Hunter's Woods Writing Prompts

   Amara shifted and tilted her head as she squinted up at the night sky. She didn't know it, but it was well past midnight now.
   "...Whatcha doing?" asked Beatrix, who plodded up next to her. "Looking for shooting stars or something? Lyssa liked to do that. Or an... ah, I forget the word, it was like, aura-something?"
   "Aurora," Amara replied, not even turning to glance at her companion. "And no. I'm trying to figure out what sort of timeframe this planet runs on. Every one is different, you know."
   "Er... timeframe? You mean, like, what time it is?"
   "You're oversimplifying it a bit... but yes, you could say it's something like that," she answered. "You can glean certain things about a planet's timescale from the movements of the sky. How long it takes for them to orbit around their sun, how long their days are..." Amara's dragon prodded at Beatrix's leg with one of its forelimbs as she scrunched up her mouth. "Do you have any idea what the current tilt of the planet's axis is in relation to its position in its orbit, and where on the world we are? Approximate latitude? Those can have a surprising impact on the length of days and nights. It'll take me a bit of time to calculate it out, but if you happen to know, I should be able to figure out the approximate length of one calendar day-"
   "That seems pretty complicated," Beatrix said. "I mean, humans have already figured all that sort of stuff out."
   That managed to break her attention, and Amara turned away from her stargazing to meet Beatrix's gaze. "They have?" she asked. "Do you know what they've calculated them out to be? What sort of measurements they use?"
   Beatrix swished her tail. "Hmm... well, they break days up into twenty-four bits called hours, and those hours are each broken up into sixty bits called minutes, and then those minutes are all broken up into sixty seconds," she said. "There are three-hundred and sixty-five days in a year... except sometimes there's an extra day called a leap day, apparently? That day only comes every four years, so humans who were born on that day like to joke that they're a lot younger than they are!" She laughed. "Lyss was born on one of those days, I guess."
   "I see... and a year is how humans refer to the planet orbiting the sun once, then?"
   "Uh..."
   "Right, that's fine, I'm sure we'll figure it out," she said, and then nodded to her dragon, who nodded back at her. "And what else?"
   "Oh, um... well, there's twelve months, which are all usually about the same length? Some of them are only thirty days, and then some of them are thirty-one days, and there's one that's either twenty-eight or twenty-nine depending on if it's a leap year or not? It's sort of based on the phases of the moon, but sort of not. The moon usually takes shorter than the months, I think, which is why sometimes there are these things called blue moons, when there's a second full moon in one month-"
   "Right, right. The moon cycle... this world only has one moon, correct?"
   "Um, yeah." She paused. "So then, seven days make a week, starting on Sunday and ending on Saturday... There are four seasons that all last about three months, they're divided up into even quarters, I think based on the length of the days? Winter starts on... I think it's the longest day in the north and shortest in the south? Or maybe it's the other way around... Anyway, then it's spring when the times are even after that, and then summer when it's the opposite of winter, and fall in the middle again, until it wraps back around to winter. Oh, and the days change over at midnight! That's either zero o'clock or twelve am, depending on how you measure it." She smiled to herself and nodded. "I think that's everything?"
   Amara nodded as well. "Right, I think I got all of that," she confirmed. She tilted her head and gazed at Beatrix expectantly, and her dragon did the same. "And you keep track of all that? What time and day is it now? The more specific you can get, the better."
   Beatrix shrunk into herself a bit. "Oh, um... no, not really. I mean... we don't really keep schedules the way humans do. So we, erm, our whole group? Doesn't really keep track like humans do. We just sort of go with the flow when it comes to when we do things, and the seasons are more of guidelines anyway, Kat says it's always more practical to trust the weather itself than anything set in stone like that."
   "...Oh," Amara said, clearly disappointed. "Well... Hrm, this is going to be troublesome, but we should still be able to figure it out. We'll need to keep track of the sunrise and sunset daily to see when they even out, and when we do we'll be able to know that those are each twelve Earth hours, and then we should be able to divide those further into smaller measurements, and-"
   "Um...!" Beatrix interrupted. "I know you're training under the god of time and all, but you don't have to go to all that trouble! Uh, humans have clocks. There's usually signs with the time outside of banks and stuff. A lot of the time they'll have dates, too? We might have to be sneaky about it because you, you know... you stand out a lot? But I can show you the next time we're in a town, if you want!"
   Amara was a bit taken aback by the other feline's offer, and that surprise was clear in the look on her face. But after a moment of hesitation, she responded, "That... would make my life significantly easier, yes. I would appreciate it."
   "Great!" Beatrix declared. "Then it's settled! The next time we're in town, I'll hunt down a clock for you, and we'll go see it together!" She smiled. "Until then, you should get some sleep. Gotta make sure we have the energy to get there in the first place!"
   "Right," she agreed, and turned to head for the roots of a nearby tree, dragon following shortly after her. Then she turned to look back towards Beatrix, who was contentedly trotting off herself. "Ah, Beatrix, before you go. On that topic, why were you awake at this time of night? If you should have been sleeping and all."
   "Oh," she answered, "uh, your eyes glow when they're open, like Viv and Berkeley's. It was kind of distracting."
   "Oh." Amara blushed with embarrassment beneath her fur. "Um, my apologies. I'll... try to be more aware of that going forward. Thank you for letting me know." And she hurried off towards tonight's bed, more eager to close her eyes now than she cared to admit.