I sent Mark the mental equivalent of a face-palm over the soul-link. We had discovered some strange things about our new home - although strange was a relative term, as there were quite frankly a great many things that we didn't understand (superpowers, astral travel, and reincarnation to name a few). The most recent mystery had come up when we had tried to calculate how far away from my village Mark was located.
According to my parents, one could walk north from the Sunset Mountains and arrive at the Sunrise Mountains in ten days at the widest point of our land (which is where my village was located), and the City was located right in the middle of this widest stretch as well. Going in the other direction, east and west, walking from the Valley of Shadows to the Endless Ocean would take closer to thirty days, with the City located very close to the center point of that stretch as well. It seemed like an awfully big coincidence for it to be located so centrally, but nobody we asked had thought it was anything except perfectly natural, like the sky being above the ground. "Of course it's in the middle of everything, it's the City!", we had been told.
The land also ran at an angle, with one tip of the oval (the Bloody Pass which leads to the Endless Ocean) to the northwest, and the other end (the massive Valley of Shadows) to the southeast. The mountain ranges to the north and south of us were almost shaped like a pair of brackets, displaying an unnatural and unlikely symmetry that enclosed a mass of land that was, by my rough calculations, about half the size of continental Europe back on Earth.
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<-which... wait, how did you interrupt me like that... you know what, never mind. Anyway, assuming you are in the City, it is considered to be a three-day journey from my village to your location, right? If we assume that there are 4 hours for eating and whatnot, and 8 hours for sleep, that leaves 12 hours of travel time at most. From both memory and some simple calculations based on how long it takes Mom to walk across our house, I think walking speed is somewhere between 2 and 4 miles per hour.>
I was glad that Mark hadn't commented on my use of the word 'Mom', but sad that he was still so bad at simple math,
That... was actually a really good question. Why had Jaws assumed that I would know what he meant? I had picked up the language around numbers and counting via listening to inventory discussions at the Smithy over the years, but picking up a basic understanding of math from context clues wasn't something a normal child should be even remotely capable of.
I smiled to myself, already having prepared for this question,
The hemisphere thing had occurred to me already, but I had discarded it as I couldn't think of a way to test for that. There was something we both vaguely recalled about the way water swirled down a toilet, or a drain, but neither Mark nor I remembered which direction meant what, and any calculations I did based on fluid dynamics gave an answer so close to zero that I wondered if was just an urban legend in the first place.
Oh, by the way, we did indeed have toilets and basic plumbing in my village, although everything looked quite different from what we had back on Earth, and the toilets had to be 'flushed' manually by dumping a bucket of water into them.
Mark's idea about following the conventions of sunrise and sunset, however, had not occurred to me...
<... Right... So yeah, anyway, if we are actually a hundred miles or so apart, and the difference in sunrise was accurate at just a few seconds... then even if we give a huge margin of error, this planet we are on is way bigger than Earth. Like, Jupiter-sized or something. Not just a few times larger, but like dozens and dozens of times larger, at a minimum!>