Brasilis - People of the Serras
The Franconegro Empire is immense, easily surpassing 10 million km² in area, and therefore many peoples and cultures live here. Despite that, the main difference is still between those who live in the inner country (called serranos) and those who live in the city (urbanites): two people may be of the same culture, but if one of them lives out in the country, then she will have much more in common with her neighbour than with someone of her same culture who lives in Vila Real.
The main cultures are:
The Indigenous Peoples - The original peoples of what today is the Franconego Empire don't share a culture or a language, but they do share a fate: large part of their populations have been exterminated by diseases brought by the Franconigerians and abandoned their cities. Around the Serra da Esperança, the dominant people are the Yakrák who, despite their reduced numbers, never stopped fighting the franconigerian invasion.
The indigenous peoples as a whole have very variable appearance. The Yakrák have straight black hair, brown skin, and eyes with epicanthic folds. They speak their own Yakrák language, which they simply call "the language", but they have no written words.
In terms of religion, some have been converted to the Church, but most of them follow the religion of their people, which teaches that the Great Father, creator of the world, has no physical form but his voice may be heard in the thunders. The Great Father created the souls of all of the living beings, but he himself doesn't rule the cosmos, and his sons, Older Brother and Yougner Brother, created the mundane world. The Yakrák tell stories of how the caipora (ou the caiporas) protects the woods and huge serpents protect the rivers.
They have been enslaved and, despite the practice being declared illegal 2 generations ago, many still live in poverty, but give their all to maintain their traditions alive. The Yakrák society only had debt slavery, originally, but these days there's not enough of them to keep this institution alive. Despite what many believe, the Yakrák didn't have knowledge of the Serra da Esperança, and their own intellectuals have many theories about what it is and where it goes.
The Franconigerians - The Franconigerians are the coloniser culture of the Empire and the most common and disseminated in the country. They come originally from the isle of Santa Cruz de Lançarote, and they were guided here by their king Ptolemy I the Navigator circa 2 centuries ago, rapidly spreading through the coast and making their way inland. Around Serra da Esperança, at least two thirds of the population is franconigerian.
The Franconigerians consider fair skin to be the most beautiful, but most of them have bronze skin; they also have dark eyes without epicanthic folds, and dark, curly hair, with a minority having clear eyes. They speak the Franconigerian tongue, which is also the language of the imperial bureaucracy.
The Franconigerians are generally devoted to the One Church, who is led by a pope, and believe in a God without a proper name, creator of the world, without a physical form, that eventually incarnated as a human and was crucified. How much this divinity acts in the lives of its followers is a question of constant debate, with some scholars saying that humanity has absolute free will and God never meddles directly, while others say that the fate of all men has already been written in the mind of the Divine. The lay followers usually fall somewhere in the middle, or make up their own stories about spirits and cities of gold in the clouds and things of that sort. The most important creed is that of the saints, who act as mirrors of how a person should ideally act, or as intercessors and members of the Divine Court who may appeal to God in the name of the believer. The most saint of all saints is, of course, Our Lady of the Pains with her many titles.
The Franconigerians have never been enslaved, but many of them have owned slaves.
The Pericarnassians - The Franconegro Empire is only the biggest in the world today because the one that came before it, the Empire of Oioh in the continent of Pericarnassia, ended up in ruins. The Pericarnassians are the subjects of this old empire that have been enslaved by the Franconigerians - and other peoples - and dragged along with them to this place. After slavery was abolished, some tried to return to their empire, but found that they weren't recognised as part of what remained of that land anymore.
The Pericarnassians in general possess brown skin in different tones, dark eyes, and coiled dark hair. Some Pericarnassian ethnicities possess epicanthic folds in their eyes, but most don't. They speak many languages, as Oioh never had a single language, but most of the people have a functional knowledge of Fan-Fan. Intellectuals usually can write in Ogan, the language of the Ogama people, from where the Prophet came from.
The Pericarnassians have 3 great religions: the Pericarnassian Rite (ancestral followers of the same Church as the Franconigerians, but believing in different saints), the Legalist Faith, and the faith of Irem.
- The Church of the Pericarnassian Rite doesn't acknowledge the authority of the pope and has, instead, autocephalous patriarchates in its place, but they're identical otherwise, and in the Serra da Esperança only the most pedant would draw a difference between the two.
- The Legalist Faith is extremely complex. It recognises the same God as the other churches, but tend to call it "the Divine" instead of "God", so as not to personify it. The Legalist faith believes that the material world was given to humanity to be protected, and so it can do that, humanity needs to know it deeply. Because of that, the Legalist faith is entirely oriented around codes of law instead of sacred scriptures, and their scholars usually study alchemy, cartography, mathematics, and medicine. The Law is a divine force of order in the universe revealed to humanity throughout its prophets (only 5 of which are recognised by every faithful), and its letter should be followed in all things. In the Serra da Esperança, they're a minority.
- And the Faith of Irem is a sophisticated belief-system that varies a lot from region to region, but was said to have originated in the Lost City of Irem, which existed at once in the material and spiritual worlds. It is said that, in Irem, spirits or gods incarnated as humans, assumed human identities, and lived like ordinary human people, but because of their divine origin, they possessed great wisdom and power. These gods were many, of many powers and of many hierarchies, but the details vary too much from each region to condense here. Some of the members of the faith even believe that they were, in fact, normal humans that only went through an apotheosis after death thanks to their saintly life. In the Serra da Esperança, the Faith of Irem is omnipresent and highly syncretised with the others.
The Pericarnassians were enslaved, and the Empire of Oioh practiced a form of slavery distinct from the Franconigerian one.
Foreigners - There are foreigners in the Serra da Esperança, but they're extremely rare. The most common ones come from the highly technological Confederacy of Lucerne, and they have fair skin and hair, as well as clear eyes, and believe in the One Church. Less common are the ones who come from the warrior nation of Mokoli'i, but they're mostly immigrant workers who know nothing of the ancient wars of their people.
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