Worldbuilding Weekend Prompt #124 - Ex-Pats

Welcome to the next in an ongoing series of writing prompts in the Worldbuilding community !

I'm aiming to post one of these each Sunday - this week's one is a day late. Sorry ! I was away over the weekend and got back far later than expected. They aren't a replacement for the excellent daily prompts from @worldbuilding they're just an extra opportunity if you have a writing itch you want to scratch. 😀

Image generated by AI in Wombo.art

The prompt this week is - Ex-Pats

Tell me about ex-pats in your setting ! There's a fine dividing line between immigrants and ex-pats, and I guess it's that immigrants move to a country to make a new life there, while ex-pats go to a country to work or trade with a view to going back home once they've made their money. I'm aware this is a potentially sensitive and politicised issue, but this is a worldbuilding post rather than a commentary on current events - I want to find out how other people use ex-pats in their worldbuilding for fiction or games !

How does it work in the world you have built ? Where do ex-pats come from, where do they go ? Why do they go there - to work, as merchants, to study at some reputable university, or something else entirely ? Do they form small tight-knit communities, or integrate into the local society ? Who welcomes the ex-pats, and who comes into conflict or feels threatened by them ? Is the relationship an equal one, or does one side or the other end up being exploited ? How long do the ex-pats tend to stay before going home, and do they generally achieve their goals of wealth, knowledge, experience or whatever ?

Just to add a bit of spice to things, the two entries I most like (and are linked in comments to this post, so I can find them !) that are posted by midnight (GMT) next Saturday will each get a prize of one Hive SBI.

This link will take you to the FAQ where you can read more about Hive SBI - it's a project I thoroughly support because it gives both the donor and winner a steady trickle of passive income paid out in the form of upvotes on posts.

Guidelines

I stole these guidelines straight from @worldbuilding prompts (I hope that's okay !), I couldn't have written them any better myself....

• Prompt replies may be anything! Art, game assets, stories, worldbuilding details, fake wiki entries, maps... whatever you want to create!
• Please ensure you reply to this post with a link to your reply
• Posting in or cross-posting to the Worldbuilding community is highly encouraged
• Use the hashtag #worldbuilding
• Prompt replies can be any length.
• AI images to illustrate your posts are fine, as long as they are credited to whichever software you used to make them
• Posts using AI to create the text are not acceptable; these prompts (and community) are a way to expand and have fun with human imagination, and I firmly believe AI will never be able to replicate the human spark.

Some other neat communities for writing that you might want to check out are:

• Freewriters
• Scholar and Scribe
• Tabletop / DND
• The Ink Well

It can be a lot of fun to mix and match our prompts with some of these other community prompts.

People who have asked to be tagged;
@sherah

If you'd like to be tagged in on these prompts, let me know and I'll happily add you 🙂