Time Divisions in Pastel

[Mesocyclone Goddess]

Forgive me if this has been asked before. I don't think it has, but the majority of the old Pastel forum has disappeared, so I can't be sure.

100,000 Pastellian years.

What signifies a "year" in a cosmos with no celestial bodies like Mundis Mundis and no cyclical phenomena like Shatterel or Orbset/rise? Is this designation entirely artificial, a carryover of the calendar from Tryslmaistan or perhaps even Earth? Are there any natural, cyclical events associated with Pastel physics? It's hard to envision any large-scale events, given the nature of Arc-ducts.

Here, we have assigned an absolute value to our smaller time units based on the time it takes for certain atoms to radioactively break down. Is there Chatoyanic radioactive decay?

The reason I'm curious about Pastel time measurement is because it's truly striking, when you think about it, just how alien that universe would be to the human experience. Trys is far more familiar; it has a day/night cycle, entities that resemble the sun and moon, something that passes for seasons, and the occasional rain. Pastel is truly foreign.

[strange_person]

I would guess cyclical wind-speed or light level variations, or just an arbitrary day-count like the drow (pronounced like "crow," not like "cow," and not pronounced at all if you want to avoid sounding racist) in Tales of MU. After all, the human population was founded by a floating research island, so clocks and calendars would be readily available.

[Tychomonger]

They carried over Tryslmaistan time. They keep track of it with clocks.

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

They carried over Tryslmaistan time. They keep track of it with clocks.

Exactly so.

[Monthenor]

"Year" is an example of convergent linguistic evolution, as in Pastel it's a contraction for "yellow era"; i.e. the amount of time to concretonize 1 000 chatoyant yellow pieces from one block. There's also the archaic forms "reyara" based on chatoyant red, which is about 5.5 years, and fell out of favor as years are more convenient for measuring human timespans.

[Wizard CaT]

They carried over Tryslmaistan time. They keep track of it with clocks.

Exactly so.

Really? I would have thought Chatoyant formation would have been a good measure.

[Alikat]

It really must have helped a tremendous amount that the bit of Trys that got sucked into Pastel just happened to be a scientific research station. They certainly knew how to keep the clocks running, even without anti-entropic radiation.

[Thilia]

It really must have helped a tremendous amount that the bit of Trys that got sucked into Pastel just happened to be a scientific research station. They certainly knew how to keep the clocks running, even without anti-entropic radiation.

It's one of those fascistic places where you may hate living there, but at least the clocks run on time.


-Thilia

[Alikat]

I don't like Godan's Stormfall-initiating policy, but I like his Creator of the Universe policy!

[Talaru Corinu]

The gods of balance have always created with one hand and destroyed with the other. Careful calibration of the rate of each is the key to a working system.