Tesseract
A tesseract, as the name implies, is a four-dimensional structure within the Manifold comprised of cubes. Each tesseract within the Manifold intersects shares it's cubes with other tesseracts to form the five-dimensional structure of the Manifold.
Geography
Much in the same way that a cube can be unfolded to reveal it's six faces in a flat plane, a tesseract can be unfolded into eight cubes arranged in a three-dimensional space.
Normally, within a given tesseract, all cubes actually coexist within the same length, width, and height volume, separated instead by an invisible fourth spatial direction. Because the inhabitants of the Manifold are themselves three-dimensional, they perceive the interior of the tesseracts (and, by extension, the Manifold) as a series of cubes conjoined by a convoluted network of face-to-face connections that wouldn't logically make sense in a three-dimensional context.
It is frequently easier to think of the arrangement of the various cubes in terms of their connections to one another rather than their spatial arrangement. In the Manifold Sky setting, adjoining faces can be crossed between via the use of commissures - fissures in the center of a given face which, when a traveler traverses it (via falling or climbing), the traveler soon finds themselves climbing or flying upwards from the fissure in the adjoining face.
For the purposes of mapping the connections within the tesseracts of the Manifold, all tesseracts have the same sort of connections between their faces. Given the face and cube naming conventions presented in the images above above, the following connection list can be constructed:
- A1 to H4
- A2 to B4
- A3 to F4
- A4 to D2
- A5 to E4
- A6 to G4
- B1 to H3
- B2 to C4
- B3 to F1
- B4 to A2
- B5 to E6
- B6 to G5
- C1 to H2
- C2 to D4
- C3 to F2
- C4 to B2
- C5 to E2
- C6 to G2
- D1 to H1
- D2 to A4
- D3 to F3
- D4 to C2
- D5 to E5
- D6 to G6
- E1 to H5
- E2 to C5
- E3 to F5
- E4 to A5
- E5 to D5
- E6 to B5
- F1 to B3
- F2 to C3
- F3 to D3
- F4 to A3
- F5 to E3
- F6 to G3
- G1 to H6
- G2 to C6
- G3 to F6
- G4 to A6
- G5 to B6
- G6 to D6
- H1 to D1
- H2 to C1
- H3 to B1
- H4 to A1
- H5 to E1
- H6 to G1
Comments
Author's Notes
Currently fiddling with a random article block CSS feature based on Stormbril's work here.