PmWiki | Waylight / Tsuxia

The only nation-state in the Plateau, the totalitarian theocracy of Tsuxia is too preoccupied with cultural homogeneity to be expansionist -- this is fortunate for Slipstream inhabitants, since Tsuxia houses slightly more than half of the total human population in known existence. Tsuxi doctrine is that geeps and womps are Invaders and Streamies are poor Invader attempts as infiltrators, so the population is homogenous -- there are plats of every color, but only plats, to the point where being too tall is suspect. However, most Tsuxis peasants and workers do not even believe that the people outside the Plateau are anything other than monsters or demons.

Hybrid and deep life is hunted down and disposed of mercilessly, which has allowed the Plateau to function as a biological reservoir for the old ecosystem. A large "shield wall" has been erected to block off the Plateau's only mist-lapped valley; what little commerce Tsuxia has with the outside goes on there, and periodically exiles are left there. Crystals are rare, and are generally mined from the Plateau's outer walls; power comes from geothermal vents and windmills.

Tsuxia's government claims itself to be an extension of the Celestial Bureaucracy and the descendent of the shadowy organization that managed to repel the Invasion a thousand years ago; in practice, today Tsuxia looks like an amalgamation of every badly-run empire in human history. Few buildings are over three stories tall, the cities are livable gray and uninspiring, the political structure in practicesquat and brutal. A third, or a tenth, or one percent ó it's impossible to tell ó are part of Oversight, the counterespionage branch of the Bureaucracy, which controls all economic, social, and political activity in Tsuxia.

Fear of the long-dead Invaders is constant, and paranoia is institutionalized. In fairness, however, it was this brutal system of control that allowed any semblance of human civilization -- not to mention the original ecosystem of the world -- to survive after the botched Invasion. Tsuxia has been officially under emergency management until such time as when the original ecosystem reasserts itself -- this, obviously, has not happened. To enforce its isolationism, Tsuxia keeps a powerful standing air force and isn't above raiding "Invaders" for resources if it cannot obtain them in other ways. Tsuxia's militia is largely concerned with keeping the peace, but its sheer size makes it impossible for any other land to invade the Plateau. Civilian travel is limited largely to trains between cities and agricultural hubs, and horse or mule back otherwise; the cities themselves are officially designated as "temporary refugee shelters" and numbered, although most of them have evolved a name over the centuries. The central seat of the Buraucracy is a large land-crawler-temple called the Celestial Array, and moves cities every twenty years in an attempt at fairness; it currently resides in City 17.

Permanent Tsuxi settlements outside the Plateau are limited to a few highly fortified bunkers on small lands of strategic importance near the Plateau itself.

 (Stereotype: Evil Empire)