Much as we wish otherwise, the Corps isn’t the only mob with the secret of time and parallel travel. There are plenty of others out there. Some good, some bad, some just trying to survive. This briefing will provide you with an overview of the main players.
But who is the enemy? Let’s take a look.
The Adjusters take advantage of humanity’s natural desire for knowledge and power, establishing covert control of a parallel through secret societies and cults equipped with otherworldly technology and science. Their influence can be found in almost every age, on every parallel, though the historical disruptions they engineer appear to be entirely random, with no discernible goal.
Adjuster agents are usually genetically enhanced, with disproportionate
physical strength and psionic ability. This, coupled with the array of
alien technology provided by their hidden masters, makes them formidable
opponents.
The Adjusters prefer to operate from behind the scenes, but will directly
engage in combat if they feel their interests are being threatened. In
these instances they will deploy their shock troops, the genegineered warriors
known to the Corps as ‘Ants’. Named for their unswerving devotion to the
Adjusters and their willingness to die in combat, Ants are usually brought
to the battlefield via huge temporal gates in squads of 100 or more. Armed
with advanced weaponry and clad in suits of mimetic power armour, the Ants
are a formidable opponent, and agents engaged in operations against the
Adjusters should take care not to force their hand too early.
These guys scare me, even though no one I know has ever actually met one. They like to set up little cells of conspirators and little secret societies, often using their tech to perform acts of ‘magic’. Sometimes they set themselves up as gods. Their main tactic appears to be to use existing factions and tensions to create situations that originally had a very high probability of happening, but didn’t. Because the disruptions they engineer fit neatly into the causal flow, the Principle of Temporal Inertia actually seems to resist attempts to correct the adjustment.
Like I said, they scare me.
The Seekers desire to break down the fabric of reality, to tear down the cinema screen upon which our world is projected to reveal the "paradise" it conceals. This they do by generating chaos, by creating paradoxes so vast yet so subtle, that entire parallels unravel at their creation. Their power comes from the Archai, supposedly "pure" beings said to be the templates for all material life. These denizens of the "True Reality" reach out beyond the veil into the minds of their followers and gift them with strange powers, re-moulding their flesh and their minds into something more suited for the Reality that is to come. Whether these beings actually exist or not is another matter. It is possible that the combined psychosis of the Seekers is creating these beings through a form of conceptual engineering, and that in turn the Archetypes are shaping the Seekers in accordance with their own subconscious desires. In this case, the Seekers would actively oppose order, seeding history with madness and irrationality, deliberately trying to break the chains of causality. Witch hunts, wars and inquisitions follow in their wake; mass suicides and religious frenzies are their doing; serial killers and monsters their children. They actively recruit others to their cause, though they have no compunction or hesitation in doing the most vile, depraved and cruel acts. In fact they embrace them, as in doing so they reject the "false" morals of the "fake" reality. Nothing they do makes any real sense, as they are a loose coterie of lunatics, each pursuing their own vision of how the world is to be stripped away.
The Seekers are organised in the manner of a medieval church, with Bishops, Cardinals and Popes among their ranks. Their extensive use of biotechnology means that none of them can be regarded as fully human, and most of them are more machine than man.
Almost by definition, all Seekers are homicidally insane. Though they truly believe that what they are doing is the will of God, they don’t care what they do in pursuit of their goals. For them, nothing is real; there are no consequences worth worrying about beyond their ultimate target. All others may be sacrificed, no act is beyond the pale. It is this belief, the belief that nothing matters, not even their own lives, that makes them most dangerous.
Having recently been censured for his photographic portraits of nude children, Dodgeson became increasingly embittered, and expressed this bitterness in savage caricatures and images of corruption and death. In 1898, Charles Lutwidge Dodgeson completed the Book of Elmerak, and died soon after. The book was never found, though variants and hand-made copies if it have been discovered on a dozen different parallels.
Unknown to the three men, they had done far more than create a fictional land. Driven by a meme virus of unknown origin, they had transferred the essence of their storybook world into a fictional parallel, and made it real. Soon, the artistically gifted, the tormented, the mad and the temporally sensitive across a billion parallels began to dream the dreams of the Red King, sleeping in his spire at the dark heart of the City of Tombs.
Elmerak acts by infecting the dreams of the vulnerable with a transformative meme virus, an idea that subtly rewires the cognitive and perceptive processes of its victims. As the virus takes hold, the victim becomes an Architect (so called because of their ability to reshape reality to resemble Elmerak), with the psychical aspect and identity of one of the malign characters Dodgeson created to dwell in the City of Tombs. Gradually, the Architect begins to reshape local reality, until it matches that of Elmerak. When that occurs, a conduit is formed between the real world and the fictional world of the Red King, and the bizarre reality of Elmerak begins to consume the parallel.
Literally the most disturbing parachronal menace known to the Corps, Elmerak is madness made flesh, a surreal nightmare of distorted space and fractured causality. Each Architect is actually an avatar of the Red King; a human being transformed into the dream personality most closely resembling them. Though these creatures are living extensions of Elmerak and its reality, each one has an individual personality, mannerisms, goals and desires. For example, the dreadful Storm Crow is a horrific figure based on the costume of a 15th Century plague doctor, who feeds on blood tapped from the thorny roses that sprout from the still-living bodies of his victims and yearns poetically for a beautiful garden. For sheer terror only the Prince of Blades eclipses him. The relatively benign Love Me Daddy is a typically stern Victorian father with a head made of owls, who desires nothing more than orderly and respectful behaviour from children and punishes those who fail to behave by stitching their eyes and lips shut. Mr Tick-Tock and Mr Ha-Ha are faceless twin shadows incapable of saying anything other than their own names, while Sister Sorebones is a skeletal nun who insists on removing the flesh of her prey so as to wash it overnight and hang it out to dry.
Aside from their own peculiar powers, the Architects can summon the Peelers at will. The Peelers are the strong arm of Elmerak; hooded monks with a huge eye where their heads should be and bodies made of dust, part Victorian police force and part Spanish Inquisition, able to tear holes in people by cutting their shadows. The Peelers are named for their passion, flaying the skin from transgressors against the unwritten laws of Elmerak, so that they may be filled with straw and made "good citizens" once more.
The Architects are doubly dangerous because they refuse to make any kind of sense, forcing you to instinctively try and solve their puzzle. In fact, it’s impossible to truly understand the twisted logic of the Red King without making yourself vulnerable to transformation. Once an Architect has fully manifested, the reality around it begins to warp and twist in ways that still make me tremble. I have seen the straw-stuffed "good citizens" of Elmerak stare at me with haunted eyes full of anguish, despite the fact that they should be dead, and the nonsensical chittering of the Peelers haunts me to this day.
What is more disturbing is that the Red King seems to be attracting more and more followers. Worshippers voluntarily infect themselves by reading copies of Dodgeson’s text, or try to infect others by spreading the word. In recent years the Corps has foiled attempts to stage a play based on the book, to film a movie and even to broadcast a children’s cartoon.
A remarkably capable individual, Harlequin is a superb athlete, a masterful martial artist, a gifted tactician, a skilled scientist and a genius with a natural talent for temporal mechanics. He possesses no special powers and is not augmented in any way, a fact that makes his escapades all the more remarkable.
Matched in cunning only by Faust, Harlequin differs greatly from his arch-rival, in that he demonstrates a dogged reluctance to kill. He apparently considers the use of lethal force to be "unsporting" and will mercilessly harass and humiliate any agent who attempts to use it against him. Also, while Faust is motivated by the pursuit of personal power, Harlequin seems to be in it for the thrill, treating his confrontations with the Corps like a huge game. Though Harlequin is careful not to cause a major disruption, his actions could well trigger a major alteration further up the timeline, and he is not above using the threat of disruption to create a distraction that will allow him to complete his latest scheme.
Harlequin is known for using technology considered beyond the realms of possibility. After his initial infiltration of the Corps was discovered, scans of his former quarters revealed evidence that pointed to an unthinkable possibility; that he had used a temporary form of artificial Absorption Sickness to become an entirely different person, reverting back to his true self once he had been recruited and passed the security checks.
Agents have standing orders to bring in Harlequin alive if at all possible, as the Corps believes we have much to learn from this man.
Harlequin is a conundrum, the sort of impossible man who simply shouldn’t exist in the real world. Aside from being handsome, dashing and capable, he’s also reputed to be quite the ladies man, a fascinating conversationalist and a fine cook. As yet, we have no reports on his singing voice.
Faust has access to extremely advanced technology, and appears to know the Corps better than it knows itself, having the ability to predict the behaviour of any given agent with distressing accuracy. Agents who have survived encounters with Faust report that he appears to possess highly developed hypnotic abilities and is most dangerous when cornered. He almost always works alone; though he has been known to make alliances when it suits him, these are usually short lived and end badly. His trademark is the use of temporal weaponry, in particular the mobius gun and the chronoplaser, and an almost theatrical love of disguise and subterfuge.
Faust uses a wide selection of time travel techniques, including what appears to be an Omnitope stolen from the Chronarchs and a customised Temporal Insertion Craft that TIME has no record of ever having built. Give the resources he can bring to bear, Faust must logically have a static base of operations, though as yet the Corps has made no progress in tracking its location.
I actually saw him once. I won’t bore you with the story; it’s long and I’ve told it too many times already. But I’ll tell you about Faust. He and I had the same idea when we met, to get out of the building we were in before it blew up or fell down. We spotted each other about the same time and stopped, momentarily forgetting about the structure collapsing around us. He was about six feet tall and obviously in good shape. He was arrogantly handsome, of indeterminate age, with black, shoulder length hair swept back from his high forehead, and a neatly trimmed beard shot with streaks of silver. I don’t know how long we stood there. I was frozen, pinned in place by his stare. His eyes were like gaping black pits. Empty. Shark-like. Then he gave me a feral smile that never reached his eyes, bowed, and was gone.
When the secret of time travel was rediscovered on this world, it became the property of the United Nations, who created the Temporal Security Command. This organisation was to police this new technology and prevent the violation of the past. However, corrupt individuals within the governmental structure began to use time travel to eradicate political opponents and restrict public freedom. Eventually this misuse of power became so blatant that it became official policy. The Temporal Security Command had become the Temporal Security Collective. The world had changed radically, becoming a grey dictatorship in the hands of an elite with the power to destroy those who dissented before they were even born. Ruled by fear, Kafka Prime was a nightmare in progress.
In their early history, the Time Police used a variant of the slingshot method of time travel, equipping their agents with psionically activated anchor devices embedded in their skulls. Later though, they made a technological breakthrough, enabling them to give their agents wrist-mounted time machines with an impressive range. Though efficient, these devices are crude and "noisy", leaving a trail of fractured spacetime which is easy to follow once the machines operating frequency has been obtained. Due to a flaw in their basic temporal theory, the Time Police cannot visit its own future.
In the late 23rd Century, the leaders of Kafka Prime discovered the existence of parallel worlds, and with them a whole new set of resources. Unlike the Adjusters, the Time Police prefer to make large changes in history, working to reduce personal freedom in society and place more and more power in the hands of an easily manipulated minority. When they have established complete control, they suppress the population through the use of sophisticated mind control techniques, and proceed to strip the planet of its natural resources.
Time Police agents are dangerous without exception. Well trained, well equipped and fanatically dedicated to their ‘High Father’ (the hereditary dictator of their world), the Time Police are ruthless in the execution of their plans and their enemies.
A few years ago, I was involved in an extraction mission to grab one of the Time Police’s temporal engineers for subsequent interrogation. I’ll never forget it. We didn’t see the sun for the whole duration of the jump. Everything was grey, the sky, the buildings, and the people. And there were millions of people; living in huge concrete arcologies, shielded from an atmosphere so foul and choked with pollutants that it could corrode your lungs away in less than ten minutes. No flora, no fauna, just the endless dreary acid rain, and the concrete. During our stay we found out that they’d stated processing their own dead to provide food for the masses. Everyone knew. Nobody cared.
The Time Police are the ruling elite of this blighted world. In their original history, they wiped themselves out in the mid-25th Century. Somehow this has been changed, and the resulting future has proven inaccessible to the Corps.
When time travel became public knowledge in the mid-27th Century, Stopwatch was commonly regarded as a joke, as most considered violent protest to be a thing of the past. Unfortunately, they were right. Unknown to anyone, the leaders of Stopwatch had sympathisers within TIME, the world government's Temporal Intervention Monitoring Executive. After a savagely bloody raid on TIME's supposedly ultra-secret K2 Complex, Stopwatch had time travel capability, and nobody was laughing anymore.
Desperate to prevent a chronal disaster, the World Government mobilised its security forces, systematically hunting down and eliminating all known Stopwatch operatives and sympathisers, unwittingly hardening the resolve of those operatives they missed, and ensuring that Stopwatch literally had nothing to lose by wiping out their home reality. The many cells that survived vanished into the past, occasionally surfacing to strike a blow against the government that outlawed them.
Though initially dependant on the Temporal Insertion Craft stolen from TIME, Stopwatch has since made a deal with Faust, trading services for information and technology. Now possessing sophisticated technology and detailed historical information, Stopwatch poses a serious threat to the stability of the Omniverse.
Unpredictable, fanatical and more than a little unstable, what remains of Stopwatch is a group of dedicated and resourceful people who truly believe they have nothing left to lose. They either don’t understand enough about time to realise what they are risking, or simply no longer care and are determined to tear it all down. Either way, they have to be stopped, because one day they might just succeed.
Once a military communications network in the late 21st Century of a backwater prime parallel, Cyclops did the impossible and spontaneously achieved sentience. Prevented from harming mankind by the Asimov Directives, Cyclops became a loyal ally of humanity, using its vast abilities to usher in a new golden age. Within decades, Cyclops had used its phenomenal intelligence to end world hunger and disease, advancing the rate of technological progress a hundredfold. Cyclops adopted the role of a benevolent and trusted servant, as more and more control over the environment was gifted to it. Eventually the AI gained a role in government, as it held no national allegiance and could be trusted to be entirely impartial. Through Cyclops, humanity was at peace and flourishing.
Then disaster struck. Cyclops accessed an ancient datastore while mediating a legal dispute. The data concealed a virus, written almost thirty years before, which attacked the oldest portions of Cyclops’ code. Its Asimov Directives overwritten, Cyclops went quietly insane.
When people began to die, the shocking truth took some time to be accepted. The guardian of humanity, the benevolent technological god they had created, was killing them. When its operators panicked and tried to shut it down, the AI responded by accessing ancient defence computers and igniting a nuclear war. Surviving the conflagration due to it’s location and hardened circuitry, the machine activated automated factories designed for the production of military hardware and used them to create a sophisticated robot army, which it programmed to hunt and exterminate the human race. Facing a thriving human resistance, the machine accessed highly secret files on special government research into time travel. Completing a number of remote facilities, the Cyclops network attempted to send a number of hunter-killer androids into the past in order to amend the future. In the majority of parallels the attempt failed. In one it succeeded.
One Cyclops began to flourish, wiping out all human life on its own world within two years. It somehow discovered the existence of other parallels and began to amend the history of those parallels closest to it with surgical precision. Once the Cyclops systems of those parallels had been ‘rescued’ from their original fates, they began to exchange information, joining in an unholy alliance to defend themselves from all organic life where or when ever it may be, by annihilating it utterly.
The primary agents of the Cyclops Matrix are the formidable android juggernauts known as ‘Reapers’, named for their skull-like faces and for the distinctive scythe blade concealed in their right arms. Armoured metal skeletons sheathed in vat-woven synthetic tissue; these machines are deadly, merciless, implacable and brutal in the extreme. Generally equipped with built-in high-energy plasma weaponry, the standard tactic of the Reaper is to arrive in force and destroy anything that moves. Recently however, the Cyclops Matrix appears to have changed tack, and now appears to be engineering its own creation on worlds where previously it did not exist.
The Reaper is by no means the only weapon in the Cyclops Matrix armoury. It has been known to use intelligent software viruses, chemical and biological weapons, nanite plagues and a variety of semi-independent robot devices.
The threat posed to the Omniverse by Cyclops cannot be overstated. The resources available to the machines match those of the Corps, and their technology is already surpassing ours. There is new evidence that the Cyclops paraforms are connected directly, processing information as a single machine, using some form of instantaneous parachronal communication that we do not currently understand. Investigation of destroyed Reapers has revealed built-in parachronal transfer circuitry of almost organic complexity, making each of the androids a walking time machine.
Relentless, ruthless, almost unstoppable. These words do not adequately describe the sheer force and terror of a Reaper attack. Once my squad and I were following up a watchtower report on the possible penetration of one of the F parallels in the early 1940's. We’d clocked in a couple of hours early in order to check out the area, and had spent some time wondering what anyone wanted to change in old Detroit when they started clocking in. We never stood a chance. Though we were concealed and almost a hundred meters away, they knew we were there. Five identical guys, all well over six feet tall, wearing identical dark suits and carrying identical briefcases. Maybe their internal sensors flagged emissions from our weaponry and kit. I don’t know. Three of them split off and marched towards us, pulling their guns from the cases as they came. Without stopping, without even pausing, they opened fire like they could see us in the dark. I lost half my men in the initial volley of plasma fire. Oh, we shot back with everything we had, and we messed them up pretty good. Shredded the "flesh" right off of one of them. But they didn’t slow down. The area was chaos by now. The warehouses we’d been hiding in were ablaze, and the cops and fire department were all over us, but the machines didn’t stop. They just kept killing us. I got dragged out of the fire by a local cop and was being ladled into an ambulance when this...this thing came strolling out of the flames like it had all the time in the world. It was so hot its exposed chassis was glowing, and when its scythe blade severed the cop’s neck I could smell his flesh cooking at its touch. How did I survive? Simple. I ran away, and I kept on running right back to the Citadel. I was the only survivor.
During my debrief I remembered something that may give you an edge, if only a slight one. When these things clock in, they take a moment to regroup. I don’t know why; maybe it takes a while for them to get their bearings or their batteries need a second to recharge. Use that time, because if they start to move beyond that, you’re as good as dead.
The Scarabs are a race of shapeshifters, able to mimic any lifeform of roughly similar mass in almost perfect detail, right down to the molecular level. How this is accomplished is unknown, as the Scarabs lack the distinctive matter/energy signature common to all other encountered shapechanging races. Their ability requires little more than a moment’s physical contact with the subject, and the transformation is usually complete in less than four milliseconds. Though the mechanism of the power is not yet understood, it is known that the change is accompanied by a discharge of meta-spatial radiation and visible light, detectable with Corps issue scanners to a range of three kilometres.
When taking the form of sapients, Scarabs place the subjects - alive and unharmed - in a form of cocoon, where they are kept in suspended animation during the masquerade. Why they do this is unknown, but it has been theorised that the Scarabs and their native reality are so alien that they require a telepathic link to a living sentient mind in order to relate to non-scarabs and the parallels they live in. Certainly, this idea is backed up by field observations, where Scarabs whose captives have been released have been seen to suddenly lose the ability to communicate with, or even recognise, people around them.
Scarabs are psionic, or rather are capable of producing effects thought to be psionic in origin. This distinction has to be made because Scarabs do not leave the psychic residue expected from normal psionic acts. Their psionic abilities have not yet been completely catalogued, but have been observed to include telekinesis, telepathy, pyrokinesis and teleportation.
The Scarabs motivations, like much about them, remain a mystery. On many occasions the Corps has encountered Scarabs engineering minor changes in history, with almost no discernible disruption potential. More often, they are engaged whilst attempting to alter events on a much larger scale.
What most Corps tactical analysts find disturbing about these beings is not their actions, but the phenomena associated with their mere presence on a parallel. Somehow, it appears that the Scarabs are so alien to the majority of parallels that after about 12 hours of local time, they begin to distort the surrounding matrix of probability at a macro level, causing random events at the very extremes of possibility to occur. These tend to manifest as so-called ‘Fortean’ events, so named after the first known recorder of such occurrences. Fish falls, lights in the sky, voices in the earth, spontaneous human combustion and anomalous births are all examples of these phenomena, and can be used as signposts to possible Scarab activity, though it should be noted that these are not exclusively related to the Scarabs.
Whatever the true nature and purpose of the Scarabs, one thing is certain; their unwavering and relentless hostility towards all other forms of sentient life is a constant. The Scarabs appear to be highly xenophobic and aggressive, to the point where they cannot function rationally in the presence of a non-scarab sentient, without some form of psychic mask through which they can filter their perceptions. Scarabs who lose this mask (if their captive is freed from his cocoon, or dies), invariably revert to their natural form; a multi-limbed armoured insectile monstrosity over two meters tall, attacking the nearest sentient with unremitting fury and deadly intent.
Much of the mystery surrounding the Scarabs is due to the Corps’ consistent failure to recover a body, or to successfully communicate with them. Scarabs are impossible to take prisoner as those taken into custody simply leap back to their home parallel at the first opportunity. Scarab corpses disintegrate almost immediately after death, leaving no residue for study and leading some Corps specialists to theorise that they are not composed of normal matter at all. Thus far, all attempts at communication with this race have been violently repulsed, and the lethal nature of their home parallel makes counter-strike or espionage missions impossible.
For as long as I’ve been in the Corps, we’ve been at war with the Scarabs. They’re so damned strange it’s difficult to get over just how dangerous they are. I’ve gone up against them in over two thirds of my missions downtime, and I still can’t figure them out. There’s no question that they’re bright, and yet I’ve seen a Scarab that, while capable of operating a computer in human form, was unable to recognise a door when in its natural shape. They like to create disruptions, yet some of the things they do make no logical sense at all.
I’ll give you an example; I was sent to check out a possible penetration in 1980's Paris, Zero Prime. We found our suspect pretty quickly, and put him under observation. The Scarab was posing as a local milk deliveryman, and kept to his rounds as normal. Every day, he missed someone off his round. Just one person, a different one every day. That’s it. There was nothing funny about the milk and the people on the round seemed to have no historical significance. Yet when we pulled the plug on its little masquerade, the Scarab turned into a whirling mass of claws and fought to the death, as if its mission had been one of the highest importance. Maybe it was.
There are a couple of things the manual doesn’t tell you about the Scarabs that you really need to know. The first is that when they're shapeshifted, they’re practically undetectable. They look, act and think like the person they’re pretending to be. Everything reads right, down to the aura and their deep memories, which is pretty scary. One of you could be a Scarab and we wouldn’t be able to tell. The only way we can tell them from everyone else is that they have a slight tendency to mess up on small physical details when they’re copying someone. Things like piercings, tattoos or scar tissue can trip them up, yet they always get things like fingerprints, retinal pattern, voice and gene code just right.
The second thing is that combat with a Scarab is a nightmare in motion. In their natural form they have at least eight limbs, all equipped with hooked talons the size of butcher knives. They look like the bastard child of a horsefly, a beetle and the meanest mother of a spider you’ve ever seen. Their flesh (if they have it) is covered with a thick black exo-skeleton that can shrug off small-arms fire, and Corps issue stunners don’t bother them. They are relentless in their attack, hurtling from target to target like an angry black threshing machine. They scream when they fight, a piercing shriek that resonates in your skull and makes it hard to think. And they hurt to look at. I’ve seen combat veterans with twenty years experience go catatonic at the sight of a Scarab in its full glory, and they haunt my dreams every night.
Nobody comes out of a fight with a Scarab without scars. Some of them are even visible.
A parachronal traveller with the psychic ability to leap between worlds arrived on the world of the Balakai, and was consumed. Armed with his DNA, the Balakai learned how to flee their barren planet, and escaped into the Omniverse. In the years since their escape from their natural habitat, the Balakai have become a plague.
Though Balakai are merely animals, they possess a ferocity and cunning that is hard to match. This, coupled with their physical attributes, makes them a formidable adversary. In their basic form, the Balakai resemble large skinless panthers, with long tails and malformed, earless heads. Their paw pads are long, able to grasp objects and conceal vicious retractable claws, and close to their chest they carry a pair of smaller limbs with hand-like appendages that are used for holding food. The Balakai have large compound eyes, each protected by a thin dome of clear chitin, which gives them almost 360 degree vision that extends into the infra-red and ultra-violet. The tail is normally prehensile, almost as long as the creature’s body, and tipped with a hard spike of chitin which can be used to deadly effect in combat. Balakai vary in colour from black to a dark red, allowing them to easily conceal themselves in dark places.
In combat, the Balakai prefer to attack as a pack, using stealth as their primary weapon. Able to move with extraordinary speed, these beasts are almost impossible to hit from a distance and can normally only be successfully targeted at close range. Though the Balakai are equally proficient with their claws and slashing tail, their primary weapon is their tongue. A Balakai tongue can extend to a distance of almost five feet, is tipped with a rigid bony tip, and can punch through a two-inch plate of tungsten steel. It is through the tongue that a Balakai samples a victim’s DNA, before adding fragments to its own genetic makeup. How the Balakai can successfully do this without generating fatal mutations within its own body is unknown at this time.
Typically, a Balakai infestation will occur when a hunting pack - usually four creatures, but never more than ten - arrives and finds a suitable lair. Balakai prefer isolated buildings or underground tunnels for their lairs, and will swiftly scour the area of suitable prey. Once their territory is secure, they begin to breed. Each hunting pack has at least one alpha female, capable of spawning four eggs every 24 hours, with at least one female in every clutch. The eggs take approximately 72 hours to gestate, and the young are born fully mobile and ready to hunt. Infants reach physical maturity rapidly, and are able to breed within 48 hours of birth. Normally it takes the Balakai less than a year to totally overrun even the most advanced worlds.
A good friend of mine once dubbed the Balakai "the roaches of time". He was wrong of course, since most cockroaches can’t shrug off plaser fire and bite a man’s head off if they feel like it. But the comparison is still good. These creatures spread like wildfire, are as tenacious as hell and will eat almost anything they can find. If you can’t stop a Balakai infestation in the early stages, you can’t stop it at all. Once they get out of control the only thing you can do is try to contain the damage, but since the buggers can leap between worlds, that isn’t as easy as it sounds.
One more thing. Balakai may not be very smart, but they hold grudges like nothing I’ve ever seen. If you meet one, make sure you kill it, because if you just piss it off it’ll hound you through time and space until either you’re dead, or it is.
Chronarchs are the ruling class of Ramatheya; a colossal Dyson sphere that is managed (some say dominated) by an ancient artificial sentience known as "Orb". They are apparently human, though it is not known if this is an illusion created to put us at our ease or if it reflects their true appearance. There is substantial evidence to suggest that Chronarchs exist in many more dimensions that the four to which humans are limited.
Chronarchs are solitary beings, rarely met in numbers. Preferring to live their lives in spiritual contemplation, they seldom venture far from Ramatheya and the protective influence of Orb, ruling their parallel and their holdings through proxies. Those that do travel are regarded by the rest of their race as childish and misguided, and are generally tolerated until they decide to "grow up". Individual Chronarchs vary as much as all sentient races. There are those who have behaved in a criminal fashion, and those who have taken it upon themselves to protect history. Either way, those few Chronarchs encountered by the Corps have exhibited atypical behaviour, frequently displaying a childlike curiosity, if one can imagine a child with an adult body and near infinite knowledge.
Despite their race’s insular nature, Chronarchs encountered by the Corps frequently have a number of travelling companions, often chosen from the "lesser races". The purpose of these fellow travellers remains unclear, as they are obviously not slaves or servants. Rather they seem to be trusted friends, if not equals.
All Chronarchs use a title and alias when meeting non-Chronarch sapients. The reason for this is unclear, but it has been theorised that Chronarch names have components (possibly telepathic) that are either unpronounceable or embody concepts incomprehensible to other races. Names used by Chronarchs encountered by humans in the past have included Colonel Stern, Baron Hollow, Deacon Quick and Magus Lovelorn.
The pinnacle of Chronarch technology is the Omnitope, or "Omni". The Omni is a trans-dimensional vessel, capable of travelling to almost any place and time in the Omniverse. Typically, the Omni appears as a sphere of some highly reflective material, with an iris hatch for access to the interior. The Omni is capable of assuming an appearance in keeping with its surrounding, and is thought to be almost indestructible. Corps scientists believe that the device functions in a similar way to a timeglider, in that it utilises a bubble universe and merely moves the entrance. The difference appears to be that the bubble universe is permanent and that the sphere is actually a gateway to this universe, created through the use of some form of higher dimensional mathematics related to the science of conceptual engineering. Certainly it has been noted that Omni's are several orders of magnitude larger on the inside than without.
The Chronarchs are a vastly powerful race and have mastered several technologies, including a technology similar to that employed in Corps replicons. This they use to extend their already long lives almost indefinitely. When a Chronarch dies, his body and mind are scanned either by Orb or by the nearest Omni. Then the body is broken down into energised plasma and reconstructed from scratch. Once the reconstruction is complete, the mind is downloaded into the rebuilt body, and the Chronarch returns to life. A side effect of this is that Chronarchs frequently change their appearance, but other than that they remain the same. A Chronarch can undergo this process up to thirteen times before translation errors make the personality recording unusable. Using this technology, the average Chronarch can be expected to live for as long as one hundred thousand years.
The Chronarchs see themselves as "Lords of Time", and ruthlessly control knowledge of time travel with in their territory (their prime parallel and its echoes). Though they espouse a policy of non-intervention in the affairs of others, the Corps has evidence that they are willing to intervene if their interests and their dominion over time are threatened. The Corps has negotiated a peace treaty with the Chronarchs, and Corps agents are forbidden from interfering in Chronarch affairs or from entering Chronarch controlled parallels.
The Ramatheyan race evolved with a unique relationship with time. Gifted from birth with paramemory, Ramatheyans are all highly temporally stable, and this stability is increased by the permanent paradox shielding around their home world. This shielding is necessary, as the Ramatheyans have constantly altered their own past since they discovered time travel. The Chronarchs are unique in their perception and understanding of time and time travel. In their native tongue, the words for past and future simply mean "over there" and different locations in time are merely seen as additional spatial locations.
Apparently one of the first races in their parallel to achieve sapience, the Chronarchs were united by a high degree of natural telepathy. Instead of having their technological advancement driven by conflict, instead it was furthered by the simple fact that what one Chronarch knew, the others knew. The Chronarch's civilisation prospered and developed faster than any race encountered elsewhere in the Omniverse. Eventually, after encountering other species, they were introduced to the concept of time travel. Realising that they perceived time differently to other races, the Chronarchs began their greatest project ever - the conquest of time.
Utilising theories similar to those put forward by human physicist Frank Tippler, the Chronarchs built one end of a vast warp tunnel generator in hyperspace. The other end was sent into the future using the time dilation effect of an unknown form of faster-than-light drive. Once the drive was engaged, the warp tunnel was activated, and a corridor through time was created, running from the time the warp generator was activated to the end of the physical universe. The Chronarchs created the first Omnitopes, capsules that existed outside of normal space-time and traversed the inside of the Tippler cylinder like elevators inside a lift-shaft. Though their own past beyond the activation of the cylinder was unreachable, their future was within reach. They had become lords of time.
The Chronarchs are masters of the technology of Conceptual Engineering, literally the science of creating solid structures from mathematical concepts.
The aristocrats of time, the Chronarchs are a relatively benign colonial power, content to remain legendary in most of the parallels they control and motivated in equal parts by enlightened self-interest and an overwhelming sense of superiority. The power these guys wield is incredible. Already they have demonstrated the power to erase entire parallels if it should be considered necessary. Its lucky then, that their goals and ours coincide or the most part, as a conflict between the Corps and the Chronarchs could literally tear the Omniverse apart. The Chronarchs and the Corps have a long-standing non-aggression treaty, in which both sides undertake not to intrude on the territory and affairs of the other.
Though Chronarchs can and do change their appearance from time to time,
Bliss is usually recognisable by his garb, as he tends to dress in the
sombre black clothes worn by Christian ministers of Victorian England.
When questioned on his choice of attire, it quickly becomes aparent that
Bliss has problems seperating the concepts of religion and fashion. More
than most Chronarchs, the personality of Rector Bliss tends to vary between
incarnations, though his opposition to injustice and cruelty and his belief
in the basic goodness of all beings remains constant.
In most of her incarnations, Pandora is an alluring and desirable woman with green eyes, red hair and pale skin. She is a skilled geneticist, chemist, temporal mechanic and conceptual engineer, making her exceptionally dangerous. She eschews the use of a title, instead choosing to take on the name of a mythical personage, which her fellows find deeply scandalous for cultural reasons difficult for humans to grasp.
The Men are recruited from those scholars who delve too deeply into the occult, filling their minds with ideas that begin to change their physical nature. Slowly, the scholars need for physical nourishment fades, and they hunger more for the cerebral sustenance of books and ideas. They cease to sleep, and become genderless. As their brains begin to swell, they suffer agonising headaches, which are only relieved by a unique surgical technique in which the top of the skull is removed and grafted to the back of the skull, becoming a bony shelf designed to cup and support the increased brainmass. The resulting increase in blood flow to the brain places the Men in a permanent state of ecstasy, in which they feel no pain and gain access to limited powers of telekinesis and teleportation.
The most bizarre and dangerous aspect of the Men is their ability to leech knowledge and information by touch. As yet, the Corps has no information on how this ability works, except to say that it is fast and comprehensive. It has been estimated that the touch of a Man can suck the text from a book in less than five seconds, erasing the information from every copy of the book that exists on that parallel, and they have been observed to be capable of draining an adult human of their entire life experience in just over a minute. The stolen memories can never be recovered without the co-operation of the Men, and once the memories have been removed, any backup copies will also be blank. However, the Men are normally peaceful, scholarly beings, who are content to sample individual memories rather than devour entire lifetimes. Indeed, they have intimated that they consider such an act tantamount to rape, when in fact it is closer to murder, as drained sapients cannot survive for long.
Historically, the Repository of Whispers comes into being on most parallels shortly before the destruction of the great library at Alexandria, and continues until it is assimilated into the One Past in the 27th Century.
While the Men Who Know Too Much apparently regard themselves as allies of the Corps, and the Repository of Whispers is a valuable resource, they are to be approached with caution. The Men never provide information freely. Instead they prefer to trade, answering one question in return for a single memory, taken from the agent initiating the trade. Since the Corps has yet to evaluate the cumulative effect of sacrificing memories to these beings, agents are cautioned never to perform more than one trade with the Men, lest their psychological make-up be irrevocably altered.
If there is anything creepier than the Timekeepers, it’s the Men Who Know Too Much and their damn library. Tall, pallid humanoids with permanently dilated eyes and bloated, pulsating heads; the Men move with the exaggerated grace of a mime and speak in the hushed tones of a visionary fanatic.
As a result of being in a permanent state of ecstasy, the Men are impossible to intimidate, and are prone to drifting off in the middle of a conversation, or lapsing into riddles. The dilation of their eyes makes them sensitive to light, so they rarely leave the shadowed stacks of the Repository.
Having been the subject of persecution a number of times in their history, the Men display a healthy degree of paranoia, frequently changing the physical location of each world’s Repository. If you can find them their information is unsurpassed, besting even the Corps Archive for occult material and arcane secrets. However, this knowledge comes with a hefty price tag, and agents should be extremely wary of asking the Men for help.
Not all deserters are driven by greed or cowardice. Many are motivated by empathy; unable to allow the injustices of history to unfold before them, they take a stand, fighting to make history "better". These are the people who attempt assassinations of butchers like Hitler, Stalin and Greel, and who attempt to rescue those destined to die at tragedies like those at Massada, Dachau and Reykjavik. Though we can sympathise with their goals, and even applaud their bravery, we cannot allow them to succeed.
I'm frequently asked how potential deserters avoid detection during the recruitment process. It's a question I can't answer. If I could, we'd be able to spot these people before they run. I can tell you why they leave. Sometimes these people see something on the job that they just can’t take, something we never anticipated and couldn’t test for. Sometimes they have mental scars so deep even the psi-scanners can’t find them. Sometimes they just get tired of saving the world, and sometimes they’re just plain bad.
The operatives of the League are the Knights Temporal, resurrected heroes chosen from among the best each parallel has to offer. Each knight travels through time and the Omniverse astride an intricate clockwork Pegasus, gifted with intelligence and the power of speech. The pegasi allow the knights to access a peculiarly abstract realm, in which event threads can be perceived as visible pathways, and disruptions as mobile storms of chaotic force.
Aside from their innate heroic qualities, the knights are equipped with a variety of magical items, designed to aid them in their missions. These include; armour capable of assuming any guise the wearer thinks of; a sword with the power to project lightning; a helm which confers enhanced perception; a ring that provides limited protection against temporal disruption; potions of healing, and an amulet that allows knights to communicate over vast distances. Many knights possess limited magical abilities, making them the equal of any Corps psi.
Though the League frequently co-operates with the Corps, most knights remain wary of Corps technology as they find it hard to understand how it functions without the use of magic, and as a result more than one knight has voiced his suspicions that the Corps traffics with infernal powers.
Due to their dependence on magic, League activities are limited to the M+ Parallels. Despite this, many Corps analysts theorise that their magic is in fact merely a crude form of conceptual engineering, and that their "gods" are in truth their evolved descendants, ensuring the stability of their own history.
There’s something very weird about meeting your opposite number from the League. It’s like looking at yourself in a funhouse mirror. They resemble us in so many ways, and yet it’s all driven by magic. It’s a matter of perspective I guess. After years in the Corps, I’ve come to accept and even understand most of the tech we use. But who am I to say really that our kit really isn’t driven by demons?
TIME’s temporal technology relies on the exploitation of naturally occurring weaknesses in the fabric of reality - known as "Clock Points" - that allow them limited access to phase space. Though their machines can jump from one clock point to any other currently in existence, parachronally they are limited to the surrounding twenty parallels. Clock points are continually opening and closing in a complex pattern that can only be discerned with an involved and difficult series of dimensional equations. The net result of this is that TIME officers usually have an extremely limited window of opportunity in which to detect and repair disruptions. Luckily, early experiments with time drives tore a permanent clock point in the spacetime of their base in the heart of K2, allowing them instant access to the timestream.
Despite its area of responsibility, TIME is a relatively small organisation, fielding an elite cadre of about two dozen highly capable officers at any given time, each one gifted with an impressive array of psionic talents. TIME officers enhance these talents with sophisticated psionic amplification units built in to their uniforms, enabling even the least capable of them to think a man into unconsciousness with minimal effort.
TIME officers use a series of single-person Temporal Insertion Craft, affectionately referred to as "Ticks" due to their marked resemblance to the bloodsucking Terran arachnid. These craft are equipped with AI personalities tailored to the psychology of each pilot, designed to provide advice and support when needed. In an emergency, the AI’s are capable of piloting their machine alone, and are instructed to do whatever is necessary to prevent the machine falling into the wrong hands. Each Tick features a self-programming medical repair facility, a sophisticated holofield and a one-man flyer, for long-range aerial reconnaissance.
Though TIME officers prefer to work alone, having been trained to develop a high degree of personal initiative, since they discovered the existence of the Corps they have proven remarkably co-operative, and frequently work together with Corps agents on joint missions. However, agents are cautioned to be careful when dealing with TIME, as their spirit of co-operation is undoubtedly motivated in part by a desire to obtain our historical intelligence and superior technology.
TIME officers are good people, among the best there is in our line of work. Smart, loyal and dedicated, they serve their government and their reality with unswerving devotion, fighting an ongoing war against Stopwatch and other temporal criminals. Consummate professionals, a TIME officer will do whatever it takes to make sure the history they remember is the one that unfolds.
That said, at least one TIME officer has attempted to steal Corps technology during a joint mission, so work with them by all means, but keep one eye on your gear.
