TIME VARIANCE AUTHORITY (TVA)

 

TIME VARIANCE AUTHORITY (TVA)

First Appearance: The Mighty Thor (Vol. 1) #372, October 1986

Description: The Time Variance Authority (TVA) is an infinitely bureaucratic agency whose function is to monitor all realities throughout the multiverse and limit temporal incursions. They are of unrevealed origin, presumably self-appointed, and operate in a dimension called the “Null Time Zone” where time cannot be interfered with.

The TVA’s highest authority is its director, currently Mr. Alternity. Beneath him are various administrators, each of them clones produced from the same genetic material, and thus all identical. This managerial class cloning increases efficiency and enables them to promote from within expeditiously without friction. These administrators are Mr. Mobius M. Mobius, Mr. Orobourous, Mr. Paradox, and Mr. Tesseract. The most numerous TVA employees are the Chronomonitors, faceless men who sit before computers that monitor every event of the timeline to which they’ve been assigned. There’s a TVA Chronomonitor for every timeline in existence, with one created every time a reality comes into being. For all intents & purposes, Chronomonitors are infinite in number and their workplace, the Hall of Chronometry, is as large as the omniverse.

When time-travel or reality warps occur within their assigned timeline, a Chronomonitor will alert administrators through tachyon impulses and the administrator determines how to proceed. The TVA has the power to discontinue timelines, virtually erasing them from history. The enforcers of the TVA are the Minutemen, an army of soldiers produced via cloning and cybernetics, and wearing suits of power armor. The Minutemen are led by Justices, temporal patrol officers with the power to time-travel and solve the TVA’s problems; the most well-known of their number is Justice Peace. The TVA also employs various freelance operatives.

For the eternity of its existence, the TVA has accumulated (and continues growing) vast amounts of temporal energy. Retired TVA employees can draw upon that energy for quality of life purposes, living a near-immortal life in any time and at any location of their choosing. At the end of time (the final common endpoint of all surviving realities in the multiverse) just prior to the heat death of the universe, the final director of the TVA (known as “He Who Remains”) is fated to use all of the TVA’s accumulated energy to create a triad of hyper-evolving beings known as the Time-Keepers.