《Big Red Button.》Press number 1784-ish.

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You step on the button.

Ding.

The walls are now covered in antique maps.

Neat! You’ve always found maps cool, who wouldn’t?

You head over to a wall and look at one of the antique gilded maps. People used to make maps so fancy, you don’t get maps with little monsters or mandalas in them nowadays. Now maps are designed so that every line has a meaning. Well, what’s wrong with “I’m good at drawing little mermaids” as a meaning?

Most of the maps are nautical.

The majority of surviving maps from the 1700’s tend to be. After all, back when printing and cartography as a whole was still a very expensive process, someone had to have a very good reason for buying one. “I live on a ship and will literally die without it” is a very good reason. People traveling from Paris to Rome could probably find their way without a map, and arrive safely, but people going from London to St. Kitts were slightly screwed if they didn’t keep meticulous track of where they were. They might end up dying of starvation, caught in a storm, or landing in Quebec. All horrible prospects.

The average ship had at least three maps. A map of the stars for determining latitude, a map of the coast they were headed to, and a general map of the ocean they were on.

The big ocean map usually had fancy things on it like rhumb lines, giant fish, arrows showing current directions, scantily clad people, locations of main ports, and several possible locations of El Dorado and/or Atlantis. At least two of those things were quite useful, and are still found on nautical maps today.

I’ve always wondered why so many old maps have naked or nearly-naked people on them. A part of me suspects that it’s because one of the first (or at least most famous) cartographers secretly wanted to be a porn artist, but was forced into being a mapmaker by his overbearing parents, and that was his way of rebelling. It near-instantly caught on, and eventually to become a cartographer you had to be really good at drawing tiny boobs.

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Sure, I have no proof to back this theory up, but I will take that headcanon to my grave.

Anyways, yes. Fascinating maps. Maps that, if you put them together, would show in fairly great detail the whole world. Or at least, the world as it was a couple hundred years ago.

Pretty cool.

You spend a couple hours looking the maps over, and only stop because you start to get hungry. You turn to the button, ready to move on.

You find maps boring. Honestly, you don’t see the appeal.

Oh look, a piece of paper with lines, wow. Ooh, this one has names you can’t pronounce. Fascinating.

It’s possible you find them uninteresting because you’ve spent your whole life in one place, rarely traveling further than fifty miles for anything. Ever. And so you can’t point to some distant spot and say “oh yeah, I’ve been there”. Maps insult you by saying there’s a fascinating world out there that you’ll never get to see.

Or perhaps you find them uninteresting because you’ve traveled too much. You cringe when people ask where you’re from, because you’ve lived in three different countries. Your record for staying in one house is barely three years, and growing up you averaged six months to a house. The maps at family-owned coffee shops? The ones with a box of pins under them? The ones that cheerfully suggest you put a pin in all the places you’ve been? They never have enough pins for you. You don’t care for maps because you’ve spent most of your life looking at one, trying to figure out where the hell your Dad was dragging you to now.

Whatever the case, this room holds no interest for you. You’re ready to move on.

DO YOU PRESS THE BUTTON? Yes No

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