Quick Quarter, Delay District

[sythyry]

I am considering making two unusual districts in the perhaps-to-be-made city. Let's call them Fast Town and Slow Town --- no, the Quick Quarter and the Delay District. The Slow Slum, I hope, is not appropriate.

In the Quick Quarter, time runs nine times faster than outside. One could enter it after breakfast in the regular world, enjoy a full day's worth of whatevers, sleep it off, and leave it at lunchtime in the regular world. Or, one could spend a year in there writing a book, and only the month of Trandary would pass in the regular world. I expect this to be popular with many sorts of people, such as vacationers; we will need to have excellent recreations available within, among other things.

In the Delay District, it runs nine times slower than in normal reality. I don't expect this to be as popular as the Quick Quarter, but if one is working in the Quick Quarter and one does not want to age unduly, one must spend some time in the Delay District.

I could also produce a Quite Quick Quarter and a Doubly Delayed District, eighty-one times faster and slower, for those occasions in which one needs to do a year's worth of work in three days, or ... well, the main use I have thought of is, to wait out an unpleasant term painlessly, such as a statute of limitations, or wait for a rich relative to die. Or, perhaps, if one is under a curse fatal in eighty-one hours, one could go there and hope that the relevant wizards and healers (me, I suppose) could work out a cure in a year -- but this is quite unlikely, since most curses go by days (viz. dawns in the real world) and not by hours.

As far as I know, no other city has such amenities, though certain rooms in certain wizards' manses or ducal palaces work that way. Most people rarely if ever get to have access to time manipulation.

How might you take advantage of one or more of these regions?

What sorts of amenities should we provide in them?

What perils and troubles and problems might arise from them?

Comments

[rowyn]

I think the biggest problem is that your friends are going to die even faster, because the Quick Quarter will be lots more popular than the Delay District. :( Residents are likely to spend their days working at normal speed, then their free time vacationing in the Quick Quarter, and die "young" (relatively, if not perceptually). I guess you could try restricting total time primes are allowed to spend in the Quick Quarter without spending corresponding hours in the Delay District.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

That is a problem. I'm not sure about how to address it -- I can do something to compensate for the aging partially, but I should look into how well it can work. Annoying bookkeeping laws like that will be hard to enforce, I suspect.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Hmm. Will the guilds in other cities be angry because they'll have to make their own quick quarters to compete?

Will the vacationing aspect be overwhelmed by demand for filling it up with any craft profession that doesn't rely on cley or uses-per-dawn?

Will people actually be able to get by for a week on one day's worth of cley? On the flipside I suppose there might be cley-sellers who can actually make a good living at it by waiting out the recharge time in the delay district. That won't actually make cley-for-sale more common though since it's only them that are waiting it out.

The delay district should have day care centers, because parents are going to want to leave their children there while they go do other stuff -- less time for the kids to get into trouble!

[rowyn]

Wow. Combining child care with the delay district is an awesome idea. O.O You get a break and don't even miss out on what the kids are up to!

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I don't know about guilds in other cities. We'll have to be careful with trade, I suppose.

I certainly don't mind the vacationing being overwhelmed by crafting!

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

Some people might want to live in the doubly delayed district so they can see what the future is like.

[bloofox.livejournal.com]

That was the first thing that came to my mind when I heard about the delay district.

On the other hand, if you're in a skilled or intellectual trade it would likely be rather troubling to have the rest of the world have ten years to advance the state of the art while you were taking a nap. So perhaps the Delay District would make an excellent site for a prison, if you wanted to be really nasty.

On the third hand, if you wait a couple hundred years and don't die from culture shop, you might be able to make a living again lecturing on important historical events (you'd just have to make sure to enter it right after (not before) one.)

[rowyn]

The problem I see with living in the Delay District is that things like rent are going to be based on passage of time in the real world, and your income is (probably) going to be based on work you do at whatever speed you live at. The landowners in the Doubly Delayed District *probably* aren't going to want to rent rooms at 1/81th the cost of rental space in the real world. Although Sythyry's making all the land so maybe zie will, who knows? Or you could try getting by on hotel rooms, which can be rented by the (perceptual) night. Hotel rooms in the Quite Quick District might be comparatively cheap, for that matter.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Of course, we don't provide round trips...

[dracosphynx.livejournal.com]

You are going to have to be careful about maintaining calendars.

Any sort of legal/commercial contract based on time (i.e. hourly rate, deadlines, etc) is going to become quite crazy to settle in a dispute if things are not carefully managed and explicitly agreed upon before hand.

Even things like "See you in three hours" might become unduly confusing -- unless you had some clocks that kept the 'absolute' time in all areas that people could rely upon to know what the 'real' time was.

[tuftears.livejournal.com]

Clearly an absolute clock would be needed!

Here's a question: what prevents someone from keeling over dead when they cross 'time zones', as part of their body is suddenly living at nine times the speed of the rest? Does only one zone ever apply to any object, depending on where its center is?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Sloot clocks, slootly!

[dracosphynx.livejournal.com]

Also, what happens if a crazy Deep Mage tries to rush a Tempador Enchantment using a Tempador spell in one of these areas? >.>

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Speaking as a crazy deep mage myself: the areas won't be very good for enchantments. Also, enchantments go by dawns, not by hours, and the time areas won't have their own dawns -- I'm not that good; indeed, I doubt that there are two beings in the universe who are.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

... Wait a minute... What kind of crazy duels is going to happen in Doubly Delayed town? I mean, 81 days in the span of a day? That's (for around here) one day every 17 minutes! If you refresh based on the actual time that the day in Normal Time starts, that means you are going to have some high end wizards doing crazy stuff, like summoning Six headed Watery Things and start smashing other wizards over and over again, because clay is close to free at that point.

I think that it is suitably Doomy for someone like you, though, and reminds me of popular games on this side of the planar divide... but there is danger in double Delayed Town!

[barberio.livejournal.com]

I would suspect that the Double Delayed Town would... attract unwelcome attention from certain powers.

[stormydragon.livejournal.com]

Refresh is based on dawn occuring, not amount of time that has passed. So you wouldn't refresh your cley any more often in delayed town since the sun is still outside it.

[xolo.livejournal.com]

The DDD would be an ideal place for the storage of perishables. Warehouses for spices, food and wine, etc., would have built-in advantages from locating there. For expensive things like spices that must be harvested in the wild, you could probably build up a regional trade using city warehouses, as you could have a dependable supply selling at constant price when competitors have to depend on the spot market. Out of season foods would be another commodity that would sell well, and with even less competition.

You might consider some sort of hospital for non-primes suffering little-known diseases, or for anyone afflicted with some some sort of odd curse or condition that requires study before it can be treated.

By the same token, businesses using time-dependent processes such as fermentation would be best located in the QQQ - cheesemakers, brewers, wineries, etc. They can turn the product over faster, getting more product from the same production facilities, plus they can respond faster to changes in demand for different flavours, etc.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Maybe have a QQQQ zone where people do fermentation etc. but with a normal-speed (or maybe merely QQ) zone where the workers stand so they don't immediately become skeletons.

Although being sped up isn't really an instant death sentence when you can just walk back across the line at any time.

Suddenly, all the slow lazy jobs are high-energy speed tasks.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

Ah, an excellent and thoroughly practical set of ideas! They delight me!

[foomf.livejournal.com]

Nobody has mentioned harm being done.

Here is the risk, and it may dissuade you from providing this service.

Kidnapping. Force or trickery. If someone is taken into the Delay District and held there for a few days or weeks, unable to communicate, while outside, the world continues. At the least they might miss important dates or meetings; at the worst, they might find their loved ones dead and gone.

Or worse, if they're taken into Fast Town and kept there for long enough that those outside miss their childhood, or key times in their life because of it. Worst case, they die of old age prematurely (as far as their loved ones know.)

That's the dangerous part of it.

[kensan-oni.livejournal.com]

Well, I would have assumed that Sythry knew about those hazards. I am more worried that he hasn't thought out some of the more outside circumstances that could occur.

It's still good to bring those up, though.

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

This time system would be great for gouging people on ticket prices! "Get seven days' admission for the price of one!* [fine print] *...and be charged again in the afternoon because 7 days < 1 day." Same for the sale of overpriced food in the quick areas.

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

I was actually going to propose the -- quite radical -- idea that foreigners not be cheated.

[kris-schnee.livejournal.com]

Hmm... actually there's an interesting possibility besides that. The Tree rejects non-magical technology, but within the quickened areas cley doesn't refresh at a faster rate. So if you could build automated devices for producing manufactured goods, without using magic at any substantial rate, you can have that machinery cranking out products at 9X or 81X normal speed.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Even a lot of enchanted things can work without using up cley, so it might not have to require no magic.

[ragarth.livejournal.com]

This is a terribly interesting idea, and it seems to go handily with something I was considering throwing your way.

The essential issues with having quick and slow districts is aging. People go in one, and die before others outside or after others outside. So if you were to go into slow district, take a bonk to the noggin, and lay unconscious in an ally for a day you'd miss many days in the outside world. Conversely, certain illegal activities between towns could be more effectively done in the quick district. Mitigating all these issues either requires some form of record keeping or additional tracking magic.

What I've been trying to flesh out for you is the idea of city walls made of locodor magic. I've never seen mention of a city using locodor for city walls, and a floating city is uniquely suited for such a thing since the walls could provide locomotion (and even the floating effect if you essentially make the city fall infinitely and then make your own gravity). Ontop of that, a locodor city wall could help provide internal security since it sounds like you'll have a mix of primes and nonprimes (and the eventual disasters that will occur when a nendrai flakes), and space expansion. You could even do short-range gates to satellite districts around, but not connected to, the main city.

For the quick and slow districts, the city walls can also teleport people out of them if they spend x amount of time inside, thereby imposing an inherent time limit and mitigating most disadvantages. Illegal activity in quick district would have to take place within the time-frame given, and incapacitation in delay district means you just have to wait for your time to run out. For those people who want to spend more time than x inside the district, have them register.

Now imagine a tempador/locodor city wall.