Register of Anomalous Claims

The Register of Anomalous Claims is the primary docket for all petitions, discoveries, and formal declarations pertaining to subjects which challenge the Tower's established taxonomic or spatial frameworks. Its purpose is not to adjudicate the truth of such claims, but to provide a structured, cross-referenced repository for their bureaucratic existence, thereby preventing their loss into the Tower's general administrative noise.

Jurisdiction and Scope

Authority over the Register is vested in the Grand Registrar's Office, specifically under the purview of the Librarian-Provisional for Anomalous Holdings. The scope is defined in the Third Concordance, Clause 11.δ, which states: "Any assertion which necessitates a footnote contradicting the Principal Register or which requires measurement by a non-standard unit shall be routed to the Anomalous Claims desk." This has been interpreted to include claims of: rooms that appear only on alternate Tuesdays; catalogued items that exhibit more pages than were originally inventoried; and staircases that descend but report arriving on a higher floor.

It is important to distinguish the Register from the Register of Irregular Acquisitions, which deals with physical objects of unknown provenance, and the Bureau of Unattributable Claims, which processes submissions made under correspondent anonymity. A claim may be entered into all three registers, a situation which typically triggers an Edict of Precedence to resolve jurisdictional overlap.

Physical Form and Access Protocol

The Register itself is a bound folio of vellum sheets, housed in a reading room on Floor Ξ-7 (the "Antechamber of Qualified Exceptions"). The folio does not obey standard pagination; new entries manifest as interstitial leaves between existing ones, often causing the volume to swell inconveniently. A dedicated clerk, whose title is Registrar of Anomalous Ingress, is responsible for applying the necessary pressure to the covers to allow consultation.

Access is granted by presenting a docket slip stamped with the sigil of the Department of Anomalous Durations. The room is equipped with a single, slowly rotating chair bolted to the floor, intended to discourage prolonged study. Citations from the Register must use the format RAC [Claim Number].[Sub-clause].

Notable Entries and Precedents

The Register's most cited entries form the backbone of the Tower's anomalous jurisprudence:

• RAC 001.α (The Claim of Perpetual Shelf): The foundational entry, documenting the first formal claim of a bookshelf that, when measured from left to right, yielded a length greater than when measured from right to left. This established the principle of "dimensional non-commutativity" in spatial claims.
• RAC 408.β (The Arrin Conundrum): A cross-reference to the findings of the Inquiry into Persistent Anomalous Material Deficiency, concerning the scholar Arrin, whose extensive written work on a non-existent seventh sub-basement was entered into the Register, but who himself failed to materialize for subsequent hearings.
• RAC 992.γ (The Whispering Stacks Petition): This claim, submitted by a consortium of indexers from the Satellite Desmene, argued that a specific series of shelves in the Non-Euclidean Stacks were not producing shadows, but rather "auditory echoes of potential shadows." Its validation required consultation with the Register of Manifestations and resulted in the creation of a new auxiliary sensory taxonomy.

Contradictions and Ongoing Disputes

As with many Tower documents, the Register's authority is frequently challenged by contradictory statutes. The Register of Ephemeral Statutes once contained a statute (since expired) declaring all entries in the Register of Anomalous Claims to be "provisionally canonical," a status the Precedent Register lists as "superseded by practical obscurity."

A more persistent academic debate concerns the Register's relationship to the Register of Unanswered Questions. Some scholars, notably those of the Incidental School, argue that every Anomalous Claim is, in essence, an Unanswered Question wearing the formal garb of a petition. The more bureaucratic Formalist School rejects this, pointing to the Ancillary Register's clear structural differentiation. This debate was ostensibly settled by the Third Concordance, Clause 7 (regarding Edicts of Precedence), but continues in the footnotes of every major treatise on archival metaphysics.

Procedural Flow and Integration

Once a claim is inscribed in the Register, it undergoes a mandatory cross-referencing process. This involves the Bureau of Unattributable Claims checking for anonymized parallels, and the Ontological Register's clerks assessing its impact on the Tower's foundational categories. Approved claims—or more accurately, claims that have not been actively nullified—are eventually fed into the Central Wall-Register via a semi-annual consolidation decree issued by the Grand Registrar. This integration is often partial, resulting in the curious phenomenon of floors that officially "contain a disputed zone, see RAC" rather than a room with a fixed number.

The final, and most critical, output of the Register is its quarterly digest, which is distributed to the Register of Eligible Adjudicators. This ensures that any Librarian called upon to rule on an anomalous situation has a curated, if not necessarily coherent, body of precedent from which to draw.