and looking at where the tape got cut off.
The only things that aren't affected by Voidspace are the sun and the moon. No one knows why.
Void gas may be the only unsurmountable barrier to science, and it's clear that voidspace would like to stay that way.
Celestial bodies
Which is to say, the Sun and the Moon (always capitalized). The Sun is what gives off light, and the Moon is just a literal rock that doesn't even symbolize nighttime, as will be explained below. Scientists have speculated that the Sun was a huge mass of void gas so condensed it started nuclear fusing.
The Sun and the Moon orbit the continent at slightly different speeds, converging on one day where the Moon lands directly in front of the Sun. This happens every 365 days, and is called the New Year, or the Full Eclipse.
The Eclipse can only ever be truly full, a perfectly symmetrical ring, near the center of the continent, mostly in Atlasia and Westavia. It made sense because TIR civilization originated in the Atlasian region, but is still a bit funny when the emperor moved the capital to Flower City that they celebrate the Full Eclipse with the Moon slightly to the north of the Sun.
The time leading up to the New Year and the time following are called Partial Eclipses. The Eclipses are what mostly determines varying temperatures across seasons — the less the Moon is blocking the Sun, the warmer it is. In the winter half of the year, the Moon will practically always be in the sky with the Sun, creating partial Eclipses; while in the Summer half, the Moon appears in the night sky by itself, glowing red because it's basically perpetually in a lunar eclipse. The Ancient Bauhinians have come up with four seasons and later 24 solar terms to describe the temperature pattern and how it affects agriculture.
The axis around which the sun and the moon rotate is leaned southwards, making it so that the south is always warmer than the north. One of the emperors built two additional palaces for himself, a Winter Palace in the south in modern Froggy Island, and a Summer Palace in the north in modern day Sylvandia.
Calendar system
TIR uses the Gregorian calendar. Right, instead of anything that makes more sense given the 24 solar terms they canonically have, and New Year does not lie on January 1st. Meta reason is that I can reference my calendar apps for dates and such and it's easier, and that TIR dates can map perfectly to our dates so I can celebrate them in real life (which I don't do). In-universe reason is that there is no reason. The months especially, since there's no lunar cycle, months won't even make sense. An emperor took a day out of February to give to August, just like Augustus. They just did that for shits and giggles. 'Tis all shits and giggles until someone giggles and shits!
The corners
Northwestern
Also called "the End of the World," the northwestern corner is the most famous one for its approachableness and how much of it has developed into tourist attractions. Starcorp owns a fair share of the shops and services, though international law forbade any entity, be it corporations or states, to own any crumbled land. Every country has research outposts here, but of course the biggest ones belong to Bauhinia and Moreland respectively.
As for the activities tourists can do, there are glass bridges between a few islands, and cableways between others where you can ride up in a cart and slide down on a rope. Terrifying stuff but people live for that shit. Some of them.
Southwestern
The northwestern corner can be understood as a rookie version of its southern counterpart. Being a part of the Fantoni Plateau though legally outside of Fanton's territory, it is full of tall mountains that rise into the sky and break apart into floating islands near the tip. The highest one, named "the Roof of the World," is like Mount Everest to the TIR people.
Northeastern
Not much is known about the northeastern corner of the world. I'm just too lazy to come up with something. I will. One day.
Southeastern
The southeastern corner is not very studied or explored due to how dangerous it is. It is completely ocean, and where the ocean bed breaks into floating islands, giant waterfalls cascade directly into the void gas below. Many exploring ships and submarines had fallen down these falls before, as it is incredibly hard to swim up the currents.