The World is the lid of a Jar balanced on the head of the Mother Goddess. For uncounted generations she has held it perfectly steady. But the rise of arcanoindustrialism has led to the pillaging of the Eastern Continent for magical resources, and the movement of such enormous amounts of stone and metal from one side of the world to the other - not to mention the biomass of Eastern refugees - is threatening to upset that balance. Not enough to actually topple the jar - but even a slight sway could drastically alter coastlines, razing cities and flooding farmlands and killing or displacing millions of people. Returning an equal weight of material to the Eastern Continent would be an impossible undertaking, but a worldwide alliance of magicians, geologists, and physicists have devised a solution. A wizarding guild in the Sunset Lands has developed a new kind of magic item called the Ballast Marble. Ordinarily, it’s no heavier than a nonmagical marble of its size, but when it is placed atop an obsidian pedestal properly installed on the edge of the world, its weight increases a millionfold. To restore balance to the world, seven Ballast Marbles must be created and shepherded to strategic points around the rim of the Jar.
Our tale follows the fellowship charged with traveling the very farthest distance - from the Tower of Towers in the Sunset Lands where the Marbles are created, across the Western Kingdoms, over the Bellicose Ocean, and through to the furthest reaches of the Eastern Continent. Their journey allows them to witness both the incredible advances in medicine, technology, longevity, and quality of life that would never have been possible without the Sunset Lands’ wizarding guilds and their access to the resources of the Eastern Continent, and the horrific conditions in which live the Easterners whose lands have been scoured. They bear witness to ethical and practical conflicts beyond their grasp, perhaps beyond the ken of all humankind - whether and how to preserve the advances wrought by the Sunset Lands against the declining resources of the world, and how to insure those advances can benefit the inhabitants of the Eastern Continent as well - and in the end find themselves forced to accept that they are not wise or powerful enough to be the ones to usher in utopia. Instead, they must embrace their role in merely keeping the world alive a little longer, in the hope that it might, one day, be truly saved.
puella magi madoka magica au where humans have seized control of magical girl tech and used it to create a dystopia: folks are forcibly recruited into magical girlhood, brainwashed into wanting to expand humanity’s empire throughout the entire universe, their wishes used to make magical starships and their powers used to conquer planets and enforce human supremacy.
eventually the empire stumbles onto some planet full of humanoid aliens early in its civilization’s history, and set to conquering it. they plan to use it as a testing ground and incubator for a magical girl that they’ll eventually transform into an enormous, massively powerful witch a la walpurgisnacht or kreimhild gretchen, who will eventually grow powerful enough to destroy the planet. once the planet is destroyed, they’ll capture and restrain the witch, and as need arises, deploy it against the empire’s powerful enemies.
one magical girl winds up making friends with some aliens, though, and eventually decides that this whole magical empire thing Sucks And Is Bad. she rallies some other girls to her cause and a massive magical girl war ensues. many magical girls are killed, many become witches.
eventually the earth empire loyalists abandon the planet, writing the whole project off as a loss. there’s only a handful of rebels left on the planet, and witches and familiars run wild. the surviving rebels don’t have any way off the planet, so they hang around for thousands of years, watching the aliens’ civilizations rise and fall, interfering occasionally but mostly staying out of the way.
but after thousands of years, the initial instigator of the rebellion falls in love with an alien. a whirlwind romance ensues. after adventures and character development, the rebel magical girl and the alien have a child together, in classic humanoid alien fashion. but the magical girl dies in childbirth, and for reasons no one understands, can’t regenerate from her soul gem. her rebel friends stick around to help the alien raise his alien child, inasmuch as they’re capable.
this is the first time in human history that a magical girl has borne a child, so no one quite knows what to expect. as the kid grows, he (it’s a he) starts manifesting some of his mother’s powers, especially those centered around her soul gem. the rebels’ history on earth is sufficiently sordid that they keep it from him at first, but he learns some details of how magical girls work, including witchdom. eventually he and his magical girl foster parents start going off on adventures to defeat witches and familiars and bring their grief seeds back to their base, where they’re secured for repeated use and eventual experiments with de-witching.
but eventually earth sends another magical girl to the aliens’ planet. she’s captured and interrogated, and it’s revealed that earth’s original experiment into super-witchdom is still there, under lock and key and simulated emotional torment. with help from the original rebels and the now-turncoat magical girl from earth, the kid must find the old earth experiment and destroy her if she’s already witched, or rescue her if she’s still a magical girl.
once upon a time a monk had a loved one (close friend, family member, lover, could work either way) who was eaten by a gibbering mouther. when a gibbering mouther eats you, your body dissolves into the same flesh-colored goo that gibbering mouthers are made of, leaving your eyes and mouth intact; the gibbering mouther incorporates your remains into itself, and your soul is woven into the terrible hatred and hunger and agony of the gibbering mouther’s mind. in theory, everyone a gibbering mouther has ever eaten still exists somewhere inside them, but in practice almost no one in the world has the self-discipline, composure, and centeredness to exist in the horrible body of a gibbering mouther without giving themselves over entirely to the creature’s hunger.
but the monk was determined not to give up on their friend. they trained for years until they reached level 20, then went out looking for the gibbering mouther that ate their friend; when they found it, they let it eat them.
as a level 20 monk, they’re capable of keeping their own mind clear, and helping everyone else the gibbering mouther has ever eaten survive and think straight amidst the nightmare existence of being in this body; but almost all of their monkly prowess is dedicated to this task, which means they can only use the abilities of a level 1 monk. leveling up represents becoming better both at being a monk and at being a gibbering mouther, so they can use higher level abilities while still keeping their body stable and their mind clear. they hope to find a way to allow the other souls trapped inside the gibbering mouther to escape (either into the afterlife or into independent bodies, as they prefer), and at level 20, to start their own monastery dedicated to teaching other monks to do the same thing, in order to rescue people trapped inside other gibbering mouthers.