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Lands

Lands are mountains and mesas that emerge from the mists of the toxic Lower Sky and allow life from the original ecosystem, or its descendents, to continue. Most lands are small, barely enough to support a handful of farms or perhaps a town built around a factory; a few are even large enough to look like a piece of countryside that a pre-Invasion person might recognize. Quite a lot of small lands are not continuously inhabited, but are visited by hunting or gathering parties. Small lands tend to either end up paying tribute to a canton, or gravitate around neighboring cantons by virtue of commerce.

The closest equivalent to a sovereign nation is a canton, a group of lands of varying sizes that rally together by reason of common culture. Cantons aren't necessarily continguous. If the canton has a centralized structure, it takes its name from the land where its capital city is. Belonging to a canton is more a matter of culture than of allegiance to a government; for example it's possible to find small farming lands close to the Enotrian border where people speak with a Cascadian accent and build their homes in the Cascadian style.

There are a number of small lands who may only be loosely affiliated with one of the main cantons, if at all; the total population of the Slipstream is around ten million, about a third of which is confined in Tsuxia, and no canton other than Tsuxia has anywhere near a million inhabitants.