"Would you have to leave out all the alchemical essences too? I guess there probably won't be any in big enough concentrations to see on a very small scale model..."

"Yeah, those wouldn't come along."

"Well, okay, let's see what a bunch of scale models of the planet look like."

So Cam makes one of the date when the last thing was written...

Tiro peers at it.

It's a planet. It has several continents. One of the continents has an enormous crater in the middle, surrounded by absurd amounts of flooding that are visible even on this tiny scale.

"That looks like a problem," comments Tiro.

"Yyyyes it does. I didn't go high enough to have an idea which continent we're on."

"I'm going to guess it's not that one."

"It could be but yeah my bet is it's not." Skip ahead, say, a month?

A month later, the crater is noticeably bigger, the flooding is noticeably worse, and the amount of water elsewhere in the world - already low - is noticeably less.

"Poor Problem Continent," says Tiro. "Poor everybody, really."

"Indeed." Cam keeps skipping by months until and unless there's a discontinuity.

In only a couple more month-intervals, there is indeed such a discontinuity! The crater has finally reached all the way through the planet's crust, and there is magma visible at the bottom, and it's twice as big as it would be if it had been keeping to the consistent schedule of the last few intervals, and the rest of the world is nearly dry and the flooded continent's water supply is noticeably diminished.

"Whoa," says Tiro.

"Whoa is right." Half a month before that?

The crater is not yet all the way through the planet's crust, and the flooding has not yet begun to vanish.

"I wonder what that big crater actually is," says Tiro. "As far as we know, if there was something in there that you can't conjure it has to have been either magic or intelligent, right?"

"Or some other category of thing unknown to demonkind, yes."

"Well, we know this world has a magic thing that can cause awful fuckups. I've never caused a fuckup that awful, though. They were all, like, person-scale, not continent-scale."

"If it was easy to do they probably would have destroyed the planet a little earlier," Cam remarks.

"True."

"Although it's possible the civilization that pulled this one off was itself postapocalyptic and the previous apocalypse just didn't actually kill everyone!"

Tiro giggles.

What's the planet look like now?

Now it looks like there are a few bits of the Problem Continent still left at the edges, poking tentatively through the drastically lowered surface of the ocean, but the entire middle bit is a water-filled crater. And everywhere else is dry and largely flat, with occasional remaining mountains.

"...Told you we weren't on that continent," says Tiro, slightly stunned.

"And right you were."

"I wasn't expecting it to be quite that... gone, though. Wow."

"No kidding." He starts going back from the end of writing; how long did it take to get that big?

The crater's growth was fairly stable on the monthly-intervals level, about ten of them all told from when it appeared to when it hit magma, but the flooding was noticeable at this scale before the crater was. Tiro gazes in fascination at the small planets.