Copper & Ember

Introduction

Our history is one of capitalist excess.

The wealthy have ravaged the climate for their own ambitions. They plunder nations for sport.

Eighty years ago, they pushed the envelope with nanotechnology to conquer death. They traded their natural blood for an artificial copper-based substance that enhances their command over machines.

Thus, they became the Blue Bloods; effectively immortal.

But their appetite could not be sated by accomplishment alone.

Immortality bred stagnation. Control became their obsession.

The Blue Bloods no longer craved wealth or luxury. They craved dominion.

They turned their technologies (nanotech and artificial intelligence) against the living. With them, they could overwrite thought, override instinct, and repurpose entire populations.

This wasn't about obedience. It was about productivity.

They didn’t just want loyal workers. They wanted unpaid, skilled laborers: engineers, artists, doctors, coders. Minds they could hollow out and reprogram. Tools with memories.

But the process broke bodies. Nanites degraded flesh. Minds shattered under algorithmic strain. The vessels failed.

So they reached beyond science. Into the old, forbidden arts, long suppressed by the governments of the world.

Magic.

Necromancy.

Their goal was a fusion of dead magic and living code to keep the husks upright; to let the AI puppeteer their corpses. Keep the skills intact, the pain endless, and the rebellion silent. The eternal unpaid workforce.

However, a wrinkle emerged in their plot.

The old ways of magic were incompatible with synthetic blood.

OwO, what's this?

Copper & Ember is an indie game developed with RPG Maker MZ by Soatok. The story begins in Westveil city, in the Calwyn Republic, although nations and governments have long since been subsumed under late-stage capitalism.

After the wealthy elite rejected their mortality, their conquest of humanity stalled. Their plot to use AI and nanomachines to turn the lower classes into an eternal unpaid workforce--one not even death can liberate them from--was foiled by their own ascension, as the suppressed history of magic is incompatible with their new biology.

Unperturbed by this setback, they engage in human trafficking to conscript aberrant individuals (those that the governments already surveil) that have the appropriate elemental affinities to practice necromancy in order to reverse-engineer the lost magical arts so it might be repurposed for the ruling class's use.

You control Ash, a brilliant student who sacrificed her own academic career to provide for her younger brother after their parents' death, as she navigates her life in one of Westveil's street gangs, The Strays.

Public Demo (Web)

https://soatok.com/copper-and-ember/v0.0.3/

Please be aware that the web interface isn't the greatest (you can't fullscreen it very well), but it should let you try out the opening act.