Hand Radio

Hand radios are one of the last sputtering embers of The Lost Ages' brilliance, compact voice-transmission devices that once linked continents, armies, scholars, and sky-fleets with nothing more than a pulse of crafted signal. In an age where letters took seconds and cities spoke to one another as easily as neighbors, these radios were as commonplace as boots. During The Fall, the ancient war with Devils that fathered the Schism, they became lifelines, desperate commands hurled across collapsing frontlines, cries for aid swallowed by static as nations burned. By the time The Great Schism broke the world into screaming, starving shards, most radio towers had fallen, been dismantled to maintain the others or deliberately destroyed to deny them to warring factions. What remains is a technology more myth than practice. A handful of towers still stand, heavily fortified war-relics, guarded as jealously as water sources, while the radios themselves exist only in the hands of the well-connected, the wealthy, the state-employed, or those, very, fortunate enough to stumble across one. The basic hand radio, tower-dependent and fragile, represents the older and more common of the surviving forms. These devices require proximity to a still-functioning signal tower, and are virtually worthless underground. Static devours their voices, entire regions fall silent, and even when connected, interruptions from storms and interference from monsters are frequent. Yet these battered relics remain in use simply because they must; For the alternative is all but extinct.   Rune radios were premium pre-Schism engineering, crystalline circuitry and delicate listening diaphragms wrapped around a binding rune-pair, allowing communication with any tower, station, or sister radio that shared their mark. Towers were optional. Runes could be re-linked, retuned, or reassigned with relative ease. But recreating the audio mechanisms, the precise coils, the ultra-thin resonant plates, the enchanted capacitors, would require academies that no longer exist, factories that lie as overgrown skeletons, and knowledge burned to ash centuries ago. Thus, the rune radio is no longer a technology. It is a meagre inheritance. Adventurers and mercenaries of renown with noble contracts, and agents of The Monarchy or The Scholar's Guild may bear them so benefactors can reach them instantly with new tasks. To hold a rune radio is to be reachable, wanted, and never truly alone; An equally rare privilege here. Today, hand radios are uncommon relics, yet indispensable in the rare moments when words must cross great distances without travel. They are useless beneath mountains, silent in the depths, infamously poor at piercing the jagged terrain the Schism created. But in the open air, within reach of the surviving spires or tuned to a paired rune, their crackling voices can mean everything. Orders. Warnings. Pleas. Secrets. The echo of a world that once spoke across the sky like gods. In The Civil Age of today, where most folk cannot read and fewer still can afford literacy, the spoken word remains king, and a radio, even half-broken, is a throne built on static.