The Red Handed Lorebook
Introduction
Timeline
Red Handed takes place in an alternate future. This means that it's not just in an alternate universe, but also ahead of our own timeline. This isn't obvious in the story because I keep the scifi tech to a minimum and there is a different in-universe calendar.
For the most part, this calendar is the same as ours. It has the same months and those months have the same days of the week that we're used to. But the year tracking is different. I did this specifically so the dates in the story wouldn't age it as we got further and further from its initial publication date.
When I first made this story, the characters would have been born some ten or so years in the future and the story didn't start until twenty years after that. Already, most of the main cast would be toddlers in the current year of 2025.
This section won't be covering the timeline of the story. Instead, it will be discussing how to decode the dates you see in the story.
The idea is this:
In the world of Red Handed, human history has been retroactively divided into "eras", starting with the Agricultural Revolution. This revolution is pretty widely considered the dawn of human civilization, which is why it was chosen as the starting point. An era is eighty years long, based on the average human lifespan.
These eras are then numbered from the beginning, starting from 1. Era 0 is everything before the Agricultural Revolution and works similarly to B.C.E. in that that the higher you count in Era 0, the longer ago it is.
Doing this subdivides 12,000 years into around 150 eighty year chunks. That's how many eras there have been. To further specify a year inside an era, you simply put the number of years since that era started, followed by a colon (:), followed by the era it's in. This might sound confusing, but it's really quite simple.
For reference, 2001 is the first year in the 150th era, so it would be written "1:150". If you were to write 2025 this way, it'd be "25:150". Easy, right?
Dates before 2000 are a little more difficult, but they're still not that bad. Era 149 starts in 1921, so it'd be written "1:149". That means that something like 1964 would be written "44:149" because you're subtracting the twenty years that aren't included in that era. Of course, the further back you go, the harder this is to keep track of, but Red Handed takes place in the future so this isn't much of a problem for me.
If you were to write a full date, it would look like this: August 30, 25:150. Or if you used a different notation, like this: 8/30/25:150. The era can be excluded in situation were it's obvious, like this: 8/30/25. Funnily enough, this looks exactly like irl notation after the 2000s, so I don't use it much.
If you were to say the full date aloud, you would say "August thirtieth, twenty-fifth year of the a hundred and fiftieth era." This is long, though, so it can also be shortened, like this: "August thirtieth, twenty-fifth of a hundred fifty". Or if the era is obvious: "August thirtieth, twenty fifth year". And of course, you can dop the year entirely if it's not relevant just like in real life.
I call this calendar the "human era" calendar because it's heavily based on human history and the human lifespan. If you're a nerd like me, you might reconize the name from the Youtube channel, Kurzgesagt, who sell a calendar with the same name. This is becaue this calendar is absolutely based on that one! You should totally go buy one; they're amazing, #notsponsored.
If you're familiar with that calendar, then you'll notice that mine is not exactly the same. This is because, while I used the same starting point for mine, I was prioritizing people not being able to read it. Thus the decision to divide it into eras, which is based somewhat on the idea of Japanese eras, weeb that I am.