Blavatsky

WIP WIP WIP

Blavatsky is a sanct in Straylight.

History

Not many weeks after people started moving in, the sanct of Blavatsky gained the dubious honour of possibly being the worst engineered sanct in all of Straylight. This strange pentagon-shaped city was, for some reason, built with no regard for sunlight - usually an extremely important consideration in the architecture of a sanct - and with little understanding of what goes into building just a decent place for people to live. Due to the significant structural faults in the spar, there were plans to actually scrap and rebuild the entire sanct. However, hotter heads prevailed, and COSAC announced the sanct suitable for habitation.

It is unknown why the sanct was built like this. The entire project was funded and controlled by a single investor who provided all the architectural plans, and was never heard of after the building project was complete.

The sanct was built to experiment with a system of "public lighting" using lamps and optic fiber to provide light from a few central "light stations" to the entire sanct. The lighting system worked excellently until one day the magnetrons of every one of the light stations burned out simultaneously. The entire inside of the sanct was plunged into darkness for several hours until new parts could be switched in.

After the commotion in the darkness, the sanct was changed somehow. It was difficult for anyone to actually tell what was different - everything seemed a little bit strange, but not one citizen could quite place a finger on anything that had certainly changed. Perhaps the corridors, which had originally been designed to feel "organic", had taken on a slightly twistier form, perhaps the air felt slightly colder and damper although no thermometer or hygrometer showed a difference. Perhaps it wasn't so much that the corridors were any different, it's just that they felt more like caves now. Rooms were found whose existence people only had vague memories about.

There was one change, however, that everyone realised couldn't have been natural. A previously empty area of the city - meant for immigrants who were slated to arrive in a couple of weeks - suddenly sported a massive new building complex, the so-called Institute for Occult Studies. Still, some of its employees felt strangely familiar to many Blavatskyans, and when contacted, none of the expected immigrants had any idea anybody had been expecting them in the sanct.

From this time on, Blavatsky's history was actually quite uneventful. The structural faults in the spar were found to be disappeared, maybe just misreadings in the first place. The Institute for Occult Studies, instead of being all evil and secretive as everyone expected, actually went on to create the

The Ashpool Theory of Correspondence

This theory was created and cultivated over several decades at the Institute for Occult Studies in Blavatsky. It postulates the existence of two structures largely unknown to physics elsewhere on Micras: A scalar field over spacetime named attachment, and some kind of a tensor field over spacetime named paradigm. The physics of attachment seem to be fairly easily understandable; simple theories have yielded highly accurate predictions on its behaviour that haven't been falsified yet. Paradigm, on the other hand, has resisted description, and there is currently disagreement even over its rank, let alone its actual behaviour.

In any case, what is known is that attachment and at least some facet of paradigm seem to be measurable, and that differences in paradigm, even if ill-definable, tend to have definite effect on the values of various numbers generally considered to be natural constants. The effect is very small, but it is what makes the fields measurable. Where paradigm is described by measuring the values of well-selected measurable natural constants, attachment is described by the rate of change of these metrics; where the values stay almost constant, attachment is close to 1, where they fluctuate, attachment has lower values.

Attachment tends to vary wildly across the surface on Micras based on experiments so far. Blavatsky itself, for instance, has an attachment of about 0.9999996261, whereas the attachment in Shirekeep has not been found to differ from 1 yet even in extremely thorough investigations.

Some Theories of Correspondence basically stop at this point, assuming simply that natural laws are described locally by a field of currently unknown nature. Ashpool Theory, however, goes farther and also postulates that paradigm has some kind of connection to conscious minds, though the nature of this connection is completely unknown so far. The Ashpool Theory is extremely difficult to make predictive use of, but some attempts have been succesful, and it's known at approximately 99.5% statistical confidence that some people are able to affect the value of paradigm in their surroundings. Which people are able to do this is not well known, although it seems that those with the ability are able to identify others with it.

The mechanism by which