🔇

The enigmatic phenomenon designated in print as "🔇", and designated in speech by pausing and gesturing emphatically, is difficult to describe. This is not for lack of trying, as several major universities have faculty who attempt to publish work on it. "Attempt" is the key word here, as all direct descriptions of it are suppressed by forces not currently understood. Despite the fact that it is not, as researchers suspect, a meteorological phenomenon, the most success on studying 🔇 has come from Barcuvian weather analysts. While the flashes of complete darkness and resounding silences of antithunderstorms are clearly similar to 🔇, the exact relationship they have has yet to be articulated, for obvious reasons. Despite this seemingly inherent barrier to results, research into it continues to be funded, undoubtedly helped by the inability of university administrators to say what exactly it is they are trying to cut out of the research budget.

For what are hopefully equally obvious reasons, this phenomenon is the subject of a great deal of interest from the Kingsland cult of Silentus, the patron deity of some goddamn peace and quiet for once. By engaging in a campaign of linguistic activism, the cult has succeeded in hijacking a number of common local idioms to connote or otherwise reference it. Consequently, conversations in which these idioms are used are liable to be suddenly halted by the suppression effect. This has led to widespread sentiment against the cult of Silentus, which, in a grand irony, has led to them being bothered by people making ruckuses more than they were before. The cult, as usual, has yet to make an official statement about this, but it is unclear whether this is because of its patron deity or because being accosted by mutes for linguistic subversion is far from the worst thing that could happen to you in Kingsland.

The motivation to understand 🔇 in the academic community is largely driven by engineers working in the field of symphonic warp traversal. The field has yet to fully understand the technology that the mad inventor Rime Grimes left behind, which enabled complex warp calculations to be performed via orchestra, and thus money is thrown at any lead on an ontological link between acoustics and other subfields of physics. This has somewhat tarnished the prestige of warp research in the public eye, as physics departments specializing in warp research find themselves unable to describe where their budget goes.

What is truly remarkable, however, is the significance 🔇 holds for the Disarrangement Act. Because it