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Jake and the Swiss boarding school
Jake is a bothersome student in a prominent and expensive Swiss school that is expelled after attacking a student whose father is a high ranking government official. This is the ultimate cause as to his expulsion, even though he had severly misbehaved in the past through his antics with his marmoset named Horatio. The reason as to why he was not expelled before is "because his guardian pays top whack to keep him here, and we need the money"(Fischer 19) his guardian being the hermit Oberon Venn. -
Jake and his reason for wanting to leave
Jake states his reason as to why he wants to leave as simply: "I know he murdered my father"(Fischer 20). At least this is Jake's steadfast belief. -
Jake sees his father
Jake, after arriving in Wintercombe Abbey, Venn's home, sees in a reflection of the sunlight on a personal mirror an image of his dead father. Even stranger is that the reflection calls Jake's name. "Jake', it said'
"How can it be you?!' Jake cried" (Fischer 94) -
Jake meets the Shee
After being startled by the vision of his deceased father, Jake goes out and sees in the woods around the Abbey a boy named Gideon who says to him: "This is the Wintercombe, mortal. And you're inside it." (Fischer 111). This prompts Jake to question the usage of mortal of which Gideon explains his immortality of Shee origin. Gideon then explains the Shee as: "They look like angels, but they're more like demons. We're the Shee." (Fischer 115) -
Jake confronts Venn
Jake confronts Venn while entering the breakfast room with: "First off, you lied, All right, maybe you didn't kill him. But you know what happened to him. This machine that she was talking about..." (Fischer 127) to which Oberon explains: "Jake, listen to me. Your father is lost. He's not here. He's not anywhere I can find him. He's lost in time" (Fischer 128) -
Jake encounters the Obsidian Mirror
After wandering through Wintercombe in all of the places that are restricted to him, Jake finds a way into the restricted Abbey and discovers: "...a slab of black glass, high as a man, wafer thin, smoothed to perfection, held upright in an ornate silver frame. Cables were attached to it at all four corners. At its back, he stared at a confusion of older machinery-rusting wires, cogs, some Victorian contraption. As if Venn had imposed modern technology with older." (Fischer 146) -
Jake sees the Ouroborus Bracelet
Jake looks beside the Obsidian Mirror: "In a locked glass cabinet next to it he saw a single silver bracelet, resting on a black cushion. It was a band of fantastically engraved silver, in the form of a winged snake biting its own tail, coiled around a glowing amber stone." (Fischer 147) These two items are the main items of the book and the reason as to why Jake's father is missing. These two objects will show up constantly throughout Time and be fought for throughout the book. -
Thematic statement part 1
Jake is a boy from a Swiss private school who believes his caretaker, Oberon Venn, killed his father, but, when expelled and sent to Wintercombe Abbey, Venn's estate, Jake discovers that his father is actually lost in time and that Wintercombe contains a mirror with the ability to open a rift in time: the Chronoptika. -
Jake teams up with Oberon to find Jake's father
Jake, after a period of learning the true nature of the Chronoptika (Time piercer) from a mysterious man named Maskylene who says that "The mirror was mine once. It was mine and it was stolen." (Fischer 148), Jake teams up with Venn and begins to read the notes of a man named Harcourt Symmes who lived back in the Victorian era. They intend to discover how to successfully and reliably use the mirror to search for Jake's father through time and rescue him. -
Jake sees Janus
Jake and the others, Wharton (Swiss school teacher with the task of staying with Jake for a while), Sarah (Girl who Piers nursed back to health after finding her nearly dead), and Piers (A Shee in the service of Venn), see a ghostly apparition of a man named Janus. Janus is only recognised by Sarah, since Sarah is "THE LAST OF ZEUS" (Fischer 188), an orginisation from the future who's intentions aren't yet made clear. -
The Chronoptika is used
The Chronoptika (the Obsidian Mirror) is being used on Sarah.
Sarah places "The silver snake around her wrist, its fit like an alien hand, but this time Sarah was ready for it" (Fischer 205). After a small delay, 'The mirror was gone. It was a wild, gaping rent in the world. A scatter of objects lifted from the desk, flew, and were sucked straight in. (Fischer 213) -
The Chronoptika fails
After the Chronoptika fails to send Sarah through time, Venn becomes emotional. "Venn was staring at himself. His hands, maimed by frost, gripped the black glass. For a second Jake was sure he would grasp it tight and pick it up and throw it to the floor, shattering it in a million pieces. But all he did was stare into his own blue eyes. He seemed to Sarah to be staring at the torment of his failure." (Fischer 217) -
Thematic statement part 2
Jake and Venn, along with Wharton, Sarah, and Piers, endeavour to use the Chronoptika to rescue Jake's father, but Jake learns also of the world of Wintercombe and its magical neighbours: the Shee, servants of Queen Summer, a Shee goddess of time, that wishes the mirror not to be used as Summer will lose control over the Abbey if Venn leaves. Failure of the mirror to work is caused by the meddling of another, Janus, a man without an explanation. -
Jake is accidentally taken through the Chronoptika
The Chronoptika, with its inherent unpredictability, transfers Jake to a place in time known as Soloman's Court. After confronting a few druggies, Jake finds a girl and asks her the date to which she replies: "You from the Bedlam, mister? Year's 1848" (Fischer 250) -
Jake returns to the present
After returning to the present by way of finding Maskylene and Symmes and going through a fiasco of finding the Ouroborus bracelet that was stolen from him and is required to go through the mirror, Jake returns to find Janus fighting the inhabitants of Wintercombe. After a struggle, Janus is held at shotgun point: "Even if you fire, you'll not kill me. I am not here. How can you kill a reflection?" (Fischer 333) -
Sarah's true purpose is discovered
Janus has taken another method to destroy the inhabitants: divulging Sarah's true intention. "We know about ZEUS' Wharton snapped'
'Really?' Janus put his glasses on and gazed at Wharton through them. 'And do you know that she's here to break your precious mirror into a thousand pieces?" (Fischer 343) Sarah is an operative of the future orginisation ZEUS which was created in the future to find a way of dethroning the dictator Janus, who gained his immortality akin to the Shee's by the mirror. -
Thematic statement part 3
Jake is sent, by accident, to the past in the year 1848 where he meets the two previous owners of the Chronoptika: Maskylene and Harcourt Symmes. They send Jake back to the present and Jake is encountered with the concluding bit where Janus has come into the home and uncovered Sarah's true identity as a ZEUS agent, which was previously explained to be an orginisation to keep the Shee from leaving their forest, but is actually an orginisation that has the intent to destroy the mirror.