Of course, there was only one town when Springfield fell through the
Deathfall portal, and landed on Durus. Over time, people started spreading
out, first to Splitsville, and then Parade, and all the way to the
unfinished and unnamed sixteenth town. This was what made the Mage
Protectorate prosper. People were able to diversify, and go visit each other
across the lands, and learn about each other. A real civilization formed out
of the chaos and struggle. After the war with the monsters, this dynamic
became more difficult to hold onto. The towns were too far apart. Without
any powers, and a severe lack of electricity, all repairs had to be
completed by hand. Some towns didn’t even have the right technician for a
given job, and it would sometimes take weeks before the right person had the
time to make the trip. The time monsters were gone, but the world was not
without its perils. One thing they did was keep the thicket from becoming
overgrown, simply by trampling over it all the time. They also seemed to
have another effect that no one could really explain. Where the seed portal
once only ever brought useful or innocuous plants, it now brought them
poisonous and thorny plants. It could have been completely unrelated to the
monsters, but it didn’t matter, because they were here now, and they made
life on this planet that much harder. By 2094, people were starting to
realize how impractical it was to maintain the status quo. What would they
be able to do about it, though? What they needed was someone with time
powers.
While the source mages had a law against mages conceiving children, this was
no longer enforceable, so people were doing whatever they wanted. They
didn’t think it mattered anyway, because Jayde Kovac had stripped them of
their powers. What they didn’t realize was that she never removed any
abilities, but the energy it took to manifest them. This energy was always
restored for new people (i.e. babies). Toddlers were now running around with
powers of their own—albeit weaker than their predecessors—having been born
with the energy needed to exhibit them. This gave some people hope for a
better future, but it would be awhile before they found the right mage. They
couldn’t wait that long, for they needed a solution now, before the human
race on this world died out. One child looked to be the most promising. She
could extract people from the timeline, and place them anywhere else. She
could not change the past, so she would always have to put them back
eventually—and sooner, rather than later, because of how taxing this was on
her—but they figured this would help them realize their goals. It was
difficult explaining to her what they needed, since she was so young, but
they were eventually able to direct her to the right man, in the right
moment. She plucked Baran Avan out of the timeline, and pulled him up to the
future, so he could help them conserve resources. He used his mass
teleportation abilities to transport every single still-standing building in
every single still-standing town, all into one place. He stacked some on top
of each other, so they almost looked like high rises, except not really at
all. He might have spent more time curating a real city design, but the
timeline extractor wasn’t strong enough for that. Once it was finished, the
towns were mashed into one chaotic and moderately unstable city, which they
later decided to call Aljabara. The end of the Interstitial Chaos, and the
beginning of something much, much worse was near.
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