Ghyll:Rancticirchiretic

Biography

Rancticirchiretic (b. -76 EC–), pronounced ran'-nik, is a technomancer, researcher, cartographer, musician, mathematician, and stud. His parents are Patrick Retic, a farm labourer from Odlucia, and Patricia Rancticirchi, a littleschool headmistress from the same. Though born of these small-time beginnings, his parents taught him well and he proved to be a natural learner; a child prodigy in fact. At the age of five he had mastered the stringophone, and at the age of seven he had completed a thesis on the larval stage of the Burnfly which is still respected as the classic in the field.

His meteoric rise continued and was crowned with the honour of becoming in -56 EC the youngest president of the Bureau of Forgotten Knowledge to date, at the age of just twenty. He is the most outspoken president of the Bureau, and the least bounded by its constraints. It is he, for example, who gave Doc Rockett access to the Bureau's Cake building in -51 EC.

Research Periods

Though he has produced advanced research publications in many varied topics, Rancticirchiretic is most well known for his work on the Nitenmangrey, Orthagonalities, and Something Else.

Nitenmangrey

Rancticirchiretic was the first scholar to realise that the period of the Nitenmangrey had become a dumping ground for other scholars to throw their research into when it didn't quite fit with fact. He therefore divided research into the Nitenmangrey into three areas, in which he took equal interest:

1. Separating truth from bad research.
2. Study of the true Nitenmangrey.
3. Study of the bad research.

Thanks to his interdisciplinary approach, he was able to become an absolute master in the field, debunking largely the work of Supetupheraraphes and showing the psychological processes though which his mistakes were made.

Orthagonalities

[Note: whilst this Encyclopaedia strictly deals with only the primary orthagonality, the one in which the two largest cities of Folktown and Iganefta exist, it is necessary here as it has been in some previous entries to discuss the others in order to define the primary].

The best work of Rancticirchiretic was in this area, which he studied from shortly after his investiture as president of the Bureau until well after his retirement. It is considered the greatest scientific discovery of the previous century.

An orthagonality is the name Rancticirchiretic bravely gave to the different planes in which Ghyll exists. Rancticirchiretic measured the distance between the turning points where three planes conjoin and found that they increase exponentially as one travels towards the borders of Ghyll—which is why, of course, exploration of these areas becomes increasingly difficult as turning into an orthagonality becomes ever more difficult to avoid. A name had never been needed before since, as the Cartographer's Nerves principle states, measurement of Ghyll is so difficult that "approximations like 'Near', or 'To the West' are so common not only in informal communications but also official literature, legal documents, and scholarly work." This is very, very slowly beginning to change thanks to the cracks that Rancticirchiretic has found, with obvious enormous ramifications.

One of the most famous, but also perhaps the murkiest, experiment of Rancticirchiretic in this area was his experiment to build a structure that covers a turning point between orthagonalities. It is believed that the @@ Odlucian Library, black dept. thingy.

Though Rancticirchiretic has been unable to explain why Pinky and Perky look exactly the same from every orthagonality, he has been able to provide the best approximation of the number of orthagonalities, based on some complex mathematics involving the increase of repetition of entry points into orthagonalities as one approaches the border of the primary orthagonality: in summary, he believes there to be a hundred and fifty, though of course only twenty are significantly populated.

@@ Doc Rockett was charged with explaining the theory to the public, which he did in Invariant Transforms, with Historio-Physical Applications.

Something Else

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More stuff from elsewhere to incorporate:

As Rancticirchiretic famously said, "It is far more comfortable for the chattering classes of Ghyll to suppose that [the Conflict] is a mere matter of legend, or at most of dead-and-gone history."

Rancticirchiretic, on the other hand, holds that aquentravalkeration was used solely by the royal line of the Nitenmangrey, and was a process by which the Paramount Queens ceremonially married the land.