Texture

## Summary

The world, as it is normally perceived, is not pure and untouched. Various layers of reality, also known as Textures, wrap around the planet's surface and act like filters, affecting how it appears. By applying new Textures or manipulating existing ones, one can effectively alter the world.

The effects of an individual Texture on the world and the effects of Textures being manipulated are not usually perceived by most people. Only individuals with preternatural senses or awareness can detect the changes, but even then, they can only feel something has changed and don't always know the specific details. When the world is changed due to the manipulation of the Texture, most of its inhabitants have no idea that the world has been changed, truly believing that the world is the same as always. The only people that have continuous memories of all the worlds as the Textures are manipulated as the Gods and similarly God-like entities. Beings who are neither living nor dead are believed to not be directly or completely affected by the changing Textures of the world, though they may be indirectly influenced.

Many religions (Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, Shintō, etc.) which have arisen throughout history have had the effect of applying various Textures to the world. It's estimated that the world contains as many Textures as there are divine legends and religions. Many, if not all, mythological events happened within different Textures, unaffected by the common reality that most people lived in, though enough exposure happened for them to be recorded in mythologies and religious texts.

The collective will of an entire pantheon can apply new Textures over the world, overwriting reality with their religious cosmology in which their authority is unchallenged and absolute. Leaving a Texture might leave a God weakened, and while they are not powerless, their authority now has to compete with that of other Gods beings for control of the universe, resulting in epic clashes of divine wills that are rarely followed by anything but terrible catastrophes for mortals.

Many Textures have different forms of energy locked within them which can be brought out through various means. Some of them may also hold lifeforms, often energy masses that closely resemble or imitate beings from legends. These facsimiles are also called Daemons(False Gods). When a Texture is damaged or cut through, the energy stored within is released and would manifest itself as a figure of calamity from that mythology, representing the evil imprisoned by the Gods brought forth once the domain of the Gods and their protection is removed.

In addition, the distance between the Textures is not even and the gaps between them change irregularly on a daily basis. As the overlapping Textures contact and collide with one another, sparks of energy contained within the Textures are released into the world. The sparks and spray produced by Texture collisions have a thin, but widespread, influence on the world and its people, affecting fortune and misfortune. With the use of magic, particularly those involving unified theories such as Hermeticism, the Textures collide even more, making sparks more frequent and influencing the probability of certain events.

When the Age of Gods came to an end, different Textures of various mythologies started to blend together, with a bit more resistance from isolated places, until it collectively formed into today's Texture, known simply as the Human Texture(World of Men). In this new Texture, the Mist runs rampant and actively suppresses the presence of the preternatural, going as far as rewriting history to erase any trace of the mythical or supernatural. This effect is named Euhemerism(Demythologization) by frustrated historians.

### The Pure World

It is believed that a world exists beyond all Textures, nicknamed by philosophers and mystics alike as the "Pure World(World of Steel)". It's a world untouched and unaffected by religion – A world of science where the pure physical laws reign supreme, and magic is nothing but the product of imagination or misunderstood natural phenomena. The mystics believed that the only way to interact with the Pure World is to destroy all the Textures above it, leaving behind nothing but a magicless reality.

## Trivia and Notes

### Trivia

* Textures are closely linked to the use of magic.
* Only planets with active ley lines can have Textures applied to them.
* Terrae Incognitae are strange lands where different Textures intersect. Crossing the borders can easily take one to the world of myths as it is to the world of men.
* It is possible for certain individuals and artifacts of immense power to alter, weave, or remove Textures. There are also 'linchpins' which prevent Textures from peeling away from the planet's surface and fasten the outer layer of the world. Examples for these artifacts include Rhongomyniad and Ruyi Jingu Bang.

### Notes

* The idea of Texture is based on a combination of Textures from Type-Moon and Phases from Toaru Majutsu no Index.