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the truth is it's a matter of perception; the object precedes the reflection, the shadow precedes the object. they are one another's object, and thus subject unto themselves. it's a beautiful idea, but it doesn't work.
What Thomas planned to do today is anyone's guess, but it seems unlikely that he would have anticipated this situation. He feels like he's been walking for hours, though it's impossible to tell. The darkness is absolute, even if he had a timepiece with him, and stifling. The air is good but smells slightly stale. By this point he's given up on trying to get back; every time he turns around he finds the wall at his back. It's an impossibility, but his perceptions offer no other explanation. The wall won't yield to force, the molecules refusing to budge beneath his hands no matter how long he stays braced against its surface in supreme concentration. He thinks of what Billy did and what Kitty Pryde told him, but the idea of being trapped in some labyrinthine buried wall is too much for even a hero to bear. Thomas isn't claustrophobic, but in these halls, anyone might as well be.
Sometimes he feels (wildly and inexplicably) like he's caught between the surfaces of a mirror1, quick enough to run unnoticed between the sight and the silver. But there's nothing to do but keep going on, ascending and descending and turning and speeding up and slowing down and going on and on, through the narrow coils of hallways. He's long since lost track of his sense of direction and space; he could be inside the apartment still or outside the City. The further he goes the more certain he becomes that he's only walking in circles.2 He starts to run. Before long-- though he can't be certain-- the friction from the too-narrow walls becomes too much, his arms aching and abraded, so he slows and walks at an angle until
the hallway widens out at last, into a cavernous space too grand to be within the house, maybe even within the city, judging by the echoessǝoɥɔǝ of his footsteps. Thomas wants to call out, wants to run, but something, some taste of an old and primal fear that circumscribes the darkness stops him☠. He creeps out into the void. This proves to be a wise course, because four steps in front of him the ground vanishes unseen beneath his feet, and Thomas stands at the cusp of some unseen chasm-- a pit, a precipice, a horizon. Darkness upon darkness, shade without end. For a long moment, he does nothing but stand there and wait, listening to the echoessǝoɥɔǝ of his breath.
1The first mirrors used by people were most likely pools of dark, still water, or water collected in a primitive vessel of some sort. The earliest manufactured mirrors were pieces of polished stone such as obsidian, a naturally occurring volcanic glass. Examples of obsidian mirrors found in Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) have been dated to around 6000 BC. Polished stone mirrors from central and south America date from around 2000 BCE onwards. Mirrors of polished copper were crafted in Mesopotamia from 4000 BC, and in ancient Egypt from around 3000 BCE. In China, bronze mirrors were manufactured from around 2000 BC, some of the earliest bronze and copper examples being produced by the Qijia culture. Mirrors made of other metal mixtures (alloys) such as copper and tin speculum metal may have also been produced in China and India. Mirrors of speculum metal or any precious metal were hard to produce and were only owned by the wealthy.
Metal-coated glass mirrors are said to have been invented in Sidon (modern-day Lebanon) in the first century AD, and glass mirrors backed with gold leaf are mentioned by the Roman author Pliny in his Natural History, written in about 77 AD. The Romans also developed a technique for creating crude mirrors by coating blown glass with molten lead.
Parabolic mirrors were described and studied in classical antiquity by the mathematician Diocles in his work On Burning Mirrors. Ptolemy conducted a number of experiments with curved polished iron mirrors, and discussed plane, convex spherical, and concave spherical mirrors in his Optics. Parabolic mirrors were also described by the physicist Ibn Sahl in the 10th century, and Ibn al-Haytham discussed concave and convex mirrors in both cylindrical and spherical geometries, carried out a number of experiments with mirrors, and solved the problem of finding the point on a convex mirror at which a ray coming from one point is reflected to another point. By the 11th century, clear glass mirrors were being produced in Moorish Spain.
In China, people began making mirrors with the use of silver-mercury amalgams as early as 500 AD. Some time during the early Renaissance, European manufacturers perfected a superior method of coating glass with a tin-mercury amalgam. The exact date and location of the discovery is unknown, but in the 16th century, Venice, a city famed for its glass-making expertise, became a centre of mirror production using this new technique. Glass mirrors from this period were extremely expensive luxuries. The Saint-Gobain factory, founded by royal initiative in France, was an important manufacturer, and Bohemian and German glass, often rather cheaper, was also important.
The invention of the silvered-glass mirror is credited to German chemist Justus von Liebig in 1835. His process involved the deposition of a thin layer of metallic silver onto glass through the chemical reduction of silver nitrate. This silvering process was adapted for mass manufacturing and led to the greater availability of affordable mirrors. Nowadays, mirrors are often produced by the vacuum deposition of aluminium (or sometimes silver) directly onto the glass substrate.
2 A phenomenon which I have often noticed.
☠A dark object absorbs photons, and therefore appears dim in comparison to other objects. For example, matte black paint does not reflect visible light and appears dark, but white paint reflects all visible light and appears bright.
However light cannot simply be absorbed without limit. Energy, like visible light, cannot be created or destroyed. It can only be converted from one type of energy to another. Most objects that absorb visible light reemit it as infrared light. So, although an object may appear dark, it is likely bright at a frequency that a human being cannot see.
A dark area has limited light sources, making things hard to see. Exposure to alternating light and darkness (night and day) has caused several evolutionary adaptations to darkness. When a vertebrate, like a human, enters a dark area, its iris dilates, allowing more light to enter the eye and improving night vision. Also, the light detecting cells in the human eye (rods and cones) will regenerate more unbleached rhodopsin when adapting to darkness.
One scientific measure of darkness is the Bortle Dark-Sky Scale, which indicates the night sky's and stars' brightness at a particular location, and the observability of celestial objects at that location
As a poetic term in the Western world, darkness can also mean the presence of shadows, evil, or depression.
Religious texts often use darkness to make a visual point. In the Bible, darkness was the second to last plague (Exodus 10:21) and the location of “weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (Matthew 8:12) The Qur’an has been interpreted to say that those who transgress the bounds of what is right are doomed to “burning despair and ice-cold darkness.” (Nab 78.25)
[ooc; footnotes courtesy of wikipedia. |D SO, this is posted to the network exactly as it is-- a piece of descriptive text with footnotes; Tommy didn't type it and isn't aware of any of it. If you comment, though, he'll be able to reply via voice only. Ping me if needed with questions/comments/to coordinate action in the dark? <3 I'm not sorry. Well, a little sorry. Some comments may come as "narration" but will not be so formatted. XD I promise!]