From the Spoiler thread...
Quote:
Originally Posted by LyricalAura
I wonder what the Schwarzchild radius of the cousins' room would be if all living things in existence were trapped inside it? Gravitational collapse would certainly account for Erika's blathering about stopped time.
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Well, there's a number of critical factors here: How many things are there in the universe? Who constitutes a member of "everyone else?" Can they be defined to exist in the room even though there is no way for them to be in there or any way for them to fit? If the wall of the cousins' room had a hole in it, could the definition of "the cousins' room" include all areas not otherwise defined bounded by the accessible physical space of the area, thus encompassing the entire universe and making "everyone else" a true statement?
...wait a second.
The definition of what constitutes a "room" is arbitrary. When Battler referred to "the cousins' room" he referred not only to the actual cousins' room, but to the cousins' room and the entire universe except those rooms which had already been defined (the six victim rooms, the next room over). At the time of the sealings, Kanon's location was "somewhere in the universe that isn't one of the predetermined rooms," thus he counted as being in "the cousins' room" yet was not actually in the room itself and thus could move around without breaking any window or door seals. Battler
acknowledged that "The definition of closed room implies that it is impossible to construct from the OUTSIDE." Erika constructed the seal on "the cousins' room" from the outside of the physical room.
Ergo, either the room was not a closed room (had a hole in the wall) or Erika's position at the time she constructed the seals was part of "the cousins' room." As she was not in one of the predefined rooms at the time of the sealing, I posit that the latter was the case and Erika and Kanon were both "in the cousins' room" but not in the cousins' room. Both were free to leave the room and enter any of the other predefined rooms so long as it was acknowledged that some seal was broken to do so; as Erika deliberately reconstructed a broken seal after the fact in Battler's room, this condition is indeed met and transfer between the two rooms is possible.
EDIT: Wait no, I can do one better:
"The cousins' room" encompasses the entire universe and all rooms previously mentioned. I'm pretty sure this doesn't violate any reds, implied or specific. Battler was in his room
and "the cousins' room." The five people in "the next room over" were in the next room over
and "the cousins' room."
The cousins' room is the universe itself, and Erika sealed it perfectly, such that no one entered or left the universe during this time.
EDIT EDIT: Lest someone commit the exclusionary fallacy, I can demonstrate that these statements are entirely logically consistent with an abstract example using numbers.
Consider the following statements:
The set of {1,2,3,5,7, ... n} are "prime numbers."
The set of {2,4,6,8,10, ... x} are "even numbers."
I acknowledge that "all other numbers" are "numbers."
Obviously, I am not
excluding prime numbers and even numbers from the definition of numbers merely because "all other numbers" are being defined as numbers (as this would make only non-prime odd numbers numbers, which is not true).
Replace the first set with the names of the people in the next room over and "primes" with "the next room over." Replace the second set with the victims and "evens" with their room definitions. "All other numbers" swaps for "everyone else" and "numbers" for "the cousins' room." Clearly, we can easily determine that
Shannon is in the cousins' room is, or could be, a true statement, if "the cousins' room" is read to define everywhere that exists
including the subset "the next room over" into which Shannon is subdefined, in the exact same way we could say that
17 is a number even though it's not part of "all other numbers" (it's a prime), because it's still a number.
Logic error, meet formal logic.