The Mon World was created by fictional leakage from popular genre of monster collecting and battling cartoons and video games. Recursion has appearance similar to modern Earth, but it doesn’t share the geography and locations. Everyone is born with personal “Companion”, a creature with telepathic link and bond to their master and unique strange powers. These creatures are used to help with many daily tasks, but most popular purpose for them is sport called monster battling.
Monster Battling is as simple as the name implies: People fight each other with their Companions until other Companions are forced to return to their masters. This sport is only sport people of the recursion practice and every sparkless inhabitant is downright obsessed with it. When the annual tournament is held in Central City, all inhabitants of recursion gather to spectate or participate.
Besides humans and companions, areas outside cities and towns are populated by wild “monsters”, monster being term for all other beings regardless of their appearance. The monsters have variety of different appearances and they are often categorized by elements or what type of creature they are. Monsters never go near populated areas, but they tend to attack people in wilderness. Some monster battlers’ companions specialize on recruiting and controlling monsters. Defeated monsters don’t die, they fade away only to reappear later longtime afterwards. Disturbingly, some of monsters look like cuter version of creatures from other recursions.
As majority of fictional material that leaked into this recursion was from children’s media, this recursion has some bizarre illogical consistencies. For example:
- Lot of technologies that work under laws of standard physics don’t work here, at least not in the same way. Guns and gunpowder don’t work at all and electronics work, but they don’t require power source. If you break laptop open, they are just empty inside. Yet they just somehow work.
- There are no animals that can be farmed. Meat products are bought at shops, but shops aren’t stocked by anything. And for example, chickens don’t exist in this recursion, but chicken legs are still sold as food.
- Annual tournament is held every half a year. While none of sparkless notice this, they hold all other annual events annually.
- There are no large vehicles like cars and trains or even roads between towns and cities. Everyone travels either by walking, cycling or even by riding tame monsters.
- They celebrate Christmas despite recursion not sharing history with Earth nor do inhabitants have any religions.
Even more bizarre, sparkless inhabitants do know what chickens, guns and power plants are, but they don’t notice there being anything strange about street lights that don’t require power source to work. Inhabitants who do take a notice in how everyone else seems to be only talking about monsters and companions and how their world doesn’t make “sense” by their knowledge likely have a spark. Many of these people with sparks question their sanity or find their recursion insufferable.
On positive side, leakage from children’s material has also resulted in that majority of sparkless criminals don’t perform violent crimes. Most dire crime they might do is robbing a store, but most wouldn’t even conceive of harming people.
Companions
Companions are telepathic beings of energy that share unbreakable bond with their masters. Companions are born at the moment their master is born. Besides wordless communication, the telepathic bond between companion and their master allows master to directly guide companions in battles and turn them back into energy to carry them with them. This allows even the largest and slowest companions to avoid slowing down their masters. In this state they can still communicate with their master and observe surroundings.
Companions’ appearances vary as greatly as monsters’ types. Main difference between companions and monsters appearance wise is that companions are always unique creatures while monsters have different species. But just like monsters, companions are sometimes small and cute, sometimes much larger than humans and sometimes even fierce and formidable. They can be humanoid or bestial, sometimes they even look like machines. Though trying to dismantle robot monster is useless as they don’t work like machines. Vivisection reveals they don’t have any type of machinery inside, they are more like dangerous huge metallic childrens’ toys. Sometimes very rarely, companions will look actually gruesome.
Recursor’s foci turn into their companions upon translating to Mon World. Foci can be virtually anything, even ones that normally require laws of mad science can turn into a companion as robot like companions aren’t actually machines. Foci from Numenera fit quite well. Even the ones like “wields two weapon” works, it for example might lead to a companion that looks like humanoid figure with blades for hands. Companions’ personalities tend to reflect parts of their masters’ personality that they are unaware of.
Normally companions are almost impossible to as when they are damaged enough, they turn back into their energy form and return to their masters to rest. However, they will defend their master to the death if necessary. If companion dies, their master will experience shock very similar to alienation. It is described to feel like a part of you literally died.
On the other hand, if the master of the companion dies violently, companion goes berserk and mutates to unique monsters. These tend to be most dangerous type of monsters out in the wilds.
Monster battle rules
Monster battles have only two rules: 1) You don’t attack the masters and 2) You don’t intervene in others’ battles. Battles can have any number of participants whether its one on one, two on two, two on one, large free for all or whatever, but outsiders can’t join in battles in middle of them.
Besides that, everything else is free to do, using items for example isn’t considered anything special. Recursor’s artifacts and equipment becomes companion’s equipment in Mon World. Using Cyphers results in companion getting the beneficial effects. Match ends when companion gives up or returns to their master.
Places of interest
The place where new recursors translate to is always Central City’s Central Tower. Central City is where tournaments are held at battle arena and it is largest city of recursion located in, you guessed it, center of it. Central Tower is basically a skyscraper and only such building in the whole recursion. Besides Central City, there are five smaller cities, several towns and small villages. Locations in Mon World tend to follow rather simple naming styles, for example, two of the other cities are called Aqua City and Blaze City.
Rumors
- Criminal syndicate named Dark Claw, composed of masked villains with questionably low level of intelligence, have started to increase their numbers in Central City. While organization doesn’t usually do much above petty thievery, rumor has it that their mysterious leader has gained a spark and is suffering a breakdown due to realizing nature of their world.
- There are rumors of particularly strong monster living underneath the city.