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To their credit, it was Farrel that went to meet Tsuiraku, not the other way around. After receiving multiple reports from fishing vessels claiming to have seen something in the sky, Farrel sent an airship to investigate. There was some difficulty during that first contact, but Farrel took Tsuiraku by surprise with how open and accommodating they were, acting completely contrary to the fear and mistrust they had expected. In actuality, Farrel had just spent several decades in fear of Veracia absorbing them, and being too dependent on the Theocracy to even resist such an attempt were it to happen. Even as they were overcoming their initial shock at the discovery, Farrel’s government saw the floating city as their way out of Veracia’s grasp.
Tsuiraku’s sense of superiority (second only to the elves) actually made them the perfect marks for Farrel. Farrel didn’t want to just want to trade their dependence on one group of mages for another; they were after the training and technology to finally become magically self reliant. And when they even offered Tsuiraku part of Farrel itself, a large but relatively undeveloped island used mostly for logging, Tsuiraku naively saw them as a primitive nation bending over backwards for them; rather than shrewd traders offering up a unimportant territory to gain what they were really after. And within just years of first encountering each other, Tsuiraku was giving them useful devices such as improved airship engines, warp gates and the crews of mages to operate them as well as training many farrelians to operate them.
The elves recognized Tsuiraku as the lost half elf city right off. There was much panic and worry over it as the first Elven emissaries traveled to the floating city. To their relief, they found the city populated entirely by humans (or at least close enough), however to their dismay, they also found the city entirely too strong to be reclaimed as some elves had been considering. Still, the elves were soon willing to offer them a cautious friendship.
Veracia took Tsuiraku’s appearance the worse of all the nations, as one would guess. Not only did their existence fly in the face of their religion, in some ways worse than the elves did, but the church could literally see their influence over Farrel slipping away. And to add insult to injury, the elves even seemed to be treating them with far more respect than they had ever showed Veracia. Many clergy in Farrel were franticly petitioning the central church to make some sort of official announcement concerning the floating country, The Patriarch and cardinals debilitated for weeks before they finally released a statement condemning the Tsuiraku mages as heretics. Unfortunately their initial hesitation to comment on Tsuiraku meant that by the time that proclamation was released, many in Farrel had already moved beyond caring about the church’s opinion on the matter. Direct interaction between Tsuiraku and Veracia was rather limited. Tsuiraku did show an initial curiosity about the church’s practices and particularly about Luminosita itself. (In fact, the construct had actually quite impressed the people Tsuiraku when they found out about it.) However their open remarks about Luminosita being only an artificial construct was practically treated as a statement of war by the church. Relations between the two forces only furthered soured from there. Some groups in Farrel were even making an invested attempt the keep the situation uneasy to create a new, lucrative trade market acting as go-betweens. A full-blown war was inevitable; it simply needed a spark to start it off.
That spark would come in the rather innocuous form of a once brilliant mage driven mad with grief over his deceased wife
