The Selsians, who live on the alien planet Niburu, have their own system of time, because the planet has its own system of time! It may be hard to wrap your head around, but understanding this gives you a good outlook into Selsian daily life. Let's check it out!
Niburu's rotation period is 19.5 Earth hours long, and this is what the Selsians consider a "day", or ñawba!
ÑAWBA: Length of Niburu's rotational period; a day
The ñawba unit is subdivided down into parts for ease of use. First, it's divided into SIXTEEN "hours", or ukle. No one's entirely sure why, but some believe it's due to the Jazrajoto's hexadecimal influence. ukle is then subdivided further with more natural senary magnitudes.
UKLE: One sixteenth of a ñawba; an hour
ZUPOW: One thirty sixth of an ukle; a "minute"
zupow is subdivided even further two more times. However, these units aren't really physically standardized, as they're hard to measure without complex tools. But they do exist, and people do use them!
PA: One thirty sixth of a zupow; a "second"
PA'OKA: One sixth of a pa; numerically closer to an actual second
However, when counting time broadly, you usually just use ukle, and maybe zupow too. A day's a pretty long time!
Now we return to ñawba, which is also compiled upwards into the Niburu calendar!
Starting off, we'll have to establish the Niburu "year", lantufel, which is approximately 179.66 ñawba long. This lends itself to the Selsian 3-year cycle, making years 180 days long by default, and having a 179 day year every 3 years to reel it back down. Kind of. The system introduces some extra complexity to better fit the real figure (of 179.657385...), but we'll talk about that later. Unit time!
LANTUFEL: Length of Niburu's orbital period; a year
Now, the lantufel is split into six total 30-ñawba "months", called temjas. Each month is named after a Selsian goddess, which you can read about in The Malxoma Pantheon. In the occasion of it being a short year, the last day of month 3 (Ēbemuf's month) is ommited, making it 29 days long rather than 30.
TEMJAS: One sixth of a lantufel; a month
The 6 temjas are then further split down into 5 "weeks", awpoxlixe, which are 6 days each. When counting days, these are usually ignored. The last week of Ēbemuf's month on a short year is only 5 days long.
AWPOXLIXE: One fifth of a temjas; a week
And that's all the units used in Selsian timekeeping!
Returning to the caveat of the 3-year cycle... it's not actually 3 years. It follows the long-long-short pattern 72 times to form a larger 216 year cycle, in which year #107 and #215 (which would be long otherwise) are ALWAYS short, no matter what. This small change actually makes the calendar dramatically more accurate! It was devised a couple years ago as a reform to the older simple cycle by Selsian astronomers.
Selsian "generations" are 36 lantufel long, their equivalent of a century, kind of. This is about 2/3rd of the Selsian lifespan, so it's a pretty good measure!
CEÑEL: A thirty six lantufel span; a "century"
There's also an equivalent "millenium" count that's 216 lantufel long, with it and ceñel using the numerical magnitude suffixes.
CEÑAW: A two hundred sixteen lantufel span; a "century"
Due to the shorter length of Niburu years AND Niburu days compared to our days and years, these really don't seem that extreme. And they kinda aren't! Hence why there is a ceñja that's 6 lantufel long; that's just not that long of a time. But it's all a matter of perspective!
Finally, let's put these units to use! This will assume you have read up to Lesson 12 of the main course. If not, please familiarize yourself with the Selsimicu Number System or Lesson 12 and come back!
To talk about the time, you can utilize ukle's secret verbal form! It's an intransitive stative verb meaning "to be the current hour". Sound weird? I don't blame you! Let's see some examples.
"One is the current hour", "It's currently 1:00"
"Thirteen was the current hour", "It was 13:00"
"I might go to her house when eight is the hour"
"Be at the party when it's 5 and a half"
"Excavators work for six hours!" (Crucially, this is NOT telling the time, but an amount of hours elapsing!)
"The bird makes a noise every time 1 is the hour"
To talk about the date, Selsians use the DD/MM format, notably "ñawba Xnōk ta [GODDESS OF THE MONTH]". Examples include:
"Day 1 of Plaza'o", 1st day of the year
"Day 28 of Ēbemuf", 88th day of the year
"Day 18 of Kextafiz", 168th day of the year
For numeric shorthand, Selsians write the ñawba number first (in senary and ignoring the nōk), a slash (/), and then the first non-glottal consonant of the name of the month's Goddess. This makes the letters P, N, B, M, T and K. Rewriting our previous examples (with initial numbers in senary too):
"Day 1 of Plaza'o", 1st day of the year
"Day 28 of Ēbemuf", 88th day of the year
"Day 18 of Kextafiz", 168th day of the year
You can just add the year onto this too with another slash after. D/M/Y for the win!
As previously discussed, Earth time and Niburu time hardly match up at all, with a lantufel only being the length of 2/5ths of an Earth year. If you're looking to adapt this system for Earth timekeeping, at least one will have to be stretched out dramatically. Not to say you can't, of course, you'll just have to get creative! I'll propose one way to go about it, and leave you all to think about more if you want:
PROGRESS METHOD: Silvia's procedure for matching Earth dates to Niburu dates, and vice versa.
PROCEDURE: Take whatever Earth day you want, and divide it by the total number of days in an Earth year. You will get a decimal between 0 and 1. Multiply this by 180 (ñawba in a lantufel), and that's your day!
Also possible vice versa.
EXAMPLE: April 10th is the 100th day of the year, and is 27.4% of the way through the year (0.274). On Niburu, the day 27.4% of the way through the year would land on the 19th of Onamiu, or 31/N!
If anyone comes up with an alternate system of mapping and you want it featured here, DM me on discord! That'd be really cool. You'll be put down here with proper credits.
Need a starting point? Consider this: June 19th, 2034 @ 00:00:00 = 5th of Onamiu, year 418 @ 00:00:00:0. Good to know.