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Time
Time is a theoretical measurement created by earthling homosapiens who thought that the Earth was flat.
 Discrepancies in travel were observed. An uneventful trip from PointA to PointB in the summer appeared to take longer than an identical trip took in the winter. Because the seasons changed, and the star Sol moved off beneath the equator. It disturbed people to think that days were either getting shorter, or that they were getting slower. They invented time.
Time was invented to be a constant. One second equaled one second; sixty equaled a minute; thirty-six hundred seconds, or sixty minutes, equaled an hour; twenty-four hours equaled one day.
Seven days equaled a week. That's as constant as time ever got.
Four and a half weeks or so equaled a month; ten months equaled a year. People began to measure time.
It wasn't too many decades before June arrived with the snow. Something had gone wrong.
So the calendar was adjusted: two months were added to equalise the length of a calendar year to a terran year.
Centuries passed before people noticed that something was still wrong.
Leapyears were invented: every fourth year, a given year--divisible by four--was three hundred sixty-six days in length.
Ultimately, every hundredth year which would otherwise been a leapyear, neglected to be a leapyear; every fourth century, that hundredth year became a leapyear yet again.
Every century, the years X04, X08, X12, X16, X20, X24, X28, X32, X36, X40, X44, X48, X52, X56, X60, X64, X68, X72, X76, X80, X84, X92, and X96 were leapyears; the year Y00 following X96 wasn't a leapyear, except in the years 400, 800, 1200, 1600, 2000, 2400, and so on.
It was all very confusing, and people were all very confused; people were confused anyway, so they embraced it.
Regrettably, the people were confused enough that they misunderstood the simple mathematical formula involved, and by AD2000, began to assume that the twenty-first century had begun. There were various reasons for that 'logic', none of which made any real sense to anyone of any real intelligence.
But even the intelligent homosaiens became confused in matters of fourth-dimensional travel.
Having worked out an acceptable calendar--albeit one which required microseconds to be added and subtracted from Boulder's atomic clock every few years--homosapiens began to find new problems with time. One of them was relativity.
Superlight travel did terrible things to time. Or, more accurately, since time was still nothing more than a theoretical constant designed to measure distance, it did terrible things to homosapien observers. It moved. It bent. It warped into Mobius strips of unease.
It disintegrated and reintegrated as something entirely else.
And that was just a matter of superlight travel, which wasn't really that big a deal.
Bigger a deal was the emigration from and immigration back into a given dimensional area--universions, extradimensional locations, LosAngelinoid areacodes, and other such theoretical quasilocales which looked great on paper but failed to make any sense to the onsite observer at all.
Id est: a homosapien travelling from its universe to the Lost Kingdom and back often travelled also through great spans of otherwise unaccountable time. Years. Decades. Centuries. Millennia. Time.
Homosapiens travelling from El Que to a universe from which they hadn't come from were at least as likely to move very, very far into the future, or into the past.
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