chapotraphouse

I've posted about it before. Swords and sorcery fantasy world figures out how to reverse-engineer the ancient technology of the elves, who disappeared thousands of years ago. They went from horseback and swords to levitating airships that fire lightning cannons in a single generation. Given this incredible destructive power and the morals and predilections of a medieval society, they set about absolutely destroying themselves in petty wars that rapidly escalated to massive conflicts that ravaged the entire continent. Genocides were attempted (succeeded in one or two cases), massive damage done to the environment, nations wiped off the maps, peoples displaced, famine, disease, an ever-churning Maelstrom of a lightning storm that decades later still continues to rage, a cursed peninsula where anything dead rises up and launches itself with murderous intent at the closest living thing. As the nobility tore itself to pieces and organized religions fell upon each other and then to infighting, a revolutionary movement began to grow that successfully strangled the last nobleman with the entrails of the last priest, as it were, but sadly peace did not magically manifest immediately. Half the population was dead. A further half would die in years to come from disease, famine, unnatural disaster, brigands, secondary wars, etc. before the Mages Guild (what was left of them) managed to convince the revolutionaries not to murder them all as punishment for helping develop the weapons that effectively ended the world (in their limited perspective) by developing time-accelerated farming techniques that saved millions from starvation. Likewise, they were able to broker peace with the vengeful druids in exchange for prioritizing the healing of the natural world as rebuilding progressed.

Fast-forward a few decades and the cleanup and rebuilding has been going on for some time and society across the western continent has evolved quite a bit. Various nations have half-formed in experimental configurations as scholars and politicians struggle to create a new order in a world where the old hierarchies were washed away in blood. These people have flying airships, flawless 3D illusionary projections from cheap mass-produced magic mirrors, golems for heavy lifting, little swarms of crystalline shards called "sprites" that can be programmed to do simple tasks, mystic looms that can weave fully-formed objects out of crushed raw materials, archival techniques that can fit small libraries onto crystal needles, and all manner of new social developments like double-entry bookkeeping, propaganda, stock market boom/bust cycles, and RETVRN losers who associate monarchy with order and an honest, bountiful harvest instead of 3D printed bread in novelty shapes. There's a pristine continent to the east inhabited by all sorts of scaley lizard type folks (and probably others, at least some primate people for sure) who can no longer just fire long-range alchemy shells at would-be invaders to keep them at bay; now they have shrouds that can deflect them. Now they have to talk, and trade. And the Peacekeepers are a bit too busy diplomatizing with the northern, "civilized" city-states of lizardfolk to really do much of anything about the soft colonialism going on down south with the nomadic hunter tribes who just use their gunpowder for wholesome hunting and hallucinatory purposes. So it goes.

My protagonist is an insectoid lady whose race is from the desert, and had their own weird internal strife going on during all the wars. She wears a hijab-like headscarf (which I won't call a hijab in the book due to the cultural associations) and robes that kinda make her stick out in the jungle continent, where she's been stranded after taking on work on a ship that got decommissioned by its owning corporation mid-journey, and got robbed in the backwater boomtown she got stuck in immediately after. She runs afoul of some corrupt lawmen and gets falsely implicated by them in an industrial accident they cause while chasing after her, for her crime of not having enough bribe money. She runs into a pair of human brothers, who offer her a job when they find out she's an airship artificer (fantasy mechanic) after helping her escape the cops. She goes back with them, desperately in need of money both for herself and her mentally unwell brother back home, and helps get their airship running well enough to facilitate a sale of anti-airship weapons to some of those savage nomadic type lizardfolks, so they don't get murdered by people who want to use their hunting grounds as slash-and-burn cash crop farmland for time-accelerated coffee harvests and eggs for slave labor. The lizards are short on the promised gold but have a bunch of ancient elven shit they grabbed out of the sunken airship that had the gold, including a very important plot item that looks like a faberge egg but is basically Elf Wikipedia, complete with diagrams for horrifying weapons that makes the shit grandma and grandpa used to kill half their countrymen look like children's toys.

Not quite sure where I'm going with it from there, but as I said, shy awkward artificer bug gets gregarious multilingual human signaller bf, they try to keep it secret from the rest of the crew (aforementioned crusty goblin with missing eye and ear who floats around in hovering chair, old orc chef war vet who talks like soccer hooligan, half orc/goblin first mate lady with piercing owl-like yellow eyes and dresses super masc, jerkass dwarf bosun with undead grafted left arm he lost in accident, human bf's bro who is a fantastic pilot but a bit of a foot-in-mouth himbo, retired/exiled spy bat lady who serves as medic, possibly also orc chef's scrawny half-orc nephew as surly lookout) while shenanigans with the macguffin ensue.