Neighboring Skeins

A merged skein is bigger: two small skeins merge into a medium one, two medium into a large one — and a large skein grows a bigger Bower, up to forty-eight blocks. The Swift merges a neighbor in a minute, the Skein Bowl keeps a skein apart. Even without them, skeins side by side live with each other: they share threads, merge, cloud and hollow each other.

LatticeGale

Neighbors are skeins within seven blocks of each other. Every ten seconds a skein arcs a share of the thread it holds more of to a neighbor — along an arc with a running bead. The threads spread until they even out. The last share of a native thread stays; an opposite Spring never arcs into a skein whose Lattice cannot hold it — turbulence does not spread. Under the Loupe, quiet threads to every neighbor show.

Closer than four blocks, neighbors twine around each other for five minutes — two strands, tighter and brighter — and merge. The one with more shares draws the other in; a hungry greedy skein always does, and the merged skein stays greedy unless it is sated. The absorbed skein brings its threads less an eighth of each, and what does not fit goes to murk. No more than three threads stay native. Murky and lucent cancel each other out — the result is steady.

Every half a minute a murky skein arcs a share of Murk to each neighbor — even to a full one, which then loses a share of its own. When Murk is a sixth of a steady skein, it turns murky in five minutes. A hungry greedy skein draws threads from all its neighbors, and a thin skein beside it turns greedy itself in five minutes. A lucent skein burns Murk away; the Loupe shows how long is left.

Murk

The Skein Bowl keeps a skein apart: place it under the skein or beside it, within three blocks. Its skein neither arcs nor takes, never merges, its neighbors' murk and hunger do not reach it, and a turbulent one chafes half as often. With an empty hand switch it to "takes in": the skein draws from its neighbors and gives nothing. Keeping costs two flux every ten seconds, taking in — five; in a drained chunk the bowl holds nothing. While it keeps, a woven sphere rises around the skein, the bowl's eye watches it, and neighbors' arcs strike the sphere and fizzle out; taking in, the sphere warms and lets arcs pass inward.

Place the Swift by the skein that should grow, within three blocks. Its skein draws two shares every ten seconds from each neighbor within seven blocks and merges with the nearest in a minute, without coming closer — and it is always the one that draws the other in. The Swift costs ten flux every ten seconds while it reels and sixteen per merge. It does not reel Murk and leaves a skein under a Skein Bowl alone. While the reel turns, its skein spins up: the threads run faster and faster, at full speed by the merge.

A skein with a Bower shares threads like any other but never merges by itself: only the Swift of the Bower's owner or a guest merges it, and it is the one that draws in — the Bower grows with the new winding. Two skeins with Bowers never merge. A skein cannot be unwound closer than three blocks to another; between three and four they will merge.