Born in 5182 in the Deorsai Protectorate, young Dula Jyrexil spent her time playing with the local Greenling children, to the detriment of her schoolwork. After her family moved to Miakovos-Pameka in 5196, she continued to daydream; her diaries profess that the Greenlings possess “truth that cannot be told, for it has not yet been forgotten.” Her academic work remained undistinguished.

In 5200, Jyrexil took a job as a janitor at a Miakovan energy lab, where she astonished her employers one morning in 5202 by presenting them with a working temporal gradient engine that she had apparently been building in the supply closet. Thus began a five-year period of creativity culminating in the Core Process.

One day in 5208, Jyrexil failed to show up at her lab. A search found her home abandoned; a note on her desk urged that construction of the Malika Core Grid cease immediately. Legends sprang up: some said Jyrexil had been assassinated, others that she was working in a secret orbital laboratory. In 5248, an elderly woman matching Jyrexil’s description applied for residence in the uppermost reaches of the Elsoni Starsnare, explaining to the astonished agents that she wished to be “closer to the past.” Stories of the medicine woman at the top of the tower persisted for decades, but few dared make the journey.

—Thucydides Plutonium