founding

Ordanz, being largely unaffected by Arsene's poison, has retained most of its infrastructure and society since antiquity. A glacial land covered year-round in ice and snow, the Ordish people drilled a hole through their continent to drain the poisoned water flowing from Nix. They took to harvesting their existing clean ice and snow, melting it in geothermal vents and boilers, and distributing it to their populace, sidestepping the issue of the poison completely.

geography

An icy wasteland across over 90% of its landmass, completely barren apart from the northernmost reaches. While the aboveground areas are almost completely deserted and largely uncharted, belowground is a massive network of populated tunnels and volcanic chambers. While the first tunnels naturally existed in the earth, the people of Ordanz soon developed the technology to properly expand and ventilate chambers of iron and steel.

society

A cruel oligarchy with a brutal wealth gap between the rich and the poor. While billionaire tycoons and other wealthy families relax in aboveground mansions, the underground teems with exploitation and poverty. In conditions beyond inhumane, civilian labourers and factory slaves toil endlessly for scraps of food and pitchers of water. The de-facto middle class hosts minor businessmen, overseers, and political figures who can afford to rent housing, sometimes even nice housing, rather than huddling up in random corridors as the poorest do, or filing into communal bed-cages as the slaves do.

The Upper Ordish discern an individual's social class by the way they make money. The six recognized classes of income for the Upper Ordish, in roughly descending order of prestige, are: Corporato CEOs, managers, owners, and administrators of businesses, as well as general merchants, bankers, lawyers, and stockbrokers.

Inheritors Those who came into wealth by way of donations, legally owed recompense, an unexpected windfall, inheritance of assets, or sales of assets, but have no or negligible active income.

Erudici Those with extremely high-level technical skillsets that require specialized education. Doctors, engineers, physicists, programmers, economists, advertisers, etc.

Aesthete Joymakers who create works that stimulate the emotions or senses. Principally artists, but architects, designers, chefs, influencers, 'personalities', journalists, drugmakers, prostitutes, and pornographers also fall in here.

Mercanto Private guards and mercenaries. All district ministers of Ordanz are expected to hire Mercanto to enforce civil order.

Proles Physical labourers, service workers, factory men, builders, miners, and those who conduct menial tasks.

Rather than see Ordanz as a division between aboveground and belowground, most Upper Ordish see Ordanz as divided between the lines of these 6 income classes, with the starkest divide being between 'prole' and 'everyone else'. The Upper Ordish regard prole work as extremely shameful, embarrassing, demeaning, and pitiful, and often will commit murder before ever doing work as a prole. To note, they will still regard a Lower Ordishman who owns a small business on a higher level than an Upper Ordishman who works as a maid in a mansion, as the former is a corporato, and the latter is a prole, even if the latter makes more money.

In contrast, the Lower Ordish have no conception of these income classes at all, with their fundamental social divide being between those who live aboveground and those who live belowground. The most powerful family in Ordanz are the Seacrests, of Seacrest Enterprises. They are the parent company to most every firm with landlord rights over the vaults, own the volcanic forges for smelting metal, own the main ventilation systems, own the major food production firms, and hold a complete monopoly over the nation's water supply. In these circumstances, and with travel between vaults highly regulated, rebellion is not a pipe dream so much as actual stupidity.

Submit, starve, or adapt. Pick your poison. Law & Order Every year, one representative from any family may pay an established sum for the right of ministerhood. Ministers may propose, remove, and alter laws, ratified upon an 80% vote of agreement among the cohort of ministers. Ministerhood fades after a year and must be renewed to be kept. There are no limitations on how often anyone may become a minister or on the number of ministers. The money spent to become a minister is dispensed back to a random vault or city yearly.

Despite the inherently changeable nature of Ordish law, some precepts are so old and agreed-upon that they stay untouched. Notably, the penalty for most crimes is slavery, and enforcement of this is astoundingly strict. Despite that strictness, some vaults have struck bargains with Seacrest and others are not valuable enough for hard regulation, leaving gangs and local opportunists to rise in these looser regions. It would be a bit of a problem... if Ordanz wasn't so massive, that letting some vaults go wild just doesn't matter. Industry & Technology Ordanz is economically strong and technologically quite advanced. Having industrialized and discovered diesel power before other countries hit the bronze age, Ordanz dominated international trade relations for centuries before Asphodel eventually overtook them. Since then, Ordanz has stagnated, its economy reliant more on the vastness of its labour force and cheapness of production than quality or technological innovation.

International trade is crucial to Ordanz, with enterprising merchants often accruing significant wealth and power. The domestic market is much weaker, but still viable in select towns and vaults. Also successful are novelty acts and entertainers – anything that can reliably slake the general boredom of the upper classes. And drugs. There's lots of drugs.

Its main exports are iron, steel, coal, misc metals and ores, household and industrial tools, synthetic fabrics and clothing, plastics, oil, and water. People & Culture Split for over a thousand years, the constitutions between those living above and underground are distinctly different. Both groups, however, have pale skin, hair colours ranging from red, to blonde, to medium brown, and eye colours ranging from brown, to blue, to olive.

Surface-dwellers are notably tall, resistant to cold, and prone to heterochromia, though it isn't quite the norm. They are otherwise pretty unremarkable.

Ground-dwellers are typically stunted, jaundiced, and ugly, victims to generations of horrid living conditions and any number of congenital ailments. They can subsist on minimal food and water, with incredible physical endurance and stamina, pushing their bodies beyond what seems possible. Their senses of direction are uniformly impeccable, preventing them from ever becoming lost or disoriented, like a kind of constant internal compass. Many of them have a natural preference for enclosed spaces and tunnels instead of discrete rooms, and would freak out in agoraphobic terror if they ever saw the sky.

Food is a major problem in Ordanz. Most people eat a diet solely of edible cave fungus, farmed in exorbitant quantities. A lucky duck might supplement that with bread or apricots from Kitiven. Or if they're really a madman, an egg! And how about a real luxury: rat meat from the vermin that infest the tunnels! Delicious!

Aboveground, things are not like this. The air is crisp and the mountain views from the populated basins are stunning. There is no clattering of pipes, whirring of fans, or hissing of boilers. Cabbages, radishes, carrots, beets, peas and scallions survive in the north. Greenhouses nurse imported crops of lemons, limes, figs, and apricots. Elk meat is not particularly rare and breaded rabbit makes for a good snack. And for everything else, there's importing!

High Ordish is spoken aboveground, with Terran taught as a compulsory subject in schools. Low Ordish is spoken underground, and most communities do not have schools for Terran to be compulsory in.

Religion

When Arsene closed the spacial distortion field around the Glen, Ordanz figured Camellia's interests lied more with Arsene than humanity. When the entire Glen dropped into Nix and the air and water became poison, that only justified their stance. They see Camellia's absence as humanity being forsaken, but free, to be as indulgent or petty or vapid as it wants. In other words, whoever wields the biggest club makes the rules, which is really how things have always been, so whatever.

Ordanz knows shockingly little about supernatural phenomena, and dismisses most notions of spirituality being legitimate or useful as a distraction from the real source of worldly power: money.

Death Rites

Souls in Ordanz are severed. Bodies of slaves are fed to more hardworking, dutiful slaves, so as not to waste precious meat. The poor typically sell the corpses of their loved ones if they don't eat it themselves, since the alternative is decomposition and consumption by rats. The rich go through a more involved process of encasing their dead in ice and entombing them deep in the tundra, which preserves them forever.

Notable Places

East Welding: An underground vault-city run by the gang Black Thorns. Originally built to house welders, smelters, and simple factory workers, its economy boomed with the arrival of the mysterious Desiree Blackthorne. A hotspot of crime, violence, drugs, and sex trade, its flow of dirty money nonetheless made it one of the only underground cities where local businesses turned reliable profit.

The Warrens: The collective term for the tunnels that run between vault-cities, many of them poorly regulated. Often the end destination for the unemployed and homeless. While some regions have built decent communities, others are known only as kidnapping hotspots and cannibal nests.

Marie-Elliot School for Able Students: A high-class boarding school in the Great Pines district of northern Ordanz. Despite an impressive alumni, it is somewhat looked down upon for its rather lax standards of entry.

relevant characters

Reyl: The daughter of Desiree Blackthorne, and a local celebrity in East Welding. Notorious for enforcing the Black Thorns' regulations and for upholding even her most trivial threats. Violent, dangerous, is bribing the authorities. Will likely inherit the gang once Desiree passes.

Raum: The son of Desiree Blackthorne, and a local celebrity in East Welding. Notorious for spending money exorbitantly and doing favours at the drop of a hat. Also, for hopeless promiscuity. If you believe all the rumours about him, then without exaggeration he's bedded half the city.

Poppy: Middle daughter of the Seacrest family. Introverted and nerdy, she's nonetheless a world-renowed social activist, indeed the face for Ordish social reform and the driver of an associated social revolution. Long story short, it didn't go great. She's an Archon now. Not a popular one, either.

Aster: An unremarkable warren-rat who always seems to be present when significant happenings are afoot. Appears to know many things, but also might just be insane.