Egdard's Decree - RV

One of the so-called "unindexable" sealed decrees of Egdard the Occasional was the so called "Two Hundred and Seventy-Seven Ruined Vacations." This was a scroll marked with the condition "277 RV" beside the red wax seal of the king. Many scholars, scribes, and law keepers of the realm spent collected life-times combing through kingdom ledgers, news sheets, works of fiction, plays, astrological charts, and more to determine when this condition might be met, all to no avail. So much time was lost in the search for the meaning of 277 RV that the joke of ruined vacations began to carry more weight than other competing theories.

In the ninth year of the rule of Beon the Round (for that is how the year of the calendar was recorded in those days), a pair of wizards requested an audience with the king. Royal audiences are not given lightly, but requests of wizards are similarly not easily dismissed. The first wizard was a tall and elegant woman known as Rena the Curious. The second was a pale and scrawny man called Varra the Philosopher.

They were taken to the Green Room of Darkling Castle, the room where those seeking an audience with the king were to wait. The unnamed scribe assigned to the room recorded that "Varra paced relentlessly, while Rena sat motionlessly, following Verra with only her eyes."

Finally, the two wizards had their "moment in the court." When they explained their idea for a new calendar to the king, who ate three whole distinct cuts of cyron during the presentation, the king was quite dismissive. A calendar based around anything other than his nine years of deliciously glorious reign seemed less than ideal. It was the royal advisor whose interest was finally peeked. When Rena reached the point in the presentation where she said that this would be the year two hundred and seventy-seven in the new calendar (the "Rena and Verra" calendar) the advisor had a revelation.

The presentation was paused, while the scroll was fetched. The scholar that was working on the scroll at the time was missing a summer vacation with his family as they had gone to Moon City to see the Girafapigs without him. This was coincidentally actually the 277th ruined vacation, and the scroll by that measure had indeed come to fruition, but as some in the office felt that scholar was actually bringing this on himself with the way that he had been treating his wife, nobody was willing to concede that this might be the true interpretation of RV.

Regardless, when the scroll was brought to the royal throne room, it was opened immediately. Inside was a decree that the Rena-Verra calendar would become the official calendar of the land, superseding all other year reckoning schemes immediately. The law even contained a veiled threat that anyone resisting this law would likely be struck down by food poisoning due to having just consumed a poorly prepared cut of the "forbidden chop" of cyron. Given that the king had just eaten such a chop, he was unwilling to run the risk since prophecy within the scrolls of Egdard were common and reliably accurate.

Verra, who had been making the case for calling this the Verra-Rena calendar was immediately outvoted by the force of history, policy, and culinary arts, and thus the calendar became the law of the land.

Some scolars use the RV decree as a poignent example of Egdard's strange nature. They note that several decrees which were penned before the RV decree was penned, make references in their text to dates before 277 RV (but only in decrees which were set to trigger after 277 RV). Of partular note is one decree which includes a massive 34 page digression (seemingly for no purpose) written by Egdard in the 1st person, which relates events in extreme antiquity in which Egdard refers to the current year as "-2748 RV":


 * They did not understand what I was saying.  I added: "but that won't make sense to you yet because it is only -2748 RV! Hahah!"  Again, they looked at me without comprehension.  I ammended, "I mean... it's only the 3rd year of throckmorton".  They nodded breifly, and then squinted, and looked just as confused as before.  "Nevermind, nevermind... It'll all make sense to... someone, at some point, eventually... but mostly just me.   Now, where was I?"