The fictional town of Grantville, West Virginia and its power plant are displaced in space-time, through a side effect of a mysterious alien civilization. A hemispherical section of land about three miles in radius measured from the town center is transported back in time from April 2000 to May 1631. The town is thrust into the middle of the Thirty Years' War, in the German province of Thuringia in the Thuringer Wald , near the fictional German free city of Badenburg. This Assiti Shards effect occurs during a wedding reception, accounting for the presence of several people not native to the town, including a doctor (James Nichols) and his daughter (Sharon Nichols), a paramedic. Real Thuringian municipalities located close to Grantville are posited as Weimar, Jena, Saalfeld and the more rem