The Telescope

Colm had noticed it for a few days now, quiet and easy to dismiss individually, but harder to ignore once he actually paid attention to the pattern.

Arista had answered his last three messages with short, distracted replies, nothing like her usual enthusiastic tangents. Claire had waved him off from the workshop twice, citing something vague about "logistics" without offering any further detail. Even Nettle, normally endlessly chatty, had cut their last conversation short with an oddly hurried excuse.

He sat with it for a moment, turning the observation over carefully, the same methodical attention he gave every survey measurement.

...Am I doing something wrong?

He didn't think so. Nobody seemed upset with him, exactly. There was no coldness in any of it, no sharp edge to the short replies or the hurried excuses. Just... distraction. Busyness. The specific, distant feeling of being gently kept at arm's length without anyone explaining why.

He sighed, setting the thought aside for now. There was, he reasoned, likely a perfectly reasonable explanation he simply wasn't privy to yet. It happened sometimes, in a crew this large and this occupied. He'd learned, across years of patient work, not to read too much into things before he had the full picture.

He turned his attention back to his own project instead, the one thing that always settled his mind when everything else felt slightly out of focus.

The telescope sat half-assembled on his workbench, a more ambitious build than his usual survey lenses, incorporating a longer optical path, carefully ground glass, and a sturdy, adjustable mount he'd been refining for weeks.

He wasn't building it because he expected it to reveal anything meaningful. Realistically, the moon and stars visible through the cloud barrier were probably little more than decorative elements of the sky, not evidence of some elaborate, fully modeled solar system waiting to be discovered by anyone patient enough to build good optics.

He was building it simply because he was curious.

That had always been enough of a reason for him, long before Bram had walked into the glassworkers' guild and pulled his careful little world into Arista's much larger one. He mapped oceans not because anyone demanded precise depth soundings, but because not knowing the shape of something bothered him in a way he'd never quite been able to explain to anyone else. He surveyed mountain ranges and mermaid ring boundaries with the same patient thoroughness, driven by nothing more complicated than wanting to know.

The sky felt like the same kind of question. He'd stared up at it a thousand times across years of this world's existence, and he'd simply never gotten around to looking closer.

He ground the final lens carefully, checking the curvature against his notes and adjusting the mount's tension until it held perfectly steady.

He carried it outside that evening, setting it up in a clearing away from the settlement's lantern light, and angled it toward the darkening sky. The cloud barrier overhead had already begun its familiar transition, sunlight fading into the gentler glow of moon and starlight filtering through instead, the whole ceiling slowly filling with countless soft points of light.

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He found the moon's glow easily enough, a broad, luminous patch brighter than the scattered stars around it, and adjusted the telescope's focus, half expecting nothing more than a slightly larger, slightly blurrier version of the same soft light visible to the naked eye.

Instead, faint detail resolved out of the glow. Subtle variations in brightness crossed the patch, something that might, with enough imagination, almost read as cratering, rendered with far more care than he'd expected for something players normally only saw through the cloud barrier.

He adjusted the angle slightly, searching for anything else worth examining among the countless scattered points, patient and methodical.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he remained faintly aware that his friends were being strange with him. He'd get to the bottom of it eventually, he was sure.

For now, though, the sky held his attention, and that was enough.

Colm adjusted the telescope's focus slightly, tracking along the moon's soft, glowing edge with careful, unhurried patience, when something about the surface near its rim caught his attention.

The markings weren't compressing.

He frowned and leaned closer to the eyepiece, following one faint patch toward the edge. On a sphere, features approaching the rim should have appeared progressively narrower as the surface curved away from him. These didn't. They kept the same proportions right up until the image simply stopped.

"...Wait," he murmured, mostly to himself, adjusting the angle slightly to make sure he wasn't misreading what he saw.

He checked another patch, then another, comparing their apparent width against the notes he'd already made. The result stayed consistent. Whatever texture had been applied across the moon continued flat across the visible surface without the foreshortening he should have been seeing near the edge.

Colm sat back slightly, letting the small discovery settle in.

The moon wasn't a sphere, rendered fully in three dimensions the way a genuine celestial body would be. It was a disc, carefully textured and lit to appear convincingly round from any ordinary vantage point, but unmistakably flat once he knew what to look for.

It made perfect sense the moment he thought about it. Rendering an entire celestial body, complete with a far side and proper rotation, would be an enormous amount of unnecessary development effort for something almost nobody was ever expected to examine at this level of detail. A textured disc, angled and lit convincingly, achieved the same effect for anyone who wasn't specifically pointing a carefully ground telescope at it and checking the geometry.

He smiled, pleased in the same small, satisfied way he always was when some previously unnoticed detail about the world's construction finally made sense.

It wasn't a grand discovery. It wouldn't change anything, wouldn't unlock some hidden quest or reveal some sweeping cosmic secret. Nobody would build an entire project around it the way Arista inevitably did with her own discoveries.

But it was his, a small truth about the world that he'd found simply by being patient and curious enough to look.

He made a careful note in his private notebook, sketching the visible edge and the unchanged proportions of the surface markings exactly as he'd observed them, cataloguing the discovery with the same meticulous care he brought to ocean surveys and mountain ranges.

Moon appears to be a flat, textured disc rather than a fully rendered sphere. Surface features show no visible foreshortening near the rim at high magnification. Likely a deliberate development shortcut, given players are not expected to examine celestial bodies this closely.

He closed the notebook, satisfied, and glanced back up at the sky with fresh appreciation, not disappointed by the discovery so much as pleasantly amused by the practical simplicity of it.

"...I wonder if the Celestials know," he said softly, smiling faintly.

He packed the telescope away for the night, already looking forward to pointing it at something else entirely tomorrow, while the unresolved strangeness of his friends' recent distraction settled somewhere in the back of his mind, still noticeable, but no longer important enough to compete with the sky.