I'm trying my hand at building a MUD (multiplayer interactive-fiction game)

I'm in the design/conceptualizing phase and I've run into a problem that I can't come up with a solution for. I'm hoping some more experienced programmers will have some advice.

Here's the problem as best I can explain it. When the player decides to perform an action he sends a command to the server. the server then processes the command, determines whether or not the action can be performed, and either does it or responds with a reason as to why it could not be done. One reason that an action might fail is that the player is busy doing something else. For instance, if a player is mid-fight and has just swung a massive broadsword, it might take 3 seconds before he can repeat this action. If the player attempts to swing again to soon, the game will respond indicating that he must wait x seconds before doing that. Now, this I can probably design without much trouble. The problem I'm having is how I can replicate this behavior from AI creatures. All of the events that are being performed by the server ON ITS OWN, aka not as an immediate reaction to something a player has done, will have to be time sensitive. Some evil monster has cast a spell on you but must wait 30 seconds before doing it again... I think I'll probably be adding all these events to some kind of event queue, but how can I make that event queue time sensitive?