The Astrals of the Iron Lake
Anthropology Log: 45th of September, 7840
I’m beginning this log with a brief introduction into the culture I will be involving myself with for the next several months. They call themselves Astrum Sapiens, or simply Astrals, referring to a Latin word signifying stars, constellations, or heaven. They exist on the periphery of the Iron Lake, maybe 100 miles due north of the New Chicago Republic, though their existence in similar circumstances in several other places in the world has been noted by my friend and colleague Hamish La Parc from the University of Versailles. The conditions surrounding the Iron Lake are particularly interesting to me, as I remember hearing about them as a young boy and being absolutely enthralled by the concept of a lake of extraterrestrial ferrofluid that responded so strongly to the reversing of the magnetic field of the earth it created new life. It was Dr. Juni Lao who first explained to me that she was not convinced that the lake had created life at all, so much as it had simply influenced the life around it during the last magnetic shift. She stated that, because strong electromagnetic fields can have psychological effects on people, it was reasonable to assume that the Iron Lake had merely influenced much of the local population into behaving differently.
