Estella stories - episode 004 - The beginning of Estella

part 001 The planet of Zarlum

In our 4th instalment of our story.
The story continues as most of them do on the beautiful enormous planet of Zarlum. 0In our previous story we discussed the massive mainland and it's cities which funnily enough have very similar names to Earth, funny how that works. In this episode I have decided to explain where a lot of the stories will take place and that's the mighty island cities. Now Zarlum has almost 1500 small islands all over the ocean however only about 1 tenth of those were actually inhabited by people, about 70 percent of them were inhabited by animals and the people decided they would leave the animals to live on the island. However, the rest were just left alone because they were either too dangerous for anything to live on. Out of the 150 people actually lived on, most of them were subspecies of Zurms like tree and water Zurms just trying to survive away from the mainland, so they were left alone to do whatever they wanted. However, some islands were inhabited by normal Zurms, thousands of years ago people diverted that there were 12 islands surrounding the mainland in a half circle all similar distances apart however they were all almost totally different sizes. The islands were the biggest in the ocean and were actually connected to the mainland however water levels had risen cutting them off. All the islands are connected to the mainland by 15 bridges assigned to each island and all the islands were turned into enormous cities all being funded by the mainland because without them the mainland would greatly suffer. The cities were called.
— Dereham
— Xander
— Xylem
— Mandia
— Iron city
— Bento
— Hark
— Fia
— Houver
— Ratin
— Orin
— Blora
All the cities apart from Hark had millions of people, a few depended on the mainland for many things like materials for buildings and even large shipments of food if needed, in return the island cities gave them money, power, help with materials for scientists or even helping by allowing scientists to experiment in their cities. However, some bigger cities were completely independent creating their own materials from mines and growing their own food. Dereham was the biggest of the cities it was the only city that the mainland actually depended on because they were the most technically advanced city in the world not just out of the island cities but any of the others on the mainland, apart from the sky cities because they were in a league of their own. The reason why the mainland was so dependent on Dereham was because it was sat on one of the biggest material mines on the planet and was between 2 other islands further out to sea which were also mining islands. Dereham supplied almost 10 percent of the mainlands power from nuclear power plants and ocean wind farms, and supplied the mainland with oil from the oceans. Because of the huge amount of materials many scientific bases were there, and they were used to create extremely advanced weapons, and other items which they sold back to the mainland giving the city even more money. However, Dereham did come with a bad side, they had farms however they had nowhere near about to feed all its people, so it had to have a lot of food deliveries, more than all the other island cities put together. All the cities have an incredibly rich history, a lot of it being bad almost half the cities have a huge amount of unused sewer lines and the reason they are unused was because of the underground catacombs full of millions of the dead, people usually weren't allowed to venture down because it was dangerous, and a large group of people knew what could happen if people went down and couldn't afford for the world to go back to the dark times, so they were all closed off for the peoples' protection. The biggest issue with the island cities was the fact that all 12 seemed to be connected in organized crime with families being in every city constantly fighting and arguing about who should be in control, 75 percent of all illegal weapons, drugs and other illegal items all came from the different island cities and nowhere was as bad as Dereham which 50 percent of the 75 came from, the police were also powerless to deal with it, because all the families were powerful. Because of extremely inflation issues more and more people were beginning to turn to crime because there was no other way. People began to hope that people would come and help, and maybe they were on their way.