Expatria (Ex-pat-tree-uh)

Known for:

• Community engagement

• Diving competitions

• Art installations

• Language education/multilingual population

• Seawater sweets

• Barter culture

• Color coordination

Expatria is in many ways a nation unto itself and also the least consistent gathering of people in all of Ostelliach. The city is located far north, where the Sea of Traitors of Traitors meets the Hafti Ocean, and the name of the aforementioned sea is entirely due to its relation to Expatria.
Expatria is in actuality a massive floating city made of ships, ship parts, rubble, wreckage, and general flotsam and jetsam made to be inhabitable. The size of the city fluctuates due to the nature of things eroding in an ocean over time as well as storms, wildlife etc. In addition, the location of the city changes slightly, though the general navigation crews that direct the approximate flow of the state within the tides are always careful to keep it squarely in either the ocean or the far edge of the Sea of Traitors.

Culture

Expatria calls itself a soveriegn nation and declares itself entirely separate from the rules and expectations of the Ostelliach mainland. The fact that there is no central government over Ostelliach itself does not change this fact; the people of Expatria made this bold declaration of independence more symbolically than anything else, depending on who you ask (on mainland or in Expatria itself). In reality, given that there is no Ostelliach patriotism for them to shirk, Expatria is more accurately an amalgamation of people running from things. Perhaps they flee from family, from prosecution of some crime large or small. Perhaps they just love the romance of a piratic lifestyle without the naval experience or capital to invest in a ship. What does it actually mean to shirk something that wasn't there in the first place, after all?
Despite the lack of a dedicated country state for them to expatriate themselves from, the people of Expatria hold a united sense of pride and patriotism for what they have now--and the people of mainland Ostelliach hold them in less esteem. In a way, by saying they weren't from Ostelliach, the people of Expatria inadvertently united those who were against them, creating more patriotism on the way out than there was before.

Easy Come, Easy Go

It is true that much of Expatria's personality and customs can be directly compared to customs on the mainland (usually as a direct rebellion of them), such as their staunch refusal to judge people's merit based on length of residency (like is done in the Cities of Mercy and Wrath). Instead, merit is judged by how earnestly and wholeheartedly someone is invested in contributing to Expatria, though "contributing" is a loose term that is less tied to earning and more based around a passion for seeing the city survive (whether through safety, supplies, education, recruitment, or even nourishment of the souls aboard).
There is also a practical reason for this lack of value for seniority: people are actually encouraged to come and go freely from Expatria, either after deciding they want to travel or that Expatria no longer suits them. The city is founded on a fundamental desire to belong to the community and encouraging people to stay longer than they may want simply to be "valued" more runs counter to that. In addition, Expatriates traveling brings updated fashion, new goods, and word of outside happenings into the city so it is encouraged (and often funded by members of the community) with the hope/faith that they return home safely with supplies, new skills for the community, and fun stories.

Socialist Anarchy

If they had the words for it, Expatriates would likely describe their city-state as an anarchosocialist one. They value community, and emphasize a flat structure without hierarchy where everyone has a voice. This sometimes leads to things taking a very long time indeed to be agreed upon, but Expatriates are vigilant for those who try to disrupt their structure (or lack thereof) and requesting mutual aid as well as freely giving it are cornerstones of becoming an Expatriate. They cherish vulnerability to request help and those who are not community-minded to help their fellow Expatriates are quickly shunned out of the city. This includes healthcare and education based on bartering and donations as well as an open volunteering spirit for taking turns on hard or dangerous jobs.
This view of the community also means that people in Expatria generally are very trusting and make a strong effort to know their neighbors, coworkers, or people they pass regularly. Those who are not sociable creatures would likely find Expatria downright exhausting if not inhospitable to them (since their lack of social inclination would reflect poorly on them).

Quad Spirit

Each Expatriate feels a large amount of pride for the Quad they live in, but this pride is less territorial and certainly not static, seen more as an arbitrary team assignment that a person buys into wholeheartedly as a joke. This tongue-in-cheek loyalty is extra obvious when someone works in one Quad and lives in another, as it's a common joke for someone to wear a "signifier" of pride for whatever Quad they are currently in, then change it as soon as they pass a threshold (such as a yellow bandana when at work in Yellow Quad, then dramatically yanking it off your head the second your shift ends).
Each spring, there is a Quad Spirit festival hosted in The Table where, much like high school pep rallies, each Quad tries to show their enthusiasm for their Quad with cheers, music, and dressing in the proper hues. The winning Quad hosts a large party where all are invited and wearing the "proper" colors gets drink discounts.

Shorers

"Shorers" (what Expatriates call people not from the city-state) are generally allowed in with reluctant hospitality, given their understanding that the sea simply cannot provide everything a growing anarchostate needs. Each Quad has a designated innspace for Shorers to stay in, and they're welcome to explore Expatria to their heart's content as tourists bring supplies but also potential new Expatriates. However, the longer someone has stayed in Expatria the less likely they are to welcome outsiders as they buy more and more into the "of us, by us, for us" mentality; sociopolitical experts have wisely identified this tribalism as a growing concern for both visitors and Expatriates themselves, given the city cannot survive alone and people rudely refusing to accept that will likely bring either war or famine in the future.

Government

In lieu of an "actual government" which the anarchist minds of Expatria solemnly swear to never serve under again, the floating city-state is ruled by committees, lots of voting, and extended town hall discussions at The Table. These committees are a mixture of ad hoc ones that are created when needed then disbanded again and permanent councils that see changes in members regularly.

Voting

Anyone over the age of adulthood for their respective species (with books that keep record of what that age might be and an office that hears arguments for those who come from species without a definitive number) are allowed to vote, provided they have a job or role that somehow contributes to Expatria in some way. This is not necessarily a "job" in the sense that it pays, as Expatria staunchly rejects a capitalist notion of exploitative labor and requiring capital contribution to give a voice. (Indeed, given the sheer number of disabled sailors that find their way to the city-state, the standard idea of "jobs" wouldn't hold up long).
Some of these roles may include healer, lookout, swimmer (a catch-all term for anyone who dives for food, salvage, supplies, or anything else of value), entertainment (bards, courtesans, general funny-guys etc.), business owner, or guard. In reality the requirement is to a) ensure that the people getting a say in Expatria's future are people who have a stake in it and b) not force someone to prove loyalty by staying a certain amount of time as a resident (directly spawned from a general distaste for how the Cities of Mercy and Wrath conduct themselves). Roughly summarized, the saying goes "can 5 people outside ya family vouch for ya givin' a shit about Expatria?"
All of the votes are submitted at The Table and counted by 3 different groups of people to ensure there is no cheating; the 3 groups of people are chosen at random each time a vote comes up, similar to jury duty selection.

Committees

Committees are the primary way for things to be decided in Expatria, with the people elected based on brief campaigns depending on the type of committee. (Permanent committees tend to see a slightly longer campaign cycle, up to a month, where ad hoc committees are usually out of great need and picked within 2 weeks.)
Some of the permanent committees include:

• Safety and Defense (overseeing the various Quads' military presences and ensuring all are trained coherently)

• Expatria Planning (architecture, structural security, and Quad expansion)

• Culture and Passion (event organizing, general morale, but also being aware of dissentious factions, those who potentially jeopardize Expatria's culture of anarcho-socialism etc. Many politically savvy or espionage-trained people orbit this committee)

• Supply Chain (including the shipping in and out of goods but also overseeing food stores, ensuring all clinics are stocked etc.)

• External Relations (working closely with the other committees, especially Culture and Passion, to ensure Expatria has what it needs and that no one is planning to jeopardize it)

Law and Order

Given Expatria's prioritization of community, any wrongdoing is seen as a slight not against one person but against the entire collective, and as such, is tried publically at The Table by a rotating jury that is mostly symbolic; pretty much everything is decided by community agreement about the severity of a crime and rehabilitation is emphasized.
The nature of the city-state is that many people who were previously criminals find their way aboard, but they quickly learn to assimilate and behave or be marooned with no remorse. The people of Expatria are fiercely protective of their culture and of each other, and the punishment for those who seem unrepentent is to spit them back into the cold sea and the colder cultures outside of the city's embrace, usually on a dinghy or rowboat with a day's rations, a compass, and a "good riddance." Many would-be criminals who come to Expatria however soon find that their impetus for committing crime (poverty, hunger, homelessness) are addressed by the open community support of Expatria and they don't need or want to hurt the community anymore.
Typically, crimes are given weight based on the reason why they were committed and if the underlying reason can be committed. For example, theft is highly frowned upon, but if it comes to light that someone stole because another was not helping them or a part of the community simply couldn't help, the redress might vary (from punishing the person who refused to help or committee action to address the dearth of supplies).
Some crimes are seen as especially heinous as they show a general lack of respect for what Expatria stands for. These include:

• Price gouging (asking over what is needed for something, including under or overvaluing certain barter items)

• Destruction of property (as the continued existence of Expatria literally depends on people respecting and supporting it)

Defences

Given that Ostelliach lacks a cohesive mainland government and instead is mostly chains of alliances and ties between other cities, Expatria has rarely had need to be concerned with external forces targeting them militarily. The nature of their location makes it impractical for any city or region to try to subsume them. However, they still maintain a volunteer-based militia that sees 99% of its action rebuffing pirates and brigands (rare) or sea creatures (much more common). Said militia being a volunteer organization, it is often made up of healers, crafters, or other trades that make it useful to assist after natural disasters that are much more likely to be a danger to Expatria than a foreign military.

Industry & Trade

Expatria is by-and-large a barter and goodwill economy, meaning things are either traded or given freely (with the underlying belief that someone would not ask for something if they didn't need it). However, sometimes there is a need for money to exchange hands. In this, there are two situations.

1. A Shorer simply refuses to trade anything other than gold/silver/platinum for their goods/services

1. A person does not have an equivalent item (or service) for barter at that moment but is expected to at a later point

In case #1, there is a shared pool of Shorer currency that is overseen by External Relations and can be dipped into based on community vote (such as for resources only available from traders). Expatriates are encouraged (but not required) to add to this pool when joining the community, and those who decide not to usually end up relinquishing it later when they decide to stay and see how little it serves them afloat.

The Shell

Case #2 above invokes the concept of The Shell, which is less a tangible currency so much as a show of good faith and an "I-Owe-You" in Expatria. See The Shell for more information.

Professions and Roles

Common Roles in Expatria

• Carpenters, naval repair, artificers, other types of "keep it running" handy types

• Runners and delivery-people (both within the city-state and externally)

• Scroungers, scavengers, delvers, divers, fishers

Highly Sought Roles

• Translators (given the high level of diversity of people who come to Expatria)

• Highly specialized crafters

• Educators (of all sorts, including classic academia, external affairs, and trades/crafts)

• Tacticians and military training officers (given the volunteer nature of the militia and fact that most are not soldiers by default)

• Magic users skilled in transmutation, conjuration, or evocation (or really anyone good at making supplies out of little)

Infrastructure

Expatria contains all the general necessities that a city-state needs to survive, including inns, restaurants, shops, and cultural centers like libraries or museums. These are all, of course, made of or atop salvaged ships and other floating wreckage, making the entire city a sight dizzying to the eye and fascinating to the creative mind, puzzling out what a building used to be or how pieces fit together. Many of the creators of the city (for the city is known for attracting creative types) revel in creating infrastructure both whimsical and functional, unpredictable and unstable but useful and tasteful at once. Expatria is a city of the absurd and they strive to exude this in all they build.

Sculptures and Art

Some of the most notable architectural achievements of the city are its many art installations built by various craftspeople and artists from formerly all over the continent; it is something of a cultural tradition, artistic self-challenge, and game to devise new art sculptures along the boardwalks of Expatria that push the boundaries of gravity, challenge the color coordination the city-state so cherishes, or invent new ways to combine pieces into still-functional works. Because the real estate of Expatria is precious (limited as it is by what salvage is available), the true challenge for artisans is finding ways to either leave the smallest footprint horizontally or make their sculpture also functional in some way.

Visiting the Fish

A variety of different aquatic trappings, including fish hatcheries and nurseries, aquariums and natural history museums, dolphin-training-parks, and other ways to interact with the aquatic life of the Sea of Traitors have popped up across the city over the years. These may be entirely functional or simply novelties that much like the sculptures of the city are something of a whimsical game to establish and maintain.

Districts

The shipmass (not landmass as Expatriates are quick to admonish) is divided up into 4 quadrants, named not by cardinal direction (as the nature of a floating mass is that it rotates in the waves) but colors. These colors (clockwise: blue, yellow, red, and green) are loose classifications at best when it comes to deciding where new building materials are assimilated, with discussions such as "is this brown more red or blue" extremely common and usually put through a complicated voting system that factors in aesthetic, who got the last piece, and where the piece would best fit in (much like a game of Tetris).
Each Quad is required to have a few establishments, as determined early in Expatria's inception:

• An inn or tavern with room for any visiting (from another Quad or Shorers, see below)

• A shipping harbor to help dispense and take in salvage, deliveries, and wayward souls

• A defense post of some sort, be it a warship, a barrack of foot soldiers, a floating tank of trained octopi, or anything else that could help protect Expatria

• A medical clinic with a strict no-charge policy

Assets

When it comes to aquatic trade, ruin salvage, and underwater tchotckes, Expatria is unparalleled. When they trade with the outside world, it is often their treasures scrounged from or created thanks to the surrounding oceans. They are also known as innovators of sweets, in particular saltwater taffy, and supply many-a-sweet-tooth in Ostelliach.
Their assets include naval military weaponry and ships, hodge podge libraries of different cultures collected over the years, and crafted goods from all sorts of travels all over the continent; Expatria is a city-state of many people, with many types of goods created, stored, traded, and sold from it.

Guilds and Factions

The guilds of Expatria are primarily knowledge-based, focused on collecting and sharing information given the city-state's unique position (literally and culturally) as such a distinct entity of different cultures merging and shedding their pasts.

• The Translator's Guild focuses on documenting and cataloguing the different languages (including dialects) of the city, including a rough census of how much each is spoken as well as available teachers or translators for each to help new arrivals or visitors that do not speak the Common tongue.

• The Cultural History Society collect stories from different travelers and often host fireside story nights by theme (such as ghost stories or stories of hope and resilience) where people are encouraged to tell tales, either true from their life or fables from their homeland, in a sociological exercise in understanding where people have come from, what their shared beliefs are, and how they differ.

• The Scientific Searchers are a guild of scholars with a head for mathematics and theorems, chemical reactions and creative chemistry, astronomy and anatomy, seeking to stay up to date with newest scientfic research from other locales. They meet every few weeks and openly encourage Shorers and newcomers alike into their ranks in order to stay abreast of as much new findings as they can. They also conduct their own experiments, though they are less open with these results and tend to spend long periods of time poring over results and cross-referencing them before releasing them to the public, both as a peer review safety exercise and to understand what knowledge may be most strategic to release at deliberate times.

• The Artifactory is a guild for artificers and crafters of the mundane and arcane varieties, with a focus on building a professional network of connections and trading skills and knowledge to enrich Expatria's builder society. They regularly host workshops and courses, and being chosen to host a tour of one's workplace (whether it's an entire underwater bubble lab or a simple workbench in someone else's shop) is a great honor that is picked at random every 3 months. The Artifactory prizes innovation and creativity but also has strict edicts about safe, ethical crafting, given the structural integrity of their city quite literally floats in the balance and any harebrained explosion could cost many lives.

Each of these guilds regularly exchanges missives with the Scriptorium Soiram as a sign of good faith with the mainland, as they all share a goal of collecting and making knowledge accessible and hold no qualms with swapping information with the mainland scholars the same way rare goods are traded for in the marketplace.

Points of interest

Some notable landmarks of Expatria include:

• The Table, the large congregation area at the center of the shipmass, build of a huge tour ferry that would never be seaworthy if it were not surrounded by every other piece of Expatria as protection

• Sully's Sail, the state's oldest and most beloved tavern located squarely in Red Quad

• Diamondback, the state's marketplace, which runs the line between Yellow and Blue Quads

Founding Date

457

Type

State

Inhabitant Demonym

Expatriate (ex-pat-tree-at)

Related Historical Events

• 457 AB
  Creation of Expatria