Johannes Belsarus was a 13th-century watchman who thought he had discovered a way into the future. Obsessed with the idea of being the first man to break through the frontier, he spent many years working on various hair-brained schemes and machines to try and manipulate the timelines – everything from extraordinary electrical experiments to arcane magic rituals – but nothing ever worked. It drove Belsarus to madness. He began to roam history looking for mythical future objects – ones that he believed had fallen back through time. Although none were ever found – the theory that these out-of-place artefacts exist is still referred to as the Belsarus’ brainstorms, another term for a flight of fancy or crazy scheme.
What Belsarus never knew was that there was a department within the protectorate that was secretly following Belsarus’ research – keeping tabs on everything he did – who knew a little more about the out-of-place objects than the unfortunate, misguided watchman. A small closely guarded office known as the Paradoxical Disposal division, thwarted his investigations at every turn. Their mission to ensure that everyone believes the future is a chaotic unknown – that no one, not even the founder himself is aware of the random objects that have come back beyond the frontier.