In an obscure corner of the universe lies the Shadow of Bat'alzer.  The Shadow
is consistently fast in relation to Amber prime timeflow.  Thus, though the Shadow itself is young, its inhabitants and cultures are already ancient.
        Bat'alzer is relatively sparse in sorcerous nature and power sources.  Spells cast within the Shadow take a great deal of concentration and time for moderate to small effects.  But the physical laws have remained constant enough for a fairly advanced technology to have developed.
        Bat'alzer is a world of strata.  Above, enormous and beautiful cities float in the clouds.  Below, the refuse of eons is heaped over the entire surface of the world.
        The only known sentient inhabitants of Bat'alzer are the Kalri'i.  These are the denizens of the skies.  Descended from diminutive flying saurians, the Kalri'i are a beautiful -- though ancient and corrupt -- people.  Magnificent multicolor crests top elongated faces with cruel eyes.  Wings that blaze with scintillating color grown from thin shoulders and end in lacquered finger claws.  Serpentine tails carry stingers armed with a light venom, suitable for stunning smaller creatures.  Short legs lead down to large, delicate and razor-clawed feet. Though most of the above is hidden by the voluminous and ornate robes that theKalri'i prefer.
        The technology of the Kalri'i is based on the use of 'makers', a genegineered bio-equivalent of nanotech.  However, very few of the Kalri'i actually know how to use or construct maker-masses.  A few reclusive technicians and scientists supply and work with the maker-masses of each city.
        From these various vats, everything that the Kalri'i desire or need is grown.  The vats are incredibly efficient, spewing forth an entire city's supplies and luxuries from waste, sunlight and the occasional trip to the surface to supplement the vat's raw materials.
        The Kalri'in cities are themselves miracles of technology.  Built upon -- and sometimes through -- disks of an incredibly strong lighter-than-air material, the cities float in the gentle breezes of the calm Bat'alzer sky.  Each of the cities is guyed by several long suspension cables to anchors buried deep beneath the garbage, sunk into the bedrock of the planet itself.
        On rare occasions, disasters have been known to befall particularly ill-omened cities.  Cables snap and the city floats up out of the atmosphere into the destroying chill of space.  Disks become corrupted and the city plummets to ground to add to the ruin and decay of the surface.  And other more mysterious things.
        Kalri'i culture is ancient, serpentine and twisted.  Elaborate rituals surround even the most common activities.  Dueling is second only to poisoning as the most common form of death.  And rarely can more than three generations of a Kalri'i family be found alive in the same city, though the Kalri'i are capable of living to enormous lifespans.  Each city contains one (or more) factions struggling for control.  But it has been an eon since any one power has held control of more than two Kalri'i cities.
        The Kalri'i speak a bastardized form of Thari -- recognizable but completely without the prescence of first person singular pronouns.
        Below this squabbling decadence lies the underworld of Bat'alzer.  Mountains of decay, garbage and ruin cover the entire surface of the planet.  Rogue maker-masses have made certain areas particularly dangerous as they continue to spew out (or consume) things without guidance or discretion.  Toxic wastes have accumulated into lakes of poison and rivers of filth.  Derelict machines -- of various levels of intelligence -- operate fitfully in the shadowed twilight under the cities.  Disease and air-borne maismas swirl in lazy polluted fogs around rotting mountains of festering refuse.
        No known sentients live in the debris of Bat'alzer.  The denizens of the Underworld are marked by more cruel cunning than by intelligence.  And a certain adaptability.
        Insects hold most of the higher ecological niches.  Their reproductive rates giving them a mutability in response to the toxins and poisons around themselves.  Many of which they have adapted into their own bio-systems.  Kre'er beetles -- 4 feet long and ebon black -- can spit a concentrated acid spray almost 15 fifteen feet.  Taoni flies are poisonous to the touch, being covered with a moderate neurotoxin.  Freel swarms emit a mild airborne sedative that can anesthetize quite sizeable prey, depending on the size of the swarm.
        The few remaining lizards and amphibians, remnants of the days before the Kalri'i took to the skies, have developed more patient defensive abilities.  Hard skins, filters in the nostrils, resistances to diseases and poisons -- they struggle along, but they are still there after all these millennia.
        At the bottom of the ecology, a few small mammals -- shrews, rats and mice -- fight to survive in the toxic and changing environment of the Bat'zalerian underworld.  Birth rates keep them present, but they are hunted by everything and mostly survive by being unnoticed.
        It is from this world of dichotomies that Croix comes.  Intelligent, educated, beautiful -- feral, poisonous, savage -- Croix has lived in and enjoyed both halves of Bat'alzer.
 
 
 

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