Mina knew that Guillermo didn't like pubs or taverns, and preferred to keep to himself while on shore leave. There was little intel she could glean from his moping sessions and he wasn't receptive to being asked about them, so she generally left him alone.

But Guillermo's silence didn't sit well with her. She had a feeling the mule knew details about Victor's plans that Victor wasn't telling her, which meant either she wasn't as deeply embedded as she thought or Guille had something to offer the cat that she couldn't.

Although a pirate, Guille wasn't callously wicked like Victor was. He may be guilty of being on the wrong team but he hardly seemed worthy of the harsher measures at her disposal. Thus she merely resolved to observe him more closely.

So imagine her shock when she not only found Guille in a tavern, but talking his head off and being the life of the party! A crowd hung on his every word as he spun yarn after fanciful yarn. All were stories of the sea: tales of blood and treasure, of cunning and intrigue, of suffering and triumph.

Where had he been hiding this tendency? Mina had barely heard him speak a dozen words before! Was it just the ale loosening his lips or was something else going on?

As she sat in the back of the room, listening with heightened interest, it slowly dawned on her what she was witnessing. Other agents had reported this phenomenon but in the whole of Mina's long career she had never seen it happen herself. The key lay in the fact that none of the stories the mule was telling were his.

There was no doubting it: Guillermo was a Timekeeper.

Timekeepers were as essential in the universe as they were rare. To understand why, consider Victor.

Victor had a lot of blood on his claws, and each individual he'd killed had sent a ripple through history. Although true butterfly effects were uncommon, every murder increased the probability that the original breaking event that set him adrift in time would fail to occur. Victor would be the cause of his own retroactive unexistence.

A paradox, in other words. The universe was highly averse to paradoxes. It had a habit of extinguishing them violently.

Unless it could find a more peaceful resolution, and sometimes it did.

Guille was circulating the memories of the dead and in that way he was bringing them back to life. He was countering Victor's violent acts one by one. After all, where lay a pirate's essence if not in the telling of his deeds?

The physics behind the phenomenon were poorly understood. Guillermo almost certainly didn't know what he was, and if he DID know he would never admit it to anyone, let alone Mina. For a keeper to speak openly of his status was to risk losing that status. The subtle door that opened would slam shut.

Mina sometimes heard rumors of a top secret government project that was experimenting with creating artificial keepers. It was a good thing they hadn't succeeded, because otherwise she'd be out of a job. All SPF agents would be.

She questioned how, or whether, she would report this finding to HQ.

She also wondered: if Guille didn't know who he was... did Victor?


Artwork by  gatorpond