Ascala Spotlight - Economy and Technology

 Hello. C J here. Ascala the city in the Legend Setting may look a lot like modern day Earth. It is, in many ways, but it’s a bit different as well. The Legend Setting was never Earth and the galaxy it’s in, Creation, is not the Milky Way. Where is Creation compared to the Milky Way? I don’t know. Make it up. It will never come up in the stories. Ascala is roughly 25 years in our past in terms of technology.

Their version of the internet, called the Interspace, is different. It’s built on a coding language called Square, which is in turn designed to run on their magitech CPUs made of blue crystal. Red crystal also exists and is not used for this job. The Interspace looks like the internet 25 years ago. People have cell phones but smartphones are decades away. AI doesn’t really exist. Video games though are everyone’s favourite weekend activity and there are a ton of them.

Square can also 3D print magic using a device called a spellwriter. These devices are common items and have many civilian uses, while the military grade ones are loaned out to police and military officers as needed and are kept careful track of. They can do magic, although mages are so common in the city that their uses are purely recreational. Gender alteration, basic summoning and temperature manipulation are some of their common uses.

The city has music in large quantities as well. Most concerts are in parkland like many real world outdoor festivals. Some of these are ongoing most of the time. The concerts are normally free to the public and are run and funded by the Division of Media, one of the three Divisions of the Ascalan Government. The current Chief of the Division of Media is a male leonin who I haven’t named yet. These concerts feature acts in a wide variety of genres from something we here would call rock music to unique sounds created by code wizards in real time.

Education is a bit different as well. Ages ago, before the Mages’ Rights Movement restructured the economy, business travel was a constant fact of life. Vantara, Oiwan and Ascala constantly tried to fix the problems in their economies without realizing that those problems were caused by the fact that the mages who invented their technology weren’t the ones who ran the companies making it. No one understood how magic worked because they weren’t the mages doing it.

Fast forward 100 or so years and now these three nations have learned that if a wizard invents something for you then they need to be the one in charge of making more of it. The system works and is overseen by the Division of Economy, led by the female pronoun intersex human Sandran Anion. The third Division is the Division of Security and is led by the also intersex, male pronoun human Azkail Anion. These two are distant relatives although there are almost a million humans with that surname in the city. 

That leaves a gap in the economy about education. The hotels, convention centres and event catering teams saw an opportunity and started working with the corporations to run seminars and educational conventions out of their buildings and with food they already knew how to prepare in bulk. The business model stuck and, since most corporations are funded by the government, they were funded to provide education. The unique economic model the Ascalan Government manages means that these aren’t government employees but they work closely with people who are.

I will be depicting more of this culture and the continent it’s on, including Vantara, Oiwan and Ascala, in the third Quantum Expansion, Five Million Strong. Five Million Strong will not focus on the police as their culture and tools are so fun to design that I allocated another Quantum Expansion to them called Crime Doesn’t Pay. Crime Doesn’t Pay is far enough in the future that I don’t know exactly what number it will be. The city also has popular fiction, which is normally hand bound by the people who write it. Romance and mystery are common genres. That’s all for now. Expect more recipes soon. I’m working on a simplified roast pork rib the next chance I get.

C J Mcpherson