Day 10

I may be on to something.

Last night I did my observations in each of the pods and happened into Payiferen shortly after sunrise. Four rays of light were streaming through the holes in the front window, and it was clear that, given more time, those four rays of light would shine upon four spiral plates that were on the floor.

Payiferen

I happened to be about an hour away from when the Payiferen portal time (I didn't wait because it was past my bed time - yes, I am a retentive nerd), so I suspect in an hour the light beams would be shining on the floor plates. It struck me that Payiferen could be the key to the other portals. Perhaps the light beams on the plates is the trigger that sets off the other portals. Now, the other portals don't open at the same time as the Payiferen portal, but perhaps it takes time for the signal from Payiferen to reach the other portals. Perhaps the numbers on the floor indicate a distance from some fixed point?

I began to look at the times in a different way then I did before.

	pod number difference from Payiferen (n)	time to portal after Payiferen portal (t in tahvo)	t/n
Nagilahn	5	57.5	11.5
Dereno	12	62.6	5.2

Not too encouraging, but it is certainly possible that one or both of the other pods are more than one portal cycle away. Adding one portal cycle to the travel times would still give you the same portal times. If I add one pod cycle (65 tahvo) to Dereno, we get this.

	pod number difference from Payiferen (n)	time to portal after Payiferen portal (t in tahvo)	t/n
Nagilahn	5	57.5	11.5
Dereno	12	127.6	10.6

These are very close! In fact, within the accuracy of the numbers I'm working with, this is almost bang on. A simple way to measure the accuracy of a measurement is to count the number of digits. Most of the numbers I'm working with have only two digits of accuracy. For example: The message at the Greeter's Guild told me that the Payiferen portal is 2.4 tahvo behind Dereno - two digits. For that mater, the pod numbers (13, 18, 25) are all two digits of accuracy. If they really represent distances, 13 could really mean anything between 12.5 and 13.5.

If you start factoring in the inaccuracies in the measurements, high school level error analysis will yield a range for t/n (time delay from the Payiferen portal per pod number) of between 9.5 and 12.1 tahvo, with the values around the middle (10.8) being the most likely.

All of this is obviously highly speculative. The test will come when we have access to another pod (there's obviously a fourth one coming).

HC

PS: It's possible this range could be much smaller. If we take the pod numbers to be 100% accurate (and they may be) and only consider the inaccuracies that exist within portal times (which certainly are not 100% accurate), the range comes down to only 10.4 to 11.1 tahvo per pod number.

I'll post how all this stuff is calculate if I get asked to.