At the beginning of our story, it is the year 5723 of the Old Reckoning or year 2138 of the Reign of the Ebon Empress. Forget the world as you know it today, for that was the "before time" when The Maelstrom did not howl above the sky and The Myst did not encroach on the edges of settled lands. No one now knows what called down Maelstrom and Myst, but they know that It was The Ebon Empress who united the survivors of the Earth, threw them back, and started humanities glorious expansion outward into the galaxy. The Empress dominion is sharply divided in this age into two classes of people, Freemen, and Slaves. Freemen make up the majority of the Empress subjects, but on distant frontier planets like this one, the majority of the early colonists are Slaves. This is because all Frontier Planets start off as nothing but a waypoint in the Maelstrom, and expand from that until they finally coalesce into stability centuries later. You are a Freeman who has won a Colonist's Lottery on one of the core worlds, you have been awarded passage to Skyfandrious, a frontier world on the dorsal fringe of known space, where you are to tame the land of a new plantation with the help of a group of slaves, and possibly find yourself a wife/husband/hand-groom and raise some children... It is of particular note that you need not be human. As the empire has expanded explorers have encountered many other sapients and they have been added to the Empire. Most sapient races are cross-fertile and share the peculiar male x female or herm x herm pattern of the biology of humans, where males and females can (occasionally) give rise to herms but herms commonly have male or female children in addition to more herms, and it is not uncommon for either group to have a 'Neuter' child who cannot reproduce at all without magical intervention. Despite ancient legends to the contrary, all sapient races seem to have the same lifespan, they reach full adulthood around 18 years and very rarely live past the age of 100. This is as true of incubi and succubi as it is of goblins. The World of Skyfandrious: At the start of the game, Skyfandrious consists of a small port city and two plantations, one eighty acres in area, and one forty acres. The eighty-acre plantation is owned by a pair of human freemen, a husband and wife pair, named Greggory James Washington and Winifred Hortons Washington, both of whom are 'Chyoa Guru' status on both sides of their charts. Their plantation supplies the majority of the foodstuffs consumed by "New Edinburgh" on the coast. They have three slaves, all neuter "Generic Servitor Drones" and are looking to bid for more. The other plantation is that of the Widow Klegshor, a young Neuter dragoness. 'Her' husband was going to buy her a Total-Body-Morph potion so they could have children but died in a hunting accident leaving the farm to 'her'. She has one slave, Patchouli Alonso, a double Vergin-class human male, who is not as much help as you might think considering she herself is double 'CHYOA Guru' class. Most of the Widow Klegshor's plantation isn't even cleared of the scrub trees and brush to start proper agriculture, only about five acres, planted with a mix of onions, carrots, and wheat. At the start of the game, it is the beginning of the spring season, which means the snows are starting to melt and it is time to plant seeds for the crops that will grow over the summer into the food for sale in the fall and to sustain the plantation through the following winter...
