Sotheby: Before she became the Timekeeper?
Sotheby: Whoa! So, Vertin wasn't born a Timekeeper!
Matilda: She didn't tell you that? Wait, no one is born a Timekeeper. It's not an inherited title!
Matilda: Anyway, this report includes the secret chronology only accessible to the core members of the Foundation. You can only check it under the supervision of the monitor assistant before you become a qualified investigator.
Matilda dusts off the folder carefully.
Matilda: No matter what the reason is, it shouldn't have been shoved in this dusty room like rubbish.
Matilda: To evaluate its authenticity and risk, the genius Matilda Bouanich will fulfill her duty as the monitor assistant and carry out a thorough inspection of this report!
Matilda: If you agree to this resolution, please nod, Assistant Sotheby.
The speech is full of terminologies Sotheby has never heard of, but it doesn't matter. Based on the tone of the speech, she has already decided how to answer—
Sotheby: Hoor- ... Yes!
Writer of the Report: That was 1985, a gloomy, miserable night compared to that peaceful morning in 1996, when we were only bothered by confusion.
Writer of the Report: We didn't expect time to be reversed again, nor did we understand the consequence.
Writer of the Report: Even now, I still remember Paulina's desperate cry. One of her hands was already inside the safe area when she fell at the entrance to the headquarters, and that was the only part of her left to us the next second.
Writer of the Report: The only legacies we found were an engagement ring on that hand and her favorite blue polka dot scarf, which we used to wrap her remains in the end.
Writer of the Report: To be honest, I admired those who still remained calm, and sympathized with the arcanists on the edge of mental breakdown. It had nothing to do with the one-quarter arcanist blood in my body; it was only the kind of empathy which all mankind would share out of instinct in the face of a hopeless calamity.
Writer of the Report: We lost many ... too many colleagues. In the materials they sent back, we even saw all the horrifying phenomena, such as one's veins turning into electric wires.
Writer of the Report: Since then, the "Storm," a word simply taken from visual observation, has been used to refer to the calamity.
Writer of the Report: Of course, we can have a word for the calamity itself, but what words should we use to conclude all the absurdity and panic?
Writer of the Report: Before the "Storm," we were all familiar with time. It was supposed to be a straight line connecting the past and the future.
Writer of the Report: We followed the line to move forward: We broke free from ignorance, we built civilizations, we developed technologies, we promoted the well-being of mankind, and we improved our living conditions step by step. We were so sure that we were making progress on the right path.
Writer of the Report: But then, the path was taken away all of a sudden.
Writer of the Report: Oh, time, our closest old friend, where are you taking us?
Writer of the Report: Back to the two most painful war times in the 20th century? The era when no one had ever heard the hiss of steam engines? Or the century when mankind was yet to be enlightened?
Writer of the Report: So far, mankind has achieved a lot in history: dynamos, automobiles, flyovers, railways, hospitals, poorhouses … But if it goes on like this, what is the point of all the efforts we have made?
Writer of the Report: Now, we are like a shipwreck left on the island of time, witnessing the fall of the whole modern world in the unstoppable tsunami.
Writer of the Report: Even though the Foundation has lost a lot of staff members, they are still doing fine compared to Laplace.
Writer of the Report: My younger brother was a good example. He was the most sensible person I have ever known. On the first day of the second reverse, he told me, in a calm manner ...
???: "At least we have reaffirmed that Newton was right. There was never an arrow of time in classical mechanics. Hahaha! Neither in relativity nor quantum mechanics!"
???: "That means this is absolutely normal! Whether the time goes backwards or forwards, even if it starts spinning around like a table top foosball player, they're not against the law of physics. We can go back in time and give Poincaré a medal of Great Prophet!"
Writer of the Report: The next day, he almost fell off the sixth floor due to excessive drinking.
Writer of the Report: All the perceptions of time and space developed to this day were overthrown. We couldn't find any theories to explain the "Storm" in any existing researches. There could only be two reasons for this situation ...
Writer of the Report: Either we've been completely wrong all the time ...
Writer of the Report: Or, we've come to a brand new world.
Writer of the Report: And this new world can never make sense in the way of science, or that of physics. It cannot be verified by an independent third party, and it is impossible to be comprehended through reasoning.
Writer of the Report: Is it true that we've been going the wrong way? Is it true that those once proven wrong by history, those arcanists who claimed to possess Gnosis, are actually on the right path?
Writer of the Report: In fact, the one who put an end to the chaos was indeed not a human.
Writer of the Report: This "thing" ... I had no idea what it was. It claimed to be a machine which never stops working. It laughed at the limitations of our brains and the metaphysical mistakes we make ceaselessly.
Writer of the Report: But it did solve the most urgent issue: a system was built to tackle "Storm-relevant" emergencies after it took charge of Laplace.
Writer of the Report: The first measure it adopted was contacting all the existing branches of the Foundation's at the time to confirm the scale of available manpower, then it built observation stations all over the globe to find if there were any other regions immune to the "Storm."
Writer of the Report: After that, numerous offices responsible for deducing the cause of the "Storm" were established. Even though there were countless disagreements during the research, at least we had taken the first step.
Writer of the Report: I handed in the application to take part in this mission, determined to get rid of the fog in my mind.
Writer of the Report: In 1986, I was assigned to the office in Egypt. All my friends came to the dock to see me off ...
Writer of the Report: Because we knew it could be the final goodbye ... Even though we were equipped with the emergency communication devices issued by Laplace, we were still not clear when the "Storm" would assault us or where we could hide nearby.
Writer of the Report: What really scared me was not the threat to my life, but the possibility of dying ignorant.
Writer of the Report: Then I boarded the ship to Alexandria from Athens, and that was when I met "her."
Writer of the Report: Now when I recall it, it was almost impossible to ignore that group of arcanists on the ship.
Writer of the Report: There were about a dozen of them, all in eccentric-stitch robes. They were followers of a strange school which mixes arcanum and mathematics.
Writer of the Report: I talked to them. No matter how much that conversation bewilders me now, I was more excited than confused at the time.
Writer of the Report: They also survived the "Storm" in 1996, and they noticed the unusual changes taking place in the world as well.
Writer of the Report: That means I actually met another group of survivors from the millennium.
She stops turning the pages.
Matilda: Wait, wait.
Matilda: A school of arcanists who survived the "Storm"?
