• Magic practitioner factions are divided into different “cults”

• A solarpunk technology world, very renaissance though

• Internal strife between different cults, as well as with the technological world

• The world is entering into a new age of some kind, giving technology an edge it didn’t have before

• Politicians trying to suppress magic due to it being a shiny new runaway research focus

  • The politicians in the shinier solarpunk areas are more benevolent technocrats in an anarchist society

• Four POVs

  • Mage’s apprentice

    • In one of the magic cults

    • Bombastic master’s journey to become more magically powerful and unlock their eventually immense power

    • A scene like them unleashing a massive power to destroy a threat

    • Has a bestie who is absolutely ride or die

    • Had a robot leg, like hired gun’s arm

  • Hired gun

    • Roams between Badlands and solarpunky areas doing jobs (Retrieval, assassination but only “If they deserve it”)

    • Polite, jovial, gregarious, ever so slightly cleverly smug

    • Has a robot arm

  • POV Character 3

    • Someone in a tech faction

    • Involved with the politics at a lower level, but just high enough to glean what’s going on

    • A hard drinking acerbic asshole

    • Also woman

    • Has a sister who she has a soft spot for

    • Arc is to become an effective stateswoman

    • Also gay

    • Learns to turn that aggression into ruthless political acumen

  • POV Character 4

    • A high ranking member of a tech faction who is secretly learning magic

• It has been 200 years since humanity has vanquished climate change

  • It has not been without trouble, however, as notable amounts of “Badlands” dot the world

  • Particularly dry, rocky formations with, despite best efforts, minimal vegetation

  • Looks a bit like Badlands national park in America

  • Still a harmonious with nature kind of technology, but with more scrappy windmills and communal gardens rather than the glittery

  • Not quite cottagecore but definitely lived in

  • Like Arcosanti in Arizona

• Hired gun approached to do something by someone with grander ambitions in mind

  • Maybe person is a POV character?

  • Tasked by one technocrat (the man in black) to assassinate/kidnap/transport a different technocrat

  • The man in black is a vaguely sinister Varys/that one guy from Babylon 5 type

  • Maybe the person to transport is a status obsessed technocrat type who slowly learns to be more down to Earth

  • “You can’t buy friendship.” “Oh yeah? The friend who goes drinking with another man isn’t buying friendship?”

  • Hired gun and the mark go from annoyance to friends as they travel, then the mark FUCKING DIES

  • Mark gets drunk and starts babbling about who he is

  • Mark is important to a potential merger between two tech factions and needs to be protected when being transported

    • OR Mark is important to transport to prevent merger

    • Maybe to essentially kidnap them long enough to provoke the factions and ruin the merger

    • Maybe hired gun has to pretend to be a member of one of the factions so that the mark will tell their faction once they’re free

• Big bad is destroying a city while the POV characters are doing other stuff and a one-off POV that shows somebody witnessing the destruction on the ground and dying

• Most major city is on the river, and the less glittery/Frutiger aero parts look like the above, with the river where the words are next to the walkways

• Another city that’s built upside down on a large overhanging cliffside

• Three tech factions, and three magic cults

  • Each faction/cult concerns the purpose of technology/magic

  • Factions

    • Peter and Sons Co

      • More traditional top-down corporate structure

    • Seeders

      • Concerned primarily with ecological technology

  • Cults

    • Wardens

      • Magic must be used to protect the populace, taking a more patriarchal figure for humanity

    • Suppressors

      • Use magic to suppress magic, it must be kept away from the populace

      • More drab, dark clothing

• Disputes over land are over, in the anarchist solarpunk society you simply live where you choose in a community of your choice

Characters

• Hired Gun

• Mark

• Mage

• Mage’s friend

• Man in black

Prologue

• Three people come riding into the badlands towards a rickety house

• Talk with the person who turns out to be a magic user

• After a fight the magic user is dead

The back and forth squeaking of a cockrel rang out through the dry, crusty valley. The landscape was peppered with dashes of crunchy grass and creaky trees wearing branches only on their tops.

A shack, wooden and short and squat as it was, sat beside an isolated dirt road.

Inside, an older man inspected his hydroponics bay. The vibrant green leaves of spliced tomato, lettuce, and banana plants, amongst others, ran through the old man’s fingers. He smiled and popped out a mug from a cabinet, flicking a switch on the kettle. A clear LED screen on the kettle began to climb from 25°.

He peeked outside the kitchen window and saw three figures walking across the landscape to his house.

---

”

---

The kettle popped, and all four shot up. Henry ducked into the next room before the three could raise their guns and pepper the room with electrically charged metal balls. As the group reloaded, the old man popped out, far more agile and less frail than he had shown before and he waved his staff in a circular motion.

Before any of them could react, the vines of the hydroponics plants grew, twirled out, and restrained one of the goons, dropping her gun on the ground. The plants wrapped tight around her, giving her a colourful wreath of vegetables across her neck.

Hired gun is hired

“Why not let one of your own do this job, they could probably be more trusted to do this job. He’s not a prick, is he?”

The man in black smiled. “No, Mr Pitch, he is not a contemptible man. He has simply gotten himself mixed up in that which he should not.”

• Hired gun in downtown less glitzy area of town

• Visited by sinister man in black

A hearing for the mage

“LAD,” a voice rumbled down the hall, for he was never greeted as simply ‘lad’ by this voice, it was always ‘LAD.’

• The hearing fails, and the mage only has one more chance to redeem himself