Investigation into the San Marseille Event
To the Office of the Mayor of San Marseille
Laura Lye
Madame Mayor,
As per your request we have begun our compilation into the research of the municipal commonly referred to as San Marseille, that being the city and immediate surrounding countryside. To the best of our knowledge and the available records, this is the first such undertaking.
While it is impossible to put an exact date on the founding or formation of the city popular opinion and general consensus among academics put it between ten and fifteen years, local time. Time, as you will be familiar with, is inconsistent within San Marseille. Early attempts to associate this with standard gravitational time dilation theories quickly proved inconclusive, in part due to a lack of specialised expertise in this field within the city limits. However, while atomic clocks are able to measure the difference in nanoseconds relative to gravitational potential, time inside and outside of San Marseille is much more fluid. The difference between San Marseille and the world outside the city limits has been measured in anything from days to weeks, months and on two occasions, entire years. To date, we have been unable to determine pattern or formula to track these discrepancies.
Within the city the effect is observably more muted, rarely expanding beyond a twenty-four hour mismatch. The difference is most readily observable within the city’s metro network, which we have included a more thoroughly detailed report about, but not limited to. The effect has been observed at both fixed and floating geographic points that we have had more some success in mapping to both lunar and solar cycles, though we stress that there is still a high margin of error in predicting these occurrences.
As instructed by the Mayor’s Office, the initial focus of our investigation and research was the phenomenon San Marseille’s oddities are widely attributed to, what is referred to in layman’s terms as The Night. A conclusive scientific consensus has not yet been reached on what exactly the Night but the most popular theory is in line with the colloquial terminology; this being that the Night is a form of primordial dark matter.
The Night, as you are no doubt aware but for the purposes of this report, surrounds and defines the outskirts and boundaries of the San Marseille area in its entirety. To the best of our knowledge this enclosure is complete in the sense that is impossible to go around, above or below the Night. Attempts at all manner of circumnavigations have been made, none successful. While it is known to be possible to traverse directly through the phenomenon in both directions this is not without consequence and effect. An expansion of this is included later in this report.
As to what precisely the Night is, consensus is hard to reach. The Night is both a physical and meta-physical phenomenon that surrounds the city limits and can be found throughout the region as well. Some of these are well established, including the metro infrastructure, central reserve, Echoes of Aphasia and the entirety of the Reficul district, comprising much of the city centre. More on the inhabitants of Reficul later.
While manifesting primarily as darkness, hence the common term, the Night has also been observed in the form of storms, mist, clouds and other extreme weather states. However we do have reports from outside of San Marseille, that report of similar events of the Night taking the form swamps, jungles, forests, deserts and various states of briar or hedges. These reports do line up with a cursory study of mythological history, as it relates to what we will refer to as the fae, but the difficulty of travelling back and forth across the Night mean that we have been unable to verify any of these reports and must treat them with a degree of scepticism. However it seems reasonable to assume that the Night is not a one-off occurrence in the San Marseille area, though our manifestation may be unique in its own ways.
What we do know is the Night acts as a geographic perception filter. That is to say anyone within the geographic zone of San Marseille accepts the phenomenon and associated affects in the same way they accept a basic scientific principle such as gravity. Even though it may not be understood in a mechanical or precise manner the result in self-evident. Also this leads us into those few people and residents who are able to cross over the boundaries, whether intentional or not. The effect of this transition is what we would call a cognitive block, an extreme version of what happens when you walk into a room and forget the reason why. People leaving San Marseille, as near as we can determine, for reasons of obvious difficulty, have no recollection of the ways in which San Marseille differs from the mundane world. Their perception of whatever they might have experienced during their time in the city aligns with what would have occurred had the Night not been a factor. It is normalised for them. This effect has also been noted to include any form of media, including photography, video, literature, email. The list is extensive. A diary, for example, may include reference to fae or fae events, but the written words would not register to a reader outside of the Night’s influence. Likewise, if an individual in San Marseille were to make contact via video link with someone outside, the person outside would observe nothing remarkable. Anything that might stand out as incredible or impossible, such as say a fae individual of the more fantastical variety, would be normalised to their perception. This is the perception filter we refer to, an order of magnitude more massive than the commonplace glamours one observes in day to day life in San Marseille.
As always, there are exceptions, the most notable being the Szgany, who have provided us with so many of the reports we have been unable to substantiate. This report wishes to stress that is the largely due to the Szgany we have been able to observe the situation from an outside perspective, but are unable to determine what biases this may have introduced.
Travel from the mundane world to San Marseille and back is almost exclusively restricted to members of the Szgany, whereas travel from the Fae world seems to be one-directional. Individuals have been observed to arrive with semi-regularity in the San Marseille area. Without exception they have been subject to their own form of the Night’s perception filter and have no recollection of where and whence they came from. Integration into the greater San Marseille community covers a spectrum of outcomes. More to follow in this report.
We have no confirmed reports of anyone travelling from San Marseille to the Fae reality, let alone returning.
The origins of the Night are as difficult to pinpoint as the origins of the Big Bang. We can find trace evidence but the actual formation is something we believe happened in the distant past. Perhaps in parallel with the Big Bang itself or perhaps not, given the fluid effects on time the Night demonstrates. However the Night, as we have touched on but not yet elaborated on, displays a different set of rules of physics and metaphysics than those we are familiar with in the mundane universe. And this we believe, is the simplest way to describe the phenomenon and situation we find ourselves living in within San Marseille.
Ten to fifteen years ago, as best we can approximate, an event occurred. As with all things this study has tried to encompass, accounts vary. Individuals, groups and entities refer to it by different names; the fall, the merge, a conjunction. We have compiled a list of names for you to peruse at your leisure. Commonly referred to as The Fall, likely in relation to the individuals known as Fall Children, we however have elected to refer to the event as The Merge, as it better illustrates our understanding of what occurred.
In simplest terms, there are two worlds, two planes, two realities. Two sets of existence with different rules governing them. One is the mundane world, with history and physics as we commonly understand them. The other is the Fae world, where creatures, events and states exist in what we would have previously referred to as mythology. The situation of San Marseille is this; that the two worlds crossed over or were superimposed upon one another and have continued to co-exist in this merged state until present. This would account for this inconsistent application of physics and mythology within San Marseille, how creatures such as faeries, werewolves and a host of unrelated cryptids can co-exist incorporated into modern society alongside the invention of electricity, antibiotics and any number of scientific advancements. It is also why some of these well understood sciences on occasion fail to function as they should, whereas superstition and folklore can be relied upon, given the right circumstances.
It brings us to a theory that has been suggested amongst our research group. In human history, throughout the world, every culture has its mythology. In the past much of this mythology would have been taken as established fact. In more recent times this has been challenged and debunked. This study of San Marseille, of the presence of the fae and other cryptids, taking into account the perception filter of the Night, leads us to believe this may not be accurate. It is possible that mythology, at certain points in time, was factual. Until it was not. And at the present, it is again, at least within the boundaries of San Marseille. In some ways we would liken this to Schrodinger's Cat, where the cat can exist in two different states until observed otherwise. As an analogy this is the best we can offer at present.
In summary, as an opening to our study, the city of San Marseille and its surroundings exists in a superimposed state, one world governed by physics, the other by mythological metaphysics. These two governing sets of rules interact with each other in inconsistent and incomplete ways, with certain locations or times giving sway to one or the other. It remains to be seen whether the merge is complete, in progress or of a temporary nature. We do not believe this is the first time such an event has occurred.
Regards,
Professor Harold Riley
Committee for the Investigation into the San Marseille Event