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File 148410147997.png - (152.50KB , 550x400 , 0025-questDiscussion.png )
107622 No. 107622 ID: e6d65e

Current Thread: https://tgchan.org/kusaba/quest/res/769644.html

Discord Server: https://discord.gg/cQeD4kM

Past threads in current series:
https://newrem.com/adventures/0001-heatherQuest.html
https://newrem.com/adventures/0002-worbyQuest.html

I'll answer questions about me, the quest, the setting, etc. You play as a character who knows a lot about their setting, so I'll also be happy to answer just about any question that the player character knows the answer to, to help you metagame!
Expand all images
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No. 107626 ID: d79f26

this is super cute
>>
No. 107628 ID: 143250

hm, looks like I got some reading to do. Gotta find the time to do it, lol.

Looks pretty cool from what I've seen so far.
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No. 107666 ID: e6d65e

>>107626
>>107628
Oh my gosh TGChan is so nice. Aaaaa!
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No. 107667 ID: 5b93d3

>>107622
>pervasive magitech
>law/programming-based magical system
>Sure I could be super-powered and fight monsters but I'd rather be an architect
This is the best thing!
>>
No. 107720 ID: 67d5dc

See also: adorable pokemon themed quests
http://old.newrem.com/adventures/

If I ever end up making a pokemon clone, Durumana is absolutely going to be one of the starters.
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No. 107746 ID: 398fe1

What currency is used in this world? Cloud Cash is mentioned but that sounds like some kind of microtransaction coin shit.
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No. 107747 ID: e6d65e

>>107720
You have my permission. God help you if you choose to make the engine support more than two types and put in Darumananananananananana.

>>107746
There are a few currencies.
-The main currency used in all Blue states, like Moncrefe, is "Bux" represented with a Thaiwan Baht (฿) symbol. Bux is basically credits injected into the government by economic ministries that oversee the state of the economy. Bux has no physical form.
-Pink states such as Shibuya use "Coins" represented with a cedi (¢) sign, which are basically drops from monsters in the area. Some dungeons have these items that look like poker chips, so they're used as currency as they're a sort of scarce resource.
-Elves use "Klel" in their encampments. Klel is basically magic bitcoin. It... works... for them...
-Orange states used to use MMO style copper, silver, gold, but it's basically Zimbabwe Dollars now. Now they use the fiat bux currency, because it's far more stable and agile.
-Demons in Zealand use bux nowadays but they used to use "Tesh" represented with the tughrik "₮" sign, until they started trading with humans on the surface, and now it's all bux all the time.

Scrips, coupons, bartering, and the like are also super common. Exchange arbitrage is a pretty easy and fun way to make a lot of money in NewRem.

Cloud Cash is just some gamified bullshit the wages have. Some white mages take it really seriously, but most don't.
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No. 107761 ID: b7883c

This quest has very interesting worldbuilding so far.
Some questions:
- Is the [White Ceiling] the age past which powerful healing (or resurrection) no longer works?
- What notable megacorps are there aside from Evangate?
- Are Blue / Pink / Orange states basically confederations of states like the European Union?
- If solving [God's Curse] would allow the disenchanting of gods, I'd imagine at least some of the gods would be against that sort of thing. Are they able to do anything about it?
- How do dungeons work?
- Did Shine actually end up swapping kids?
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No. 107769 ID: e6d65e
File 148463041016.png - (214.36KB , 900x712 , Map.png )
107769

>>107761
>Is the [White Ceiling] the age past which powerful healing (or resurrection) no longer works?
Got it in one! People die pretty quickly from normal sickness after this age, so it's basically life expectancy. (Not a lot of non-magical medical research.)

>What notable megacorps are there aside from Evangate?
- Qrystal® is a Shima based company that manufactures PDAs. They're mostly government controlled because PDAs quickly became a necessity for just about all modern work. They're the thing you're seeing when Shiné projects her quest log or something. PDAs can read your Unique Mana Signature and thereby function as your ID, Passport, etc, and if you pick up another person's PDA it displays your stuff rather than theirs. They're also free. Qrystal doesn't really have any competitors but they're practically a government agency at this point so it's fine.
- Van Merr® is a company that makes fashionable monster slaying equipment. Whenever you see a slimming chain mail bikini or anything like that, it's usually by Van Merr, as equipment found in the wild is usually clunkier and more darksoulsy. They're also big in the industry of buying your shit because they disenchant thousands of pounds of trash equipment you get to try to make better custom outfits out of it. Van Merr's main competitor is Taiga® who also buys and sells equipment but they don't really make anything themselves. Taiga's like the auction house ebay company. Van Merr has been trying to get an Evangate Contract for forever but Evangate prefers to make their clothes in house.
- The Alhambra Trade Company makes all the boats in the world that transports all the barges and stuff. It's not as efficient as Earth's shipping container warehouse database system but they've got their ways. If you wanna do any business across the ocean you have to do it through ATC.
- Shibuya, as a city, is basically a big megacorp too. Shibuya is The Golden Saucer from FF7, as a giant city, basically.
- Zeal Pet Services. They'll rent you a catgirl if you're a sad demon who is depressed. Absolutely nothing fetishy going on here. Honest. (There actually isn't, much to the chagrin of some of the customers and contrary to the beliefs of some people on the surface. Professional therapy nurse/maid/pet/cat.)

There's also guilds for just about every RPG class you can think of, and more!

>Are Blue / Pink / Orange states basically confederations of states like the European Union?
I've attached a map of the major city states of the world. Generally speaking, if states are the same color they're allied, except for the gray ones which unaffiliated and weird. I say "generally speaking" because sometimes these alliances are a little tense, like Corneria and Fallenhal, or Fargasta and everyone. Blue states are pretty nice places to live if you're poor and fucking shitty places to live if you're rich. Pink states are the opposite. Orange states are more diverse and have less in common with each other and are mostly allied because Fallenhal is like old timey british colonialist.

Oh and the little teal dots are Elven encampments. Don't worry about those. They mostly keep to themselves and serve as nice little hubs for adventurers to resupply.

>If solving [God's Curse] would allow the disenchanting of gods, I'd imagine at least some of the gods would be against that sort of thing. Are they able to do anything about it?
I should clarify. "Gods" is sort of a misleading word that makes you imagine the Greek Pantheon, but they're pretty different. NewRem had one God that was killed with a magical pun and then upon their death they were split up into two twin, a brother and a sister. The sister managed to straight up die of old age eventually, but then her position and role ended up going up for grabs in a weird way that just about any human can sit on the throne and acquire her nature in a similar fashion to the way a personality sphere in Portal 2 changes when they're plugged in to the enrichment center, except like... good? Anyway so disenchanting [God's Curse] would let you poof the still alive God, but not kill it. They could just assign themselves a new form. Disenchanting the Human God that is currently running the show in Celestia would have more severe consequences so... uh... don't do that. The Goddess is Cynthia Evangate though, so it's unlikely the White Mages want to disenchant her, but you know how it is. The White Mages have a Batman plot to kill everybody they know. [Holy] is a white mage invention to kill demons, for example. They've also got other stuff like [Turn Undead] and the like. This would just be another and they'd probably call it something like [Theodicy] if they get it.

>How do dungeons work?
Dungeons work much the same way as they do in an MMO with some of them just being locations that people mark on maps that are usually tunnels through the ground that monsters have taken up residency in, and others being little pocket dimensions where time progresses differently like a little Narnia. Stuff respawns in the second kind and a lot of the natural resources that the world has to work with comes from them. "Instanced Dungeons" like the second sort are either way more forgiving than the tunnels or far less forgiving depending on how regulated they are. Most of the low level dungeons are regulated so hard that if you die in them you instantly wake up outside the dungeon with some of your money missing that goes to the upkeep of the domain. More difficult dungeons generally don't or can't be

>Did Shine actually end up swapping kids?
Not yet. (Probably not ever. Once the player loses control of Worby she goes back to behaving normally.)
>>
No. 107776 ID: 398fe1

>>107769
Those mountain formations... the continental plates are moving towards the equator?
>>
No. 107777 ID: e6d65e

>>107776
So now we're really getting into the nitty gritty. That map is a rectangular projection of a torus/donut shaped planet made by the Alhambra Trade Company. The equator of the planet is studded with 12 massive Yggdrasil style mana trees that mark the center of each city (except for Fargasta which takes more of a treehouse approach and built their city a little ways north of the main Mana tree). Shima, Parthen, Fiveside, Corneria, and Cataclypse are referred to as "Poloidal" cities for daring not to be on the equator, and thereby not being supported by a Mana Tree. Those mountains aren't exactly to scale, but rather are just a quick little piece of clip art I slapped on there. I need to get around to modeling the planet's surface in 3D. Those mountains more resemble sort of a bumpy stand for the ring to rest on. Despite being a torus, if you saw the planet from space it'd look more like the shape of a red blood cell because the inner ring is mostly iced over.

You see, NewRem, at its core, is a pastiche of SNES/PS1/Saturn RPGs. Influences come from Treasure of Rudras, Final Fantasy, Tales of Phantasia, Terranigma, Ragnarok Online, and Albert Odyssey. I'd describe the universe's laws of physics as naive. Newtonian laws of physics, gravity, geometry, logic, set theory, and other kinds of math all work exactly as you'd expect them to, but the real nitty gritty of particles, atoms, quantum effects, etc work differently enough that you should avoid trying to draw analogies. Impact forces have physical limits. Contiguous supersolids that are not comprised of atoms exist alongside atoms in the same universe and don't play nice with electrostatic forces. The "core" of the planet is such a solid, and there is an opening to the underworld around Cataclypse where the "Hellevator" can take you to Demon civilization certain times of the year when the intense gravitational electrical storms aren't so severe. The mountains are jagged bumps in the shape of the torus, rather than volcanoes.
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No. 107785 ID: 42673b

>People die pretty quickly from normal sickness after this age, so it's basically life expectancy.
Assuming a similar day length to Earth, 140 -> 210 is around 38 -> 57 in Earth years. Due to the magical aspect I would expect significantly less variation than with Earth life expectancy (due to the decreased rate of death while below the ceiling age, especially in infants). Does that mean that Shine basically invented the phenomena of having living grandparents as an adolescent/adult?

>There's also guilds for just about every RPG class you can think of, and more!
Is there a Barbarian-Corp, who's CEO sits at a desk of skulls and lives to drive the competition before him and hear the lamentations of their shareholders?

>Despite being a torus, if you saw the planet from space it'd look more like the shape of a red blood cell because the inner ring is mostly iced over.
Nonstandard world shapes are neat. Does gravity get weird near the ring middle? Are there one or more epic level dungeons down there in the low (or no) gravity ice peaks?
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No. 107788 ID: e6d65e

>>107785
>Day Length
You're close enough! NewRem's common time measurement is done in "Zuns" which are exactly 15 minutes long. There are 100 of them in a day, and 100 days in a year, which gives NewRem 25 earth hour days. This brings the 38-57 up to 40-60.
They have a concept of minutes, hours, seconds, but it's more used for turns of phrase since the (relatively recent) adoption of English/Common.

>Barbarian Corp
There's a Berserker guild called Berserk Corp. that has a CEO who does exactly what you're describing. Unfortunately I already used up all of the Conan reference design space with a stupid pun when I made the Barbarians the world's leading haircut and cosmetics company.

>Gravity
That supersolid material (which I will refer to as HL from here on out, as that's what remeran scientists call it) has some interesting properties concerning gravity and other interactions with normal atomic matter. HL is a malleable substance (assuming you don't try to touch it with anything atomic, in which case it is the most unyieldingly hard thing you'll ever ever come across) that clumps together in a liquid-ish way, but within its own physical reality there is no such thing as gravity per se. But atoms regard it as having gravity, and quite a bit of it, that all pulls toward the center. The center being a big hole.

You could forgive early remerans for believing the world to be flat, and then believing it to be a mobius strip. The large cities being all located around the equator is no accident. It wasn't until much later that domain magics and gravity spells made it possible to go beyond the northern mountains without falling off into space and being sucked into what was basically a black hole in the center of the planet, but those magics caused their own fair share of problems with the spirits in the underworld track being suddenly stuck to the walls and eventually becoming demons to be able to move.

>Epic level dungeons in the ice peaks
Unfortunately no. Although there are monsters in the Cataclypse wilds, there are no instanced dungeons as the first God who made most of the dungeons had no reason to assume humans would ever be able to explore that place before he died, and the new Gods are more content to explain the mysteries of the world rather than update the landscape each time Humans come to a new environment. (Though they will make easter eggs from time to time for fun.)
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No. 107802 ID: b7883c

>But atoms regard it as having gravity, and quite a bit of it, that all pulls toward the center. The center being a big hole.
So the effective gravity is consistently inwards towards the center of the ring. The part about falling into space implies that the atmosphere is only fairly close to the torus, so would you be able to transport things quickly to the other side of the torus by [Launch}ing them horizontally off the edge fast enough for them to orbit around to the other side and [Slow]ing for landing?
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No. 107805 ID: e6d65e
File 148470250220.png - (86.10KB , 414x672 , 0026-doink.png )
107805

>>107802
Theoretically possible in a vacuum! In practice you collide with a solid block of atmosphere and ice so dense you'd lose all of your speed and get stuck.
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No. 107850 ID: b7883c

Since we are seeing someone nonhuman in the current update, what intelligent species are there in the setting? So far there we have seen or heard mentioned humans, humes (whatever those are aside from humans), humans with cat ears (are those humes?), demons, elves, gods and (to some extent) monsters.
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No. 107857 ID: e6d65e

>>107850
"Hume" just means Human. The Zeal language (most common demon language) drops the last syllable of lots of loan words. That being said, because Demons are usually referring to Humecats when they say Hume, some pedantic liar type people decided that it's a term for all the different kinds of humans like cats, dwarves, etc, so they can be xenophobic bigots. From there it's kind of a location and demographic thing as to whether or not "Hume" is offensive or not. College age Catgirls usually consider it REALLY offensive, and others tend not to care, and some will even correct you that they aren't Humans but are in fact Humes and it's just a tremendous fucking pain in the ass to try to talk to people anymore.

Anyway, the main races and their varieties are:

Humans - Civilians, Gifted (Monster Slayers), Humecats (Catgirls), Dwarves, HumeCows, Halflings, and the various city ethnicities.
Demons - Way too many to list off the top of my head. Pick a fursona and it's probably a demon. There are also some demons with no animal analogue such as Barto, Zeal, Eskers, and Calmers.
Monsters - It's complicated. Lots of beautiful emergent behavior from creatures that specifically exist to just be fought and killed by dudes with swords.
Plants - I guess? Some plants have reflexes and some can cast magic. They're typically not intelligent though.

With some extra much rarer races:

Fiends - Elves, Dragons, The Valkyrie, etc
Gods - Hendrix, Linus&Joy, Shiné, Cynthia, in that order.
Earthlings - Alex T. Spiegal, the protagonist. Just one.
Hybrids - Mika, the one and only half demon half human.
Homonculi - Alchemist creations. Nothing as cool as Full Metal Alchemist. More like blobby little animal pet things imbued with the ability to cast certain spells and take orders.
AI - PDA computer people. Not as smart as fictional AIs but smarter than anything we've got on Earth.

All of the above have the potential to be super smart or super stupid depending on what variety they are. Cows, for example, are bred by demons to be idiots. Except for the ones where there's only one I guess which are all pretty smart.
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No. 107885 ID: a107fd

>>107805
So, how is it the atmosphere hugs the sides of the torus, instead of all flowing downhill away from the cities? Why is that block of ice at the center a cylinder with concave faces rather than a sphere?
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No. 107887 ID: e6d65e
File 148491440663.png - (550.23KB , 1024x1024 , zz035.png )
107887

>>107885
The atmosphere is an obloid spheroid centered on the geometric center of the torus with a little distension around the outer circumference. Luckily for the air breathing population, NewRem's atmosphere is REALLY big. It's practically a gas giant of breathable air. Important when in addition to the people on ground level, you have Kami's Lookout in the form of Celestia.

The ice is actually convex, rather than concave, it's just that my drawing there was scribbly and bad. The not-perfectly-spherical shape of the ice is a combination of clingy gravity domain magic, surface tension, and sunlight. Also the wacky way the planet wobbles and rolls like an unbalanced wheel throughout the day. The ice is a pretty slushy mixture of air and water, but nevertheless pretty dense because it's compressed tightly by a planet's worth of gravity with no volume to hold that gravitational center at bay. There's also these electrical storms but I don't wanna get into that because literally none of this is going to come up at any point in the quest.

Also, I should probably mention, the giant mana trees in the center of each town keep making water that drains out into the ocean and that water drains off into that center via gravity until it's flung out into space every KATet when a huge blast of energy shoots through the hoop and causes catastrophic hurricanes for a week followed by a pretty intense planetwide winter until JA starts.

Tets are super predictable and everybody has known how to deal with them for about six and a half thousand years or so at this point. Tets happen at the end of every season, and are just a part of your life as a Remeran on the surface. JA, SA, KA, RA, are the words for Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter, and JATet, SATet, KATet, and RATet refer to seasonal Noah's Ark level floods, Hellfire Heat, Crazy Winds, and Extreme Colds, respectively. That's what that dumb JATet preparedness quest was referring to when trying to sell Shiné name brand water bottles.
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No. 107893 ID: e6d65e

>>107857
I just reread this post and I wanna clarify the last statement.

Almost all of the species where there's only one of them are smart. Not cows.
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No. 107940 ID: 3abd97

>The White Mages have a Batman plot to kill everybody they know.
Yes, good. It's basically the perfect school for this.

My first thought on discovering being restricted by [Soft Touch] is that honestly wouldn't slow us down that much if we didn't want it to. A hypermax white mage is pretty much the perfect powerset for subjecting targets up to fates worse than death that do not technically harm them. There's potentially massive wiggle room for shenanigans if you go looking for them.

Not that it looks like we're going to need to get especially creative in that regard, as we've got more important and sillier day to day stuff to concern ourselves with, ala >>107667 .
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No. 108264 ID: e6d65e
File 148586181852.png - (257.83KB , 1024x1024 , 0027-batai.png )
108264

>>107940
There are a lot of Asimovian plots to subvert the rules and hurt people as Shiné but they're harder to think of than you'd normally expect.

As far as setting traps goes, Shiné can totally hurt somebody with a bear trap, but it has to sit there for an exceptionally long time compared to normal people. Getting stronger ended up making Shiné weaker in a way.

In addition to nullifying physical pain, it causes any spell that registers as offense to fizzle.

Also, [Soft Touch] only affects physical pain, so Shiné could call you mean names or something I guess.
>>
No. 108269 ID: 3d2d5f

Well we already established that insufficient or less effective heals are permissible. If you restoring hp without treating root cause (don't actually remove the poison or the sword stuck in them or the water in their lungs, allow the monster to keep chewing on them, etc) you've got a system of torture where technically all you're doing is healing.

Or heck, if you can heal wrong that works too (look I'm sorry your bones are set wrong now but I stopped you bleeding to death, stop whining. I can't break and reset them now, that would be harming you).

There's healings or buffing things you really shouldn't (you mean I shouldn't have cast haste, regen, and auto-rez on that bacterial strain?) or purifying things you shouldn't (you mean you needed those other bacteria living in your gut? Make up your mind).

And there's the perennial favorite of immortality horror. I mean, technically, if someone is locked in a dark box or room and can't get out, constantly hitting them with healing to keep them from asphyxiating, or starving, or dying or thirst, and keeping their body fully charged so they never succumb to sleep is good for them, right? (Shiné just needs an appropriately complex Rube Goldberg that allows locking someone in in the first place, or to trick them into locking themselves in).

Depending how much fine control white mage allows, you could functionally drug people at will with various "positive" effects. Or train / brainwash people with additive state changes or by stimulating pleasure feedback.

White mages are really easy to turn into nightmare fuel if one wants.
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No. 108290 ID: e6d65e
File 148591649258.png - (685.73KB , 1024x1024 , 0028-cliveBarkersWhiteMages.png )
108290

>>108269
I totally forgot about tying somebody up and leaving them there. Totally legal for Shiné to do. She can also do cement shoes and drop them in the ocean. Hilariously, they'll have just under a week to think about it while they wait for her B-Life to expire before they die.

As for the rest of what you wrote, I just picture pic related.
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No. 108291 ID: 398fe1

>>108290
B-Life? You mean, buff length? So Soft Touch works like a buff on the person Shine interacts with?
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No. 108300 ID: 79a07e

Just gonna admit this. I didn’t know this was part of an expansive universe.

I liked the name Rudy over Shine. Would be a neat plot twist or something.
>>
No. 108313 ID: e6d65e

>>108291
A-Life and B-Life are sort of like philosophical concepts that are actual physically detectable properties once magic is involved, illustrated in this diagram. >>108264

Atai, translated as A-Life in English/common, is the aural component of your spirit. It coats you, as well as everything you're touching, and clashes with other people's A-Lifes. It's sorta like an AT Field, or Ki, or things like that. Very important to physical fighters, as it's what makes it possible for them to punch through things harder than their bones are. A-Life contains your mana signature and thus a bunch of information about you. Everybody with any sense has a periodic passive A-Life scrambler to avoid being the target of true name spells.

Batai/B-life is the residue you leave behind with you everywhere you go. Arrows from a bow, bullets from a gun, traps, will all have B-Life all over them. It was once pretty useful to civilian law enforcement, though that's outmoded now. The A-Life to B-Life conversion is one way and basically impossible to figure out who a given B-Life signature belongs to unless you can go into their house and get a sample of theirs and compare the two.

Anything Shiné touches will be covered in B-Life and thus become harmless for around 5 days unless somebody else picks the thing up to acquire ownership of the object and flush her B-Life out with their A-Life. Scrambling either of these won't actually help Shiné with overcoming soft touch as whatever new signature she gets will immediately have the [Soft Touch] properties.

>>108300
Rudy is a rad name. She'll live with remembering thinking her name was Rudy for a couple minutes for the rest of her life. She'll probably use Rudy as a name in online video games and stuff like that. Your legacy will be preserved.
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No. 108314 ID: d79f26

>>108313
here's a large scale application, what happens if shine touches nuke?
>>
No. 108315 ID: e6d65e

>>108314
Assuming you could get something with effects analogous to a nuclear bomb there -- a physical mechanical object that has city wide destructive explosive force -- were Shiné to touch it as it's blowing up you'd get July City from Trigun. A big crater, all the buildings wrecked, the land messed up, and nobody hurt. Then you gotta get the hell out of there before her B-Life expires if there are any secondary effects like fallout or anything like that.
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No. 108688 ID: e6d65e
File 148697778719.png - (534.15KB , 1024x1024 , 0029-collage.png )
108688

Wew... apologies for not updating in four days. Some stuff came up and then I had a birthday thing.

Back to trying to do dailies and doing every other dailies instead because I draw so slowly!
>>
No. 110485 ID: 5b93d3

Huh, seems toroidal planets may be stable without magical influence: http://www.aleph.se/andart/archives/2014/02/torusearth.html
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