JOURNAL OF INK-TALON, ENTRY 2
Writing some more, not because I'm planning on making a habit out of it, but because no one gets it when I complain about this and if I don't vent about it somewhere I am going to explode.
The "Transporter" we are going to be traveling to Darksoil with arrived today, a peculiar-looking horse named Steady-Step. (As an aside, nothing could have ever prepared me for interacting with actual large animals. It could have crushed me under one hoof and I'm supposed to just casually converse with it?) Surely, I thought, if anyone were to have a map for me to look at, it would be the person who travels long-distances for a living. I asked about it, and it said it did! It directed me to examine a rather large wooden panel built into the side of the wagon with the map supposedly etched into it.
It was smart design! Most animals capable of hauling cargo would be unable to handle the paper scrolls smaller creatures use, and some would certainly lack the eyesight to clearly make out marks as small as the ones I'm making now. However, as soon as I looked at the panel myself, I realized a problem.
These animals do not draw maps.
No, instead, the "map" is just a long list of locations, each providing the type of terrain surrounding them, and their relative positions to nearby locations or important stretches of terrain. My Understanding is able to form some manner of mental map out of it, but I really suck at visualizing so all I see are dots, circles, and lines. Distance is given with the cumbersome, absurdly imprecise unit of "typical flights," the distance the average bird can healthily travel in one session. Direction is slightly better, and is at least intuitive. "Dawnward" and "duskward" are east and west, the directions the sun rises and sets in. They don't use north or south, though. Instead, they measure deviations from east and west. As an example, directly north-east would be formatted as "45 degrees left of dawnward." I don't think they're even using degrees, they just signify a position in an arc and my Understanding filters that through my personal context.
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I get it. I really do. These animals have no precise means of measuring long distances, and little need to. Knowing what direction a location is in, about how long a bird would take to get there, and how fast you yourself can travel relative to that are all that is technically needed to navigate when you have the ability to intuit and infer so much with little effort. A "mile" loses a lot of meaning and usefulness in a world where you have to account for the wildly varying methods, speeds, and difficulties of animal locomotion, and proper cartography obviously requires a combination of skills, tools, and time that could be used more productively elsewhere, even if they had reason to invent the techniques. But... I just want a nice map to look at, is that so wrong? Something you would see "Here be Dragons" scrawled on the margins of. Knowing points of data is just not the same as having a complete visual. It doesn't evoke the same sense of place as a real map. And worst of all? It's boring!
The other humans are sympathetic, but don't see the big deal if it works. The animals, not having ever seen a drawn map, only understand them as the same data points they already use, even when I drew a rough example of one in the dirt.
I know I have more important things to worry about, but I was actually looking forward to getting a picture of this world. If I'm going to live here for... possibly the rest of my life (Note to self: Do not think about the lifespans of animals), then I had hoped I could have at least indulged in the more fantastical aspects of it. I psyched myself up for artistically rendered medieval cartography and got a utilitarian list of GPS coordinates instead.
Well, that's one "scholarly" pursuit lost to me. At least there's one other thing I can occupy myself with. The original Scholar Ink-Talon had entire baskets full of writings and records of whatever it is it did for a living, and they're going to come with us to Darksoil for archival. I have absolutely no idea what this bird's field of study was, but I'm going to have at least a few days to kill on this trip, judging by the "map," so maybe I could learn a thing or two about the world this way. I just hope it's something interesting and not, like, logs of soil testing or something similarly tedious.