Ravnica

Writer - Cory J. Herndon

Cover Art - Donato Giancola

First Printing - September 2005

(Well, I think it’s just called Ravnica. The cover and the colofon say that, but there is another title page that uses the “City of Guilds” tagline that they brushed out from the cover, so... who knows?)

SUMMARY

The story opens with Boros officer Agrus Kos and his lieutenant Myczil Zunich investigating a group of Rakdos killers. Kos and Zunich start to chase after their priestess… and we move 57 years further in time, to that last days of the year 9999. Ravnica is gearing up for a celebration of the Decamillenial of the signing of the Guildpact, and Kos is now an old man, drinking too much, divorced several times over and still bitter over whatever happened to Zunich all those years ago. In fact, he thinks he sees the ghost of Zunich at one point. Which should be impossible: ghosts linger on Ravnica, but without something like an Orzhov contract they don't last that long.

The plot really kicks off when this supposed ghost leads Kos into an alley where a Rakdos goblin just killed a little girl that used to live at the orphanage Kos grew up in. Kos chases the goblin to a bar where it blows itself up, killing, among others, Kos's partner Bell Borca (which is odd: Kos left him with the corpse of the little girl) and a prominent Selesnyan, the loxodon Living Saint Bayul. When Kos wakes up in the hospital he learns that Bayul's bodyguard, who is now missing, was Fonn Zunich, his old partner's daughter. Kos promised to take care of the Zunich family, but could never bring himself to face them.

We the readers learn Fonn was taken to a safehouse by Jarad vod Savo, a Golgari hunter who was send on this mission by his sister, the high priestess Savra. But we also learn Savra is in league with a mysterious figure and that they planned to have Bayul and Jarad both killed in the blast. The mystery man sends Savra to Svogthos, the Restless Tomb, where the Golgari parun Svogthir has been imprisoned ever since the Sisters of Stone Death took control of the guild. She frees him but makes sure she has power over him. Svogthir kills two of the sisters, after which the third surrenders. Savra then kills Svogthir himself and absorbs his power, making her the sole ruler of the Golgari.

Kos tries to get out of the hospital and back to the investigation, but as his body might not survive the necessary healing magic due to his age and condition, and because he is to personally involved in the goings on, he gets into a spat with his superior officer and gets suspended. He gets another visit by the ghost of Zunich, and then by the ghost of Borca. It turns out Borca did have an Orzhov contract that allows him to haunt Kos until his death has been avenged. Borca tells him he never went to the diner where the goblin blew up, but stayed with the dead girl and was killed there. Feather, a Boros angel who as punishment for some unknown crime had her wings bound and was forced to live among the rank-and-file, decides to help Kos. She gives him the healing potions he needs and breaks him out of the hospital.

Meanwhile Savra sends harpies to kill Jarad & Fonn, but the two work together to defeat their attackers. Jarad had been expecting Savra to move against him eventually, and Fonn is now wanted for questioning because of Borca’s death, so the two team up to find out what’s going on. While fighting more Golbari one of the zombies attacking them turns out to be a shapeshifter whose real form is a bunch of worms.

The two investigations lead both to the restaurant/gladiatorial arena of the Orzhov imp Pilvic, who sets both Kos and Jarad up in a match against a Rakdos informant. We learn that Kos knows Jarad, though we don't get many details yet. The informant tells them the suicide goblin was a slave bought from him by the quietmen, ghostly Selesnyan servants. Immediately upon this revelation a bunch of those burst through the windows and start slaughtering people. Kos, Feather, Borca, Jarad, Fonn and Pilvic team up and escape. They head back to Wojek headquarters where a mortician tells them Bayul is still alive, just in some kind of torpor. Meanwhile the quietmen start herding people towards Vitu-Ghazi, and Golgari forces start attacking the Boros, said to be the first open conflict between the guilds since the signing of the Guildpact. The 'pact should force all other guilds to stop the Golgari doing this, but everyone seems entranced by the quietmen.

Bayul tells the crew that there are three non-dryads in the Chorus of the Conclave, including him. They are connected to the Chorus through gems on their forehead. Savra wants to take his gem to join the song and take control of another guild. He then expires, giving him gem to Fonn... at which point various Boros members also turn out to be wormy shapeshifters and attack. The crew escapes those, only for Fonn (and the gem) to be captured by quietmen and taken to Vitu-Ghazi. Kos removes Feather's bonds so she can follow them.

Savra reveals she's been creating her own quietmen (read: killing people and turning them into ghosts-warriors) and mingling them with those of Selesnya, and that she's been filling the City-Tree's roots with necrotic filaments. The Selesnyans then asked her for help to cure the tree, which she used as leverage to be allowed to join the Chorus once a position had opened. She rips off Fonn's hand to get Bayul's gem and becomes the Golgari "ambassador" to the Selesnyans (the dryads, and most of the rest of the populace are completely entranced by Savra's quietmen at this point)

Savra's mystery ally then appears and reveals himself to be Szadek, leader of the Dimir, the secret tenth guild most people thought was just a myth. He calls Savra his liberator... and then snaps her neck, killing her and all the dryads she was just connected to. He takes control of the quietmen and has them tear a hole in Vitu-Ghazi. This reveals Mat'Selesnya, the Selesnyan parun whose dormant form powers the Guildpact. He starts feeding from her.

By then the crew has arrived. Jarad grabs Savra's priestly staff and uses its power to take control over Szadek's wormy shapeshifter minions, who are revealed to have also been responsible for the ghost-Zunich apparitions Kos has been seeing. The shapeshifter attacks the vampire and nearly tears him apart. Meanwhile Fonn gets Bayul's gem back and places it on her wolf Biracazir, who was hurt in the battle (I haven't mentioned him up to this point because... well, he's not done anything plotwise. He's just Fonn's companion and a handy ally in a fight). This somehow kickstarts the Chorus again and Mat'Selesnya starts emitting energy waves that destroy the shapeshifter and leave Szadek little more than a burned skeleton. Kos, ever the policeman, steps forward and arrests him.

The last chapter picks up a day later. Szadek is said to have been "dealt with" by the Boros. Jarad is now the Golgari guildmaster. Borca has been avenged and moves on. Kos has decided to quit the force and join Pilvic in moving to a "reclamation zone" (more on that next novel). Before he goes though, he owes Fonn the true story of how her father died. He tells her how they chased the Rakdos priestess, but that she was also hunted by a Golgari bounty hunter: Jarad. Zunich thought he had found the priestess hiding and immediately attacked... killing an innocent girl Jarad had planted as bait for the priestess. Mad with guilt Zunich tried to kill Jarad. Kos then tried to stop him, and in the ensuing chaos Zunich slipped and fell of the roof.

In the final scene of the book the coroner Helligan plans to cremate the body of the little girl whose death started this all, only for her to be revealed to be a shapeshifter as well! The thing kills Helligan and takes his place. So if the little girl, the Borca in the diner and the ghost of Zunich were all shapeshifters, it sounds like Kos was essentially herded towards arresting Szadek and there might be a lot more to his otherwise rather anti-climactic defeat... (more on that in two books time!)

REVIEW

The original Ravnica trilogy is just great. Yeah, the villainous master plans that they revolve around can be a bit too byzantine and if I know some people are a turned off by their more silly sides, but I can live with that, and if you can as well I can definitely recommend this trilogy!

The first thing that I love here is the world-building, which is done by throwing in as many ideas as possible. Between the weirdly high-(magi-)tech policing tools, the half-demons, the unexplained references to stuff like necrobiology or magewrights, ghosts just casually being accepted as witnesses, let alone all the references to the various guilds, it’s clear from the very start that this is a very dense world full of interesting details. There is an obvious Discworld influence in both the fantasy-city setting and the slightly sillier tone than you might be used to in Magic novels, but where Terry Pratchett had many novels to build up Ankh-Morpork, adding the trolls and dwarves to the populace first, then the undead, then the golems, etc., Magic’s big city just dives in headfirst. And it just keeps building, with almost extinct sentient races, angels who can hear people talking to them from any distance, Ravnica humans randomly being much longer lived than those on our world… and that’s just the second chapter!

This is especially nice at this point in Magic's history. Mirrodin felt (intentionally) about the size of a soccer field and had very little history, being created from an empty world by Memnarch. Kamigawa had hints that there was a larger world with other continents out there, but the bit we got to see featured just a handful of cultures and other than some references in the fatpack booklets the only bit of its history we got to see was the Kami War. Ravnica on the other hand hits you with 10 guilds, each with their own subdivisions, 10.000 years of history (and this book even has hints to what was going on before the Guildpact), and keeps piling stuff on top of that, exploring the consequences of having a citywide world or completely unrelated stuff like the lingering ghosts. The book is constantly explaining things, and in addition to that it makes liberal use of the fantasy trope of throwing words like “ratclops” at you to hint at there being even more to discover out there. Off all the planes introduced after we've left Dominaria, including the ones we haven't covered on the blog yet, I think Ravnica feels the deepest, most varied right from the get go.

There is a downside to this of course, in that a load of this stuff is just throwaway references that will never get elaborated upon. But I'm going to say that's the fault of the sequels for not picking up on them. It's just great to introduce your plane with so many plot hooks right out of the gate.

A specific part of the world-building that I'd like to highlight is the fact that Ravnica... well, that Ravnica is quite a horrible place. The story opening on a Rakdos massacre and corpse-smuggling operation makes in immediately clear that horrible things happen here, and to then be told that murder is not actually illegal if its not a guildmember getting killed shows just how deep injustice runs on this world. A subplot involving Wenvil Kolkin, a man who goes on holiday to the Tenth District only for him and his wife to be killed and turned into quietmen, really hammers this home as well. This will be a recurring theme for all future Ravnica coverage: the tension that exists between the plane being very well developed and very well-liked by fans, while also being a horrible, horrible nightmare world to actually live in. I'll save my final verdict on that for we've covered the entire trilogy.

One more minor world-building thing I appreciated was that all the chapters open with quotes from city-ordinances, newspaper articles, pronouncements by various Azorius Grand Arbiters, epigraphs, et cetera. Opening chapters with these in-world sources is something of a fantasy cliché, but one I've always loved. It’s just efficient world-building; you can cram in a lot more information that makes the world feel deeper and more alive without having to worry about how to incorporate it into the story, or grinding the flow of the story to a halt with an info-dump. That said, quite a few of the opening texts in this novel are stuff like this;

“Don’t wake me for the morning brief – Epitaph of Wojek Sergeant Yrbog Vink, 2525-2642 Z.C.”

...yeah, not really the history lessons of Arkon, Argivan Scholar from The Gathering Dark. Still, they add some nice flavor to the world and reveal some interesting historical factoids.

The world-buidling doesn't rest entirely on the novels of course. While they add a lot of stuff, most of the work designing Ravnica was done by creative team beforehand. So let's focus on some stuff that is unique to the novels instead.

One thing that sets these stories apart from the rest of the Magic canon is its dry humor. It's not a pure comedy story by any means, but many of the characters have a snappy, sarcastic streak, and often there are minor, or even purely background, characters about to make a silly remark here or there. The story doesn't take itself too seriously and isn't afraid to embrace the fact that a giant world-city populated by countless animal people is a bit silly when you think of it. It gives the story a breezy flow and funny atmosphere that I really can't imagine working on, say, Mirrodin or Rath. Well, until you get to a scene where Kos stumbles upon a stabbed orphan that is...

Actually, it might not be the humor that sets Ravnica apart, as the way it is integrated with the rest of the story. At times the story turns to horror or epic fantasy, yet it somehow works. This isn't Scourge where we go from the scatalogical bumblings of Sash and Waistcoat to hamfisted statements about religion and you can hear the grinding of the gears. Of everything I've covered on the blog, the tone reminds me most of the Ice Age trilogy, although in a somewhat sillier setting.

Ravnica? Silly? How dare I say that!

Something else book-specific that I like a lot is the characters. There's a lot of them, so they don't all get a whole lot of space, but the space they do have is enough to make you like them. They have very distinct personalities which come through very clearly with even the minor characters. And the high level of snark on Ravnica helps, it's nice to read about funny people.

The one of gets the most development is Kos. He gets drunk on duty and picks a fight with a completely random, nice and well-spoken minotaur. So, a bit of an ass. But at the same time he's still doing good police work. There’s obviously some Sam Vimes in him, but he’s not a carbon copy. He’s a drunkard like Vimes was in his introduction, but also determined and stubborn like the sober Vimes from later novels. He also still has a grudge about Zunich’s death 50+ years later, telling Borca he’s not his partner, just someone he works with, except after Borca dies he slips up and does call him his partner- and promptly stops doing that after his ghost shows up. That was a lovely little detail.

It's a bit sad that so many of these characters never made it into the cardgame. We've seen this with the last few blocks of course, where usually just the main characters, who were probably designed during world building or the outlining of the trilogy, make it into the sets, with maybe a secondary character introduced in book one making it into set three, like the Kami of the Cresent Moon. Here it is much more noticeable since the books feature so many characters, while the sets are quite restricted in which characters they can feature due to the guild structure. You can't put a Selesnya legend in Dissension since that set only has Azorius, Simic and Rakdos after all. It's good we eventually got Jarad, Feather and Borca cards, but I'm still waiting for Fonn, Biracazir and Pilvic! And heck, if the likes of Brinelin and Gol Muldrak get to make it into the cards these days, let me expand that list with Saint Bayul, Myc Zynich, Garulsz the Orge Bartender...

Just posting Jarad's art instead of his card so you won't get any spoilers for the Dissension novel. Probably pointless, but hey, better safe than sorry!

CONTINUITY

Ravnica is perhaps the most planes-hopping-iest setting in the planes hopping era, in that its story is entirely insular, with only a very minor link to the rest of continuity being revealed in the third book. So if there are no continuity references, what will I talk about here?

We will return to Ravnica many times of course, so I could just this section to look forward, but to give you a complete list of those would require me going through all future Ravnica stories with a fine-toothed comb, and... well, you've waited long enough for this review as is. Those errors/issues will be pointed out when we get to those future stories. I'll point out a few obvious issues, but it won't be a comprehensive list. I will say that in general the way these early Ravnica stories get referenced in later sources is actually pretty solid. The people behind the Ravnica Artbook and the Guildmaster's Guide D&D book clearly read these books and get stuff correct down to the currency conversion and the dating system.

(There are some big continuity issues in Ravnican history, but those don't come in until you try to match Agents of Artifice with Return to Ravnica, nothing to do with these books.)

• Kos watches a play about the signing of the Guildpact at the start of the story (he's there because the actors don't have the proper permits). In it Azor appears as “a man in simple blue and white robes … His bright eyes twinkled and a few rays of sunlight broke through the cover over his head. His white beard, bald pate, and weathered, sun-beaten face made him look like a farmer, but he wore the attire of a senator”. Oh, and he's not a sphinx. That could be seen as a continuity issues, but it's easier to just assume either a bunch of details got forgotten over the millennia, or he appeared in a different form way back when.
• Several references are made to species dying out on Ravnica, including sentient ones. At one point we meet an owl-person and are told “most people throughout the greater plane supposed they’d actually gone extinct, but obviously not in the city.” and we're also told the loxodon are dying out due to pollution harming their sensitive noses. Finally we learn from Savra that the Sisters of Stone Death are the last gorgons around. That caused some grumbling when Vraska and Korozda Gorgon were printed years later. Maro was asked about it, but his answer wasn't much help. The easier explanation is to just assume Savra was mistaken when she declared the gorgons extinct, just like people were mistaken about the owl-people. If Vraska was actually the child of the last surviving Sisters, or a clone, or had some other special origin, surely that would've come up by now. We'll talk some more about other supposedly extinct species in the next few reviews.
• Anything else? Eh... there is the fact that Vitu-Ghazi is consistently written without a hyphen in these novels and is not called the "City-Tree" but the "Unity Tree"? And there is an apparent spelling error where a "zido" coin is mentioned instead of a "zino", which the wiki has dutifully reported as an alternative denomination? Eh... so yeah, not much to report so far.

Are these zidos?

TRIVA

• In the play we are also told that “Millennia of open war between ten factions had finally settled, through a series of betrayals and alliances, into two major forces: those whose interests favored the rule of law-and the rest”. There is a duel between Razia and Cisarzim (the Gruul Parun) which gets interrupted by Szadek and Azor, who has allies in both camps and presents the Guildpact. After that there is a lot of talking which Kos finds boring, until finally there is another duel that brought the Gruul Clans into the pact. Don't put too much stock in this version of events though, as Razia is already talking about how it is the worlds destiny to fall under the Guildpact before Azor introduces the concept...
• Kos thinks about how Szadek was believed to be a necromancer who tried to take over Ravnica but was destroyed by the Paruns for attempting to lead an army against the city. That is apparently "the one statute that all guilds were required to enforce equally. In ten thousand years of history, Kos could count the recorded violations of the first law on one hand.”
• There are a couple of references to people being “new in the city”. Later it is made clear that outside of the city there are still buildings though, but these references initially created a bit of confusion about just how much of Ravnica was covered by cityscape.
• Ravnica is a very high-(magi-)tech plane. Just looking at the policing nicknacks Kos utilizes we have a magic dust that counts the dead inside a building, grounders that trap ghosts for a while, a baton also capable of banishing ghosts and items called “teardrops” capable of healing grievous injuries. The 'drops are actually "concentrated time, accelerate the healing process."
• The Radkos slaver Kos and Jarad face is a half-demon, which are apparently common and all have unique looks. “Whatever hideous thing Rakdos did to create half-demons, the result was different in every one”.
• The goblins of the Krokt clan have been members of the Rakdos cult since before the Guildpact. They believe they were carved from stone by Rakdos himself.
• The axe of Cisarzim, the Gruul Parun, is called Skullhammer. Kos doesn't get why an axe is called "hammer" either.

Perhaps Cisarzim named this thing as well.

• Kos can't pronounce Feather's real name, flubbing the first name as Pierzuva and not even attempting the rest. We'll hear her full name before the end of the trilogy and... really Kos, it's not that difficult.
• Feather is working at the Wojek guildhall to pay off a “holy debt”. We won't really get an explanation for that though. But we'll talk more about it in the Dissension review nonetheless.
• Angels can always hear it when they are directly spoken to, even from great distances. They call this "prayer".
• Ravnica's sky-high thoroughfares are enchanted against vertigo. They end at a place called "The Center of Ravnica", one of the only bits of Ravnica's surface not yet covered in city. It's actually the top of a mountain which houses the Hellhole, "where the Rakdos cultists thrived in their mines". The wiki lists the Hellhole as a separate place from Rix Maadi, but I get the impression it's supposed to be one and the same, since Dissension describes Rix Maadi as also lying under the Center and being full of mines.
• It's also said though that there are untouched ice sheets and mountain ranges at the polar regions
• At the edge of the Center the guilds have build many of their most important buildings. For the Boros this is Centerfort. In front of it stands Zobor, one of the giant stone Titans that are the Boros's ultimate weapon. The other 9 stand in a ring around the City. Zobor gets activated in the story's climax, only to be destroyed by Golgari forces. The Titans were created by wojek Commander-General Ferrous Rokiric in the fourth century of the first millennium. They sound far too cool for the extremely minor role they'll end up playing in this trilogy. And certainly too cool to only be shown on one tiny split card art! Okay, so apparently someone at WotC agreed with me, and between me writing this and finishing the other Ravnica reviews they actually printed Ferrous and his golems as a card! 

• In addition to Ferrous several other commander-generals of the past are mentioned: Wyoryn’vili, the only viashino commander-general to date, who fell defending Centerfort in another Rakdos rebellion in 6342, and Wilmer Odrinescu, who had made Kos the partner-apprentice of Myczil Zunich. The current one, for the past 27 years, is Vict Gharti, “ Iron Vict”. At some point he was replaced with a Dimir shapeshifter.
• A bit more about Kos: he was an orphan left in Tin Street Market and wanted to become a wojek ever since one single-handedly kept the orphanage he was born in from being burned down by the Rakdos. He's had several ex-wives including Sulli Valenco, who is now the Ninth District Section Commander. 
• The Ravnica sets are already bursting full of creature types, but we meet some more here. There are some Gruul pterro-riders, so "pterro" can join "pteron", "pterodon" and "pterus" on the list of weird fantasy-sounding bastardizations of "pterosaur" Magic uses.
• Among the Golgari we meet harpies, griffins, centaurs & nagas. Two of those we’ve never seen on Ravnica, and the other two we’ve never seen as part of the Golgari on the cards! (Unless Loaming Shaman counts?) Some people complained when merfolk suddenly showed up in Return to Ravnica, but clearly the world is big enough to have all sorts of species hanging out. I think it would be very neat to showcase these weirdo Golgari troops at some point.
• (but heck, even “pinchbeetles” and "ratclops" showing up would be cool in my eyes. I love it when the cards reference throwaway lines from old novels...)

Okay, Golgari Griffins would be a bit weird at first sight, but it wouldn't be the first time we learned that B/G can have something we all thought was mono-White!

• The Sisters of Stone Death have been in power for a thousand years and live in a labyrinth “build to the whim of a mad pre-guildpact king” which is far enough from the Hellhole not to be attacked, but close enough to keep an eye on “Golgari’s sister guild”.  Apparently the sisters have not been paying enough attention to the business side of the Guild, at least according to Savra, who resents them for taking power away from the Devrakin and spending Svogthir’s money. There used to be five Sisters, but two didn't survive the battle with Svogthir. The last three are called Lydia, Lexia & Ludmilla.
• Svogthir was the third to sign the guildpact, after Razia and Azor, giving his allies on the chaos side an excuse to do so as well. When he shows up in the story he has a giant stitched together body which include's Cisarzim’s torso. (though he's been rotting for a while now) He’s “the oldest conscious -if not technically living-thing on the plane." Savra gives him a new plant-based body with extra eyes hidden everywhere for Savra to see through as she can’t get into his head, which is the last remaining bit of Svogthir’s original body.
• While he was imprisoned the Sisters sapped Sogthir’s necromantic power, as they feed on “raw power, be it magical, supernatural or physical”… I wonder if Vraska can do that as well?
• Kos entered "the last sixth of [his] expected lifespan”, so humans reach 120 years on average on Ravnica. No reason for this is given, though we'll come back to that in Dissension.
• “Voja himself” sired Biracazir.
• You wouldn't say so from their look (or their creature type), but zeppelid are a kind of lizard.
• The Dimir wormy shapeshifters are called Lupul, which is Ancient Ravi for "lurker". Feather says "We believed their last colony was destroyed thousands of years ago, and the-their master imprisoned"
• Selesnya's Ledev guardians descend from a group of warrior monks that protected the roads in pre-Guildpact days.
• Mat'selesnya is an elemental made from "the merged forms of a dozen ancient dryads who had sacrificed their identities and their freedom ten thousand years ago to give their world a chance for permanent peace". Lookswise her description sounds pretty typical for a Selesnyan elemental: crystals encased in plants. 
• After Szadek is defeated Mat'selesnya creates new dryads to replace those who died. Biracazir is left supervising the new Chorus. Their first act is to do away with the quietmen.

TIMELINE

Oh dear, the Ravnican timeline. This is going to be one of the more unique problems in the whole timeline project, but to make sense of it we need all the information from Guildpact and Dissension as well. So let's start with the easy stuff now, and we'll deal with the rest in a few weeks.

On Ravnica time is calculated in years before and after the signing of the Guildpact: Al Concordant and Zal Concordant. All chapters begin with dates, which is very convenient. The flashbacks to the day Myczil Zunich died happen in 9943 Z.C., the bulk of the book happens in the last days of 9999 Z.C., and the last chapter and the epilogue on the first day of the year 10.000.

Jarad and Savra are about 200 years old, and Fonn is 57, as she was described as "newborn" on the day Myczil died. Kos is 110 in the main story, which means he was already 53 when Myczil died. That's a bit confusing considering he is called "young" multiple times in the prologue. We'll have to chalk that up to Ravnican humans growing a lot older than us earth humans I guess. The out-of-universe explanation might be a revision of the story. Cory Herndon had originally intended for there to be a 80 year gap between the main story and the flashback, which got changed over the course of writing, and there is actually still a reference to that accidentally left in the book! The references to it being 57 years are far more numerous and consistent though, so that one stray reference can easily be discarded.

Some other interesting dates:

• Before the Guildpact there were “Millennia of open war”
• 10 years ago the Wojek League was decimated by the latest Rakdos uprising, which was much larger than "the one in 9940."
• We're also given a the birth- and death dates of various historical characters in the chapter headings, but none of them are people we know. The only one with a larger presence in continuity is "First Judge Azorius", whose dates are given as 47 R.C. – 98 Z.C. This is clearly an alternate name for Azor, so this gives us a date when he presumably moves on from Ravnica. (Not sure what "R.C." stands for. Perhaps it's just a spelling error for "A.C", or maybe there was originally another term for pre-Guildpact dates other than Al Concordant.)

Okay, that's the easy stuff... but now how do we place this on the timeline when the main timeline uses Argivan Reckoning dates? Well, that's going to involve either investing in a calculator, or throwing out some long-standing continuity! 

How's that for a timeline tease?