Troper Langsa's playground universe.
Grandia Collective is an assortment of shortfic set in a postindustrial fantasy world, where scattered, walled cities are protected and connected by ‘wardens’; a class of magicians trained to combat hostile creatures born of human despair. The Collectiverse favours one particular web (the eponymous 'Grandia Collective') and the wardens who hold her walls, navigate her highways, and ensure her populace isn’t devoured by soul-snarfling spectres.
... it's a bit much for a Slice of Life series, huh?
Despite the setting's potential for an actual myth arc, Langsa keeps the Collectiverse material episodic, as she's incapable of creating complex plots.
Click here
for the shorts. Perhaps a serial will come into being someday.
Unrelated to the videogame series Grandia.
The Collectiverse provides examples of:
- Asskicking Leads to Leadership: occasionally subverted. While most Head Wardens earn their position by accomplishment, sometimes all a candidate needs are the right connections.
- Cast from Lifespan: Why most wardens retire around thirty. Hurling all that Life Energy around isn't good for one's longevity.
- Child Prodigy: Nea Fairchild, who eventually replaced her doting uncle as the Grandia Collective's Head Warden.
- Color-Coded for Your Convenience: the colour of a warden's uniform indicates their subclass. Convoy wear navy, gatekeepers wear maroon, and trainees on their practicum wear white. Private wardens wear black, or whichever colour they began with sans Central-issued armband.
- Competence Zone: most active wardens are between 18-30 years old. Justified, as a decade of service drains about as much from your lifespan.
- Conscription: are you a firstborn child? Enjoy spending your prepubescent years training to become a warden, and whittling away your 18th - 23rd in the field.
- Magic Feather: children learning to manifest their Life Energy may find using a treasured item as a focus helpful.
- Master-Apprentice Chain: Head Warden Faulkner took Frieda Reinhardt through her practicum; five years down the line, Frieda takes Nea Fairchild through hers.
- Nonuniform Uniform: the only mandatory elements of the warden uniform are the coat, pants, and boots.
- Our Monsters Are Different: Collectiverse golems needn't be crafted from clay, among other things.
- Our Souls Are Different: can be excised, transplanted, weaponized...
- Real Men Wear Pink: Grant Vallance makes cute felt plushies.
- Ridiculously Cute Critter: the golem birds tradionally held by Grandia's Head Wardens.
- Trigger-Happy: though they don't use firearms to temper the mist, some wardens develop this trait after a few years in service.
- World Half Full: even in a universe plagued by the manifestation of human despair, happiness is not unattainable.
