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Timekeeping in the Darkness; Regional Lore
Topic Started: Tue Oct 1, 2013 10:37 pm (545 Views)
¤Ozan[Adm]
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Timekeeping in the Darkness:
Daily Life in Balefire


Balefire is the city of eternal night. The only time is the one kept by the residents themselves, as there is no sun, no stars, no weather or way outside of their own inventions to see the progress of time. Newcomers to the city, if they don't set a schedule for themselves, are prone to a mental malady known as Balefire Sickness. Sufferers, lacking the usual markers such as the sunset and sunrise, tend to either sleep far too much or go for days without rest. Leaving the darkness can also be disorienting for the natives of Balefire. For once they are not living by their own internal rhythms, but are instead far more at the mercy of the passing heavens for when things are and are not to be done.

With no natural way to agree how long anything lasted, Balefire turned to manmade inventions to divide existence into hours and days. One of the earliest timekeepers was the candle clock. Made of wax and meant to be crafted to a certain height and width, depending on the time being measured, the candle clock was marked at even intervals to measure minutes, hours, and, for the far more massive varieties, days as the candle melted and burned down. Candle clocks could also contain a bauble entombed in the wax at a known interval. When the wax melted, the bauble would clatter to a dish below, thus acting as a practical and reliable alarm.

This early method allowed a way to objectively tell intervals through the day, though problems did arise due to the inability to ensure standard sizes, materials, and the issue of not everyone lighting their candles, and thus holding their schedules, at the same time. Two adjoining neighborhoods could have a time difference anywhere between twenty minutes to several hours. Considering the impossibility of ensuring all would light their clock candles at the same time consistently, the residents of Balefire simply grew to accept the idea that the baker on one block was just starting to bake his day’s bread while one on another block had been open for over an hour.

Several other inventions rose and fell through Balefire's time in the darkness to attempt to standardize the time through the city, but they all shared the flaw of being personal time pieces or ones that could only be seen in a district's central plaza. Ensuring all remained somewhat synchronized, or that someone wouldn't tamper with the time pieces, was impossible in a city as disorganized as Balefire. The grand breakthrough came in the form of the Clock Tower rising high above the buildings of Balefire, its four faces illuminated in magelight. It shows a circle divided into twenty-four numbers, 00 being midnight, 01 being one in the morning, 12 being noon, and so on. Each of these hours were themselves divided into sixty minute intervals, a division that fit far better on the clock face than the previously used one hundred. The internal mechanics of the Clock Tower are kept a close secret, though eyewitness accounts from the inside speak of great clicking wheels spinning and pulling each other in perfect time. How the Clock Tower came to be is still a matter of speculation within Balefire, though the usual answer, even if said in jest, is that it was the one thing the nobility could agree to work on together.

With the rise of the Clock Tower came, at last, a common means for all to tell the time -- though the residents, long used to setting their own literal hours, tend to use the proffered time as a common benchmark, such as knowing to meet another at 1600 hours or knowing one's job across the city started at 0700 hours. Places of business and finance could finally synchronize their working hours so as to act with more efficiency. However, the quiet quirks of the clock candles still remain. There would be restaurants serving breakfast at 2300 and supper at 1000. An apothecary might open at 0600 and close at 2000, while another opened at 1500 and closed at 0000. This is another disorienting thing for newcomers to Balefire to adjust to, when they grew up in a land where all business was done at roughly the same time, but it's generally accepted as another quirk of Balefire that showcases the city's tendency to savor independence.

Written By: Anonymous
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