Chapter 90: Day 89

Day 89,

Morning thought: What other unwritten stories do the villagers have besides “The Girl From The Forest”?  Not that that’s the official title.  I don’t think there is one.  It’s just what I thought to call it at the moment.

 

I’m making some progress with Priscilla’s writings about the floating islands.  Interestingly, she came to the same conclusion that I was starting to suspect myself; that they’re artificial in some way.  Or at least their current routes are.  Too close to geometrically precise in their route shapes.  Too regular in their speeds and timings.  Barely affected by wind and weather, only enough to throw weeks or even months-long patterns off by a few minutes or, in rarer cases, hours.  The fact that they pivot to meet docks that they stop at.  That last one’s the most compelling argument in my opinion.  Sure, people could have built Siren Overlook and its siblings to better reach the points the island naturally crosses, but the fact that the island actually turns to always face the same side to the docks and actually comes to a stop reeks of intentional design.

Even more interestingly, over decades of observations she observed that the circuits the islands were making were getting ever-so-slightly slower over time and, she theorized but had trouble confirming, more irregular in the shapes of their pathing.  By her calculations, for the floating island she was living on the average time to complete a circuit was taking about a minute or two long each year.  Doesn’t seem like a lot, but over time it would add up.  Conversely for the islands that stop at docking points (and it seems not all of them come to a total stop like the one we rode did), the amount of time they linger is getting shorter over time, with the one she lived on losing around a second per year.

It looks like one of the islands she did more in depth digging trying to figure out what keeps them up and how their routes are dictated, but I’m having trouble actually finding what the results of that were.  Mostly just oblique passing references to the incident and mentions of a set of field notes and research log from it that I haven’t been able to locate.  Did I miss something at the house or did she take them with her to wherever she disappeared to?  Seems like the sort of thing that should have been important enough to keep in that steel case (or steel-like anyway, identifying metals isn’t really my thing).

A few other points that stuck out:

-   There’s one other floating island that passes over the Village’s main island.  Its easiest point to board is near the north end of the island.  That one’s route looks to take it significantly further north, well past Cloud Tower.

-   While all of the floating islands have routes that intersect with at least one other’s, due to offsets in timing and differences in circuit length, the only two that actually pass close by one another with any regularity are the one that docks at Siren Overlook and the one that spirals around Cloud Tower.

-   With the exception of the one spiraling around Cloud tower, all of the islands that Priscilla observed have at least two regular islands that they can be relatively easily boarded from.  And sometimes points that are technically possible, but would involve dangerous and risky climbing and jumping.

-   I’ve not yet seen any mention of the edge of the world or the decayed city in Priscilla’s documents.  Was she not aware of them?  Do none of the floating island routes go out that far?  Or did she just not find it relevant to the topic of her research?  Or maybe it’s just in a part I haven’t read yet.

 

Something was bugging me about Priscilla’s notes so I went back and did some math.  Between her estimates of route and docking time decay rates, what they were in her day, and my own rough estimates of durations I’ve observed, then it must have been at least sixty years between her writings and now, probably closer to eighty.  And that’s taking into account the possibility that the decay rate’s gotten more severe over time.

So that begs the question: How old is Pat?

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