What time is it now?

"Alright, I'll be back soon."

And now it's time to improvise some tools with troportation!

She'll just need something she can score grooves into, the protractor in her bag, and two inclined planes, for scale-swapping!

Also probably a clamp.  Hmm.

That might be a bit harder than the bending jig.

Ehn, getting any backstop fitted shouldn't be too much trouble.

It's mid-lavender right now.

...she hates this timekeeping system.

Grey's up next, though, she thinks, so she'll come back 'tomorrow'.

...And maybe track down some gears and a weighted stick for forays into clockmaking, while she's looking for stuff, just for her own sanity.

She has no idea how the Swiss managed to make pocket watches, though, which is probably going to be frustrating.

Gears are not trivial to find; sticks are easy.

...okay, really what she needs is a log, a knife, drafting tools, and some clay.

Entire logs she will have to go somewhat far afield for. Drafting tools, in their local variants, are not hard to come by, and clay is abundant.

Not necessarily a whole log, just, y'know, something round.

Anyway, with materials secured...

It is time to develop proper goddamn timekeeping for fuck's sake.

In this case by making a grandfather clock from scratch.

...Do sands happen to neatly match up to two-hour periods, perchance?  She's certainly been glossing them to be that.

Anyway, carving out some gears from a clay-malleable log should be relatively easy, if time-consuming.  Determining the precise form she needs to make the mechanisms might be harder, but it's still doable.  And then, once it's done...she can use the holes she's cut out as molds for more parts.

Not that she needs to make more parts just yet, but she will eventually find a clock market...she hopes...so she'll prepare for that eventuality, and be happy, rather than scramble and be sad.

...She spends approximately an entire demi-cycle just getting everything ready for assembly, working on a blanket on the warehouse floor, but eventually, she's ready to put the clock together, take friction off the now-golden gears, set the pendulum in motion, and see if her new clock ticks.

The design is pretty simple, if timekeeping allows; the pendulum rocks back and forth, pushing a gear fitted with a ratchet; the ratcheting gear turns a 60-tooth second hand gear, which, with an extending pin, turns a gear (from the same mold as the ratchet) that turns the minute hand's gear, made from the same mold as the second hand; the minute hand's pin turns the ratchet for an hour gear, twenty-four per cycle, and also makes a chime bong, because she could make that happen and therefore did.

Sands are very close to being two hours long but it's not precise.

Well, she'll precise it for them, then.  Really.  Institutionalized hourglass timekeeping.  It's just so...absurdly inefficient.

Anyway.  What time is it?  She should probably visit...somebody.

It's late brown.

...she hates this timekeeping system.

Well, all she needs to do is find a market for clocks.

Maybe the library...?  Yeah, she'll go there.  Even if they don't want one they might know who would.

The library is as ever. "Hello," says the receptionist she approaches. This one is bothering to wear a nametag! It says "Fern".

"Hello, Fern.  I don't suppose you'd know if the library would be interested in acquiring a novel timekeeping device that requires much less active maintenance?"

"You have some kind of counterweight hourglass? The problem with those is they don't change color on their own."

"...The colors go around in a circle.  I haven't gone to the trouble of actually updating the colors myself because frankly color is a horrible way to run a timekeeping system, but -"

She demonstrates how she's fitted in some adjustable-color wedges that the timekeeping hands can trace over, in addition to the numbered hours (for her convenience).  "You can do this, and it's already set up to have the right number of colorable face pieces."

"Huh. But this would make it hard to tell how much of a sand has passed from across the room."

"No it wouldn't, that's why there's more than just the hour hand.  ...sand hand, excuse me; timekeeping back home uses a different half-a-sand unit.

"See, you have the sand hand, the stubby one, but then you also have this; this is the minute hand, and it goes 'round the clock face every - half sand because sixty-sixty-twentyfour gearing was easier to produce on account of having two of the same gear, but I'm sure I could make a hundred-twenty-tooth gear if you wanted.

"And there's the second - excuse me, grain - hand, which is honestly mostly there so you know if the clock is still ticking without listening for the noise; minute-to-minute timekeeping's not especially important for library tasks to begin with, though sometimes it's useful elsewhere."

"I guess maybe you could see those from across a room. Are you donating this to the library? What would we do if it got out of sync with the glasses?"

"Am I donating...Well, if I must; I was hoping I'd be able to sell it, but getting the idea out there in the first place is kind of important.

"As for what you do if it gets out of sync, you can turn the hands like so, but honestly unless everyone's glasses start disagreeing with it all the same way at once, or it's not been kept swinging reliably, I'd trust the clock's accuracy more than the glasses?  Of course, I have some obvious bias here," she jokes, "but I did try to keep it calibrated to the average sand."

"Actually, hmm, we could just run a live test of how close it is; it'll make a chime like this - " she rolls the minute hand around demonstratively - "and when it's done that twice, you should be able to watch the last few grains drop from your standard sand glass."

"...I have no idea what you think accuracy is for but if this thing is showing that it's blue when it's purple then anyone looking at this and then trying to make it to an appointment with someone who looked at anything else is going to be late. As long as we can twiddle the 'hands' - why are they called that - it should be fine though."

"Accuracy in timekeeping is a function of drift in measured time versus a reference time measurement derived from physical constants e.g. acceleration due to gravity; they did something very complicated back home, but we're not there, so probably gravity's the best available reference.  There's a whole system of defining units in terms of others, actually."

"...okay, but, no other timekeeping in the whole city uses that. We use hourglasses and have to match them if we want to get places at the same time as other people."

"And that is why, out of all the possibly useful projects I could have started over the past...I have no idea how long it's been since I last drowsed a mouse, I should probably do that...that I picked making clocks.

"Because hourglasses just..should not be the highest-precision unit of time.  They're not even necessarily self-consistent, require constant human monitoring, and minute manufacturing differences can grossly impact the flow."

She yawns, and subsequently drowses a mouse.  "Excuse me."

"Whereas a pendulum clock keeps the same time as all other pendulum clocks sharing the same length pendulum - that're kept in the same gravity, at least; gravity's not precisely constant but that's effectively irrelevant - because the way the physics works out, the forces in play that aren't simple sine curves amount to a rounding error."

The receptionist looks unimpressed. "If you're donating the clock, I can help you find a good place to put it."