N&X 1890: Chronology

About

The discovery of the Ninichi and Xelafish Music Shop in an alternate reality London of 1890 where magic is possible through Melodic Enchantments played on musical instruments has led to trying to piece together an understanding of this strange and intriguing world. For more information on the background of the shop visit the Ninichi and Xelafish website or the N&X 1890: Wiktionary on this site.

This page serves as a chronological archive of what we have learnt so far. Its primary purpose is to update, should you happen to exist in the 21st Century, have stumbled on the sheet music shop and it’s website and pages at any random point and wonder what has been uncovered so far. The latest details in summary right back to first contact are here.

17th August 1890 / 17th August 2019

After lots of difficulty explaining how e-commerce can work in 2019 and lots of agitated typewriter in my laptop back (I’d leave it running overnight and wake up in the morning and find this time 3000 words had all been typed into a filename) - we agreed a plan to crowdfund doing a print run of a first collection kicking off the crowdfunder in October 2019.

It is going to be an EXPERIENCE to try and hook Zesper and his typewriter up to SIBELIUS to get the music. 🤦‍♂️

The Ninichi and Xelafish site is live and will have all updates on the campaign there. Go check it out!

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Zesper will be personally taking over all Social Media, Website and Newsletter news from October 7th. Great. 😬

7th August 1890 / 7th August 2019

I had by this point established the following:

  • The world is similar to our own understanding of the 1890s era except with the presence of Melodic Enchantments cast through music though there are different creatures to (potentially the result of enchantments gone wrong?)

  • Ninichi and Xelafish is a music shop on Baalzephon Street (now Weston Street)

  • It’s purpose is to preserve and publish Melodic Enchantment history as well as provide practical solutions through music where we might turn to technology

  • Melodic Enchantments can only be composed by a skilled Composer of Melodic Enchantments of which Ninichi is one. It also takes a skilled Practitioner of Melodic Enchantments to be able to perform the desired effect encoded in the music.

  • The shop had only been open 6 weeks and then it got cursed and is stuck looping in the year 1890

  • Zesper is extremely reluctant to talk about the curse

  • Zesper has done 17 cycles of the year 1890

  • He is extremely bored of each day being predictable and as a result time has been invested into Enchantments that can break the loop in some way

  • The founders Ninichi and Xelafish were not present at the store at the time of the curse and exist outside the time loop. They can communicate into it via enchantment though are largely absent and on expeditions for future collections

  • It is at the request of (his) Ninichi and Xelafish that we relieve his boredom by branching the shops customer base into 2019

  • Can I help?

12th July 1890 / 12th July 2019

This was the day my laptop started talking back at me.

I thought I’d been hacked. In the weirdest possible way. I had started to write an email, had popped out to get dinner and on my return was confronted with this on my screen:

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Naturally I shut the whole thing down!!! Thankfully it did not send.

Except it happened again.

Would have put it down to a hack except when I saw the characters appear live the air around the laptop shimmered as if particles were being interfered with around the computer.

It was that which made me listen, somewhat slowly and painfully, as Zesper began to type out what was going on in his London of 1890 and that they had developed a Melodic Enchantment to connect his Typewriter to my Laptop through the one-way portal that they could conjure into my London of 2019.

12th June 1890 / 12th June 2019

There is a breakthrough in Music Enchantment at the Ninichi and Xelafish Music shop in 1890. For the first time in history a piece of Melodic Enchantment had unlocked a viewing hole or portal into another realm. What they could see was the strangest thing. To all purposes a luminous book turned on its side with the text at the wrong orientation. The only words that could be made out were:

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Over the rest of the month, Zesper - the store manager, was tasked with observing through the portal, almost continually, which he very much enjoyed. Occasionally interference struck and no playing of the Enchantment would open the portal. Occasionally they had a very clear view. Eventually Zesper was able to ascertain that the window opened on different outlooks (and occasionally, much to his surprise the luminous book even said ‘Outlook’) though the ‘computer’ as he began to identify it from an extraordinary number of windows updates seemed to be linked to the Melodic Enchantment to open a viewing portal to wherever it was located.

The next challenge became to come up with a Melodic Enchantment to communicate with the human who seemed to be able to make letters appear within it…