Last time we looked at the Archive we focused on one of the two main components of the Planetarium Infinitum, that being the Telescope of Ithelos, the device used to locate and observe new worlds and planes of existence.

We discussed the process of how the Observer and the Head Scribe document these findings into World Books that create the one-way portals from the Archive into these realms.

Today, we’re going to look at the other half of the Planetarium Infinitum: The Orrery of Worlds.

The Orrery
The Orrery of Worlds is a massive mechanical construct. Thin metal arms and dangling metal wires spin all the known and observed worlds, discovered through the use of the Telescope, and arranges them into a three-dimensional representation of their position relative to one another.

As these worlds move and spin in real time, the arms of the Orrery spin and move to match, just at a substantially reduced scale.

Each sphere of the Orrery represents an entire world, or plane, or system.

If a system contains multiple planets or other celestial bodies, the positions of those objects are not observed on the Orrey, only the overall position of the system that contains them.

Due to the number of worlds already observed by the archive, the Orrery itself is substantial, and ever-growing.

In the past, the Planetarium Infinitum had to be expanded dozens of times to accommodate its increasing size.

These days, the Planetarium is able to magically expand to fit the Orrery as it grows thanks to some clever spellwork by the Third Observer, Galithon of Mercasia.

Keepers, called “Orrerists”, maintain the Orrery and are able to move throughout the apparatus with ease.

Typically creatures that have multiple arms, legs, or some other kind of prehensile appendage, or that have the ability to fly, float, or hover end up as Orrerists as they are less like to fall or slip during traversal.

They are also the ones who can help you locate the position of a world or plane in case you need to know the physical location or physical proximity of a world.

To the untrained, the Orrery looks like just a mass of spinning metal and knowledge of the positions of these worlds and planes seems arbitrary. This seems especially true if one can simply use a World Book to travel there.

But as the Keepers of the Archive have discovered, certain celestial and multiversal phenomenon can occur during various conjunctions and alignments of these celestial bodies. These cosmic events create connections that facilitate travel across the multiverse.

What’s more, physical means of traveling between the worlds and planes does exist, even if it’s not frequently used. As such, there is a population of the cosmos who cares about the relative position of the worlds and will come to the Archive and the Planetarium seeking such knowledge.

The Creator
The original creator of the Orrery was a Construct known simply by the call sign BZ09, originally tasked by Ithelos to build a small model of the multiverse. As more and more worlds were added and BZ09 continued to expand the Orrery, it reached a point where it concluded that maintenance and operation of the Orrery would be best served by integrating its own machinery into the Orrery itself.

As such, the modern Orrery is both a useful navigational tool but also a semi-sentient construct in its own right.

The Keepers who maintain it can interact with the sentience of BZ residing within and can ask it to help them locate celestial objects.

The Orrery typically shows the current positions of planes and worlds but can be asked to show previous configurations and even predict future ones if permission is granted by the Observer.

After showing such positions it will return to displaying the current positions of the celestial objects it contains.

Next time we’ll focus on the Keepers themselves, the enigmatic group of scribes and tinkerers who keep not only the Orrery and the Telescope operational, but the entire Archive itself.

See you then.

– Mike