The world of Tag-Along is a writing/art project I have been working on since 2014. Ten years later in 2024, I decided to finally buckle down and turn it into something real.

Overview:

Azuria

Chimera

Swill

Faroffia

Amorph

Da’oole

See my World Anvil page for the world at https://www.worldanvil.com/w/amarian-empire-dthrocket

Book 0: The Diamocan Lie

I haven’t yet decided if Book 0 will be more of a “prequel” or just the first book of the series. It takes place loooong before Tag was even born, hundreds of lightyears from his world of Azuria. It tells the story of how Smoot met his wife, Echo, and how his friend Gall seduced him into pursuing a treasure that was against the will of the Amarian Empire.

It starts out on the planet of Quixaria, which is has a school for Amarian Fleet Cadets training to become Imperial Treasure Hunters. This school houses a trove in its Vault of treasures from near and far across the galaxy, from present and from ages past. The building is a cube a half mile in each dimension, and has over a million rooms large and small.

Unfortunately, Smoot’s dreams are crushed when war breaks out just before his graduation. So instead of going off to have peaceful adventures with his new bride, Echo, he and his friend Gall are shipped off to go fight the next intergalactic forever war. These wars take hundreds of years to resolve, but for the fighters in them that are continuously ferried around to the front lines, kept young by the effects of time dilation, all would be over in a few years.

During this time, Gall poisons Smoot’s mind against the empire, and leads him on a rebellious path toward personal treasures for themselves… a treason to the empire.

This story is all about what is truly valuable in the universe, and where to look for it.

Book I: The World Below

Book II: The Chimera Empire

Summary: The crew tracks Gall to a planet of rolling hills and expansive plains, and six (or is it five?) kingdoms. They are: Woa, Iir, Aor, ___, ___, and Hefterwallopsnod. Of these, Woa is the greatest, and supreme leader over their whole empire. They have long forgotten their Space Age heritage, and their civilization has descended into Bronze Age barbarism. A long time ago, the world was nominally gifted to the Outer Race as part of a treaty to end a galactic war. But the original inhabitants of the planet did not take kindly to the newcomers. Over the centuries, they oppressed them using biological warfare, which diminished them greatly, both in physical and mental stature. They oppressed them with burdens and made them their slaves, and after many generations of inhumane treatment, they lost the ability to speak altogether, all but solidifying their societal status as nothing more than beasts of burden.

The crew travels to Woa, but Tag gets separated and ends up in Iir, where he is taken into the Lord of Iir’s court as an adviser on “Science,” which Iir thinks is a strange, foreign religion. Tag ruffles some feathers when he claims that these beasts of burdens, or “Fudan Yeren” are actually humans and have rights, though he struggles to explain why from only his scientific worldview.

One day, a very fearful man brings one of his Fudan Yeren into the court of Iir for inspection, because, he claims, some evil has bewitched it and it can speak the words of men. When he demonstrates this, everyone panics and demands that the young Fudan be disposed of. But Tag intervenes on the Fudan’s behalf, and makes a wager with the Lord of Iir to prove this Fudan Yeren’s humanity. Iir gives him one hundred days to make his case.

So Tag gave the girl lessons and tried to teach her things about being human. But in the course of the training, he discovered that the more insurmountable hurdle was explaining why she was human in the first place and not an animal, and why being human was even preferable.

Flora: There are NO TREES on this ENTIRE planet. Only grasses, flowers, crops and small shrubs. The amount of flowers in the springtime is magnificent, of all different sorts of colors. White, yellow, blue, green and pink. The main staple crop on this planet is called “potamia,” and its uses are multifarious. The root is a rather zesty, starchy staple food, with a crunchy consistency only a little crunchier than potatoes, and a spiciness a little zestier than horseradish. The stalks are cut and dried and used for rope, composite brick, and wicker furniture. The plants are grown in submerged paddies that stretch for miles at the base of the bluff that the city of Iir rests on. The Fudan Yeren are made to swim in the deep paddies and dive for the bulbs, since they can only be unearthed by hand. It’s a very dangerous job… (see Fauna section)

Fauna: Horses, just like the ones from earth. Horses roam free over the entire planet, though millions are kept in captivity for war, transportation, agriculture and even meat. They have been genetically augmented in their distant past to make them bigger and stronger. Mice: there are mice with bizarre defects running wild on the planet… remnants of ancient genetic experimentation. Tag and Mayo notice a mouse with three tails out in the plains, and the sight of it along with what Tag had to say about it were deeply unsettling to her. There are many beautiful insects on this planet that Tag loves to study, especially a world full of fireflies in the spring around the time of the Festival of Light, when for about a week they light up the whole world. In terms of predators, there are wolves that prowl around at night in the long grasses. They mostly hunt the horses in packs, but they will also prey on anyone foolish enough to camp alone in the night. The Fudan Yeren are hunted constantly in the potamia paddies by giant water snakes, one of Mayo’s worst fears.

Book III: Chasing After Wind

Summary: The crew crash lands their shuttle on the windy planet of Swill, where they encounter a man named Beni-Ran Dunnat who has been stuck in the same paths of the wind for ten years, unable to find anything new. But together with the crew of the Celestia he is able to navigate to the one place on the planet where there are only calm winds, and in the process they all learn a little about how to find your way when all the forces are against you.

Swill is a mostly hostile, barely habitable planet where the only survivable biome happens to be in a very narrow altitude band midway up the spiky mountains. The lower atmosphere is argon or some other noble gas, then a cloudy, moist layer that obscures the bottom of the planet. Then the breathable atmosphere on top of that which is 20 percent oxygen, 10 percent noble gas, 60 percent nitrogen and 10 percent other. Helium can be easily tapped off vents in the mountains, and animals actually utilize this resource in biological lighter-than-air or slightly-heavier-than-air flight mechanisms.

Flora: The flora of swill is rather windblown, so either floats gracefully in the wind or is stout and sturdy in its onslaught. Such are the medusa trees, which have stout, twisted trunks with roots that wrap around rocks and into cracks. Their branches are long and flow in the wind, with hard leaves that don’t come off, giving the trees this scaly, tentacle-like appearance. There is also moss that grows on the leeward side of the mountains that the floatfish feed on. At Waff there are large evergreen trees that grow straight and tall.

Fauna: Bagbacked Peppamartens are flying primate-looking creatures, black or dark grey, with smart-looking mustaches, and a gas-filled bag on their backs that help them offset some of their mass because they don’t have hollow bones like birds. They can tap off helium vents to replenish their supply, and they have a check valve located on their bellies. You can often see them lying on their bellies on the mountains, what they’re doing when their in this position is filling up. Mayo helped rehabilitated a Peppamarten with a torn bag, and when it was healed she let it go. There are also many forms of floatfish, big and small. These creatures look and move like their marine counterparts, but are lighter than air and “swim” through the air. Their bodies are generally long, with long tails that gyrate to propel themselves forward. Instead of gills they have air intake valves that can open wider or smaller, allowing them to extract more oxygen at lower levels of the atmosphere.

Sky Brigade: After the second colony ship crash landed on the planet, and poor refugees began banding together under banners to stake out an existence for themselves, it became clear that a force would be needed to keep marauding pirates at bay. Thus, the Sky Brigade was formed, by a young woman named Aura Novu, who escaped from the galley of a merchant ship dealing in human trafficking, and vowed to hunt down every pirate and human trafficker on the planet and send them to the murky depths. Beni-Ran loves her–however, he still sees her as a lawless sky pirate in need of reform, because he is rather prejudiced, and quite frankly they look just like pirates visually, and Aura even wears an eye patch (for looks, to make her look tougher. She actually has two good eyes, but that is her secret).

Book IV: Sparks in the Dark

Book V: The Mines of Amorph

Book VI: The Sky Below