1666 -- The solimond of Thomas Farynor's oven sets fire to a stack of wood left too close one evening. The resulting blaze soon spreads to neighboring buildings, one of which is a freehold. The solimond consumes the power of the balefire and, fueled by that Glamour, begins the Great Fire of London. Unusual winds blowing from the east to the west spread the fire away from the Tower, toward the wealthier parts of the city. The solimond consumes all the balefires in his path, destroying the Web of London, the mystical network that linked the freeholds together. Fae attempt to use the City walls as a magical barrier to contain him, but he breaks through on the west. Dallin Cynefrid, former King of Albion, engages the solimond in battle at the breach. This stalls the solimond's progress long enough for a coalition of fae sorcerers to entrap him, using a combination of many cantrips, including Ensnare, Hopscotch, Flicker-Flash, Compass Winds, Go Ask Alice, and Gimmix. Only by hitting the solimond with so many cantrips at once are they able to overcomes his power. The solimond is thereby entrapped in a Treasure that was formerly used to cast Weaver Ward; the Treasure is rendered unusable. Daily applications of Harden, Toughen, or Oakenshield are necessary to maintain the prison against the power of the solimond.

1682 -- Having maintained the solimond's prison on a daily basis for sixteen years, the fae are desperate for a more permanent solution. They are assisted in this process by Isaac Newton, a mortal scientist, alchemist, and mathemetician. He has been developing a plan on their behalf, but the appearance of a comet in the skies suggests a new possibility to the fae; they jettison Newton's plan and formulate a new one, wherein they force the solimond to transfer his Anchor from the spark contained within the Treasure to the comet itself. In order to prevent the solimond from creating a Husk and returning to cause trouble, they intend to carry out the transfer an instant before the comet can no longer be seen by the naked eye. Newton warns them to wait until it can no longer be seen through a telescope, either, lest the solimond escape that way. They use one of his own reflecting telescopes to enact the cantrip.

1703 -- Sir Isaac Newton becomes president of the Royal Society of London.

1705 -- The astronomer Edmond Halley publishes Synopsis Astronomia Cometicae, wherein he proposes a theory that the comets seen in 1456, 1531, 1607, and 1682 are all return visits of the same comet, and that it would appear again in 1758. The troll Halga Redfield, one of the former guardians of the solimond's prison, receives a vision by which the fae involved realize Halley's calculations have made it so that the comet's return will bring the solimond back. Work begins on a new solution to the problem.

1727 -- Sir Isaac Newton dies. He is replaced as president of the Royal Society by Sir Hans Sloane. The focus and approach of the Royal Society shifts, depriving the fae of the assistance they had been receiving there during Newton's leadership.

1742 -- Edmond Halley dies.

1752 -- Viscount George Parker, Earl of Macclesfield and president of the Royal Society, arranges the switch from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. As a result, the calendar skips eleven days, jumping from September 2nd to September 14th. Realizing that they are running out of time to solve the solimond problem, the nockers of the Albion Temporal Experimentation Society capitalize on Parker's unpopular move, and harvest all the days lost by all the residents of Britain at the time. These are placed into a room in the ATES building, to which access is strictly controlled.

1758 -- As defense against the solimond's return, fae sorcerers perform an epic Bunk and place a Fuddle over all of Albion. On Christmas Day, the German farmer and amateur astronomer Johann Georg Palitzsch sights the comet in the skies.

The current situation is this. The Fuddle has, so far, kept the solimond from being able to see Albion, which is where he wants to return to. Nobody trusts it to last forever, though. Some of the fae working on this problem hope it will last until the comet leaves again; that will buy them another 76 years to come up with a better plan. The odds of this are not good, though. (Besides which, there's no guarantee he won't just give up on Albion and jump down somewhere else. And at least some of the people working on this don't really want to see him attack another place -- if for no other reason than because other places are unprepared, so he'll probably get even more powerful, which really only makes the problem worse in the long term.)

If he sees Albion, no one has yet come up with a workable plan for how to prevent him from creating a Husk, which would give him freedom of movement again. They also don't have any good ideas for how to create a new prison for him, since the Treasure that held him before was destroyed when they transferred him to the comet. Besides, that was only ever a stop-gap solution anyway, requiring daily maintenance. If you could destroy his Anchor, he'd be left in his unprotected dream-form, which would be much more vulnerable. Unfortunately, as his anchor is a bloody COMET, that's rather hard. Not to mention that, since he ate six balefires, he's rather powerful, and any plan to deal with him will have to take that into account.