the idea of The Great Machine has been in my mind for a while now, of course. I think it's older than the idea of Oesala, since the idea of Ngimonians being the Language of Magic is older than her, so..
However, I add it to my website now :3 yay
the Great Machine is heavily inspired by the Iterators from Rain World, which are something I think is extremely cool. However, there is just one, not many. Alright, that's the foreword :3
The Great Machine is something built by the Ancient Ngimonians. It was a machine with as purpose, allowing people who are connected to it, to simply utter their desire, and the Great Machine would produce that effect with magic, if it was reasonable enough.
However, this went wrong, which is of course a central plotbead to the background story of Oesala and Erundur to a lesser extend. The machine pulled so much mana out of the ground that it couldn't refill fast enough, and it caused the central continent to sink, and the Great Migration, and millions or possibly even billions of deaths by drowning.
>>inner workings
The Great Machine consists of stone and iron as skeleton, filled with arrays of biological neural systems and biological mana-manipulating systems, connected with metals, mainly silver, quicksilver, and glass, and it is inhabited by a city of humans who handle the machine, perform maintanance, and build, and specialized automonous biological machines for the same things, and at the core of it all, a spirit who is the person that is the machine.
>>>the process when someone wants to use it
To be connected to the Great Machine, one needs to have a small communication device. These are often in jewels or implants. The device sends the request to the local long-distance communication tower, which sends it to the Great Machine. When it arrives there, it is sent to the language-interpertation neural systems, which try to understand the request. If this works, they send it along to the computational neural systems, who turn it into a set of finite-group-theory problems (why?? uh I like groups :3), and then solve it. Part of this is by giving mana-manipulating plants which actually.. can't use magic.... to do it. They then 'think' they can do it, and their attempt can be read, and this helps to produce what the actual desired effect is. They then send the instructions they calculated back to the long-distance tower and to the device, which contains some mana-manipulating purposed plants (which are way simpler and thus dumber than the ones in the Great Machine), which then do that effect.
>>>parts
mana conduction: rivers of quicksilver as main bus, wires of silver for everything lesser than that, with some copper mixed in
mana storage: orbs of glass for critical systems, orbs of ice for less critical systems, tanks of water for redundant storage
the building itself: stone and iron
thinking: biological neural systems specialised for linear transformations (and representations, as such, being able to do groups) (animal-based)
long-distance communcation: biological radio wave receptors and producers (plant-based)
magic production: large variaty of mana-manipulating biological machines which have been neutered from their actual mana-manipulation (plant-based)
maintanace: human settlement (abandoned), as well as specialised biological machines (animal-based)
large-scale decision making: the spirit inside
The spirit deals with the more complex requests which the automatic systems can't decide whether to reject or not, things like that, as well as, well, any like important decisions I guess :v
it's the bat spirit by the way
>>current day
nowadays, the Great Machine is mostly underwater. Some spires still stick out, maybe, not sure yet. The machine is still somewhat running though, parts are broken, but since it's used way less, that's not a big deal. The language it knows (Ancient Ngimonian, aka Quoçialãç) is mostly forgotten, so it also just gets the exact same 'incantations' constantly, which makes it all very simple, so that's why it still works