Now dear reader I will tell you a story.
Long ago, when the world was new there were no “private islands” and no “direct teleport”. All the people of the world lived on a single landmass. If you wanted to go to some distant location you used the landmark and were teleported to a nearby Telehub. These telehubs were busy places, as you can imagine, with many businesses clustered around them. For the most part this left the rest of the land for residences and places to build and play. When you arrived at the telehub there would be a beacon, much like you sometimes see today, marking your destination, even if that destination was several regions away. People would fly or walk or rez a vehicle and drive. In some places there was even regularly scheduled public transportation.
All of this resulted in people often stopping along the way to check out a shop or chat with people they met along the way. Relationships of all kinds blossomed.
Then one day some very clever people approached the gods with a plan. (In those days the gods walked among the people and the people could travel to their glorious castle in the mountains). These clever people wanted Islands, detached from the mainland and which they could sell (well actually rent, but that is another story for another time). The gods asked “how shall people get to these islands, will you have a telehub on each region?”. So these clever people thought long and hard and challenged the gods to eliminate the telehubs, after all, they reasoned, they would buy many islands and pay a tariff for each of them. The gods thought this was a very good idea and made it so. Everyone was very happy, they could teleport door to door without those annoying walks and attend to their business without being bothered by other people along the way. The Gentry, for that is how the owners of the private islands took to thinking of themselves, could sell land to people who could not or would not pay the tariff to the gods themselves.
All seemed to be well in the world for a time, then someone noticed that there was more and more empty land on the mainland, but the gods said “it will pass, there are more people coming to the world all the time and they will need a place to live”. And so it was for many years.
As time went on the gods retreated to their mountain towers, obscuring the path with jira and support so the common people could no longer find the way. In time the gods became a legend to the people, some even questioned that they had ever existed.
And now it is time for bed. To be continued tomorrow……….
Rambling with Shug 