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Loreposting tonight because I'm exhausted and can't think for some reason. Also, have a picture of <span class="mu-s">The Orange</span> that I drew today.
<span class="mu-s">Knight's Harness in the Daffodil Kingdom</span>
<span class="mu-i">An Article from Artifice & Khemistry Monthly</span>
Though it now occupies much of the southwestern reaches of the continent of Bosquet, the Daffodil Kingdom is at its heart a maritime nation. The seat of its power sits upon Stamen Isle at the center of the Gulf of Petals, and its heartlands are the volcanic archipelagos that serve as stepping stones towards the mainland. As a country whose stoutest walls are its copper-bottomed fleet of cannon bearing galleons, armor has been historically a balancing act. How heavily can the Kingdom armor its knights, soldiers, and sailors without impacting their performance at sea?
That question received its final answer two hundred years ago, now: "as heavily as it please you".
The invention of modern folding plate provided a solution to the two principal issues that arose when wearing heavy armor at sea: weight and rust. Even a simple breastplate would weigh a sailor down enough in the water to drown him, let alone brigandine or a full plate harness. Not to mention how they would all rust without extensive maintenance. Older models of folding plate provided some protection against the humid air and salty sea-breeze, but still sat heavy upon the shoulders. This left the seamen with few good options outside of khemically treated leathers and a prayer to the LORD.
Like its predecessors, the modern folding plate provides substantial protection from humidity and other factors that would cause the armor to rust without significant maintenance. The retraction mechanism shunts the bulk of the armor into what khemists call "imaginary number space."
This "imaginary number space" is a bubble in reality that sits outside of normal human perception, but can be accessed through sorcery and khemistry. If one were to imagine our world as a panel from your favorite four-box story, "imaginary number space" would be on the reverse of the page. Sir Wayland Russ invented the spellwork that allows modern folding plate to retract into this bubble of reality, and that method spread across the continent after Pope Dorothy VI signed the document approving the magic as free of heresy and apostacy.
Most nations saw the invention as a gimmick or a toy. Something a rich lord might show off at a party, or a paranoid man might wear everywhere he went just to be safe. Other maritime nations never even considered it, for common knowledge held that heavy armor was a death sentence at sea. The Daffodil Kingdom alone had the marriage of naval tradition in the heartlands and knightly tradition on the continent necessary to embrace the new technology.
And embrace it they did. In the modern day, if an adventurer searched the markets for a set of armor, they would hardly find anything that did <span class="mu-i">not</span> retract into "imaginary number space".
