Bathroom Monologue: Twenty-One Fantasy Countries Made From Scratch

Randall Nichols is a dear friend of mine who's wrapping up work on a card game. He asked me to check the twenty-one one-sentence pitches for Fantasy nations he had to invent – a pretty mean feat for anyone on a deadline. I was happy to help, but because my imagination was obnoxious, I couldn't stop myself from generating my own countries, based on ridiculous Fantasies he couldn't possibly use. Blame it on Calvino and sugar.

I wound up running until I had my own deck of twenty-one uncomfortable neighboring cultures. Like Randall's, mine get one sentence a-piece to sum them up. It is the most fun I've had in a while, writing or otherwise, some pure play that I have to recommend trying at home. Maybe you already do.

If you don't, I figured I'd share my twenty-one Fantasies here.

1 The most technologically advanced culture is dominated by sentient robots that are mostly threatened by advanced models time-traveling from the future to supplant them with infinite hindsight.

2 The country of eight-armed people with no legs, who are renowned for their litigation, and arguments that take days as lawyers constantly argue, "And on the other hand…"

3 The nation where everyone believes their shadows are their true forms, and their bodies of meat are but biologically afterthoughts.

4 A bog in which every human civilization has sunk and failed, but the bacteria is quite evolved and has a bustling culture.

5 A strict theocracy worshiping the gargantuan on whose back they all live, harvesting giant lice for food.

6 A loosely collectivist culture with no central government, and yet everyone is obsessed with constantly building great labyrinthine walls, such that invading armies starve before hitting any homes.

7. A culture like any other, except it lives upside down, gravity reversed, and so mostly excavates tunnels or conquers the undersides of floating slabs of rock.

8. Capitalists who live on the top sides of most floating islands and slabs of rock, whom sell anti-gravity powder and whatever else gets stuck in the treads of their shoes.

9. This culture is unknowable.

10. A democracy where everyone ages backwards, only the middle-aged may vote, and newborn ancients are protected by world-weary infants.

11. A nomadic tribe of beings with no immune systems, but who are carried in individual wads of slime that are toxic to everything they touch.

12. A storied monarchy of underwater creatures, claiming their territories include all the world's seas, and who raise giant squid to defend their borders against sea trade.

13. The only country to ever forge a peace treaty with 12, this is a sentient gestalt reef of coral bordering several countries.

14. Barbarian horde living with domesticated dinosaurs, living the dream of every good Metal album cover.

15. A religious conclave of worm- and human- symbiosis dedicated to finding and digging to the center of the planet.

16. A nation of religious crusader pacifists who have rationalized their dogma such that they only invade the opposite end of their own kingdom, switching sides every year, crusading safely without bloodshed for a record 150 years come this Fall.

17. A nation of werehumans who are quite content for most of the month, until the full moon, when their curse fills them with existential dread and body issues.

18. A vine-covered nation of sages so trapped in nostalgia that they are trying to reverse time and return to the glory days.

19. A culture of mountain-dwelling misotheists who view the lands and seas as the gods' creation and seek to build something better on scaffolds between the peaks of the world.

20. When they say they're a nation of sunlight, they mean that all time stops for anyone and anything in their vicinity if shade or night passes overhead.

21. A nation where every third person takes turns not existing for a year so that everyone can reminisce about how wonderful he/she was, their annual return providing a constant stream of reality checks and disappointment that keep the culture grounded.

Bathroom Monologue: The Shoemaker's Profits

Walk two leagues west of the Cloud Hills and you will see The Ascent, the city that was once the first outpost in this region. It was settled before golems did the work of humans, and grew into one of the first cities in the entire Empire of Gold and Jade. It is built into along the steepest slope in the region so that the hands that built it would never forget the feet that supported them.

Everywhere in The Ascent is a fetish for staircase, and every structure in it is only one story tall. There are no houses as there are on farms or in modern cities; instead, every baked clay abode is covered by another overlapping set of stairs, going diagonal, or winding amid each other, and every door is set beneath where someone treds. This way anyone can walk anywhere, and this way every head rests to sleep below where feet will run, and so everyone in the city knows they are not alone. It is a comfort and an obligation, reminding every citizen to rest no longer than they must and to return to service.

These tiers of houses run up to the mayoral residence, above which no one lives. Passages have been built throughout the intricate staircases to carry the noise of all the footfalls in the city up to the apex, and so they echo through the mayoral residence and the chambers of his staff, thus reminding them more than any who they must rise to serve. When policies are unfair, people climb The Ascent with heavier footfalls, or remove their shoes to beat against the mayor's door. At the worst times, the citizens have hurled loads of unwashed shoes at those windows. The shoemaker profits on every discontent.

Bathroom Monologue: Miss Anthrope

They had the top half of a centaur, but fewer and clumsier legs. They were slower than sauropods, and kept getting trampled under them. They had neither the artistic nor scientific know-how of gremlins; the few golems they built were uninventive knock-offs. They had the sex drives of imps, without their carnal creativity. Their offerings in entertainment were few.

They were susceptible to influenza, tentacalia or vampirism. And they made woefully generic vampires, the only new trait being that some of the young ones sparkled. There was nothing special about their immune systems. Succubae and incubae could eat them by the bed-load. At best, they were junk food.

In many ways it was a two-eyed cyclops, lacking their size and strength, but including their gluttony and cruelty, and thereby leaving them socially unappealing.

Really, they were generous to let the humans live. It’s sheer luck they took over the world.