quaquaversal
[kwey-kwuh-vur-suh l]
1. (of a geological formation) sloping downward from the center in all directions.
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The
sphere looked around, and was confused.
The landscape was wrong. It
simply was not like it should be. The
sphere was on top of a fairly small mountain, with the sun shining of its metal
skin. The mountain sloped down on all
sides of it, spreading out and down in gentle but irregular ways. That was not what was odd though. What was odd was the other mountains.
Seeing
multiple mountains together was not unusual, as that is the way one normally
sees such formations. But here, each
mountain was separate. There were clear
separations between each mountain. And
not small ones either. The sphere could
not be certain, but it estimated at least a mile between the mountain it was on
and its closest neighbor.
A
humming sound came from inside the sphere.
It was thinking. Thinking about
how such odd formations could exit.
Surely they were not natural. If
they were natural, they would be in a rough line, and more or less attached to
each other. But what kind of beings
could create entire mountains? It was
unfathomable to the sphere. It clicked
and whirred as it tried to find anything to explain what it was seeing. Nothing it thought of fit.
The
sounds stopped. The sphere was no longer
thinking, or at least not as hard.
Although it had not come up with an explanation, it had also determined
that it would not find one from its current place. It had decided to start exploring. It started moving, floating down the mountain
at a slow, controlled speed. It could go
faster, but it wanted to take its time.
The slower it went, the better it would be able to see, and the more
information it would gather about the unusual mountains.
It
eventually reached the bottom of the mountain.
It began to look around, and saw nothing but the bases of other
mountains, and the wide spaces between them.
There was nothing else. The
sphere simply chose a direction and started moving in it.
It was
quite some time before the sphere noticed something else. The ground it was floating over was
slanted. It slanted down ever so
slightly. Most would not have noticed at
all, but the sphere did. It noticed many
things. It turned around and went in
another direction. The ground went up,
but eventually slanted down again. No
matter which direction the sphere went, the ground eventually started to have a
downward slant.
The
sphere went looking for any point that was not on a slant. It found one in the middle of the scattered
mountains. Once it was there, it could
see the mountains were not arraigned randomly, but rather in rings. Huge rings that spread out over miles, and
with irregular points made by the mountains themselves. And, like the mountains, the ground around him
sloped down in all directions, with rings of mountains moving down the almost imperceptible
slope.
The
sphere started thinking hard. The sound
of its clicks, whirs and hums echoed faintly off the mountains. Once again, it knew that this had to have
been created by someone, or something.
But it simply could not figure out what.
It spent a long time thinking.
But, like before, it decided that it needed to find out more about this
land. It chose a direction and started
moving. Maybe it would eventually find
the bottom.
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So...fractal mountains? Maybe? Honestly, I have no idea. I just kind of, you know, wrote something and that was it.
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