Untimed

Objects such as the famous mirrors of Wilhelmina Corinne Bardway are said to become untimed when they are disconnected in some fashion from the normal passage of time. Those particular mirrors began to reflect events of both the recent and the remote past rather than Wilhelmina herself as they had done before. Similarly, some of the ancient artifacts in Undivaggen are untimed; for example, the cheese sandwich in the 235th room of the South Wing was apparently abandoned by an expedition more than two centuries ago, but the cheese is still fresh and the bread unmoldy.

In particular, the substance or entity called tristero, from which the famous essence is made, is either itself untimed, or becomes so when it is reduced to the essence. It is quite commonplace, for example, to find a vial of essence filled before the extraction process even begins, though the process must be carried out nevertheless to avoid the creation of a paradox.

A person is said to also become untimed when his personal history no longer corresponds with the ordinary passage of time, living his early life in the future and his later life in the past, for example. The Opoudelian Starker and the Budgerigar Master have both been claimed to be untimed. Some would say that Wilhelmina herself is untimed; certainly she has lived a very long time and has been unseen for a great part of it. No one, however, has come forward with proof that he himself is living an untimed life, and the whole concept must currently be treated as "Not Proven".

We have absolutely no theory of how something becomes untimed, and no idea what to do about it, either. Anyone who encounters an untimed object or substance hitherto unknown to scholarship, or has credible evidence that he or someone else is actually living an untimed life, should communicate it to the Unquisition without delay.

Citations: Tristero, Undivaggen, Wilhelmina Corinne Bardway.

--John Cowan 18:14, 14 October 2005 (EDT)