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Species: human
Gender: male
Age: 45~50 physically, technically 54; it is suspected that mentally he has access to over five hundred years' experience, but not confirmed
DOB: April 8, 1920
Birthplace: Earth>United States>Wisconsin>Dodgeville
Occupation: Comptroller General
Languages: English

Personality
 

Physical Characteristics
Height: 5' 11"
Weight/Build:
Hair: pale blonde, feathery and short, hairline slightly receding
Eyes: blue
Skin: medium pale
Face: pear-shaped
Attire: Previously, the white and gold jacket of a Fleet Operations Comptroller. More recently, solid or lightly patterned Oxford shirts and slacks in grey or tan

Collective History: The Grey Mandate
One of the essential laws of any "real" universe is time. The progression of moments from one to the next is a fundamental component of every feasible universe. Whenever you have a system of universes, it becomes necessary to regulate the passage of time relative one universe to the next. When the rules of finite conflict were established for the deific war between the Three and Deity Command, the Grey Mandate was formed to ensure a fairness between the two sides and ensure that the amount of time spent by each side was equal. Independent of the conflict, the Grey Mandate is an independent regulatory body comprised of some of the most gifted temporal manipulators in infinity. These beings are capable of modifying the passage of time across dimensions. During the conflict, the task of measuring the amount of time each side used was known as auditing, and thus the individuals responsible for processing these audits became known as comptrollers.

Members of the Grey Mandate are committed to neutrality and noninterference, though they occasionally offer asylum to parties seeking or requiring it.

Some temporal comptrollers have access to foreknowledge. The Mandate includes a prohibition on using knowledge of the future for non-personal gain. Comptrollers with foreknowledge are very different from Magisters. While comptrollers may see the future, they lack the ability to modify it. They cannot calculate probabilities of change and choose futures the way Magisters can. If a comptroller has knowledge of the future, it is because it has already happened. Comptrollers with the ability to live their own futures are rare and usually mature later in life than their purely regulatory counterparts.

Individual History
Wilbur was born in 1920 in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, third of four children. He has two older brothers and a younger sister. (Two sisters, one older and one younger, died in infancy.) His father, William, was a stern man who worked in insurance until the stock market crash of '29 affected his company. William was lucky in that he was able to take a job working at his brother's store, Page Housewares, later renamed Page Bros. Housewares. Though things were tough for a bit, Wilbur's two older brothers became skilled at repairing broken appliances, a service in high demand during the great Depression. Page Bros. flourished and Wilbur's family was able to keep their lakeside house and generally comfortable lifestyle.

From a young age, Wilbur was distant from his family. He enjoyed solitary activities. His main hobby was building model ships. He seemed to see things slightly differently than other people, a fact that could not merely be explained by his needing glasses. He was fascinated by patterns in water and weather.

When he was eleven, he fell off the roof of his family's home and broke his leg. It never set correctly. Wilbur began using a cane to correct his gait when he was fifteen and has used one ever since. Around this time, his ability to see things differently began to mature. He found that he could see things as they were and as they would be. At first, it was simply a few seconds, but then minutes and hours. His view was limited to his own perspective -- he was able to see where he was as well as where he would be and what he would be doing in the future.

Wilbur kept quiet about it, because as far as he could see, he never saw himself telling anyone about his ability, and he was smart enough to recognize that trying to explain his ability would probably see him placed into an asylum. Instead he simply led a semi-charmed life. The future and the present were the same to him. He was able ot prevent disasters by virtue of already having prevented them.

The more he tested himself, the greater his sight. He began to notice that he could see into his own past as well. By the time he was nineteen, he could see a year into the future, and he was getting even stronger day by day.

Which was how he knew in advance that the United States would enter World War II, and that he would not be drafted into service because of his leg, but that both his older brothers would be. As every day the years he could access grew, Wilbur was struck by melancholy at the news of death and destruction the future held. Since he was not a candidate for the armed forces, he withdrew, minding the shop in his brother's absence. He knew two years in advance that his older brother Philip died in 1944, but he could no more explain the reason for his sadness than he could prevent his brother's death, because he already knew all of his actions between 1942 and 1944, and none of them would prevent Philip from dying. This only disturbed Wilbur more. He was not consoled when, just a few months after learning of his brother's death, he also saw into the end of the war. Instead, he grew jaded, and when his other elder brother Freddie came home in 1943 due to injury, Wilbur used the opportunity to leave Page Bros. and work in a life insurance company, where he was able to use his ability to see who would be a good insurance investment. He began dating a girl named Prudence in 1943 while her beau was away, fully knowing he would marry her in 1946, a year and a half after she received the news of her soldier being killed.

His job in insurance gave Wilbur incentive to extend his sight even further, so by 1947 he was looking into 1957. By 1950, he was looking into 1965. In 1949 he became aware that he could not only see into the future, but live in it. He could skip forward and back in his life, changing what was "now" at will and with ease and knowledge. The more he practiced this, the better he became at it, so that by 1953, Wilbur was inhabiting the years between 1948 and 1975, and gaining another year or two each month. His job in insurance was immensely successful and he was paid well for his apparent knack of knowing who to insure to the company's benefit. He always insured the best investments because he already knew they were the best investments, and because he had already insured them. Past, present, and future were the same to Wilbur, and he had long since come to terms with it. In addition to being able to inhabit his life between these dates, he also found he was able to control the physical condition of his body. He wisely chose not to abuse this ability overly much an simply slowed his aging just enough so that he appeared maybe five years younger than his actual age, and attributed it to exercise and good eating whenever anyone commented on how well he looked for his age.

Prudence gave birth to two children, a daughter in 1947, Petunia, and a son in 1949, Patrick. Though she had married Wilbur and borne him two children, as the years of her life went on she became progressively more annoyed with her husband's come-what-may attitude. (Wilbur never told her anything of his temporal abilities.) She found him insufferable, the way he always seemed to know what would happen and was never, ever surprised. She began an affair in 1958, and to add insult to injury, when she told Wilbur about it in 1960, he wasn't surprised, seeing as how he already knew. He also already knew when she said she wanted to separate in 1962, and was similarly unsurprised and perfectly amicable about their divorce in 1965. Prudence never forgave him for this amicability. It only fueled her dislike of Wilbur.

Wilbur had no problems with the divorce because he was already living in his second marriage, which began when he met a twenty-one-year-old student named Amelia in 1966. Though there was a twenty-five year age difference between them, they hit it off splendidly. Amelia, who came from an abusive background, loved her "daddy-o" and how sweet and loving he was. They married the same year.

Wilbur's son Patrick, who generally sided with Prudence in everything, was horrified at his father's actions and stopped speaking to Wilbur, which bothered Wilbur not one bit when he could, at whim, return to a time when Patrick was seven and they built model boats together. His daughter, Petunia, was "disappointed" that her father had married a girl nearly the same age as her, but she was her father's daughter, especially in terms of personality, and took the marriage in stride. She tended more towards cutting off her mother, since she didn't appreciate her mother's constant complaining about Wilbur's "unseemly" behavior.

Also in 1966, Wilbur was respectfully laid off from his job, on the grounds that his behavior was a poor reflection on the company, but Wilbur had long since put his earnings into various stocks. While he paid his ex-wife a considerable sum in the settlement, his investments grew and ensured him a very comfortable life, while his ex-wife could only spend her money and eventually ended up supported by her son's family. (She did try investing, but did not have Wilbur's knack for it.) Despite being somewhat wealthy, Wilbur maintained a comparably modest lifestyle with Amelia. They moved into a lovely lakeside house in Horseshoe Lake, North Carolina, and Amelia gave birth to their first child in 1967, a son named James, followed by a daughter, Annabelle, in 1968. By 1967, Wilbur was also fully in control of his powers, and had foreknowledge of his entire life, up to his death.

Post-Extraction
Technically speaking, 1967 was the year Wilbur began his second career as a temporal comptroller. He was approached by the nonpartisan temporal authority to begin the job which forty-seven years earlier he had been born to do: the regulation of time across dimensions. He was assigned to work with the Fleet. He became a part of the family, while maintaining his Grey Mandate and not technically taking the Fleet's side in the conflict. Since the end of the conflict, he has remained with the Fleet and made it clear his intention to serve as the Imperium's Comptroller General for as long as he is alive -- and with his temporal abilities, that means a lot.