--- THE 108 SHARDS ---


Often, the inhabitants of a given world or universe believe that the world they reside within is the only one that exists, or at least, that if there are other worlds, they exist in harmony and connection with the world they're in themselves, in a sense of cosmic order. Indeed - in each world, even forces the inhabitants would consider chaotic or distorted are truly part of their world's order, as the chaos or distortion is "natural" to the reality they themselves reside within - and thus, not true chaos or distortion. In these bubbled worlds that are hardly ever tested by true chaos or distortion, life seems as it is supposed to be in the eyes of the inhabitants, oblivious to the higher truth waiting just out of view.

Yet certain worlds have had the truth of existence exposed to them, and with all the genuine chaos that entails. A massive Arbiter Titan, a colossal, unique being will appear in their world, and move to a set location within it. Once the titan has reached that location, it will use its immense power to connect the world to a network - the 108 shards - of other worlds visited by similar Titans, and lock the "Shard" or "Fragment" that is the world into place with these shards, stabilizing the worlds to the point they cannot completely fall apart into nothing, and allowing travel between these Shards using Borderlines, the "tunnels" that connect the various shards and can be accessed via a variety of ways. But this comes at the cost of the Shards beginning to suffer reality-altering collapses, being forced into a strange diplomatic world with the other Shards, and being accosted by Outsider forces, many of which have taken over entire shards - all while the inhabitants of the various Shards cannot leave the Shards in any way other than the Borderlines due to the enchantment created by the Arbiter Titans.

The 108 Shards have been growing for eons, with new shards added periodically, while several crumble and slip away. For a long time, all that was known is that the Titans intended to gather 108 Shards into the network, then they would add no more, as well as not remove any more from the network. For the millennia the network has existed, this seemed like it would never come to pass, as the addition of Shards was too slow to keep up with the regular falloff of failed Shards. However, just this past week... the final Shard has been added, and the Arbiter Titans are all in place. The network is complete, and from what little is known of the Arbiters' purpose, the people of the Shards know that soon the true function of the Network will begin, even though nobody knows what it is...

The final shard added was yet another copy of some distant world called Earth, populated with simple beings, that, yet, still have vast potential - humans, now exposed to a chaotic multiverse they never could have dreamed of in their own world. The only questions remains: will they survive, or will they fall apart.

-- FOUR METHODS OF SURVIVAL --

Meta Manipulation - Involves manipulating "meta," the term for reality in my setting as well as the name of the multiverse that the setting focuses on, allowing a person to alter reality in ways that bypass the laws of any individual world and its functions (as opposed to world-based reality warping, which is usually quite limited outside of dealing with concepts present in its world). It is unlike most reality warping in fiction int hat it's very technical and comes in many forms, rather than simply being a "wish" power.

Meta Technology - Involves using "technology" built to interact with the Meta. Everyone needs to know a little, but only certain groups or people rely exclusively on it. It involves creating technology that relies on broad concepts and meta forms rather than material science, and a result "meta tech" can range from stuff that actually looks technical to a cool sword or whatever. Aside from augmenting your body like a cyborg or whatever, it focuses on granting you cross-world potential without actively affecting what you are, and like manipulation focuses on using meta power rather than a single world's power.

Meta Empowerment - Using meta forces to increase one's ability or capability, or objects, places, concepts etc. basically it focuses on gaining power from specific meta sources rather than creating your own manipulation or technological methods, and like the other two can take many forms, be it invoking powerful meta beings or even just using positive benefits of whatever effect your world's Collapse has had on you. This is a favorite of my personal favorite of the main story shards, the Dark Demesne.

Meta Enhancement - Unlike the other three, this method doesn't rely on meta forces or beings directly, but instead uses the meta and its multiversal nature as a means to an end. Meta enhancement relies on gathering power from not only the laws and functions of your world, but other worlds within the Meta, rather than using Meta forces directly. For example - hybridizing technology from say, a real robots mecha series Fragment and a super robot mecha series Fragment tech mixing would be Enhancement, as would learning different types of magic from various Fragments or hybridizing new life forms from different shards' species.

-- MAJOR STORY SHARDS --

The 108th Shard, "Earth": The primary Shard of the story. A basic "earthsim" shard that has only just been added into the network, and has to deal with both their own developing crisis over the revelations of the multiverse, a slowly intensifying meta-collapse, and diplomacy and hostile encounters with outer factions. Its future is yet to be determined.

The 95th Shard, "Salith": A fantasy world that has developed into an advanced science fiction world due to being linked into the network, with a near future setting and analytical understandings of magic like any other form of science. Lives in a state of relative "world peace" save for terrorists, criminals, and third world wars, much like our own, owing largely due to the empire of Santore being defeated and "banished" out of the shard 400 years ago. It has a long and storied history regarding the development of various fantasy races and cultures developing into more sci-fi influenced ones, with the Santore empire being an exception which never lost its fantastic side, even as it advanced its technology like the rest of the Shard, which culminated in the modern sensbilities of the Shard clashing with the Empire's more traditional evil fantasy empire-ness, leading to the aforementioned banishment from the Shard. Meta-technology is an immense focus here, and is regularly in development every day.

The 63rd Shard, "Rokoan": A humanist hard science fiction world that has developed into a high fantasy world due to collapse effects and a link to the network. It is constantly full of Horrors known as "Ghiranod," the primary collapse effect of the Shard, which hunt down anything tied to the fragment's history of advancement and destroy it, and evolve in unpredictable ways whenever they are defeated. Laced up in conflicts of territory, family, and faith that were long uninvolved in the Shard's past, it's an unpredictable and dangerous Shard. Primarily focuses on Mars, which has been terraformed, but Venus has also been terraformed (but it's not known what's there), and the Ghiranod infested ruins of the Ecumenopolis known as Earth also plays a role. Because of the Ghiranod's hatred of technology and advancement, Meta Manipulation and Meta Empowerment are far more common than Meta Technology, as well as usage of magic gathered over time due to the general shift towards fantasy.

The 33rd Shard, "Xeta": A comic book world inspired by Marvel Comics in specific. Being third generation shard, it's been part of the network for thousands of years and as such has heavily changed over time, with a storied history and vast number of factions that make it implausible to succinctly summarize everything about it. Most superheroes still have an impact on the world thousands of years after their deaths, alongside supervillains (while some of both have managed to survive all the way to the present - but this is rare). The equivalent of Mutants has become the more populous species on the planet Earth, though there are still plenty humans. Earth's sun has become a black hole due to a collapse effect, but the planet still thrives via a new form of mutated plant-life. The sky is perpetually overcast/grey on the Black Hole side. Due to the scattered and disordered status of life in the Shard, there is no central focus and Meta Manipulation, Meta Technology, Meta Enhancement, and Meta Empowerment are roughly equally common.

The 20th Shard, "The Dark Demesne": A shard that was originally a pure, heavenly world inhabited primarily by angelic beings. For several thousand years did it remain this way, even fighting off attacks from Euclids and Chaos Demons, but eventually was attacked en masse by various "evil" and "dark" creatures and races from the various other shards, who joined forces to invade it in order to make it their new home to escape from how in their home shards they were hunted by the more traditionally heroic inhabitants - or even outsiders in the case the original shard portrayed such creatures positively. Ever since the takeover, it's become a long-lasting, corrupted haven for otherworldly and sinister races and entities, who have a complete social structure and are a major player across the 108 Shards in general. They worship a group of goddesses they call the Thorn, which they see as rivals to the Golden Crescent's sage goddesses. Home of the Blackcoats, a faction of young supernatural creatures bonded with living masses of malleable darkness that take the form of articles of clothing, who participate in cross-shard black ops missions. The Shard often uses Meta-Empowerment by invoking the power of the Thorn to strengthen themselves, and also often dabbles in Meta Enhancement due to the wide variety of different evil creatures and forces within it.

The 4th Shard, "Mejeya": The third oldest shard in the network. While it originated as an earth-simulator shard like the 108th shard, it has since become completely unrecognizable, due to a combination of a collapse effect that combined the surface of every single planet in the universe into a single, extremely long, semi-flat piece of terrain comprised of each planet's mass, with the various stars and suns floating in the sky above this landmass, and cultural development over the ages it's been part of the network. By the modern day, its central culture is a bizarre, media and entertainment-obsessed one, with great attention focuses on film, television, games, music, theatre, art, fitness challenges and even more archaic and unusual ones like arena combat. It's noted for its megacities, wide variety of aesthetics and styles, and its strange language which is made up of various geometric shapes and patterns, which is the overall most common language in the 108 Shards due to its age, simplicity, and how it's nigh-essential to learn due to the lack of universal translators. Because of its age and size, it has a healthy mixture of Meta Technology, Meta Advancement, Meta Empowerment, and Meta Ehancement.

The 90th Shard, "Afterglow": A shard which originated as a world reminiscent to a slice of life manga focusing on cute high school girls, where each of them had a unique talent. The Collapse hit the world hard, with various effects springing from the core concept of the Fragment, manifesting in a variety of bizarre ways - such as talents being able to literally level up like skills, and horrifying ways - such as men within the Shard suffering debilitating disease and decay until eventually dying due to how they were largely irrelevant to the shard's original story. As the collapse intensified, the world seemed like it was set on a course to fall apart and die out, but eventually a workaround was eventually discovered, when one of the original students from the story the Shard was initially focused on discovered how to manipulate Meta forces in a way she called Contextualization, which focused on manipulating reality to set up a "context" for reality to follow in a specific case. She began to spread this knowledge to the rest of the people of her world, planning to use it both to repair the world in a sense and as a way to fight off foreign forces despite having little in the way of firepower or research. Centuries later at the present, the world has transformed severely because of the contextualization, having become a xenophobic, isolationist civilization exclusively populated by women, where the sky is pink at daytime and bright purple at nighttime, and the power of Contextualization in the hands of the Shard's elite allows them to set up a dystopian civilization where everyone fulfills their exact role as viewed by Society, with foreigners either destroyed or forcibly integrated into their population using contextualization, all while keeping their populace ignorant of the fact the 108 Shards exists even at all. World peace enforced by draconian control over reality and perception, with a specialty towards fighting despite not having much actual power by using contextualization to render an enemy's power irrelevant depending on the type of contextualization.

The 107th Shard, "Menagerie": Another extremely young Shard, being the second youngest after Earth, only added around 5 years ago. It originated as an RPG Mechanics-based universe focusing on monster girls, with a light-hearted tone and a generic harem protagonist, even if it did have regular battles depending on the storyline, unusual for the genre. Nonetheless, the people of the world had an overall idealistic and mild style, with hardly any of the antagonists being actually evil and their battles with the protagonist usually ending with friendship or more. When added to the network, it seemed relatively stable, and had little reason to get hostile with any other shards due to how its culture welcomed the strange and abnormal, aided by their overall friendly and lacking in xenophobia culture. However, a type of magical stone, Infernite, while mostly just used for simple magic in this world, proved to be extremely efficient if used as fuel for KALI-H Meta Ships, one of the many models of Meta Ships in the network, and one specifically used by the Empire of Santore, mentioned earlier - a fantasy evil empire that escaped their Shard in eve of defeat by the rebelling population of their home shard, and has retained their status as a fantasy evil empire even after becoming a massive Shard power in their own right, down to advanced, sci fi technology in addition to their magic.

War soon broke out after Menagerie rejected each of Santore's extremely unequal trade offers, and while the people of Menagerie were more powerful than the Santoran troops on average, they were unprepared for how brutal, unrelenting, and hostile Santore was in its invasion, making almost every victory for Menagerie Pyrrhic as the population mostly just wanted peace to return, but, fearing subjugation, continued fighting. Eventually, Santore sent a massive invasion force to the capitol of Menagerie's primary empire, and the rulers feared if it fell, enslavement was certain. So, they surrendered, and in return for peace, Santore forced a set of extremely unequal treaties on the Shard, demanding control over the capitol city, freedom of enterprises inside Menagerie, a massive, yearly tithe of Infernite, and a tax of Infernite for all resources bought from Santore by businesses and governments inside the Shard. Nowadays, the Shard is still recovering from the war, and Santore's iron grasp on the Shard remains in place, those within the Shard too afraid to stand up to them, as the capitol has been filled with Santoran military bases just waiting for the war to re-open. Due to how young it is, it has yet to choose which of the Four Methods it pursues, but unlike Earth there's rallying movements and developing paths for each already in place by the time of the story, and as such serves as a minor mentor to Earth so to speak.

The 103rd Shard, "Enclave": A world that was originally a version of WW1 earth, but the introduction to the collapse network quickly threw the world's history off its course, especially when reality-altering storms started to manifest as a collapse effect, quickly changing the way the world functions. It is one of the younger shards in the network, having only been added 30 years ago. The global status quo is quite different, with america having been split in half due to a Euclid nest, Germany having become a deeply religious country which uses Sacred Geometry-wielding agents to "purify" reality of alterations and has a hatred for the supernatural, while worshiping the concept of mundanity, and imperial japan having managed to become a superpower due to advanced technology created by a collapse-made rift at mount Fuji. Being one of the youngest shards in the network, it is one of the first to be encountered "officially" by the 108th shard, being that it's the first to start active diplomacy with. It primarily focuses on Meta Manipulation, with a specialty towards Sacred Geometry, even more so than other Shards, which is saying something since Sacred Geometry is the most common form of Meta Manipulation in all the Shards.