Sketch: Tempest

Marion’s gaze moved sluggishly across the paper, weighed on by the first signs of fatigue. He sighed, resting his head with a hand on his temple. Just three nights into Vigil and the low-light strain was already impeding his productivity; not long ago he might have worked straight through the season, with only the biting wind outdoors to remind him of the long dark. The corrective eyeglasses he’d so reluctantly incorporated into his workflow seemed less a crutch and more an ankleweight, his dependence growing by the day. He loathed the thought of those wires permanently affixed to his face, like retrofitting machinery past its service lifetime. Raising his head again, he moved to adjust his electric desk lamp. Defeat.

Relaxing his eyes, he returned to the document at hand. Figures leapt off the page in the warm light, documenting the assembly process for the rockbreakers’ new end effector. The powder-driven chisel was proving difficult to reinforce against fatigue; this latest revision in the design would hold up well, but introduced significantly more complexity for the crews meant to deploy it in situ. Even he would have lost track of the version number, were it not printed in block letters in the corner of the page. He knew, of course, that all this iteration was necessary, critical; still, he’d be glad to see the final revision shipped.

As he compared an older version against his present charge, the secondary articulation point caught his attention. That joint had seen more significant improvement than any other part of the assembly. Only minor adjustments to the arrangement of these components had been made, but the result had almost totally resolved the risks associated with this joint. It was elegant work; the kind so characteristic of her.

That subtle weight had returned to his chest. Noira had been a truly remarkable asset on his team. She had taken his direction and magnified it, exceeding his expectations for any of his engineers, let alone a junior trainee. This was the quality of work that his division had needed to leap ahead of schedule; the entire program benefitted from a mechanic of her caliber. In return, it was clear that she was flourishing in this environment as well. He had seen such growth from her in such a short few months that nothing could have possibly tempered his expectations for her future.

He sighed again, sitting back from his work. The howling Orine winds scattered icy flurries across the window of his office. She had been impressionable, as she always was. Tanura was such a novelty to her. He had offered his best guidance, knowing the kinds of influences that lay beyond the company district, the cacophony of voices that could lead her naivety astray. It was just what he had been afraid of, with Noira so vulnerable after the accident. The last thing she needed were the insidious seeds of distrust; distrust in the company, and in him. He remembered her face vividly, tormented by fear, confusion…and betrayal.

As it had then, the memory pierced deeper than he cared to acknowledge. It hadn’t been the same helplessness he’d seen in the accident; there was another, more sinister component. All her anxieties had become twisted into a vicious anger, directed towards the company which had provided so much for her, had housed and fed her to a standard of living far beyond what he knew she’d left behind. An anger directed at himself, who had moved mountains to take her under his wing, to provide her with every ounce of instruction and mentorship he could, to help her blossom into the accomplished engineer he knew she could become. All of his efforts had been cast aside, burned down and replaced with this tangle of confused morals she had found in the rakish halls of Tanura.

The ice continued to fall, born from the depths of Vigil, coating every surface in its brittle sheen. Before him, the document lay still, bare. He felt his own deep-seated chagrin creeping in from the corners of the room.

Surely there was some way he might have acted differently. Perhaps he had been overly stern; she had felt stifled, it seemed, unable to meet him where he stood. His unwavering ethic had certainly incited this response before. Elias had been much the same. Marion’s commitment to his craft, the insatiable desire to improve, to push his own boundaries, had been unpalatable for his partner – former, he reminded himself. Time and again he had grappled with this snare, how the pursuit of his own fulfillment could nevertheless drive others away, as it had Elias, and Noira.

Marion closed his eyes, listening to the clattering of the tempest. He would complete no more work tonight. At length, he tucked the document into his case, standing blearily from his desk. At the touch of his finger, the electric lamp went out with a crackle.

Roselight merch!

 I don't expect that there's, like, lines of people waiting for this, but nevertheless I figured I'd make an announcement here:

I have a Redbubble shop open now! There's a few Roselight pieces available in a wide variety of products, as well as some art I've done for Proxima: A Human Exploration of Mars. If you really want Noira looking fierce on a throw pillow, or stickers of the kids, or a poster of the planets, or any number of other things - consider checking it out:

Link to Redbubble!

As an incentive, I just finished this poster that I am very proud of, which you can find on the shop:

Spontaneous Noira Poster

Noira!!

The image of our timid protagonist standing fierce and defiant abruptly popped into my brain and I had to try and realize it as best I could. This is a pretty low-quality rendering but I might try to make a larger, more polished version sometime in the future. I definitely had fun with it!

The scene is meant to allude to Noira's increasingly important role in the Roselight resistance organization, fighting corporate oppression on the distant world of Orus...

Rosa's Children

 

You may want to view the above image at full-size! Blogger compression takes a lot out of it.

I had a blast with this painting of the three inhabited worlds in the Rosa system. Only pr'Sefone had previously been depicted from space, so I figured I'd take a step back and try to render the other two in this more familiar sci-fi lens. The sizes were just eyeballed, but are intended to be pretty representative. The direction of Roselight indicates the relative ordering of the planets as well. A quick breakdown:

pr'Sefone, the small, innermost world, is tidally-locked and so resembles what many have termed a "hot eyeball planet." The Roselit side is a scorched desert, while a narrow band of temperate climate exists right along the day-night terminator. Deeper in shadow, a mysterious tundra wasteland looms in the eternal darkness. I've depicted a bit more surface water than previously envisioned; I think we've got some rivers and perhaps dammed artificial lakes now, in addition to more ancient dried rivers and deltas. I like to imagine pr'Sefone had dramatic canyons and waterfalls and such globally before it became tidally locked; most of those features are now lost in tundra or desert. The green is, technically, Earthly vegetation, although in Roselight's setting it's perhaps thousands of years removed. I've also depicted the primary spaceport out of Eterna, pr'Sefone's capital city, near the north pole.

irid'An is a lush, tropical ocean world, with a few small archipelagos and atolls springing forth from the gentle, temperate sea. irid'An is the most Earthlike of the three, with a rapid rotation period of around 15 hours and an atmosphere supporting lots of dynamic convection and such. Small ice caps are present, probably composed entirely of transient patches of sea ice. I had a lot of fun with the clouds; I duplicated the cloud layer, darkened it, and offset it slightly to get the shadow effect, even offsetting different portions at different distances to mimic the changing light angle.

Orus is the largest and most distant of the three, and is similarly covered in a deep ocean, albeit colder and more turbulent than that of irid'An. The islands jutting from the chaotic waves are harsh, rocky, and barren. Orus is a slow-rotating world, not quite tidally locked, but sluggish enough to generate pretty big temperature swings between the temperate days and absolutely frigid nights. The ocean gradually freezes over when Rosa dips beneath the horizon, making Orus resemble a "cold eyeball planet" despite retaining a day/night cycle. I did illustrate this, but it's barely visible at the terminator under the cloud cover. Incidentally, the cloud pattern is inspired by that of Venus' similar slow-rotating atmosphere when viewed in infrared.

More on each of these worlds can be found on the "The Rosa System" page up at the top of the blog! And, of course, lots of worldbuilding and relevant artwork can be found using the tags in the left column.

Timekeeping

 Sunrise and sunset? Nay, we have rosris (ROZE-eye) and rodin (ROW-din).

What follows is a sort of haphazard study of timekeeping in Roselight, and its relationship to the culture of the Rosa system’s inhabitants. As some ground rules, I’m going to maintain the use of hours, minutes, and seconds, but everything else…….we’ll see. Also, be advised this was all typed at like 3 AM so it may or may not be totally coherent.

I think irid’An has a day length similar enough to Earth that the people there can live a recognizable day/night schedule; maybe substantially shorter than ours, like 14 or 15 hours, where people sleep shorter intervals or maybe alternate whether they sleep a given day or not. I think the natural diurnal functions in our brains are probably more receptive to short sleep periods whenever it gets dark (4 to 5 hours?) so that would likely be the norm on irid’An. Shorter days but a pretty recognizable cycle.

On this world, the physical day/night cycle can just be referred to as consisting of calendar days, which would be the system-wide standard for timekeeping (dates, events, trade, economy, stonks). This is fun from a narrative standpoint as well because it sets the stage for the almost oblivious influence the people of irid’An have over the rest of the system. They’re privileged with a lifestyle that feels so pleasantly familiar that they’ve never known the fundamental upheaval of basic existence that others have had to endure.

On Orus the situation is quite different. The day/night cycle is more like weather variation on a weeklong timescale, not something rapid enough to build a sleep schedule based on. So, as mentioned before, people here probably run on irid’An time. Their clocks would be synchronized, despite the time delay ruling out real-time communications anyways. So people probably rise and sleep on similar schedules to irid’An, perhaps sleeping for longer during the nights and shorter during the days. Here we will need to distinguish between physical day/night and the calendar days.

I’ve been trying to figure out a good alternate name for a calendar day, like “sol,” so that “day” and “night” can mean light and dark. But what if we take the opposite approach? Rename the periods of light and dark on Orus, since in a way they’re more like seasons than days. The climate changes for a significant period of time, but the cycle of life continues. Daytime approaches and shifts into nighttime even as multiple “days” go by. What could we call these periods?

“Vigil” is a phenomenal name for the nighttime on Orus. Continuing the theme of liturgical hours, I like “Laude” for the daytime, but I’d honestly prefer something less biblical for both inclusion and realism (how many thousands of years has it been by now?). I’ll noodle on it some more.

Despite human society being focused on irid’An, while colonization of Orus occurred within the last 100 years or so, people have still developed new cultures and customs suited to this unique world. You’ll find the use of Vigil and Laude to be more prevalent the further you go from ASMC’s upper brass. Those closer to the company (and thus further from the world itself) view these new customs as frivolous and meaningless, while the people in villages and communities most removed from ASMC (like Noira’s friends) have already been raised under these traditions. They began among the working class who sought to make a home of this world they were contractually bound to, and have since spread to people who don’t work for ASMC at all. Noira herself is in the odd position of having lived on Orus for some time, but still being a relative outsider to the inner culture here. She’s largely been a working immigrant to the world, and so spent most of her time in a heavily company-controlled life.

On pr’Sefone things are even stranger, albeit simpler. Rosa does not rise or set, and this world’s orbit is too tightly shepherded after billions of years of resonance to have any appreciable eccentricity. So the only way to keep time is to look beyond Rosa, to the other worlds. Timekeeping here is marked primarily by the passage of irid’An in the sky, as this would’ve been the most important celestial object to the Sefones during the flightless era. This is a lot like how the month on Earth is based on the cycle of the moon, but instead of being something like an orbit, a “month” here might refer to the synodic period of pr’Sefone and irid’An. These worlds’ motion relative to each other repeats on a set timescale that both worlds could observe, so this might even be a formalized calendar definition as well. Actually, the synodic period is very important for spaceflight, so once interworld travel returns this would be a crucial measurement of time.

I’m not sure what wake/sleep periods look like on pr’Sefone – naturally, the onset of “globalization” (multiple globes in this case) means most people on pr’Sefone just follow regular irid’An time, but I wonder what the Sefones did while they were mostly out of contact with irid’An. Maybe people slept in rounds or shifts, set to a natural division of the synodic month. This could be a good tie-in to some of their cultural quirks about vigilance and the constant presence of Roselight in their lives; as Rosa never rests her watchful eye, neither must the Sefones. The influence of universal irid’An time thus becomes an existential threat to a huge part of Sefones culture. This would be a fun thing to explore amidst Noira’s immediate family – maybe some of her younger siblings have already taken on more responsible roles in the family, as someone needs to remain awake and watchful as their mother Telma sleeps.

So that gives us some semblance of an understanding as to timekeeping and its cultural implications in Roselight. I need to sleep soon but my next aim is to try and craft a more comprehensive calendar. Some notes for then include the fact that the planets are probably in resonant orbits, due to the compact size of the system, which may help to keep timekeeping nice and neat.