To Infinity and Beyond!

Back to building on the tower today.  It is to be used tomorrow as a landmark and a waypoint in a race across Caledon, and the racers will be changing over from sea to air transport here, so it seemed important that there should be some way up to the top floor.

My usual tangle of perilous metal walkways would meet the case, of course, but for the benefit of the faint-hearted, I also decided to put in another keyframed-movement lift.  So, having laid out the various stops, I rezzed a cylinder at the lowest level, intending to turn it into the lift platform....

... only for my touchpad to spazz out on me (I apologize for this impenetrable technical jargon) and the cylinder to disappear abruptly from view.

Hmm, I said to myself, this is not good news.  I had been editing its Z (up and down) position at the time, so the possibilities seemed to be three-fold (actually, they are four- or even five-fold, but only three occurred to me, I am blonde after all).  To wit:-

• It had sunk to the lowest possible point.
• It had risen to the highest possible point, i.e. the building limit of 4096 meters.
• It had risen to an impossibly high point, due to me leaving out the decimal point when I typed in the desired height, which would put it somewhere around 57,850 meters up.

(The other possibilities are: it had wound up in that sinkhole of lost items at coordinates 0, 0, 0 on the sim, or its position had got totally scrambled and it had shot off who alone knows where.)

So, I went down to the sea bed to look for it.  No dice.  So, on with the trusty flight assist, and up to 4096 meters height... took a while... no dice there either.  Cue me looking wistfully up into an infinite depth of sky.

Fortunately, there is this peculiarity of flight assists... you wear them to give you a discreet push when you are flying higher than the flight limit (which is soon to be raised or even effectively abolished, anyway, so never mind).  If you wear two of them and fly, they both detect that you are moving upwards and give a push accordingly, thus setting up a sort of feedback loop thingy where they set each other off.  This enables you to reach immense heights without wearing out your finger pressing the PageUp key.

Nonetheless, even with a freebie flight feather and my own Cavorite Personal Levitator (free from all good shops... that I own... which would make it free from one shop, and that open to debate), it takes a long time to reach 57,800 meters.

A bit shy of 53,000 meters up, not that the view changes much up here

How long does it take?  Roughly, an entire compilation album of the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's greatest hits' worth of time.  Not, perhaps, the most exact measure of time out there, but what the heck, it works for me.  I passed the time talking to Turley Hallenbook, the actual proper Duchess of Burroughs (I'm just a parvenue, you know), who had various actually helpful ideas about how to look using estate management tools and such.

Of course, SL itself gets iffy when you're up that high.  The top bar in the viewer stopped registering my vertical position properly once I'd passed 4096 meters, so I had to rely on the dead-reckoning feature of my flight feather.  I don't know if it was accurate or not.  All I know is, I never found that missing prim, and I had a devil of a job getting back down.  I turned off the flight aids, fell for a few minutes, suddenly found myself crashing through the tower and into the ground... and then falling, again, from a height of 4096 meters, and being unable to stand once I'd hit the ground a second time.  I teleported out, and - to my surprise - found myself moving normally in the sim I'd aimed for.  I was seriously expecting to get logged out, there, so well done SL, I think.

But I never did find that prim.  On the off chance that anyone happens to be cruising thirty-five miles over Caledon, and spots a plywood cylinder, could they let me know where to find it?  Poor little prim; it is lost, and a long way from home.