Week Five: Houses and Orders

Just saying I might need to go over the Hauserkinder parts because I'm really interested in this.

Hauserkinder
A time active war partly fought in unrealised timelines as both sides try to beneficially reengineer local history. Alternative histories are: actualised, raised, and reiterated. The plotting of temporal disruption is as much a map of the shifting battlelines as a higher dimensional mathematics. What survives of the scoured realities, (through paradox, "oxbow" timelines or simple bureaucratic failure) is washes up on stable hisotry as folklore. Both the Timelords and the enemy are content to ignore their own fallout until it generates something practical and spectacular. The Faction considers nothing paradoxical impractical.

House Arpexia
Chapter: Patrex.
Hyperaesthetic characteristics: Night vision, hallucinatory hysterics, and highly developed magnetism.
Notorious for taking things too literally.
The only House to retain the pre War level heade approach/belief in pure reason seeing it as: obvious, self evidient, and fundamental. does reasearch for research's sake.
They are Gallifrey's only scientific fundamentalists and thus notoriously driven and humorless.
Culturally opposed to House Xianthellipse.
They are wary of House Xianthellipse's diodiversity experiments partly due to the failure of the Babel they wer comissioned to produce Pre War.
Produces the majority of the Timelord's purely technical War devices, (it's armoury is described as endless). It mainitains the largest number of experimental timeships and created the first nechronomacers.


Babels
Second generation Casts.
Result of the, "Catherion Imprimiture" covert attempt during Morbius's presidency to improve the Casts.
Designed and bred to defend Gallifrey from physical and language viral attacks aswell as independent coordination.
Each one was sentient intelligence hardwired into the brain of a time active agent.
Bred using a specially modified loom bouyght from the long extinct House Catherione for: three birds egg, a plot of ceremonial land, and the Harrison H4 Watch. The reciept is the only proof the Imprimitire existed, no knowledge of the loom modifications survived but given how they turned out and the massacre they were grisly and horrific.
There were no more then eight, (only three reliably identified), grown within the Imprimiture's first fifty years, and all were insane to varying degrees.
Only reactivated due to the War.
Described as being pure contradiction: They see only meat. Passion unchecked by mercy or satisfaction, (known to delay an offensiove so they can properly mutilate a prisoner). They don't kill but take care in keeping thier victims alive for as long as possible. Yet they have sweet voices and pose delicately.
The babels could not turn the War by themselves but gave the Timelords a powerful advantage at a time when the Timelords were stull struggling to understand, "vuglar" combat.
The remaining ones were destroyed by the 8th Doctor during the Lethean Campaign.


Casts
Pre War Gallifrey's only line of defence, (invasion or cultural imperialism).
Hollow insubstantial baryonic matter puppets, (physical existed in ways conceputal beings don't ) and linked to Gallifrey's noosphere to literally defend the Timelord's culture. As Gallifrey is history's mothernode then an attack could erase the Timelord's: protocols, collective memeory, and language in the first blow.

Only useful when connected to Gallifrey.
Originaly created to carry out: straight forward, violent, and hazardous acitivities in the outside universe for the Timelords to maintain the starus quo.
Uncomfortably similar to conceptual entities the enemy uses but a different proposition, (sentient and physically existed in ways conceptual being cannot).
Upon activation they absorbed radiation from nearby spacetime events via lines of causality, converting it baryonic matter, (gaining physical subbstance) or strange matter, (allowing them to manifest in: 0, 1st, or 2nd dimensional forms effectively invisible).
Programmed with a set of instructions but their consciousness could be boosted to near sentience in an emergency.
Had lulled the Timelord's into a false sense of security.
Useless against conceptual opponents, (eg: Anarchitects). All but 73 were destroyed in the failed attack on Gallifrey Prime/1 which fragmented their noosphere and Eye of Harmony connections, (those not killed became plainative phantoms haunting their timeships and Houses).
Lethean campaign: The surviving 73 casts were placed in a single offensive fleet in a doomed charge, their timeships were eaten from within by the enemy's timeship eater weapons and caused a multi year firestorm on Lethe's surface.
(600 total? Symbolically 100 per Chapter and 527 is a good, impressive, non ridiculous sounding loss number).


House Catherion
Chapter: Unknown. (It doesn't matter but I'm tempted to say Scendeles: 1.Gut instinct. 2.So they actually have some).
A, "Fallen" House, (long exticnt bloodline).
It's modified loom was destroyed after the massacre.
The surviving Babels were confined to silos and starved of light and radition until dead.
3 were reactivated for the time front battles of the Lethean campaign.

The Catherion Massacre
Coincided with the inexplicable disappearance of the H4 watch from Gallifrey, (it remains untraceable, it could be anywhere like say, a garage in Peckham*) symbolic of the Timelords washing their hands of the project and or it running out of time).
Information is vague due to their being only one survivor and covered in uncertainity, historians being unsure of it's physical actuality due to the utter rarity of violence, (the Babel's morbid, obsessive desecration) on Pre-War Galifrey.
The stories suggest the psychotic murderous babel's works were something carnal or even fertrile. the most noteable being the, "House of Faces", (the great hall decorated with both it's victim's and various animal skulls precisely arranged on opposite benches, (see by some as foreshadowing for the Faction's 11 Day Empire parliment). More dubious accounts state it was wearing some of it's victims's organic exterior when it was brought down.
As the Babels were more adaptable self aware Casts it's possible it was folowing it's instincts using it's victims rather then baryonic matter.
Captured by Order of the Weal guards at high cost possibly held a House Ixion befiore being destroyed, (it wasn't).


*=Not a serious point as Raquel Turner's acting .C.V. includes work on Doctor Who but it's an interesting cultural coincidence worth noting.


House Ixion
Chapter: Unknown. Irrelevant after becoming the Order of the Weal's .H.Q..
A Fallen House, presumed extinct as the vast majority left during the First Diaspora. Looked after by a servitor house.
The House was on the southern most extent of the civilised area near the mountainous terrain.
Loom was left unused.
Technically recorded as active. (Bureaucratic error is an attempted successor organisation/reformed .C.I.A. using it as cover?).
Used to store Babels.


Lethean Campaign
Early major campaign, the Last Crusade of the Second Wave.
Notable for the participants, (all 73 remaining Casts and exotic mercenaries used by both sides) and the Babel's massive slaughter.
Renegades an interventionalists were tricked into returning to Gallifrey then House Mirraflex's military psychosurgeons lobotomised them and fittied neural links to the remaining Babels making them relatively restrained and controllable.
The Babels supremely successfully fought on the frontline for a year.
The 8th Doctor boarded the timeship where the remaining three Babel pilots were hidden and killed them allowing the enemy to destroy the remaining Babels with several waves of suicide attacks severely damaging Timelord morale.


The Order of the Weal


Dates
900.B.T.W., (10 years before the Morbius presidency): Founded during the breif realpolitik attack that resulted in Morbius's presidency.
500,000 post Founding: Chatelaine Thessalia and her obvious sucessors are killed.
400.B.T.W./100years before Gandfather Paradox's release: Ceased operating.

Purpose
Common Weal= Common Good.
Ruthlessly rationalist and covert.
Developed Morbius's realpolitik gesturing into a pure, nihilist philosophy.
Secretly held sway over the Timelords for nearly 700 years after Morbius's Presidency.
Founded by the Morbius, (who also chose Thessalia as it's head) partly as an useful counter intelligence service, (combat the Houses's, "quiet megalomania" and the rising interventionalist movements) but also a chance to remould a House to his own ideology.
Rejected the traditon starting stories of the anchoring engineers regarding them as spurious at best and ideological at worst. All oral history was considered to be lies designed to obscure or excuse contemporary political activity, (intervention groups were suspected intervention groups were planting new political mythologies into the noosphere visa the Eye of Harmony, the Order planted false histories and counter myths soley to see the information vectors). The start of the paranoia age which remained in full swing at least 50 years.D.T.W. and unlikely to ever end.
Preserved the establishment by pro actively courting troublemakers and endorsing radical political views to prevent: malcontents, renegades, and radicals them from joining genuine anti establishment forces.
First operational success was the exposure and descrediting of Morbius as a fanatic, 9he may have been disappointed but wasn't surprised).
Then it turned it's attention to the more extremist interventionalist groups as the tur enemy with which were seeking power at the expense of the comon good, (renegades and cults could be tolerated or exploited).
As more time active cultures noticed Gallifrey's existence and the Timelords felt a creeping dread about the outside universe the Order switched it's attention to the possibility of a sustained invasion by a unknown formidable enemy abandoning the Common Weal for pragmatism. Off world missions were sanctioned to monitor Violent Uknown Event hoping they would gain a future glimpse. They were dedicated to tracking down and isolating the enemy but had no starting point. Soon all of their timeships were tied up in offworld surveillance, (including at the Fornier of Time). Panic began to set in amongst the Timelord and the Order started falling apart.
Contiuned to function after deaths of Thessalia's and her most obvious successors under several caretaker directors with inertia initially keeping most of the operations going but the network of agents and contacts were now inaccessible and fragmented so it's functions and members were gradually subsumed by other Interventionalist groups.
Remembered as a typical also ran cult, one among the many established in the millennium before the War eclipsed by House the Faction Paradox. History had overtaken it as Gallifrey was living out Morbius's legacy.
May have commissioned the Babels.

Agents
Had 170 active members.
Simple heirarchy with the Chatelaine directing all operational matters and her heir apparent, (which frequently changed according to her whims).
Staffed by malcontents from other Houses given combat training but the majority carried out the required daily administration.
Myrmidobs, (antmen) were the best trained and equipped soldiers on the Gallifrey. Acted as both the Chatealine's elite bodyguard and emergency shock troops permenantly stationed in the order's four timeships. Black and gold liveried. (Maybe depict them using .L.G.T.W. armour and equipment).
Cultivated contact with reneagdes and radicals giving it a large informal spy and sleeper network who's idnetities were only known to the Chatelaine and her inner circle. Keen to recruit, "mutant" agents.
Never used the House Ixion loom. (Presumably for ideaological reasons).
Proccupied with unstable bloodlines could have prompted it to subtly alter active looms's programming dynamics to see what would happen/create future recruits.
Initiation was deprogramming the recruitee by removing the cultural and pychological blocks that blinkered them to the outside universe.

Other
Three major potentially suspect sources of information: 1.Posthuman sects eyewitness accounts regarding events surrounding it's eventual destruction. 2.Former Weal agents testimony, (incomplete and tainted by subsequent associations). 3.Chatelaine Thessalia's, "Little Book of Power".


Chatelaine Thessalia
Unpredictable.
Morbius's romantic interest.
Thought anchoring period relics cluttered up Gallifreyan society.
Regarded the only truth to be that that an individual can: see, that you can hear, feel, taste, smell, intuit, than can be reasoned.
Slightly prescient about the War, some of her suggestions could have made a significant impact on the early stages, but got several key details wrong.
Became obsessed with Violent Unknown Events.
Her last known act was an unchac=racteristic full spectro


War Predictions: Chatelaine Thessalia
Two incorrect assumptions: the enemy was not motivated by physical or temporal survival/preservation and that only the final stages of the war would be physical when Gallifrey was thoroughly crippled witht he first stike being a noosphere attack.
The minor pre War skirmishes shattered her assumptions and she planned to start: clearing up loose end, shutting down secret projects, and a new recuitment drive.


Violent Unknown Events
A high order chaotic event beyond the normal bounds of catastrophe theory, as it remains so long after the event affecting those present at the time and later investigaters.
Hard to document as by it's very nature data about them tends to: crash, corrupt, vanish, or self falsify.
The Timelords consider them too unpredictable to exploit but the enemy is supposedly able to engineer them. (SUPPOSEDLY, while it does match up with the enemy's ability to delete knowledge fo their methods it would not be the first coincidence in the Book. Also it could be that the Timelords only think they are capable of it).


What did we learn about the enemy?
27.Like the Timelords it is willing to ignore the fallout they generate until it generates something practical and spectacular.
28.Destroyed all but 73 Casts in their failed attack on Gallifrey Prime/1.
29.They use timeship eater weapons.
30.It took at least 2 waves of suicide attacks for them to destroy the remaining disabled Babels.
31.It was not motivated to physical or temporal survival/preservation.
32.Supposedly able to engineer Violent Unknown Events.

In a similar vein, the rumoured renegade who defeated the trio of Babel-puppeteer renegades is probably a big hint towards our favourite child of time. Ixion are also briefly mentioned as briefly holding a captured Babel, so it all begins to add up. Wonder if there's any suggestion on who the trio of captured renegades are meant to be?


I like how the initial entries focus on the smaller scale individuals and elements caught up in the war. Mysterious orphan children or abandoned castes of front-line soldiers (or perhaps they're the same beings, overlapping). In fact this whole chapter cleverly reflects that theme of abandoned soldiers, with the Order of the Weal and Imperator Presidency being 'passed over by history', replaced by the more daring and modern Faction Paradox. Forgotten pieces from early in the War, left behind only as traces. It feels like with each entry you travel further into the past of this little digression, starting with the left-behind lost children and ending up ascending to their creators, before they too are swallowed up by time.

The Casts remind me a bit of the cloister wraiths seen in Hell Bent, lost phantoms stalking the corridors of Gallifrey and reflecting the culture above.


I find it highly interesting in the entry on Babels that the Book goes out of its way to mention that the bizarre land receipt is the only documentation about Catherion Imprimiture or Babels in general, but continues to exposit still more detailed information, going on to mention 'reliable sources' and covering other events. Its almost as if the enigmatic authors of the book had first-hand knowledge of the project, either via interaction with the Babels or being responsible for them in the first place. Though perhaps it may hint at more of an 'oral history' compilation to the facts found in the Book, rather than relying on strict evidence. Kinda crazy to think that so much of the 'facts' might be nothing more than hearsay or rumour, but with how propaganda heavy some entries are I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised. The narration doesn't usually hint much at who might have written the Book, so this was a tantalising little potential, almost inviting one to examine the dissonance between there only being a scant bit of documentation and pages more information nonetheless.

Then later on in Chatelaine Thessalia's entry we get this golden nugget: "...[she] considered all oral mythology a lie, designed to obscure or excuse contemporary political activity." It's like the Book is screaming out not to trust what you're reading in this chapter, like a concept worming its way sublty through the entries. This is what makes re-reading in this curated order so satisfying, knowing all the pieces were there and being able to put it together with a little nudging.

Her war predictions also allows us to glean some information on what the enemy aren't, another case of the Book of the War acting like a puzzle to solve, encouraging an active reader. It also reinforces how the enemy are practically made out of the negative space where a oppositional foe to the Great Houses should be.

Despite feeling at times like a diversion from the big action or players of the War, there's an unsettling feeling throughout that there's something about all this that's more important than anyone's letting on.

And now some thoughts on the sections I know we were supposed to read.

Kaspar Hauser was a Time Lord by "birth", unless I'm misreading. When it says he was "excised from the local timeline with a simple dagger wound", do you suppose that means he was brought back to the Homeworld, or was he literally killed as a failed experiment? If he wasn't killed, it's interesting to think that he might have gone on to live a normal Homeworld life.

"Justine's Story" has nothing to do with Cousin Justine, right? None of the dates and details line up. Yet as far as I can tell it's not based on anything in real history the way Hauser's story is, so the choice of name seems noteworthy.

The symbolic purchase of the Catherion breeding engine seems more like something the Faction would do than the Presidency.

I like the way the Lethean Campaign hints at the Doctor's activities from an outside perspective. And gosh, doesn't it make you sad to speculate who the other three renegades were...

There's a line in the Thessalia entry that refers to "the interventionist aesthetic", as opposed to "the interventionist ideology". That seems rather telling.

Mh, but the Homeworld is hardly the be-all end-all of the FP Universe, is it? It is one thing that the Great Houses have an emptiness at their core, but, not to put too fine a point on it, they are the baddies. The old order fighting tooth and nail to cling to relevance, and losing pace. The Enemy are vital. The Faction, paradoxically, are vital. Even Lolita is, in her own way; especially insofar as she's a mother (albeit a mother of unspeakable things), fertile in the all-encompassing way of an ancient goddess. 

Hatchlings though.