Pearl gets its name from legends about its
creation and an unusual geographic feature which lends credence to
those legends. The legend has it that Pearl was once just that, a
bead on the necklace of the creator goddess. The geologic feature is
the Omphalos, the navel of the world, a vast bottomless pit centered
on the rotational pole. It is believed that this pit passes all the
way through the world and was where the threads went through to string
the goddess' necklace.
East, West, North and South have little meaning
on Pearl because the habitable lands are centered on the pole
(map). The
directions used by the inhabitants speak of poleward, and its opposite,
oot, meaning towards the equator. These replace our north and south,
but is the one pole the north pole or the south pole? Instead of east and
west, they use clockwise and counterclockwise. Bear this in mind when reading
the text descriptions of the images.
An amazing piece of software, Bryce,
allows me to make pictures that come much closer to what Pearl looks like
in my mind than any of my previous drawings. Those drawings were never
intended to be landscapes, but instead were
hand-drawn maps
which may have been created by inhabitants of those worlds. The map
page has been very popular ever since I drew maps of
Riven.
Review the images in the
many galleries
which display up to ten thumbnails at a time.
Once an image is selected from a thumbnail, each page
has a "previous" and "next" link to page through
the entire gallery. Most images are narrower than 640 pixels.
Local explorations of Pearl have been my
obsession of late, rendering image after image of the same scene at
slightly different angles to produce a MYST-like walk-around. A
few new concepts along these lines show up with names including the
string, "inch."
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