The Other Selish Planet in a Habitable Zone

[+Invocation]

Quote

The rest of the system is of little relevance. Though there are a number of other planets, only one exists in a habitable zone-if barely. It is barren, inhospitable, and prone to terrible dust storms. Its proximity to the sun, Mashe, makes it uncomfortably warm, even for one who has spent a good portion of her life on the Dayside of Taldain.

-Arcanum Unbounded, page 4

Is the "uncomfortably warm" conjecture based on observation of similar planets, or did Khriss somehow find a way to travel to this other planet within the Selish system?

[Pagerunner]

Hmm, that's a good point; it does sound like she has actually experienced the warmth. Since she says she can't visit Threnody or second two Drominad worlds because of their lack of perpendicularities (or stable perpendicularities), that would follow that there would be a perpendicularity there. If it is the case, it wouldn't necessarily mean a Shard is Invested there; First of the Sun shows that a Shard in another system can have an interstellar perpendicularity, so it might be an Avatar-level amount of Investiture there.

The alternative is that Khriss is just able to study it from Shadesmar and say it's hot. That's obviously the simpler answer, since it requires no mysterious Investiture on the planet, and it makes all the other conclusions topple like dominoes. I like the idea, but it might be too much to build from a single turn of phrase.

[Agent34]

Is temperature reflected in the Cognitive Realm? I'm not sure if Khriss could know how warm it is just from observing.

[tmnsquirtle]

12 hours ago, Agent34 said:

Is temperature reflected in the Cognitive Realm? I'm not sure if Khriss could know how warm it is just from observing.

Maybe there's a device we don't know about that can exist in the cognitive, and project slightly into the physical. I'm imagining something like a spren, or an elsecaller, that can exist in both realms, but only a tiny bit of it can be pushed through. That might be enough to accurately record some data about the physical realm version of a cognitive realm area.

[Weltall]

In Arcanum Unbounded she's able to discuss how Braize is a very cold planet even though she avoids actually visiting there for obvious reasons. This doesn't match with Kalak's recollections of the place as being hot; he mentions fire three times during the Prelude. It's possible that there's an inversion of temperature in the same way that we've seen a solid/liquid inversion on Roshar and Scadrial, so if Khriss goes to a place in the Cognitive Realm and it's bitterly cold she can deduce that it must be uncomfortably hot in the Physical.

It's also possible (though this isn't mutually exclusive to the first idea) that she can observe the planet using a mix of Cognitive Realm snooping and looking at it from the Physical while on Sel and make the same sorts of observations that astronomers do today in order to figure out the physical characteristics of a world she can't visit directly.

Edited August 21, 2018 by Weltall

[tmnsquirtle]

15 hours ago, Weltall said:

It's also possible (though this isn't mutually exclusive to the first idea) that she can observe the planet using a mix of Cognitive Realm snooping and looking at it from the Physical while on Sel and make the same sorts of observations that astronomers do today in order to figure out the physical characteristics of a world she can't visit directly.

True! It's easy to forget about conventional astronomy when most research is done via the use of magic.