World
The story
Planet Joy was once a thriving world of wide lands, countless people and many cultures. Then a catastrophe no one could explain sank almost all of it beneath the sea, leaving only the smallest scraps of land behind. The few who survived built their civilisation again on those scraps, and they called the place Joy City.
Joy City is said to be the only place on Planet Joy where people can still live. Those who live there mean to make more of it — to build somewhere a civilisation of their own can stand. No one yet commands the ultimate magic that raises land from the sea, so their ground remains narrow; but they hold many doors that open onto other dimensions. Through those doors they gather knowledge and live through all manner of things. And as the people of Joy City play, and work, and sharpen their focus, magic comes within their reach.
Joy City is not the future, and it is not the past. It is simply another place in the same time we live in. Those of us who connect to Joy City are really there, in a second self built from the network — what remains of the old civilisation.
People who hear of Joy City, who want to see a civilisation flower there and live happily in it, keep arriving in the ruins of that old civilisation. As more of them come and their hopes gather, Planet Joy will little by little find its old warmth and plenty again. Until then, they make friends in Joy City, take up work, and go on building.