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

[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.