Julep's Permanent Marker

Gomer Julep’s work is highly sought-after in the Gri’x and other dimensions. A ‘Nodian artist, he was present at the Breach and one of the founders of Hemming Ridge (nee Paxton). When the first iteration of the village was abandoned, he set off to tour the planes. He now lives and works in Beaconspire Village, at the edge of the Perpetuarium.   Imagine his surprise, then, when commissioned works began coming back to him, looking much older, dirtier, and faded than when he’d sent them out—which, to his mind, was only weeks, or even days, ago.   Imagine, further, Julep’s confusion and consternation when he realized that it was not the original owners sending these masterworks back for re-touches, but their descendants, heirs, or whomever happened to have been the most recent lucky bidder in a long string of art-auctions.   The problem, it seems, was a basic law of temporal cosmology: despite optional conscious perceptions to the contrary, linear time does not exist in the Perpetuarium.   These paintings were coming back not just after weeks, but years. Centuries, even, in some cases. And the current owners wanted them restored by the original artist.   It’s not that Julep minded doing the re-touches and repairs. He’s known for his pride in his craft, and would certainly not want to see any of it deteriorate due to something as illusionary as chronological flow. But Perpetuarium or not, if he were to focus on all these fix-ups, he’d never get around to doing anything new. He needed to find a way to protect his work no matter where (or when) it wound up.   His found his solution in the clear, varnish-like sap within maple trees in the forests on the outskirts of Beaconspire Village, where the trees’ roots tap into the Perpetuarium membrane. Having produced a small portrait as an experiment (a mannerist-style portrait of a colleague’s pug, its tongue lolling adorably), he coated it with the viscous syrup, set it in the drying rack*, and sent it off to said colleague as a gift, with a note asking for updates on the work’s durability.   The next day (according to Julep’s chosen Perpetuarium “time”), he received a letter from a woman who claimed to be the colleague’s great-great-great-grandniece’s college roommate. The painting, and Julep’s instructions, had been passed down through generations. The roommate had received it as a graduation gift from the family, and she assured Julep that the painting still looked as fresh and bright as the day it had arrived.   Julep set his paints aside and went to work at his drafting table, and thus was born Julep’s Permanent Marker.   The first Marker Julep produced was a thick brush pen, its reservoir filled with the maple tree sap. When a finished painting—or anything, really—is thoroughly coated with the substance, it acts as a temporal barrier between the surface and the surrounding passage of time. Julep treated all the re-touched work with this tool before sending them back. Word got out, and the response was been so wildly positive that artists across the planes began clamoring for Permanent Markers of their own.   Julep, wanting nothing to do with becoming a manufacturer or a supplier, made the Marker’s details and schematics available to the Knights of Agamus, who now work with the Spriory Monks to create and ship Julep’s Permanent Markers to any certified artists, librarians, or curators upon request.** (One is all anyone would need, as the sap in the Markers’ reservoirs, being perpetual, never runs dry.)

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* Julep’s studio techniques and tools for working within the Perpetuarium are worth a documentary in their own right, but in short: the drying rack is an extension of his work studio with a specialized fan by the window which draws Quondamaric winds from just beyond the planar border. The fan spins at just the right frequency to allow the paint to dry in linear time without exposing the work to the more intense effects of stray Quandamaric potentialities.

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** And rumor has it that they aren’t picky about checking the credentials of those who request Permanent Markers, figuring that it’s better to distribute them to the not-quite-qualified than to mistakenly deny this important tool to even one genuinely needy customer. Besides, it’s just a preservation tool. What could possibly go wrong?