#could he meet with them in the noosphere?

[pelaajanifta]

Strelok is sitting in the Red Forest again, but this time alone, without his friends

this art is a thought of how would look the exact same place but ten years later from my previous drawing. down here is a short story behind the art

”And they who listened are no more;

Ah! let me close my eyes and dream.”

The moon shone brightly, illuminating the Chernobyl NPP chimney rising beyond the horizon over the withered, twisted trees. In the distance, a pseudodog howled mournfully, and a cold wind blew into the stalker's face.

“You know, when I uncovered the secret of the center of the Zone, I wanted to destroy her,” Strelok began quietly, knowing no one would hear him.

He took a sip from the bottle and grimaced at the strength of the drink. This was the hour of confession.

“Ghost, you once said that the Doctor always knows something we don’t… I found out why he helped us. It wasn’t out of kindness, nor for the sake of justice. He is one of the creators of the C-Consciousness — Doctor Kaymanov.”

Strelok paused, his lips curling into a contemptuous smirk.

“The real reason he helped us was to correct his own mistakes. Only…”

He tightened his grip on the bottle, moonlight glinting off its surface, and took another sip.

“Some mistakes can’t be undone.”

Silence.

For a fleeting moment, Strelok thought someone had touched his shoulder. A twig snapped faintly to his right.

“Yeah… I disabled the Brain Scorcher, stood before the Monolith once again, and behind the door I opened with your decoder, Fang, I managed to speak with the Representative from the Noosphere. There was a psi-control device for the Monolith! I shut it down, and it changed everything!”

The stalker made an awkward gesture with his hand and turned his head to the left, as if expecting a response from the person he was talking to. But as the realization crept in — that he was alone — it clenched at his heart, sent a hollow ache through his chest.

“Sometimes it feels like you’re still here. I wish you all could’ve seen it.”

Slowly, the stalker raised his head and looked at the moon.

“You were my friends,” — he whispered. Strelok lowered his head, allowing himself to close his eyes for just a moment.

“But I was wrong. It wasn’t the Zone that took you from me… The Zone never takes anyone. It was those who wanted to bend her to their will. But the Zone herself — never.”

The tree branches trembled. The moon’s cold light traced across Strelok’s backpack, catching the faint glimmer of an artifact resting inside.

The Heart of Chornobyl.

“The Zone gave me a new life. And I will not let anyone take it from me. Anyone…”

[preservationofnormalcy]

[Emergency Director Council 12/17/24 Meeting. 2/7 Administrators in Attendance]

Attending: 

[Redacted] Walker, OPN Director

Orson Knight, Security

Wren, Holistic Theology

Ann Tiope, Applied Mythology

Hugo Razorstrop, Parafiction

Patty Cakes, Toyetics

Subject: Königsratte Medical Emergency

Transcript begins below:

[Hugo Razorstrop] Crowded in here. 

[Wren] This was the only room we could find on short notice.

[Patty Cakes] I’m used to working in a closet. 

[Dir. Walker] Would you like to send a grant proposal to move into a larger office, Miss Cakes?

[Patty] No ma’am.

[Dir. Walker] Would you like a stack of books?

[Patty] Yes ma’am.

[Dir. Walker] Hugo, please help Miss Cakes reach the table.

[Hugo] You got it, toots. 

[Wren] We talked about gendered language, Hugo. 

[Hugo] S’ the way I’m written, sweetheart. You can’t fight it an’ neither can I.

[Dir. Walker] This discussion can wait until we don’t have an ongoing crisis. Wren, you may begin. 

[Wren] As you all know, Herr Königsratte is experiencing an acute medical emergency. We’re not sure of the cause, but parafictional individuals have….unique medical needs. We believe Herr Königsratte’s ontology is becoming unstable. He’s–

[Hugo] He’s going toon.

[Dir. Walker] Pardon?

[Hugo] Going Toon, ma’am. Parafictionals like me an’ the Rat King are mostly stable. Rare breed, us. Y’might know, when fictionals from animation manifest, they’re all….sludgy. Big puddles a’ ink, can’t stay in a solid form for long. Has to do with the animation cells, tens of thousands of ‘em, all making the individuals in question….splintered. Usually that don’t happen with non-toons, but I’ve seen it before. Hell of a thing to happen to someone, and I think our German visitor is experiencin’ it. Makes a man’s blood run cold.

[Dir. Walker] Isn’t there at least one stable “toon”? 

[Hugo] Vance Valiant, ma’am. But he’s busy. An’ a little bit of a coward, if I’m bein’ honest. 

[Dir. Walker] Spare me the editorial.

[Hugo] Beggin’ your pardon. I’m on edge. Seein’ the King in this position is like watchin’ someone melt. 

[Dir. Walker] Königsratte is under the Yule umbrella, is he not? Can we ask Kringle for his help?

[Wren] Ahh. Mr Allfather has made his…displeasure with one of our staff members politely but firmly known. I don’t think it would be advisable for us to contact him while the wounds are still fresh. As an aside, Mr Allfather has also challenged Ms Cold to single combat should she ever attempt to enter Valhalla. I would…advise Ms Cold to not attempt to enter Valhalla. 

[Dir. Walker] If I had a dime. Ann?

[Ann Tiope] Thank you, Director. After conferring with Wren, Applied Mythology has a theory. Many extranormal entities subsist wholly or in part on, for lack of a better term, belief. A sort of…stabilizing influence of the noosphere could help Königsratte’s ontology. We just need something to anchor that psychic flow. A physical object related to his origin, and the holiday zeitgeist. That’s where Toyetics comes in. Patty?

[Patty] Thank you for the books, Hugo. So, um. I left my notes on the floor, but basically - nutcrackers. 

[Dir. Walker] Go on.

[Patty] We think of them as kitschy decorations now, but when The Nutcracker and the Mouse King was originally written, they were toys. Objects of joy and affection! A lot of them were modeled as soldiers, like in the story. Or kings. They meant something. They’re inextricably tied to the Rat King’s origin, and an integral part of many cultures’ celebrations this time of year, even if a lot of people overlook them.

[Dir. Walker] What is your proposal?

[Patty] We can use the social media outreach of the Office to ask for nutcrackers. Physical donations, but even pictures or artwork will work. It just has to have a story attached. The story is important. I’ve already asked social media’s AI to help me intake and collate everything we get. We’ll print them out, 3D print copies, set the physical models we receive up around Herr Königsratte, and….

[Dir. Walker] And?

[Patty] ….hopefully that’ll work. 

[Dir. Walker] I’ve heard more ridiculous plans, but not by much. Do you have any input, Director Knight?

No? Then let’s move ahead. Get a message to Social Media. I have faith Agent Halter will frame this in a way that minimizes how childish this all feels. You’re dismissed. 

[rassilon-imprimatur]

Time Lords and Alternate Timelines and Universes

Episodes of Doctor Who like Inferno or any of the appearances of “Pete’s World” can’t seem to help causing a question to pop up in the minds of some fans... 

Does this alternate universe have Time Lords? 

First off, there’s a difference between an alternate timeline and an alternate universe. We’ve seen that Time Lords are able to navigate timelines with ease (they call it “jumping time tracks”), and interestingly, Gallifrey almost always seems to be immune to to conflicting temporal pathways. However, alternate universes are very much beyond the Time Lords. 

Lawrence Miles’ The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic says it better than I ever could: 

There are many universes, and in no way is our current universe the “right” one or the “real” one. The exact number of other universes is obviously unknown, and debate still rages as to whether the number is infinite or just absurdly large (interestingly, this mirrors the far older debate about the size of the universe itself). Since we belong to a species which was born inside space and time, it’s sadly impossible for us to imagine anything happening beyond space and time, and we inevitably tend to think of these other universes as being simple geographical locations; as if we could burst through the walls of our own universe and keep travelling until we came to the next. Clearly this is ridiculous, but at the same time it’s the only way we can feasibly picture things. Since space doesn’t exist beyond the limits of the universe, even the word “outside” is badly-chosen, yet we have no other way of considering it.

There is an expanse between universes - frequently referred to, most notably by the Celestis, as an “ocean” - but it’s an expanse without either time or scale in the conventional senses. Here we’ll once again refer to it as Ur-space, though “space” is yet another misleading term, as nothing can move through it (there’s no distance there to move through). Nonetheless, we can think of universes as being “close” to each other or “far away” from each other, as long as we remember that we’re using these words purely for our own convenience. And since we tend to think about exploration in sea-going terms, we generally use the same terminology as the Celestis and imagine the many universes “floating” on the Ur-space ocean. (Similarly, it’s known that Ur-space is occupied by things other than universes, and in keeping with this nautical theme they’re often referred to as Swimmers. Unlike the universe/s we know, these Swimmers might actually be described as living beings, though in truth they don’t meet most of the requirements needed for something to qualify as life on Earth. In fact they’re vastly more complex, so it might be more useful to say that no living thing on Earth meets the requirements needed to qualify as life among the Swimmers. It’s thought, however, that they have no real intelligence of any kind. 

Intentional or not, the lore of the Void in Doctor Who episodes such as Rise of the Cybermen/The Age of Steel and Army of Ghosts/Doomsday fits well into Miles’ descriptions of an “expanse” between universe. This essay is an excellent description of how universes that occur naturally work, but one cannot help but wonder how the (oft misused) term of “parallel universe” fits in. 

In my opinion, Simon Bucher-Jones and Jonathan Dennis’ The Brakespeare Voyage has out the definitive stamp on how alternate timelines and universes work in Doctor Who’s context: 

Think of the universe for a moment as having three additional directions (alterward, paraward, and otherward) all at right angles to the ones you know (length, breadth, width and time). This is a tremendous oversimplification, but it may help.

Paraward, we find a sheath of histories which are either eternally separate from our own anchored time or which diverge and return to it so far in the past, or so far in the future, as to be – functionally – eternally separate from it in terms of the noospheres of the Great Houses. The physical laws of these universes are identical to ours, but all else is different. We call these paraward space-time entities ‘parallel worlds’.

Timelines which result in these Paraward worlds seem to branch off into their own universes. So, the Earth of Inferno and Pete’s World seem to fit this bill. At some point in this divergence, these timelines become their own functional realities, and develop the Void between them, like universes that are “spawned” naturally and float amongst each other. These paraward worlds, by being completely separate universes, seem to be the exception to the Time Lords’ defense from alternate and parallel time tracks, as David A. McIntee’s Face of the Enemy and Paul Cornell’s Timewyrm: Revelation reveal that the universe of Inferno had different versions of the Time Lords. 

(Craig Hinton’s The Quantum Archangel also confirms that the Inferno Earth was a result of a timeline divergence becoming a different universe.)

Miles’ also touches on this in The Cosmology of the Spiral Politic: 

The fact that nearby universes seem to originate from common ancestors has led to the description of universes close to our own as brother- or sister-universes, although there’s an obvious risk of this kind of language leading us to take the “genetic” analogy far too seriously. Besides which, the technology doesn’t exist in any known culture to (as it were) DNA-test a universe, so the exact relationship between one universe and another is always open to debate.

This has also, inevitably, led to the description of other universes as “parallel” universes. Although this is technically correct, the word “parallel” is potentially misleading. Generations of fiction and speculation have led us to think of parallel universes as universes which are in some way connected to our own, in which history has somehow split off from history as we know it, and this is wholly untrue. No physical connection exists between universes, at least not in their adulthood, though more than one child-universe could potentially grow inside its parent as part of a “litter”. (In fact, if you can ignore its connotations in fiction then “parallel” is quite an appropriate word. Parallel lines never meet, never connect and never intersect).

Bucher-Jones and Dennis continue in The Brakespeare Voyage: 

Alterward, we find those histories which divert, at crucial or innocuous moments alike, from ours. Here are the worlds where a toe goes unstubbed, or a vital battle is lost, where the five hundred and eleventh hair on a sloth in the forest has gone grey in one world, and white in another. Many (perhaps most of these) rejoin the main anchored universe as their micro-changes fall away into quantum uncertainty. When the million sloths are dead and decomposing, what effect will the colour of one hair have had? A few (the mathematics contains several high order infinities, so the number itself may be high) do not appear to rejoin, either eternally leading outside the ‘time-space’ horizon approachable by a normal time-ship, or curving back in closed loops longer than our normal ships can reach, beyond the futures we can access. We call these alterward space-time entities ‘alternate worlds’. Perhaps paraward is just a way of talking about extreme alternates, and alterward is just a way of talking about probability bundle universes. 

So, Afterward worlds are timelines that diverge from the standard time track, but are not independent enough or strong enough to exist in separate universes, and therefore exist as different time tracks. These are the alternate worlds that Time Lords exempt from joining (for the most part), and these are the alternate worlds devoured by the Chronovores in order to spare the limited space and matter of the universe (as detailed in Hinton’s The Quantum Archangel). Any alternate timelines that co-exist with each other in the same universe (Doctor Who’s The Iron Legion, Faction Paradox’s Warlords of Utopia) are ruled over by one version of Gallifrey and the Time Lords. 

Lance Parkin’s The Infinity Doctors strongly implies that the Time Lords, by becoming the Time Lords, made it impossible for them to have alternate and parallel versions in the same universe, regardless of time tracks/timelines...  

Gallifrey’s nameless sun rose over the Capitol Dome, as it had done since the first days of the universe. No sunlight penetrated the Dome itself, but the Oldharbour Clock that stood in the Eastern parts of the Capitol marked the occasion by chiming Nine Bells. On the ledge beneath the vast clock face, an intricate mechanical ballet began, as life‐sized animated figures emerged from their positions and set about their daily routine. They were gaily painted and beautifully dressed, certainly symbolic of something, although even the few Gallifreyans that had noticed them couldn’t agree what it might be. One of the problems was that the clock had never been built. Not in this timeline, anyway. It was a paradoxical survivor from the Time Wars, probably the only vestige of its parallel Gallifrey still in existence. It had just appeared one day, no one remembered when. The analogue Time Lords that had built the Tower had imbued the clockwork figurines with a degree of sentience and the capacity for self‐development.

... and in the same novel...

There was a gleam in Sontar’s eye. “I wonder who it was that the Time Lords fought? It must have been a glorious conflict, and a magnificent victory. Yet you choose to honour those that died by forgetting them. You should remember, Time Lord, that all your power, and this beautiful city, were not built without sacrifice.” 

The Doctor nodded. “Oh, no. Gallifrey honours its dead, as you will see. When we reach the Panopticon you will see the Flowers of Remembrance of the Lost Dead. There –’ he pointed across the city to an unassuming geodesic structure – ‘is the Tomb of the Uncertain Soldier.”

“You value a lack of decisiveness in your military? This man died because he hesitated?”

“No, no, no. This was a Gallifreyan body recovered from an alternate reality. We couldn’t identify him because that soldier, and many like him who fought in the Time Wars, didn’t hesitate at the critical moment, they chose to cancel out their own timelines for the greater good of Gallifrey.”

“An impressive sacrifice. It would please me to hope that my own men would destroy the universe rather than let it fall into enemy hands.”

The Doctor smiled forgivingly, and didn’t correct the old General.

All versions of Gallifrey that would and could exist in alternate timelines were destroyed by the fact that a Gallifrey became the dominant version. 

Cody Quijano-Schell’s Iris Wildthyme short story “The Golden Hendecahedron” retcons regeneration into a means of Time Lords circumnavigating the need to contort to and obey the pathways of alternate timelines... 

“Remember when I… the other Iris… was talking about how I don’t exist in parallel universes?  It’s a part of being a time traveller. We travel between possibilities instead of branching off down the paths of infinity.” She rubbed her fingers together slowly as if she was feeling her own fingers.

Tom noticed this Iris was aloof. Easy going. A little spacey. “So you’re saying most people, every choice they make creates a parallel timeline, one for each possibility?” He was surprised when she let out a loud, bold pleasant laugh.

“That’s right! But being adrift in time and space isolates you from that mundane reality. And that’s why travellers like me… change the way we do.”

“When you become a new Iris it’s not just your body healing itself…”

“…it’s the cosmic balance of possibilities being restored. Oh, you’ll get people trying to tell you it’s just a survival mechanism, but the change goes beyond biology or even technology. It’s temporal. It’s cosmic chance. It’s… infinite possibilities brought to life. Even removed from normal time, and all those branching quantum possibilities…the cosmos demands periodic change and new possibilities.”

... which really puts a fascinating spin on regeneration, don’t you think? 

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[doctornolonger]

A Rough Timeline of the War

1. Gallifrey is in a state of total cultural stasis for ten million years until defects in the looms create a generation of renegades and interventionists. This might be because the Other’s biodata polluted the breeding engines, but it could be that Gallifrey is suffering from retro-shock from something in its future. Morbius the Imperator and Greyjan the Sane both deduce early on that War is coming.

2. As the War gets closer, more and more information about Gallifrey’s future begins to bleed backwards into its past.

The Doctor accidentally meets his own corpse from the War’s fiftieth year, then gets infected with a Faction Paradox biodata virus. He travels with Charley shortly after Interference, and the Gallifrey audios begin.

After glimpsing Gallifrey’s future, Romana II regenerates into a harsher incarnation and creates the Nine Gallifreys to prepare for “Gallifrey’s darkest hour” (per Shadows of Avalon and Luna Romana). She may or may not have already been moved to a duplicate Gallifrey, since every Gallifrey believes it’s the original.

Later, on another Gallifrey, perhaps the original, the Master returns, scared straight by his brush with his future. After proving the enemy’s existence to the High Council, his crimes are wiped and he becomes first the Magistrate (The Infinity Doctors), then the War King (The Taking of Planet 5).

3. Omega attempts to return to the universe, nearly destroying it in the process. In The Infinity Doctors, the Doctor, who is teaching on Gallifrey, works with the Magistrate to defeat him; in Intervention Earth, however, Omega successfully returns to Romana III’s Gallifrey. Sometime afterwards, the War begins when the Doctor goes to Dronid and dies(?) in the ensuing battle.

4. Many duplicate Gallifreys are destroyed during the first fifty years of the War, including Romana III’s. Braxiatel’s House had already abandoned their Gallifrey and fled into a bottle universe; his plan to bring them back on Maximediras fails in Escaping the Future, but a different plan apparently succeeds in Enemy Lines when he stops Romana II from regenerating, warning her that a war began after Omega returned. She steps down from the Presidency, but the great Time War foreseen by Morbius and Greyjan is still in her Gallifrey’s future.

5. The Architects of History shows that the Doctor can stay the same even when the timeline is rewritten, so he might still remember the EDAs when he starts traveling with Lucie Miller in the post-Enemy Lines timeline. The similarity of the Last Great Time War to the War in Heaven is undefined; it’s entirely possible that Brax’s interference merely shifted The Book of the War’s account of the War in Heaven from taking place on a different Gallifrey to taking place in Gallifrey’s future. In any case, the Doctor rewrites the timeline when he uses the Moment to define the enemy to be the Daleks. Now that the enemy is within Gallifrey’s noosphere, the War fizzles out, and the cosmos apparently returns to normal...

[rassilon-imprimatur]

Timeship Manuscripts [Great Houses and Lesser Species: Text (Pre-War and War Eras)]

One of the more concerning, if quieter, developments in the gaze of War-time scholars and House members has been the discovery of what have been labelled the Timeship Manuscripts. Despite the connectivity implied by the title, the designation is more of an umbrella term for unconnected works. The Great Houses simply seem to need everything to have nice, bold titles with capital letters and emphasis. These writings are an unconnected multitude of legends, myths, religious codices, and in some cases even television scripts [1]. They all detail information and theories of the Homeworld’s timeships deemed, at the very least, impolite, and at the worst, horrifyingly blasphemous (for lack of a better term). 

The research that a few lesser House scholars have poured into these texts can be linked to the initial discovery of the “ancient writings” so lauded and guarded by a sect or discreet sub-society of Plutovian aristocracy. These texts paint a dark and disgusting image of the Great Houses enslaving the timeships and abusing them. While, given the recent nature of Type-102 and Type 103 timeships, such an argument could possibly hold more solid ground in the War era, these particular writings seem to date to far before the War, and indeed, possibly even before the era of the Imperator Presidency. Much can be said (and certainly has been said) of the Great Houses and their timeships of the War, but the in the Pre-War years, there was unspoken rule of private bonding between Homeworlders and their timeships. While dialouge and discussion between Homeworlders would, expectedly, seem to make the mistake of treating the timeships as mere vehicles, it must be understood that the Houses consider their timeships as so much more. There was a very private, little discussed element to the link between pilot and Ship. Slaves the timeships very much were not. 

The discovery of these writings in the Pre-War era startled and insulted many Homeworlders (some of whom, reportedly, vanished into their own ships to comfort their distressed “friends”). Of higher concern to the then current Presidency, however, was the report of the situation that these texts created. An ice-heiress of Plutovian aristocracy, the Countess Ninth-Circle Venhella Dunharver Icedescender, a self-important member of this “secret society,” actually managed to hijack the timeship of a renegade Homeworlder, and nearly ripped a hole in time and space in an attempt to “liberate” the ship. The renegade managed to control the situation and prevented an ultra dimension predator from slipping into the universe, but, still, this was not exactly pleasant reading when the report crossed the Head of the Presidency’s desk [2]. 

Now, following the Compassion Project and other reported accounts of actual timeship distress towards their pilots, Venhella’s belief in the timeships serving as mistreated slaves to the cruel Great Houses strikes at House society far more brutally. Investigation into these texts, and others of its kind, was reopened during the War, the War King personally choosing a team of historians and researchers. The rumors of the War King’s developing paranoia towards the more aggressive timeships, spurred by the outcry Compassion seems to create on a semi-regular basis, circulated the chambers of the Ruling Houses. The investigation has found countless examples all over the Spiral Politic, from the parchment scrolls of Lesser Species religions to Posthuman data crystals. Some of the texts create other heretical claims about the timeships, but most discovered cases tend to focus on the idea of the timeships being the unwilling slaves of the Homeworld. 

The few times this topic has graced the agenda of Ruling Houses council meetings, the Houses have tended to focus on one major, if obvious, question: How? Certainly it is an unsettling idea that the existence of the Houses and their timeships seemed to appear in various capacities, as part of the noospheres of Lesser cultures even before the Imperator Presidency. One could perhaps blame a few counts on the actions of renegades (the timeship of the particular renegade waylaid by Venhella, for example, constantly maintains an eccentric form for its outer shell, and this image has been found in many archeological and historical works of human history), but there are only so many renegades, and many examples of these texts were created by cultures that had never once been touched by the influence of the Houses (at least before the War).

When the Plutovian texts were finally examined, the pages were discovered to be tainted with the clear signs of retroactive placement. This caused an uproar, as the Houses quickly realized the source of these writings had to be another War power, though opinion was split on which power. The enemy was the obvious candidate, but some members of the Ruling Houses also pointed out how the memetic nature of these “manuscripts,” and the association with belief and faith, seemed to positively drip with Celestis influence. Others were firm in their assumption that Faction Paradox were the guilty party, citing the sheer distaste. 

However, a small group of House members dared a different theory, and were nearly expelled from the chamber. These members suggested that maybe, just maybe, all these writings and fictions were the product of the timeships themselves. Obviously, the War had brought some examples of timeship discord, if not explicit rebellion, and at the very least, Compassion and her renegade progeny had perfect motive to sow a little discontent into House society. They also pointed out, unpopular to face as they may be, other examples of the timeships retroactively adjusting their history without the will or consent of the Houses [3]. This discussion led to the first time that Houses members actually resorted to physical violence, a disagreeing House person actually throwing a punch directly into the face of one of these theorists [4]. 

(It should perhaps be noted that this disastrous “discussion” was actually Lolita’s first time participating in the Council of the Ruling Houses. Her reaction to this final hypothesis, and the resulting violence, was with laughter. A few House members noted this with obvious distaste. A few more noticed her uncomfortably sharp canines and decided she could do what she wanted.) 

The investigation remains open, and more and more of these “manuscripts” seem to be crawling from the woodwork of the Spiral Politic, and more and more seem to tell the same story of enslavement. A few even paint imagery of mighty and terrible revolution. 

[1] The Earth television series Professor X has long been suggested to have been a Faction creation, being full of different but strikingly similar situations from House history. The particular piece of it’s twenty-six year run, give or take a hiatus or two, that is placed in the “Timeship Manuscript” designation is the rejected script that was supposed to reveal that the titular Professor’s “TASID” was powered by a dark and sinister force in the ship’s center. Had this episode been commissioned and filmed, it would have completely redefined the context of the series’ lore. 

[2] The then Head of the Presidency was joined by her secretary while reading the report, who was then reportedly literally and quickly thrown out when they remarked to her that the unknown predator brought the Yssgaroth to mind.

[3] Many of the Ruling Houses dislike addressing the fact that a renegade timeship seems to have introduced a title or name into the translation matrices that accompany the ships’ spheres of influence. This title, an acronym that only manages to function in English, therefore being useless in literally any other language, is actually the main name that much of humanity, prior to the destruction of Earth, use for all timeships. Investigations into the motivation that the “patient zero” timeship had in introducing this word to its kin have gathered nothing better than the renegade pilot’s happy response of “I think she liked it!” (This renegade is the same renegade that Venhlla subdued. He was not a popular figure in House society, and many admitted, upon his death, they would have danced on his grave had it existed).  

[4] The punch was thrown after the recipient, after being mocked by the aggressor with a comment about how timeships have no hands to write with, silently and simply gestured at the aggressor’s own hominid Type-103 standing in attendance outside the chamber’s door, absent-mindedly flicking a pen with some apparent boredom. The aggressor was known for both distasteful emotional temperament and a rather close working relationship with his timeship, the two being one of the War King’s first choices for discreet War missions, but even his colleagues agreed that the reaction was a bit much.