The Floating World
Look, there's a point in this job where you stop asking questions, accept what you see at face value, and then head to the Speckled Zebra when you get back.
A World Adrift
At first glance, you appear to be standing on cobbled streets in a quaint 17th century town, with signs in Ye Olde Englyshe, men in powdered wigs, horses clip-clopping along, drawing a carriage behind them. Then there's a sudden flurry of activity as a horse and rider plummet from the sky towards the road, splashing mud on passersby and drawing assorted curses, while one person, who jumped back perhaps a bit too hard, scrambles down from the rooftop they unintentionally leaped to.To the limited extent BREACH has been able to explore this world, it consists of an uncountable number of floating fragments, from a half mile to ten miles along their longest axis, most bearing some degree of foliage and animals, mostly every Earthlike, and with civilization apparently at TL 4, and furthermore, mirroring in most ways that of 18th century Western Europe, at least in fashion and language. The politics and faiths vary; there is no England or France, nor are there Catholics, Jews, and Protestants, but there are nations... alliances of floating rocks moving roughly in unison... that have many aspects of those countries, and the dominant faith worships a five-aspected deity but has schismed over issues of the form such worship should take.
Other than the impossibility of a world nothing like Earth giving natural rise to the same cultural tropes as Earth (never mind that the language is English!), there are the physics. They make, simply, no sense. When standing on the rocks, there is apparant 1-G force, and each rock has a 'top' where the gravity exists, and a 'bottom' where it does not. However, it is possible to break this force with relatively little exertion, provided you wish to. When you jump, it seems, you choose to leap free or not (though when startled, you may find yourself jumping 10 or 20 feet and then stopping, inertia be damned, either drifting off or, if you can, grabbing a tree or building, at which point, you can clamber down easily), and this seems to be a skill taught at a young age. (Infants and toddlers are leashed, as are many pets.)
Clouds drift along, bringing rain, snow, and the like. The entire sky dims to darkness and then brightens over a 24 hour cycle. There are no stars, but the lights of buildings and fires on the hundreds of drifting worldlets create an amazing "night time" view.
Regions are formed by worldlets moving at a similar pace along similar... orbits, though precisely what is orbited is hard to say. There's a brightness in one direction, that could be a star, but its light is diffuse (and dims to form 'night'). The speed of the fragments varies slowly, as does their direction; a nation can literally break up over decades if the travel time grows too long to maintain order.
There are 'miners' who seek worlds rich in metals, tunneling into them if they're on the larger side, or netting them and hauling them back if they're small. While seemingly mundane horses are common, there are many species of winged beasts that have been domesticated, and the variety of flying craft is astounding. Some people, apparently, live entirely by flitting from world to world in beast-drawn houses. Most are fairly small, but one was sighted that could only be described as a mansion, hauled by a team of creatures that were a cross between snakes and draonflies, grown to immense size.
BREACH
Baseline scientists feel this world has far more to it than it seems. Most consider it artificial, a pocket universe on a scale that puts the lie to 'pocket'. A few feel that as stabilizers become more powerful, they are simply reaching realities increasingly different from Baseline; this is a minority view. The information gathered indicates the world extends an impossibly vast distance, and that there are many other cultures far away.The breach point keeps shifting. It seems to be focused in a roughly 20 mile sphere, but there's a reasonable fear it could jump much further, leaving breachers stranded. No other world, thus far, demonstrates this behavior, and for that reason, exploration has been brief and limited.
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