An Imperial, a Seafarer, a Tiberian, and a Nile-dweller walk into a bar.

"The Yellow River Empire is so free," the Imperial brags, "even a colonial citizen like myself could cross the Pacific to visit the capital, stand outside the gates of the Palace District, and chant 'fuck the Emperor's mother!' from dawn till dusk."

"Oh yeah?" taunts the Seafarer, "the North Sea Alliance is so liberated, any freeman could drive up the highway to his Earl's house, bang on the door in the dead of night, and yell 'duel me, you pussy!' to the Earl's son."

"That's nothing," chant the Tiberian and the Nile-dweller in unison, "the Mediterranean Federation is so open, we can log onto a VPN server in our neighbor's country and post 'the President's policies suck' online for the whole world to see!"

—from a compendium of Nickverse jokes assembled for multiversal consumption

Commonly published as a double volume: the Empire's national epic and constitution.

The national epic is broken up into three parts.

Part one follows a capricious river-goddess as she alternately provides for and torments the people of the villages along her banks. In one of her rages, she pulls a town metalworker down beneath the water and he nearly drowns; in the next, she is depicted as pregnant; in her next calm period, she gives the baby to the metalworker she had nearly drowned.

(Without cultural context, readers may or may not put together that “pulling the metalworker under the water” was tasteful concealment of a rape scene.)

The second piece of the epic jumps ahead to when the metalworker’s baby has grown into a young girl. He has just passed away from smallpox and she is crying over his dead body. Desperate for any way to bring her father back, she consults with the town elders, who eventually reveal to her a route to the land of the dead. They warn her that the journey will be dangerous, but she presses on. The girl kills monsters on her journey to the underworld; annotations mention that different versions of the epic include different fantasy creatures here, and it is traditional for new adaptations to add their own. At the climax of the second part, she has to pick her real father out from two imposters, charismatic shapeshifting monsters who had escaped her on her journey. She figures out which one is her real father by asking trivia questions about metalworking; the monsters are stumped but her father answers correctly. She returns to the village in triumph.

The third part again skips ahead in time; the girl has grown into an adult woman, developed divine powers like her mother’s, started a family of her own, and made journeys up and down the river uniting the villages in an alliance. The alliance is building levees to control the floods and protect themselves from the river-goddess’s rage. Finding herself constrained, the river-goddess tries to assassinate her daughter; all three generations of the family–the metalworker, his daughter, and her children–make their stand against her together. The girl and the goddess have a battle of wills with hydrokinesis, her family backs her up with ordinary weapons, and ultimately they prevail in the fight over the goddess. The defeated goddess repents of her actions and signs a contract with the alliance, promising protection from other gods and monsters in exchange for the alliance’s correct ritual practice and sacrifice. An epilogue of sorts describes the growth of the alliance over the next few generations, with them accumulating wealth, building cities, and educating their children, all thanks to the actions of their heroes, who saved them from the whims of capricious nature.

The constitution, known as the Yellow River Pact, is framed as a three-way treaty establishing the obligations between the goddess, the imperial family, and the people. The religious obligations therein seem mostly unenforced, or enforced only by natural consequences—if one fails to perform proper rites for the dead then the goddess won't intercede for their souls in the underworld, if one fails to perform one's exercises then one will grow weak and soft, the civil authorities are not to punish people for failing to uphold their religious obligations because the goddess can handle that herself, thank you very much. It still gives a sense of the theology that the modern faith has developed—the goddess gives the people trials to make them stronger, through her might and the Empire's even foreign gods have come to bow down, someday the people will be strong enough to go to space and master the Astral River (what an Earthling would call the Milky Way) as they have the Yellow River. The fundamental rights of the people are guaranteed—strong protections for free speech, commerce, and bodily integrity. Seeing earlier versions of the document, from previous imperial families, shows how the rights have developed over time. Notably absent are any guarantees of humane treatment for criminals or a right for people to have a say in the government. There is a warning against pushing competition with the Empire's rivals so far as to destroy them utterly, because international competition is an important motivator for human development, and a provision for splitting the Empire in the event of its rivals' collapse, so competition can continue.

Where did the Snow Demons come from? Well...

Once, there was a Rain God. He loved a woman, and she loved him. She would come out to dance in the rain whenever it came down on the meadows of our land. In time, though she was a mortal and he a god, they were married.

The woman betrayed her country, and was exiled to a faraway land where it rarely rains. That land was beyond the god's power, and he never saw his love again. His heart froze and the blood in his veins turned to ice, and he became a Snow God. He could no longer come out in the rain, but only in the snow and sleet and hail.

He never loved a person again, but he still loved learning and knowledge. He made maps and sang bardic songs and practiced magic, and his head swelled with the accumulated wisdom and cleverness, growing so big it couldn't contain just one mind. He became a host of Snow Gods all in one body. One day he would ride the north wind and bring babies to barren couples, the next he would lurk in the darkness of the winter solstice and give presents to children, the next he'd simply sit upon the ice that never melts at the North Pole, lamenting his lost love.

His many minds grew bigger and more numerous, until even his swelled head couldn't hold them, and they burst out of his skull one by one, acquiring bodies and wandering the earth together, as the Snow Demons.

—campfire tale of the North Sea Alliance, traditionally transmitted from teenagers to younger children

A book on significant decisions by COPE. Notable quotes include:
—"The Mediterranean Federation representatives managed to defeat the proposal of a nuclear test ban, but the other nations did force them into the compromise of reducing their annual ritual H-bomb detonation in honor of the sun god down to once every four years."

—"GPUs are like guns: any responsible citizen should own one, but when someone starts accumulating a lot of them, it's time to take a good hard look at what they're planning."

—"Your Empire is taking advantage of us with its weak protections for intellectual property! You make money from your work on big-budget movies and TV shows, works that only exist because of our enforcement of copyright within our borders creating a profitable market for them, and you justify your non-enforcement with the farcical argument that the poor have the right to art too—poor people who are only poor due to your pathetically stingy basic income!" "The Federation representative is reminded that the Treaty On Resource Extraction only applies to tangible resources."

—"The North Sea Alliance's policy of categorically issuing hunting licenses to nobles and denying them to commoners, as opposed to the merit-based and need-based policies of the Empire and Federation respectively, is likely to become unsustainable with the projected growth of the noble population over the next century. Solutions discussed include limiting inheritance of noble titles and restricting hunting to higher ranks of nobility."

An explainer on gender and sexuality norms explicitly targeted at multiversal visitors.

Much attention is devoted to a concept called "relationship-role" that only exists in the industrial globalized Nickverse. It's a fuzzy, social, cluster-based concept like gender-presentation, not an absolute and universal distinction like reproductive-sex. Like gender-presentation, and unlike reproductive-sex and hormonal-sex, it lacks any institutional recognition, though it has cultural importance. Names for the clusters include "initiatory/receptive" and "flashy/ethereal".

Flashy/initiatory people want to call attention to their physical bodies and be the pursuers in relationships. They tend to dress in bright colors (and do their makeup and hair dye likewise, where applicable), and are more likely to wear revealing outfits. They work out more, diet less, wear high heels more. In contrast, ethereal/receptive people want to minimize their physical forms and be pursued and treasured in a relationship. Their clothes are more covering and tend to be in pastel or neutral tones; their hair dye and makeup are more natural-looking or nonexistent. They slouch more, have smaller strides, keep their legs closer together.

A section explains historical cultural beauty and relationship ideals that merged and ground against each other to form the modern ideas of gender-presentation and relationship-role. The Empire, with many reluctant concessions to biological and economic reality, favored women taking a more active role in a relationship, and had a beauty standard of large-breasted, heavily made-up, and (relatively) tall and strong women paired with clean-shaven, youthful-looking, (relatively) weak and fragile men. In the upper classes, women wore high heels and worked out and ate more. Long hair was encouraged for everyone. In the cultures that would become the Alliance, tall and muscular men and thin, flat-chested women were more valued. Men were clean-shaven, could wear makeup and high heels, and had flashier outfits; women wore more practical and conservative outfits and could have short hair. The Mediterranean cultures more heavily prized hairy, bearded, big-bellied men, with short or long hair. Women were also encouraged to be plump and accentuate their feminine curves, though not to the point of overshadowing the men.

Modern technological developments changed the game! Exogenous hormones led to an explosion in transsexualism and transgenderism, especially later in life when one has had as many kids as one wants and therefore has no need for gamete production. Communications technology encouraged interchange between power blocs and the severing of gender-presentation from relationship-role, though neither process is complete or likely to be anytime soon.

Bisexuality is the most common sexuality, with asexuality as a sizable and accepted minority. Monosexuality is rarer and less popular; monosexual rights advocates have recently gotten it removed from popular manuals of mental disorders on the grounds that no therapy or medication has proven effective at mitigating it. Historical marriage norms in all three power blocs were most commonly "straight with gay affairs allowed"; each power bloc now has at least one major subunit experimenting with gay and poly marriage.

A book on Sun-worship in the Mediterranean! Discusses the identification of various cultures' sun-gods with each other, conflict over which meteorite was the true Sunstone and display of the eventual consensus winner at the temple in Crete, the tradition of praying towards the Sunstone and its influence on navigational and cartographic advancements, the tradition of keeping one's children inside during eclipses on the grounds that such events represent the sun-god and moon-goddess having marital relations and are inappropriate for young eyes and arguments that the existence of eclipses on the inhabited planet indicates the existence of the gods, modern examples of Federation governments implicitly supporting Sun-worship rituals over other cults despite the official lack of an established church, debates over the relative power of the sun-god, the river-goddess, and various folk cult deities as proxies for nationalism of the Federation and Empire.

A series of blog posts comparing the forms of government and legitimizing ideologies of the three major power blocs. It opens with a map, showing the territory of the Empire as consisting of (what on Earth would be called) eastern Asia, Siberia, and most of the Americas. The Federation consists of southern and eastern Europe, northern Africa, and southwest Asia. The Alliance includes northwestern Europe, southern Africa, and strategic bites out of everyone else's coastline. The Indian subcontinent, central Africa, southeastern Asia, and Australia are unaffiliated and relatively poorer and less developed regions.

Forms of government! Beneath the absolute rule of the Emperor, the Empire is mostly futarchical. Elections are small-scale, local, and infrequent. Elected officials' power is limited to setting goals, for which strategies are developed by superforecasters (mostly on the mainland) or prediction markets (mostly in the overseas colonies), and implemented by civil servants. There's a slight skew towards women in high-ranking positions, but under the current imperial family the position of Emperor is male-only and passed from father to son. The Alliance has an officially established noble class, and the countries of its heartland are governed by Parliaments where both the House of Lords and House of Commons have real teeth. The noble class attracts talent to itself by marrying meritorious commoners and occasionally elevating an especially impressive individual to noble status. Some of the "bites of coastline" colonies have instead adopted Moldbug-style shareholder governance rather than establishing a nobility. Regions vary as to the official status of prediction markets or superforecasters.

The Federation is democratic. Prediction markets and superforecasters are culturally respected, but all decisions in the end must be made by a vote of the population or their representatives.

The unaffiliated and less developed regions of the world mostly model their governments off the Federation, and they're dotted with charter cities established by the Alliance.

Legitimizing ideologies! The imperial family derives their legitimacy from claimed descent from the goddess; various families throughout history have claimed such descent directly through their founders or indirectly through descent from the (possibly mythical) original imperial family; the current dynasty claims both. The Federation governments derive their legitimacy from a mandate of the People. The Alliance is eugenic in ideology; all states try to promote good genes among their people, at least by subsidizing fertility treatment and gamete preservation, but only in the Alliance is it a commonly held opinion that some people are more fit to rule by their genes. The Alliance is also more atheistic in comparison to the other states, with more people holding the opinion that only a child would believe that the gods literally exist.

The poster laments the inability to settle debates over which political system is objectively the best because everyone insists that whichever economic indicator makes their country come out on top is the most important.

An amateur novel posted on a fanfic hosting site, by someone from one of the unaffiliated territories. It concerns a future where Earth is a battlefield between various bug aliens as thinly veiled allegories for the major powers—ants based on the Federation, bees based on the Empire, and wasps based on the Alliance.

A history book about a pair of mid-tier deities most commonly worshipped in the Empire, especially the Colonies (what an Earthling would call the Americas), Lissak and Noelia. Lissak is associated with western North America in general and the Sonoran, Chihuahuan, and Mojave Deserts in particular, wasps in general and the tarantula hawk in particular, pain, and beauty; Noelia is associated with eastern North America in general and an area corresponding mostly to what an Earthling would call "New England" in particular, trees in general and the sugar maple in particular, comfort, and also beauty. The book begins with an explanation of the cultures that worshipped these goddesses before the arrival of the Empire. It continues into an account of the role of these goddesses' churches as focal points of native (and later mixed native-colonial) resistance movements against the imperial family, explaining that the rebels won concessions, including provisions written into the Pact on artistic freedom, bodily autonomy, and the government's obligation to promote beauty in public spaces (primarily achieved by subsidizing public art and decoration, and taxing aesthetic nuisances). Finally, it explores modern negotiations between local cults and the empire-wide established church of the river-goddess. A common subject of such negotiations is coordination by religious authorities on timing of services and rituals to minimize competing obligations.

A petition to the Earl of Manhattan, arguing for a ban on circumcision in Hudson Colony* of the North Sea Alliance. It has a few thousand signatures. Sample quote:

The practice of circumcision within the other great powers has acknowledged religious roots. The religious texts of the Empire explicitly prescribe it as a sacrifice to the Goddess and a marker of belonging to Her and separation from other peoples—though, thankfully for the Empire's peoples, successive "negotiations of the Pact" over the centuries have brought the requirement down from unanaesthetized cutting of teen boys to being done on infants in a hospital, who won't even know what they're missing. While it is often justified in the countries of the Federation on aesthetic grounds, here too it ultimately derives from a ritual practice in honor of a god. One story commonly believed among the peoples of the Nile River region said that the moon-goddess takes mortal lovers with the permission of her husband, the sun-god, and bears them demigod children—and that she finds men who look like her husband most beautiful. Initially, this was an obvious rationalization of the local aesthetic preference for fat men. However, there was another story more popular along the Tigris and Euphrates. This one held that the sun-god was once captured and tortured by his enemies, and among the mutilations to which they subjected him was the amputation of the foreskin. As the various local sun-gods became identified with one another and a unified cult began to form, parents hoping for demigod grandchildren took the obvious implied next step.

How ironic, then, that we regard a practice that arose from such barbaric superstition as a mark of civilization and sophistication! Our supposed "secular medical justifications" for circumcision—paltry gains in health, sometimes with poor evidence behind them—are rationalizations over our conformity-based adoption of a practice simply because "it's what Great Powers do and we're a Great Power now", and far from sufficient to justify any other random mutiliation that might have occurred to us to try on our sons.

*"Hudson Colony" is an area roughly corresponding to what on Earth would be called "downstate New York". It's the biggest of the three Alliance territories in the Americas, the other two being a city corresponding to Chicago, and the Falkland Islands, which are used as an exile location of last resort for heinous-criminals. Its capital is an important financial center of the Alliance, and the third-biggest and third-richest city in the Americas, exceeded in population by Lake Texcoco City (where Mexico City would be on Earth), in wealth by Wasptown (the most populous of many such cities by that name in southwestern North America; it isn't exactly where Vegas would be but it, too, was a regional center for gambling and became a major financial center of the Empire after the prediction market boom), and in both by Northeast Capital (the Imperial word for "capital" here meaning specifically a regional or colonial capital, not the national one).