About 6 light years away, not so very far at all in galactic terms, there was (and still is) a star.
This star was not in any way special. It wasn’t particularly bright, or particularly large. It wasn’t in a binary system with a black hole, it didn’t have seven companions and it wasn’t about to explode.
But it did have a planet.
Not that that is in any way unusual either. Planets are all over the place. There are so many planets that astronomers occasionally have to call them something else to avoid having too many. Most stars have planets. But most stars don’t have planets that are quite as pleasant as this one.
The planet, known as Pressian, was much like the Earth, consisting of several rocky landmasses that poked above a surface mostly covered in water. These landmasses sported a diverse array of favourable climatic conditions and the majority of them were thought of as nice places to live: they were warm, fertile and generally free of disease and pestilence. Yes, there were a handful of deserts and a few inhospitable climes dotted here and there, but you would have to look pretty hard to find them. Overall it really was quite the idyllic world with its general niceness and its fantastic scenery and its glorious sunsets. It even boasted a small handful of delicately pastel-shaded moons to add decoration to its already stunning night sky.
Pressian didn’t just mirror the Earth geologically however - it also sported a biosphere every bit as rich and remarkable as our own. Its indigenous lifeforms came in a variety of styles and shapes, most of which would seem comfortably familiar to us. It had trees and flowers. It had fungi and animals. It had reptiles and mammals and birds. It had crustaceans and cetaceans and fish.
It also had, to top it all off, people.
And the people that populated the planet looked identical in every way to the people of the Earth - two arms, two legs, a head, no antennae, pinkish to brown skin; they were absolutely indistinguishable. Culturally they were strikingly similar as well, although even their most advanced civilisations were somewhat primitive compared to our own. They were at a stage in their development roughly comparable with that of our own world at the time of the ancient civilisations of Greece and Persia. Not as ancient as the Druids though; they had passed through that stage quite quickly once it had turned out it was all a bit silly.
So the leading nations on Pressian were beginning to form crude understandings of maths and science, they had begun to implement basic legal structures and they were slowly building the kind of frameworks that underpin the majority of mature civilisations. As a result there were many educated men within their masses. There were doctors, alchemists, astronomers; there were mathematicians, historians, philosophers; there were priests and architects and chemists and biologists and chiropractors and osteopaths and builders. A trade for every man and a job for every woman. And if there wasn’t a suitable line of work for you, well, you could just invent one.
Now, this might all sound very impressive and very civilised, but there was a problem. The most learned of men, the ones who were attempting to define and build the foundations of their youthful society, they were working almost entirely from first principles, making up the rules as they went. They had very little groundwork upon which to build because the good work of generations of predecessors was, for one reason or another, conspicuously absent. People had existed on the planet for at least as long as on Earth, yet they consistently struggled to achieve and maintain any significant advances either socially or technologically. They weren’t stupid, far from it - they just couldn’t seem to make their discoveries ‘stick’. To their credit they never gave up - they were continually striving to address this problem and make some form of progress, they just didn’t seem to be getting very far very quickly. Information kept disappearing, libraries kept getting destroyed, people kept vanishing mysteriously just as they were about to announce a major breakthrough... to a conspiracy theorist it could seem like somebody was deliberately interfering with the whole planet’s development.
But aside from this frustrating annoyance, the people of Pressian were pretty happy with their lot. After all, they had much to be thankful for: the climate was nice, the landscapes were stunning, food was plentiful, and life was generally enjoyable. It was, for the most part, happy times all round.
Well, almost. As with most things, there was an exception to the rule. A small volcanic island (now dormant) known as the Isle of Thercoup was a thoroughly miserable little island with a deeply grim climate and an unhappy populace. It was pretty isolated from the major landmasses that housed the great civilisations of Pressian and as such it was generally ignored by the rest of the world, although it did have a small scattering of similarly-sized neighbours with which it had the occasional run-in. It was just about large enough to count as a fully recognised country but only large enough to support one properly-sized town, called Pyright, which was famous for not very much and had an economy that didn’t really work.
The population of Pyright was fairly mixed, with individuals representing trades and races of all descriptions - which was pretty typical for a large Pressian township. Where it differed, however, it did so with the utmost eccentricity, for Pyright was blessed with a remarkably high proportion of mad inventors. The Thercoup government often bragged about this curious demographic trait, repeatedly boasting that it had arisen because of their superior education programme and commitment to advances in technology. The other nations thought this was crazy, and secretly joked that it had something to do with the water supply - which wasn’t actually as implausible as it sounds because the water situation on the island was indeed unusual, and well worth documenting here.
It rained almost continually year in, year out on Thercoup. It was a standing joke that the people of the island were born with built-in raincoats. But it wasn’t really as bad as all that - it was much much worse, for the rain wasn’t made of water. A single freak of nature gave the island its reputation for inhospitality: on Thercoup, it rained methylated spirit. Most places would find this a rather major disadvantage, but the islanders had long come to terms with it. They found it had a number of very useful benefits. For instance, it meant the island was never short of fuel, and that they did not need to cut down their trees for firewood (it should be noted, however, that because of the nature of the rainfall, very few trees actually grew on the island anyway). The meths was also used in the brewing of a local drink. It had to be treated first, of course, because in its pure form it is quite a dangerous poison, but once made safe it was the basis of one of the finest ales on the whole planet.
As you might expect, there was the odd accident from time to time. If anybody happened to light a fire outside, they ran the risk of setting their entire town alight, and although as much had been done to prevent this as possible (new laws, severe penalties, buildings made of stone etc.) it still posed a bit of a risk. There was probably a major fire twice a year on average; the locals were used to it though, and were skilled at keeping damage and injury to a minimum.
The rainstorms on Thercoup could be extremely severe. Meths was not as kind on skin and clothes as water, so the traditional material from which Thercoupian coats were made was one that could withstand such punishing precipitation. Unfortunately, with their limited technology, the only material that cut the mustard had to be spun from a form of tobacco plant. This led inevitably to a recreational activity unique to Thercoup: the smoking of raincoats. And when combined with the rainfall this made a pretty volatile combination. In fact, entire cities had been known to vanish in vast fireballs because someone couldn’t resist a quick puff on their coat during a storm.
The other drawback of Thercoup rain was the great lack of fresh, natural water. The inhabitants of the island had no choice other than to import the stuff from abroad. By a remarkable stroke of fortune, Backarnabooth, a nearby island much the same size as Thercoup, just happened to have plenty of fresh water. It also had a severe lack of mad inventors.
And so, as legend has it, the first Emperor of Thercoup instigated a trading deal with the Crown Duke of Backarnabooth. From that day forth, fresh spring water from the Backarnaboothian highlands would be exchanged for a regular shipment of mad inventors from the garden sheds of Thercoup.
Unsurprisingly, once the trading had gotten underway, mad inventors became ever more important to the island’s economy, and parents encouraged their children to follow in their fathers’ footsteps and become mad inventors as well. It became a national tradition that the first born son of a mad inventor would also become a mad inventor, thus ensuring a constant flow of water onto the island.
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Sepwise wanted to be a scientist. His father, the world famous Giekeeboll, inventor of the Saxolin (a brass instrument that was played by scraping a taut bow across the front of it) was furious. He saw his son’s disregard of tradition as tantamount to treason. If every mad inventor’s son became a man of science, he would say, Thercoup would no longer have any water, and everyone on the island would die. But Sepwise would have none of it. He knew that there were plenty of mad inventors to go round, and that he was one of only a few who chose a different career path. He told his dad that he knew what he wanted to do, and he knew he could do it. He demonstrated this by mixing together three household ingredients and blowing up the kitchen.
Sepwise was going to the School of Natural Science to become a master of the ancient arts of alchemy and natural philosophy. And nobody was going to stop him!
First, though, he had to raise the money.
He managed to get a job working at the Pyright docks, hanging destination cards around the necks of mad inventors. It was a boring job, but it paid well, and over time he built a network of connections with the hardened seamen and audacious adventurers that regularly dropped by. He always took the time to listen to the latest gossip, the stories of bravery and discovery, the tales of epic struggles with mythical creatures and powerful sorcerers, and he prized above all else any artefacts that were brought back in testimony to these fables.
Slowly, Sepwise began to grow an appetite for adventure as well as science. He decided that when he graduated from Science School, he was going to launch an expedition. He was going to cross uncharted waters, visit strange new lands, meet new people and new creatures. He was going to travel to places where nobody had travelled to before - or at least look harder at places that people hadn’t looked very hard at before.
Before all that, though, he had to continue his work at the docks for two more years until he had saved enough money to study natural philosophy, and then he faced another four years of hard, fast education that only the most gifted and determined could stick. The hours were long, the people were rude and rough, the weather was always miserable and Sepwise kept getting dodgy propositions that he didn’t feel were appropriate for a future explorer, although one or two...
Later on, when Sepwise had earned enough and was finally attending the Science School itself, it transpired that many couldn’t stand the pace. Only twenty percent of the initial intake had the ability and the determination to stick it out. As it happened, though, Sepwise was a natural and sailed through the course. He was constantly top of the class and outperformed all other students in eight out of ten categories. His abilities were such that he was singled out in his first year as a rising star of the future.
His desire to go adventuring only increased during his studies. Much natural science was written in the tongues of foreign lands, as not all scientists came from Thercoup. For instance, most of the theories governing the properties of water were in the native tongue of the island (Ackabalaralaback), due to its obvious need, while Backarnabooth had a very poor knowledge of such matters in its language (Pel). (It is worth noting here that both of these languages were in fact very similar, as were most of the languages on the planet. Even more importantly, they all bore more than a passing resemblance to English.)
During a lesson about the nature of fire (mostly devised by wise men from the burnt savannah lands of Eck), Sepwise finally decided that if he only did one thing in his life, that thing would be to travel to a distant, uncharted land and explore every tree, every rock, every grain of sand, every thing and every place he could possibly find. Vast reserves of gold? He’d find them. New sources of fresh water? Without a question. Herbs and spices and treasures and bountiful riches? Bring it on! He would return to Thercoup a hero, and have to live in exile in order to avoid the rampaging fans that would do anything to catch sight of the daring adventurer they had heard so much about.
His goal? Fame, fortune and everything that goes with it.
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And so it was that, a few years after gaining his Graduation Scroll, Sepwise found himself sitting in a small, dark, unpleasant Inne called the Book and Whistle, located at the end of a dark, miserable little street in the depressing, dingy town of Pyright on the less desirable side of Thercoup interviewing a tall blond man with a jutting jaw who claimed to be a geographer.