Great Gap

A period in the history of Inutilia where all records have been lost. Due to the almost fanatic recording of the genealogies of rulers both before and after the Gap, it is clear that records of this time once existed. It is unknown how long the period lasted.

The Gap is the one part of Inutilia's history that all historians agree is a bad thing. Pessimistic historians are of the opinion that the Great Gap was one of the most lively and enriching periods in the nation's history, because all information about it has been tantalisingly lost. They back up this theory with a second, generally accepted theory that shortly before the Gap, Inutilia's population moved from its original location to its present-day location in Mediterrae. One result of the gap is that nobody can tell when the country was established. Records before the gap use Inutilian years, which are measured from the date of the country's founding. Post-gap records seem to have abandoned this measure of time and use standard years.

There have been multiple expensive projects launched to attempt to recover information about this period of time, with resources from nearly every country in Mediterrae. So far they have been unsuccessful.

Only two things are known about the Gap. The first is that they Djelibeybian Dynasty as founded by Pteppicymon the Great extended through all of this period, as records about Queen Ahna II make it clear that she was the last member of the original dynasty. The second is that the prejudice against monarchs without the name Pteppicymon (which was so great that King Horatio I was assassinated within a week due to not being trusted, and the next queen had to call herself Pteppicymon) seems to have died out in this period, as the records of the dynasty after the gap only include one monarch named Pteppicymon.

The gap is generally agreed to be about 100-2000 years long. However, some historians claim it was a fair bit longer. They cite the existence of a King Pteppicymon LXVIII (68) in the post-gap records. They say the generations needed to produce this number of Pteppicymons when the last known Pteppicymon was XV (15) would not fit into this time scale, unless they had all had remarkably short reigns.

A conspiracy theory states that the Great Gap never in fact existed, and King Pteppicymon XV (the last king before the Gap) was directly succeeded by King Horatio III (the first king after the gap). People keen to disprove this theory point out that the end of the Great Gap was relatively shortly after the fall of the Empire, and surely even the pre-Gap records (which rarely mentioned anything other than the names of kings) would have made some allusion to the Imperial control of Inutilia; as they didn't, the Empire must have existed during the Great Gap. (Infuriatingly, no country has any record of what happened in Inutilia during the rule of the Empire, besides mentioning when it was occupied. This loophole has been tried in order to obtain information about the Gap, with no success.) This also does not explain why there are no Pteppicymons between Pteppicymon XV and Pteppicymon LXVIII, no Queen Ahna before Ahna II, and no Horatio II between Horatio I and Horatio III. Conspiracy theorists argue against both points by claiming that it was a large-scale practical joke held by the royal family. This view has been denounced as ridiculous.