[Torg] Core Earth (Genre and Being Real, 5 of 6)

[Jones Jasyn]

What does this mean for Core Earth?

Core Earth has been influenced by other realities, perhaps more so than any other cosm ever. When people of other realities dream, they dream of what is possible in their world. When people of Core Earth dream, we dream of what is possible somewhere, of what is possible elsewhere.

In one sense, this limits other cosms, they’re just not as flexible as ours, their fictions not as varied and multi-faceted and contradictory. We’re just as limited, though. We can only dream of magic, in Aysle it’s real. We can only tell tales of miracles, in the Living Land they actually happen. We can only dream of traveling the stars, while the Akashans do.

In that sense, our existence is the more tragic: We dream of other worlds, we long for other worlds, other worlds seem real to us and we want them to be real, but in the end we only live in this world. Other realities are beyond our grasp.

Were. Other realities were beyond our grasp. The Wars changed that. Now other realities, realities like those we dreamed of and yearned for, now other realities have come here.

This is a bad thing. Invading another reality requires believers. Since Core Earthers more readily believe in other realities, in some sense already believed in other realities before the Wars even started, they are more easily swayed to support an alien reality. Invading Core Earth only requires 25,000 believers, whereas invading another cosm could require twice that, or more.

This is a good thing: forewarned is forearmed. We know what spells are, we’ve been theorizing about them for thousands of years. Miracles? The holy texts of our religions teem with them. Scientific advances? We not only have foreseen yours, but hundreds and thousands of others beyond your grasp. We are Earthers, dreaming of other realities is what we do.

No cosm has ever been as prepared for the Possibility Wars as Core Earth is. When the natives of other cosms froze in shock when the patently impossible, utterly impossible, unbelievably impossibly impossible came knocking at their door, we adapted.

We didn’t sit in shock while our reality crumbled about us, we didn’t freeze in fear when creatures that cannot exist roamed among us, we didn’t panic when holes in the sky opened and everything around us changed. Instead, we accepted the existence of other realities, we adapted to the alien realities, and we struck back.

High Lords don’t expect this. One of their chief tools is shock. It is hard for most people to accept that another reality is even possible, let alone that it actually exists and more, that it has landed in your backyard.

On other worlds, even when stormers did appear, they didn’t have enough time to adapt to the new tools, new abilities, new truths of the invading reality. Before they could get their bearings, their world was gone and the High Lord had moved on to some other cosm. That didn’t happen here.

It didn’t happen here because our cosm has been molded by alien cosms, even if only in our imaginings. Our fiction helped prepare us to face other realities: to face them, fight them, defeat them.
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Jasyn Jones
jasynj (at) gmail (dot) com

"To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield."
Ulysses, Alfred Lord Tennyson

Check out my Torg webpage, Storm Knights:
web.me.com/stormknights/