Week 7.2: The Academician's Story

Academicians for Game Logic
Until the final pre War decades the timelords failed to reach the self awareness development stage.
The Leser Species's rites of creation metaphors were the ideas they primed and programmed the universe with. Also Gallifrey is literally at the center of history and is thus the most important planet in existance.
This inability to think in anything but absolutes helped cause and maintain the Timelord's cultural stasis.
The last few centures .B.T.W. sw the creeping realisation that the Protocols be caccepted at face value caused chabeges: Morbius's presidency, Faction Paradox, annd the Celstis's creation.
30.B.T.W. The Timelord's realised the War was inevitable and nominated their first Academician for Game Logic Devonire.
The War doesn't make sense without game logic. Both sides have access to unlimited resources and potential so it 's a literal war but one of ritual. It was not started as some kind of game.
The brief awareness era was the Timelord's greatest era of prgoress ended by the War starting.
Without this self awreness the enemy would never have been properly understood.


Devonire
A great: orator, debator, and negotiator but only started to rise afte r the War was acknowledged as inevitable.
Thought the War meant the post Morbius presidency Timelord's constant dissent and infighting needed to end. Organised agreementts between the more ambitious Houses.
First to negotiate treaties with the Lesser species and to point out the tactical inevitability of using the Lesser Species as permanant agents. (No menton of Ace or Leela). Pardoned useful prisoners and convinced a handful of first diaspora bloodlines to return.
Wanted to complete the House unification by convincing Faction Paradox to return. Managed to get the complete probition of Faction briefily lifted.
Thought the Grandfather's severed arm would be the symbolic gift needed to get the Faction negotiating. It failed and he fell victim to Paradox anxiety and was sent to Shada prison. His fall may have been inevitable as the Game logic era was quickly ending.


Grandfather Paradox (Reresentations)
Inuniverse this makes sense but out of universe it's undercut by Mr Miles revealing he looked exactly like Norman Stanely Fletcher.



Kaiwar
The whole situation appears have been a setup by the enemy to remind the Timelords of their abilities, (driving a Timelord insane with paradox anxiety and somehow taking his freshly severed arm from Gallifrey 1 without being noticed) while removing a very capable senior official who had effectively strengthened the Timelord's hand, (culturally and militarily if only slightly) by convincing most of the none Eremite members of the First Disapora to return to Gallifrey 1 and the release of useful prisoners from Shada. Immaculata's dialogue was a speech about how powerful her new allies were and their capabilities, (maybe even how they managed to get Devonire's severed arm).


Waves
From the Gallifrey's viewpoint, the war is sudden bursts of activity against the enemy followed by a long entrenchment period in which the High Council Houses pool their bo resources and manufacture the next wave.
The Fourth Wave: No mention of Ace or Leela''s biodata being used.
The Sixth Wave was either: 1.Retroannulled by the Timelords beause they were created too damaged. 2.Erased by the enemy. 3.Or retrocompromised by the enemy as loyal to them and thus retro annulled by the Timelords or themselves.
The enemy interrupted the Seventh Time Assualt and after both sides substantially reordered the timeline it eventually degnerated into the Seventh Retro War as is typical.


What did we find out about the enemy
67.Didn't start the war to entertain itself.
68.Could not be properly understood by the Timelords without their new self awareness.
69.May take the form of an, "impression" in Timelord senses and perception matrix recording devices.
70.Their erasure tecniques leave an after impression in a Timelord's senses.
71.Allied with the Posthuman War Godess Immaculata Formosii.
72.Considered Devonire a valuable target.
73.Able to steal a falling severed arm from Gallifrey and offer it back to it's owner before he severed it.
74.Their first forces were as illequipped, (technologically and or tactically) as the Timelord's First Wave.
75.Either retrocompromised or erased the Sixth Wave.
76. Their agents, ("reps") can be: violated, conditioned, and psychologically degraded.
77.Interrupted the Seventh Time Assualt.
78.Was destined to clash with the Timelords because of both of their natures.
79.The initial moves of it's more blatant armies and meachanisms were to form vast time spanning bulkhead and unplanned strikes on several fronts as quickly as possible.

They could of been among those The War King or Devonire welcomed back they would have had more experience of the outside universe then any others at the time.


All we know for sure is was several high level technologies. At least The Hand of Omega and The Sash of Rassilon seem to be widely assumed. Ultimately their erasure doesn't matter as Rassilon reintroduces them on/from Gallifrey 7.


Given the then aesthetic of the Faction Paradox franchise it's probably merely for gothic effect.



"perhaps to check whether some local time distortion had has changed the position of the sun". It seems to be his go to check method, while he might have some inate sensing ability it wouldn't be as developed and thus useful as that of a trained Wave soldier or agent or a long term renegade. His lack of any recorded reaction to it suggests that there were no distortions it's just the enemy, (perhaps an aspect of it's leadership given Formasii isn't scared of it and it's previously known abilities/actions against high profile Timelords).



That doesn't mean the Factio knows anything, it's just as likely to be something she deduced from what the Babel said to her. The entry makes it clear she had no knowledge of the Faction and couldn't understand it, (it's mindset and nature) as she belonged to the previous cultural revolution/upset, due to the  Morbeus's Presidency). The Order of the Weal made no move against the Faction due to it's decline. All we know is the Faction some of the surviving idealists.

I definitely think that One/Lolita/potentially Lolita's kids are an enemy, and Compassion thinks so too. In fact, she thinks they're the real enemy.

But I don't think that they're the mysterious faction that we/the Great Houses/the Doctor are talking about when we refer to "the Enemy", and neither does Compassion. She thinks the Enemy are a distraction from the real War.

My brain spent last night Schrodingering over the idea of Umbaste's "One" being the same as Infinity Doctor's "Ohm" - at first I thought it a clever twist, and then I thought, nah, that'd be the most boring thing ever. It'd be telling the same story as every other Omega story, except none of those jerk the readers around by spending so much time pretending to be something else.

More to the point, though, the one good outcome of all that is me rereading Umbaste's entry in the Book again, and noticing the bit about "One" being literally an English rendition with the time-active components removed of Umbaste's actual word. So... do we think we can reverse engineer what the original word actually is?

(this would be even more doable if it turns out that "stripped off of its time-active components" is cheeky double-speak for "stripped off of the overt Doctor Who reference element")

Also... Umbaste as one of the Seven Prophecised Heads? Umbate was, technically, the Head of the Presidency at the time, and the process with which he gained his prophetic insight is explicitly described in the text as involving him detaching his mind from his body.

And, unlike the other Head of the Presidency, this one did actually *speak* his prophecy ;3

Normally drawing on post-FP Doctor Who media like this would be a perilous endeavour at best, but here it's a very fitting lift, because Origins itself got it from Miles (knowingly or not) — I.M. Foreman in Interference to be exact. Of course, in both of these sources it seems to be a feature of early, "unrefined" forms of regeneration, but it is not impossible that even modern regeneration would retain some traces of this chameleon aspect, sufficiently so that certain extraordinary circumstances could produce noticeable effects.

Clever, although we did say relying on information from parts of the Book we haven't got to yet was poor form. Obviously there is something there, but that still doesn't seem like it clinches the case for "One is the designation of a specific intelligent agent who is the same entity as the Mother of Timeships".

For… er… one thing, "as a matter of fact, I think you can answer it yourself quite easily. You know where to look" suggests to me that the 'one thing' is something the War King already knows about; something, then, which is consistent with the War King's beliefs about the Enemy, as much as with Compassion's. So perhaps Compassion believes ‘One’ to be something to do with the Lolita masterplan, but surely the War King believes it to be something else.

For another, if 'One' is a sentient entity and kin to timeships, would Compassion refer to it as, well, a thing? That doesn't sound like her! Being that I still don't agree that Umbaste's One and the Rivera Manuscript One are the same thing, I remain of the opinion that ‘One’ refers to some sort of mind-bending vision related to the nature of the Enemy, but is not a name for the Enemy itself, whether it be the Mother of Timeships or anything else.

I do love the Timeless Child. And imagine the fun we could have with the Cloister Wraiths! 😹