Writing systems:
Rope system:
What is it?
First form of encryption used by the military by combining coloured ropes and inserting specific knots at specific location
How did it come to be?
At first military officers use flowers while keeping the messenger in the dark as a method of encryption, as well as a physical method of communication in case the message gets too long.
When the distances became lengthier and the flowers became unavailable and the time became so long that the flowers started to wilt, this changed into the rope system which was originally made to mimic the colours of the flowers they were meant to represent.
A knot was placed at the beginning and no knots at the end, this started the trend of ordering messages to make coherent sense.
Eventually knots became part of the rope system itself.
What is its influence?
Ex-soldiers began using it outside of the military for the sake of nostalgia and they also began teaching it to their kids. Since at the beginning of the Crystal Era the most sought of job was a soldier, everyone, at some point in their lives, is a soldier thus the rope system is widespread for [first country].
With the lost of its ability to become an encryption, the military abandons the rope system for the military letters.
Military letters
What is it?
With the advent of [paper]*, military letters became possible. This involves ideological drawings to represent the letters. The drawings has been heavily altered from their ideas in order to maintain encryption.
Since drawings are easier to memorize than colours and knots, the letters can be changed quite often to maintain encryption. Only the most popular letters survive outside of military use, which is fine since the letters will change often. Some old military letters got into scientific letters.
As a descendant of the rope system, it is written and read up to down, from the tip to petiole. Longer messages can be written to swirl from the perimeter of the leaf to the center, still starting from the tip but ending wherever it ends. It can swirl clockwise or counterclockwise since it does not matter. Letter orientation also varies from top-down to perimeter-center. Eventually a standardization effort was done and it was decided that the swirl must be clockwise because the sun goes from left to right according to the relative position when viewing the front gates of the capital. The sun holds a religious meaning as a popular philosopher suggested that the God of Progress might be residing within the sun. The letter orientation became top-down only since it's easier to read.
[Paper] is a paper-like sheet made from the leaves of [Angry] tree. With careful crystal treatment, its leaves can be extracted without triggering its crystal system located within the trunk of the tree meant to throw nearby pebbles at the predator. This triggering occurs when the leaves get damaged and starts a reaction to turn the damaged area from green to red.
Thanks to this treatment, [Angry] tree farms can be set up without the chain reaction of pebble throwing spoiling the entire farm. Alternatively, a simpler treatment can be applied but without the presence of a hard material at the farms, including sickles to harvest the leaves.
The reason the [Angry] tree is selected is because it has the largest, nonsegmented leaves of all the tree in [first country]'s climate.
This crystal treatment also prevents this reaction from occuring unless a specific amount of equal upward and downward forces are applied. This combination of forces is hard to accidentally apply when storing, unless the leaf is purposefully being sit on which is a method to erase the message before disposal. The treatment also extends the shelf life of the leaves into a few winters. The shorter the shelf life, the less the background is red.
By writing with a writing stick, a smoothed crystal on a stick meant to apply that specific combination of forces on the leaf, a message can be written in red with a green background.
Alternatively, the leaves can just be given 100% treatment which makes it entirely red with effectively eternal shelf life and a different writing stick meant to poke holes into the leaf to give a long-term message. It is written with the petiole of the leaf as down. A shredder is used for disposal.
How did it come to be?
[Paper] is faster to produce than the various dyed ropes. Letters are also easier to teach than knots. Letters also offer
Scientific letters
What is it?
A set of ideological figures meant to convey a message. It is written by scientists for scientists.
The scientific letters is a mixed set of rope system, military letters, and obvious ideological drawings.
Different ideas emerge on this writing system but a popular system came from the adaptation of the rope system into a [paper] medium.
How did the rope scientific letters come to be?
It became a hassle to prepare both rope and [paper] thus [someone1], a relatively famous scientist, adapted the rope system as figures on [paper].
Specific knots have certain swirls (inspired by the knotting themselves) and colours were replaced with the number of lines coming from the right side of knots (i.e. red comes from a short flower so it has one line, violet is the next highest flower so two lines protruded from the swirls).
Since there are [x] amount of colours and the resolution of the writing pens made it difficult to squeeze more than 3-4 lines at the right side, the lines eventually become drawn top right → bottom right → top left → bottom left. Up to two vertical lines can be fitted on either sides, intersecting the horizontal lines.
After realizing that this became a hassle and that certain knots didn't even have certain colours, they trade the lines for a simplified figure of the flower the colour came from, drawn at the right. However, it was too late since the lines became widespread and the popular letters stayed. However, the new and simplified colour figures also became popular so now two different notations for colours exist.
How did the ideological figure scientific letters come to be?
Inspired from the rope scientific letters, [someone2] also came up with their own writing system. It starts with the sci-rope system (simplified colours ver.) with ideological figures connected from either sides. The right side is meant as past tense whole left is future tense; to represent present tense the figure is written on the right while on the left is a circle. To represent past continuous and present continuous tense, the figure is on the right meanwhile a filled circle is on the left; future continuous tense is figure on the left and filled circle on the right.
This is the first writing system to represent tense alongside order of events so this quickly become popular as well.
