Portal:Calendars

The nations of Micras operate a diverse range of calendars, elapsing at differing rates of time to suit the narrative requirements of their respective users - from year per day in the ASC calendar to year per month under the Norton system. This results in some anomalies which tend to be glossed over.

Narrative approaches to chronological inconsistencies

Temporal haemorrhaging

The effect of coming unstuck in time, Temporal Haemorrhaging is the notorious malady that has befallen countless unwary souls. One notorious example was that of Alix Verion, who aged decades in the space of two years after transitioning from the ASC 'short count' to AN 'long count' chronology. Another is the premature aging of Kaiser Aiomide and Generation I of House Octavius.

There have been various attempts to handwave or reconcile these irreconcilably divergent calendars, none of which have proven to be entirely successful - and most humans, as a survival mechanism, prefer to pretend that the problem does not exist, whilst arranging for the prompt burial of those who do, periodically, fall prey to the phenomena. Nonetheless it is impossible to ignore that temporal haemorrhaging is just one more manifestation of the fact that Micras is a fractured narrative construct. We are all living in the distorted unreality of a bunch of squabbling second-rate demiurges.

Where the ASC calendar works on the basis of one year to the Gregorian day, on the assumption that this better represents the rise and fall of nations on Micras, it gave rise to myriad absurdities - impossibly long lives, votes that last years, elections that last decades, wars that can endure for centuries; the AN (Anno Norton) calendar operates on year to an approximate Gregorian month, with some complexities regarding leap-years. The main downside is that the AN calendar implies that the Kaisers have an average reign and life-expectancy akin to that of a Roman Emperor in the 3rd Century AD. This however is not entirely inappropriate.