EDIT: Here is a much easier to read and proofread PDF copy downloadable via Media Fire. LINK.
[As a silly silly side project, I've been making up an 'astrological' chart for the world of Glitch. Due to the curious nature of the Glitch calendar and the placement of certain holidays, it has gotten a bit wonky and complicated. This is fine. Astrology should be a bit wonky and complicated. In my head, I began to come up with justifications for some of the choices I was making. And then it started to become a story so I started to write it down. Since it looks like we'll have a relatively long break between tests right now, seems like a good time to start posting it.]
Table of Contents:
PART ONE
PART THE SECOND
PART THE SECOND POINT FIVE
PART TRES
PART GO FORTH
PART A FIFTH OF HOOTCH
PART FIVE SUBSET B
PART LEONARD PART SIX
PART SE7EN
PART HENRY THE EIGHTH
PART MINER FORTY-NINER
PART X, the first
PART X, the second
PART X, the last aside
PART ELEVENTY
PART ONE
in which Alph imagines something and other Giants figure out what to do with it
Some time after the Giants imagined existence, a thought occurred to Alph. “We don’t even know how much ‘some time’ it has been since we imagined existence because we haven’t imagined ‘time’ yet! Hell, can we even have existence without time?” (Interestingly, when (if there was even a 'when' if they didn't have time) Alph thought this, ‘Hell’ had not been imagined yet. That is another story however.) So Alph gathered together the other Giants and said, “I’m going to imagine something so that we can keep track of how long something has been and how long it will be until the next thing.”
“What do you mean by ‘how long’?” asked Mab.
“What do you mean by ‘has been’?” asked Spriggan.
“What do mean by ‘until’?” asked Humbaba.
“What do you mean by ‘something’?” asked Cosma, who was a bit slow on the uptake but still wanted to sound like she had been paying attention.
“Look,” exclaimed Alph, “this will make more sense if I just do it, okay?”
“What do you mean by ‘will’?” the ten Giants asked in unison.
“Time!” yelled Alph. And then he imagined time. “Boom. There it is. Deal with it.”
“Ooooooooo,” said all of the Giants (except Cosma who had become distracted by a slight breeze).
Now, Alph enjoys the whole fun of creating things but rapidly gets bored with everything that comes after. So he wandered off to get on with the business of imagining, leaving time sitting there in front of the other ten Giants.
They all looked at time and then looked at each other. This lasted awhile, in part because they weren’t sure what to do with this new thing and in part because they just enjoyed the experience of having an ‘awhile’ for the first... um... time.
Eventually, Tii gave a small ahem. “It appears to me that time is tricky business. I’m not sure how much of it we have. It may be infinite. It might be finite. Or It might be both. Or neither. That is the nature of these sorts of things. But in the name of fairness, we should break it up into pieces so that we can share it equally.” And with that Tii cut up time in years and years into months and months into days. (Only later were days separted into hours and hours into minutes and minutes into seconds. Again, a whole other story.)
Tii continued, “I have broken time into years so it is manageable. And I broke each year into eleven months, because there are eleven Giants. And each month I’ve broken into days because months are still too big to carry in a bag.” Pot smiled at this because bags were his idea. “I made three hundred and seven days because that is a nice prime number. Each month has a different number days since having each month with an equal amount of days would be, well, boring. So now we should just decide which of us gets which month.”
The Giants began roll the problem round in their big giant heads. Friendly, always one to peer through murk and see to the heart of a situation, rolled the problem quicker but with more care than the others. “Tell me,” he said to Tii. “I see that one month has three days and one month has seventy-three days and all the other months have a different number days in between three and seventy-three, correct?”
“Yes,” Tii beamed. “And all of them fine, good prime numbers.”
“Yes, yes. Very nice,” consented Friendly. “But if we split it straight by months, some Giants will get many days and some Giants will get very few. That does not seem very fair, now does it?”
All the Giants looked to each other, unsure of whether it was fair or not. You see, the whole idea of fairness was a very new one. In fact, not much old than time. If such things had existed yet, fairness would have been created on Twoday and time was created on the very next Hairday. But they didn’t exist, so we are talking metaphor. (Of course, ‘metaphor’ wasn’t created for another week and a half, metaphorically.) With all of this in mind, the Giants were not sure what to do.
Finally, Friendly spoke again. “The fairest thing would be to split the days evenly. Tii, how many days would each of us get?”
It took Tii no time at all to figure it out. “Twenty-nine point nine zero nine zero nine zero nine zero nine zero nine–”
“Good enough,” interrupted Friendly.
“It keeps going,” said Tii. “Quite fascinating.”
“This may all be fascinating to some,” snapped Grendline, “but that number seems like a very difficult one to deal with. Especially for those of us who are still confused by what numbers are in the first place.”
Friendly said, “Then we shall make it simpler. We’ll each get twenty-seven days. Alph can have the first twenty-seven since it was his idea and all. And then, in turn, we can each have twenty-seven days, until the year is all gone and we start a new one. That seems fair, yes?”
All the Giants nodded enthusiastically as Friendly’s idea seemed to exactly fit the very idea of fairness, as well as they understood it.
“Who shall get the twenty-seven days after Alph?” asked Zille who rarely spoke up unless it seemed like the obvious next thing to say.
“Oh, we have twenty-seven days to figure that out,” said Friendly with a smile. “If I understand this whole time thing, that will be plenty.”
And with that, eight of the Giants went off to imagine new things to fill the world. Only Friendly and Tii remained. Tii raised a tentacle (which, being wrapped around his/her/its central eye, was as close to an eyebrow raise Tii could get) and said, “Your plan sounds fair except for one thing. When all is done, there will still be ten days left over. What will become of them?”
Friendly made something with his face and mouth and eyes that may have been a knowing smirk. Perhaps it was something different. “Something tells me that, in the end, it will all sort itself out. Yes, I believe it will.”
Tii was not sure what Friendly meant or what the look on his face meant, but nodded as that seemed like the simplest thing to do.
[to be continued]