The Slice (paracosm)

The Slice is a shared, collaborative setting taking place in a world where everyone lives in the thin slice of breathable air between Heaven, the ever-present cloud layer their cities float atop, and Beyond, where the air thins into void.

This topic is to ask questions about the Slice, and @maiki and @tim will fill in details. :slight_smile:

What do you want to know about The Slice?

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What is The Slice a reference to? hopes it’s a very beautiful video game to learn about

That is a really magnificent photograph! Absurdly lovely.

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The Slice is a world @maiki and I built out years ago.

The world is covered with a thick pale pinkish cloud layer. Like islands in the sea, the tops of some mountains peek out of the clouds, allowing for some human cities. Also, no one can remember a time when there weren’t Kartick disks, a technology that allowed for the building of massive city-size platforms that hover over the cloud layer, and skyships. Skyships powered by sail, or other forms of propulsion cross the vast distances between platforms. Travellers must be wary of any abandoned platforms found.

Gah, I really need to get back to writing about this all again. It’s still all here in my head, as bright as the days we created it.

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Okay, I’ll put it on my list: write a story from the Slice.

@judytuna, folks that travel between the platforms, the wanderers, outlaws, and heroes, are called Slicers. The Slice refers to the space between Heaven and Beyond. “Heaven” is the ever-present cloud layer that allows the Kartick disks to work most efficiently, but causes electromagnetic disturbance and doesn’t contain much breathable air. Nothing that goes down into the cloud layer comes back, so folks dump their dead bodies there. “Beyond” refers to the space above the atmosphere, the effective ceiling on ship travel (Kartick disks tend to failure dramatically outside the atmosphere).

“Grounds” are steadings, and most refer to floating platforms, which can range from small compounds housing a dozen up to mega-platforms housing millions of people in layered arcologies (these tend to suck, because they have crazy religious governments with institutional xenophobia against outsiders…). A few special “grounds” are actual ground, and are exceedingly rare. Most times mountains will flare up the clouds, creating effectively borders of maelstorm-y clouds referred to as the “Deep Slice” (because no one will go near it, it’s always “far away”), which of course has all kinds of neat stuff happening, like the rumored mega-factories producing “dragons” from a lost age…

Gosh, maybe we ought to play there… :thinking:

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woooowwwwwww this is even MORE AWESOME than i could have imagined! I LOVE IT!!!

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We used to live in a place called c9th, short for “Cloud on 9th”, and created a “cloud world” for NaNoWriMo. Our November writing habits have never kept up with the world there, waiting to be explored… :slight_smile:

I wrote these things because I wanted a way to tell stories of isolation and of having to constantly struggle to find something resembling normalcy. Whenever I fly in an airplane I think of how lonely it feels to be so far from anyone, definitively, and how getting on a boat in the past was like boarding a plane or spaceship, as far as an individual person can really grok, we can either walk to somewhere, or it’s impossibly far…

I feel like I can get behind exploring that place again, because it might be helpful right now, and also because it has “dragons” and ninja and cloud cities that hang upside down and a surprisingly small amount of violence. Huh. :sunglasses:

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I branched the conversation and cleaned it up and made it a wiki and now what would anyone like to know about The Slice? :slight_smile:

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I stumbled upon an image that immediately reminded me of Slice!

I find that a very… interesting choice for a desktop image, but wow does it fit our setting!?

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