Cohost writing prompt: @Making-Up-Adventurers — Chronomancer whose spellcraft is fouled up twice a year when the clocks get changed
"Professor Aski?"
"Yes, hello." The professor blinks owlishly at the three figures on his doorstep, in strangely-cut robes of textured black. His inkstained fingers twitch. "Can I help you?"
"Professor Ebdic Aski?"
"The same. I didn't catch your names...?"
"Special Revisionist Gould, Ministry of Chronotopy." The willowy woman in the lead gestures a little to her left, then right: "My colleagues, Webster and Salieri. Apologies for disturbing you; I believe you're the author of a reference work collating standard incants that deal with the measurement and specification of units of time?"
"Er..." the professor shuffles his feet. "How...it's not finished. You're interrupting my writing time, actually, I'm working on it this very morning."
"Are you aware of the work that the Esoterics department of your university is currently engaged in, on the design of a Thaumix — that is to say, an arcanomechanical device for sequencing and semi-automated repetitive runic cantrip casting?"
"Well, that's not really my field," Aski says, and scratches his cheek. "I do see one of the chaps overseeing the project, down at our gentleman's club, over lunch sometimes. Very enthusiastic. Bit of a dreamer. I don't see any practical application, honestly."
"Mm," Gould says dryly. "Might he have made a suggestion to you, about transcribing the collated incants into a standardised runic format for easy comparison and literature review?"
"Why, yes, he did — who did you say you are, again?"
"Professor," Gould says, "I'm afraid we need to come in and talk to you about modifying your work. You see, everything past isochron 774 is currently in an exotic state of time hyperfluid."
"What? I — what? What does any of that mean?"
"Exam season, twenty-two years' time," Webster raps out. "Two hundred students write trivial example spells to be batch-processed on the university mainframe Thaumix as part of their coursework. Every single functioning spell immediately trips the university's well-intentioned but flimsy time integrity wards, the whole class is failed for cheating. Eight months later, a paper is published revealing that every time-related spell on the system relies on an autocollated, transcribed copy of your incant library, and due to a naive representation of time measures, it fails to account for daylight savings time. Because the batch was processed on the last Sunday in October—"
"My gods," Aski says in horror.
"The real catastrophe occurs when a group of former students, their lives ruined by the cheating accusation, remotely access the university Thaumix by autotelegraph and attempt to overturn the situation — retroactively."
"My gods!" Aski repeats. "What can I do?"
"We're here to prevent history unravelling," Gould says. "And you're going to be its unsung hero, by preemptively inventing good API design. Let's talk about type sytems, timezones, and falsehoods you believe about time."