I just received some information from the Fathom, the archives of Mu, concerning their Rite of Renewal, that last of which was precisely 1,296 years ago.
[Attached is a list of intervals, 216 in total. They range in length, but tend to be clustered at around 1,100 years]
The shortest interval between Rites is 802 years. The longest is 1,381 years.
This is. I do not have exact lengths of time, but when I first became the Sword-Saint, I spent a significant amount of time diving in the Mask, approximating the lengths of cycles. Somewhere, in the spare room at Badri’s, there probably still sits the lengths of string I used to approximate each cycle. These intervals between Rites of Renewal match up precisely with my understanding of the cycle-lengths of Almachadta.
Which, I suppose, is something we expected, but confirmation is useful.
Well, that’s interesting. Hang on, I’ve got to go do an obnoxious amount of maths by hand to confirm a suspicion.
I await your result with bated breath.
Samudra doesn’t have calculators???
a) Jorule, you and I are going to have a chat later,
b) I was right.
There’s– a principle in the study of randomness that defines what I guess you could consider to be the normal results of a certain kind of random process that shows up a lot in nature; if you draw a picture of it it looks like a soft round hill surrounding the most common outcome, with fewer and fewer less-common outcomes as you get further out from the most-common outcome.
The lengths of the cycles that you’ve given me fit this pattern almost precisely.
I don’t… know what that means? Maybe it’s exactly what you’d expect to see. It is a pattern that appears over and over again in the natural world, after all. Wouldn’t be the first time I’ve jumped at straws, but once I saw the numbers I had to check.
Did Tansa ever mention to you that she could communicate with some…thing… by performing comically large numbers of random rolls, speaking of?
She has one of these damn things, doesn’t she? Can you– can you use one to get someone’s attention, did we add that as a feature.
If she doesn’t reply, let me know. Duškomira’s pretty responsive and it seems like she’d enjoy the opportunity to Annoy Tasna.
Also help me out here. The cycle lengths are extremely random, which means they’re maybe also significant?
They’re… ‘extremely random’ would be if they were scattered haphazardly across the possible space of durations, perfectly uniformly. Things that are distributed ‘normally’ (that’s literally what you call it) are clumped up around some central average value, with a very regular, predictable, trailing-off deviation from that value. Think, like… heights of humans or Naiads or Kushtaka, or the number of individual pearls in a Pearl, or– there’s a whole bunch of natural processes made up of a million tiny little random chances stacked up on top of each other that end up looking like some form of this normal distribution.
And, apparently, the cycle lengths are one of them, to a really… alarming degree of accuracy.