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

[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.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

I am also certain that Sythyry knew about the hazards, but they hadn't been discussed, and I consider them to be the most severe ... others have brought up the issue of individual stupidity or inattention resulting in harm over time, but I'm more concerned with the risk of deliberately afflicted harm over time.

Sadly all the solutions involve some degree of mentador.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

Kidnapping in the first place is rare enough that this isn't a huge problem. If anything you've got an easy place to look for them, instead of having to search the entire tree like you normally would.

Kidnapping them and taking them to the delay district is especially nonthreatening since people outside have extra time to react and figure out what happened. The QQ part means you probably want to have guards on station inside the district, though.

Maybe keep track everyone who enters and make sure they leave before X amount of real time has passed.

[rowyn]

I was wondering if you could make tracking the amount of time they've been in a time-manipulation district part of the enchantment itself. Each person has to have possession of a token with an expiration stamp, and once it expires the time-manipulation spell won't affect you any more?

[sythyry.livejournal.com]

H'm. Kidnapping is not that common -- except for Vae of course -- and, on the whole, the kidnap victim is at the mercy of the kidnappers anyhow. Quick-aging them is certainly a terrible injury to them: but less of an injury than killing them, which the kidnappers could do as well. As for delaying them, the concerns are not so clear to me; I can imagine some kidnap victims preferring to spend, say, one day in captivity rather than a week.

But the point you are hinting at is that the gates to the time-regions must be guarded quite carefully, and we must be well aware of whatever is going on in there. This point is well-taken indeed.

[foomf.livejournal.com]

The situation reminded me of a speculative story I read some years ago, wherein a device was created that placed a spherical region of space into a stasis, outside of time, for a fixed period of time, which was set at the incept. There were some odd rules about it. Nothing could break into one, but neither could one form entirely around another.

There was an equivalent to murder, wherein someone would be held out of time for longer than a normal lifetime. It seems that a slow-time area could be abused similarly. Kidnapping might not be common, but someone squeamish of outright murder might want to just put them out of the way for a while.