Prologue Footnotes

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As we began formulating the ideas for this story, it dawned on us that the world map of Gaia was likely very tiny, simply from the in-game mechanics. Your bitty little sprite could feasibly walk a chocobo all the way around the world in a matter of minutes. Obviously, the planet can't be that tiny, but it gives an overall sense of a very small scale. This didn't really cause too many issues initially...until we discovered the canon timeline of events that took place in Advent Children [link]. Having a set amount of time things were required to be done in put a specific limitation of size on the planet; we needed for Reno to be able to fly the helicopter from Northern Crater back to Edge and then to Healin within a three-hour timespan.

In the FFVII Ultimania Omega [link], stats are detailed for all of the machinery used in the original game. The maximum speed of the helicopters used in-game is listed at 150 knots--about 278 kilometers/hour. Come the events of Advent Children, two years have passed, so it served to reason that ShinRa could have facilitated modifications to their current fleet to where the choppers can fly up and over 300 kph. Going with this idea, we calculated that the maximum distance Northern Crater can possibly be from Healin Lodge is about 616 km.

Then we hit the issue of timezones. It appears that Gaia has about a 24-hour day, like earth. However, with the map being as small as it had to be for distances to be traversed in the amount of time dictated, a 24-hour day presented a few logistic complications. Northern Crater--basically the northernmost point on the map--is very cold. Obviously. Mideel--basically the southernmost point on the map--is subtropical [link], meaning that the size of the map only encompasses about one hemisphere of the planet at best.

Saving you, the reader, the explanation of the hours and hours of math and geography it took us to reach our decision...here are two maps:

The first map is the canon dictation of the [known] land masses of Gaia. The second map shows necessary latitude, longitude, and timezone boundaries for the passage of time to flow normally. The top line of latitude on the second map is 60º; Northern Crater is at 58º latitude--about level with the cities of Oslo and Juneau Alaska, and running through the countries of Estonia, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, and the Alberta province of Canada. The bottom line of latitude on the second map is 22º; Mideel is at 24º latitude, lining it up with the Bahamas, Okinawa, Taiwan, Bangladesh, Egypt, or around the center of the Florida keys.

The thick red vertical lines demonstrate where the timezones would be divided, one hour being lost per timezone as one travels east Timezones on Earth fall every at approximately every fifteen degrees longitude, so we applied the same concept for Gaia, making each time zone about 269 km wide. Ergo, the circumference of the planet is 6,456 km. Since the map of landmasses only spans approximately 981 km, most of Gaia is water.

Back to the original point of this footnote... Since the landmasses of Gaia cover such a small percentage of the planet itself, there are only three timezones represented on land. Since Midgar seemed to be the largest and most populated, industrial city in the game, it served to reason that it was thus the most important. To prevent temporal issues that would have arisen from the fact that traveling east causes one to lose daylight, we chose to unite all three timezones under one blanket timezone: Midgar Standard Time--similar to how on Earth we use Greenwich Standard Time to synch up official timepieces. While each timezone does run on its own hourly marker, we chose to show the events of Advent Children as having a timestamp from a consistent source, giving us Midgar Standard Time.

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