Chapter 74: Day 73

Day 73,

Finally lost patience looking for a key and decided to force one of those second floor doors open.  That didn’t go well so we went and got Maiko to do it.  The door mostly still closes.

That first room looked to be a study.  Desk, shelves, writing implements, ink long dry, papers faded to illegibility, moldering books.  And a box.

The box was long and narrow.  Clasped and sealed tightly shut but without a lock.  Most strikingly, it was made of a shiny metal with a brushed texture to it, unlike anything I expect the local Village blacksmith could put together, and utterly untouched by rust or corrosion.

Inside the box were tubes of rolled papers in better shape than anything else we’d found here save for the box itself.  Best as I’ve been able to tell they’re notes, diagrams, charts, and maps left behind by Priscilla.  I say “best as I’ve been able to tell” because most of the writing is in some kind of shorthand and the symbols used to denote things lacked any sort of key or legend.

I wound up spending the day trying to decipher all that, tearing apart the room for anything still legible to cross reference.  I’ll confess I got a bit carried away, sticking with it even after the others got tired of it and went to go knock another door in.  Still need to get a proper rundown of what all they found for documentation’s sake.  Cass at least came back to check on me and help out a few times throughout the day, citing her role as apprentice archivist as reason to help with the deciphering.  Unfortunately I think I kept getting absorbed enough in what I was doing that I’d sort of forget she was there and fail to come up with ways for her to help.

For my part, my success with comprehending various portions of those preserved documents has been variable and questionable.  I’m pretty sure however that one of them is a chart of the courses of floating islands.  Twelve or thirteen of them if I’m reading it right, and a surprising amount of intersection/overlap in their courses.  Then again, with them being offset they might only actually encounter one another rarely.  There are some markings that I think might be indicators of circuit times and dates, but I’m not totally sure.  And even if I could read that properly I have no idea what the current date is in comparison so using it to estimate where any of those islands actually are right now is a little bit futile.  I don’t think the map’s to scale either.

Eventually Lin came in and pointed out that I was going to be straining my eyes trying to read all this without a crystal while the sun’s going down.  I hadn’t noticed until she pointed that out.  I packed the preserved documents back in their box as carefully as I could and went outside to join everyone for dinner after that.

Everything that I can carry out of that room is definitely going back to the archive.

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