Missing Sea

The Missing Sea is — or rather, isn't, in a sense — a gulf on the western coast of Iurezza. Ever since its disappearance — or rather, appearance, in a sense — in the year AES 25, it has defied any and all explanation as to why all of the ocean off the coast of Kingsland is just not there. For most scholars, after nearly a millennium of study, the consensus is that it has something to do with antiweather and that prying further is asking for trouble. Trying to investigate too deeply into anything in the vicinity of Kingsland is usually a fast-track ticket to being spoken of in the past tense, and the usual madness of Barcu extends into the Missing Sea as well.

This, of course, is no obstacle to the crackpots and pentads on the fringes of the academy. The prominent imagineer, Vexis Harsir, has made a great deal of the fixed-point cube that has been slowly scarring a line across the ocean floor of the Missing Sea. This, in turn, has been vehemently opposed by the dysthetician Johannes Chezmen, whose pet theory explains both the Missing Sea and qualified spontaneous evaporation in terms of partial differential equations that define planar slices through the possibility space of divine assemblies.

The exact reasoning involved in this debate is worthy of the attention of the regular academy. On Harsir's account, the cubes are not descriptive fixed points, but rather prescriptive fixed points. The Missing Sea, then, exists because the cube has an "internal land-sea configuration pattern" that does not match the elevation of the Iurezzan tectonic place, leading to the cube defining a land boundary below sea level. Chezmen's theory, which would take an article unto itself to explain, seeks to one-up Harsir's theory by making the cubes explananda rather than the explanans of the Missing Sea. Fixed-point cubes are too geometrical, he argues, to account for the organic shape of the edge of the Sea where the water abruptly stops. Moreover, the Missing Sea cannot simply be a division between land and water mediated by a continental land-sea regulator, because aquatic animals, despite the complete absence of water, are still able to swim through the Missing Sea. This phenomenon, Chezmen insists, can only be due to divine intervention; hence the differential equations. The literature on both sides is quite deep, and a review of it may break some new ground on the topic in the regular academy.

Neither Harsir nor Chezmen, for some reason, make any reference to Zor Olo in their theories, which is a major weakness given the moon's place in the genesis of the Missing Sea. Chezmen makes an offhand reference to divine assemblies targeted at heavenly bodies during a discussion of Selesteine mythology, which some of his peers have taken to imply that the divine assemblies picked out by the equations of the Missing Sea are those targeted to Zor Olo. Chezmen has yet to respond to this through anything other than interpretive dance.