Ever wonder why Superiors are so down on
Disturbance?
Well, yes, it interferes with Tether-formation, but
that's just the symptom. It's
like saying that the reason to be against arson is because it destroys things:
sure, very true, but you still haven't been told why. There is in fact a reason why Disturbance messes with Tethers -
and, yes, Superiors on both sides know what it is. It doesn't matter what you've been told: they know, they
know very well.
It goes like this.
Did you ever come across an item that was a little bit off? Weird photos, newspapers with strange
headlines, books written by somebody you've never heard of? And have you ever shown that item to
somebody else and they've shrugged it off?
And maybe you looked at it afterwards, saw that you were mistaken and
forgot about it?
If you have, you probably had a Tchtoke and never
realized. They show up in places where
there's been disturbance, you understand.
Actually, that's not quite right: it's more like they're left over from
places where there's been disturbance.
Tchtokes are relics of the way the universe used to be before some
schlub came along and made a racket in the Symphony...
No, this isn't time travel. Get a grip: if either side had time travel,
one way or another we wouldn't be having this conversation. Can't be done: breaks too many laws. No, what disturbance does is force the
Symphony to reweave itself to handle the sudden strain. That usually means little rewrites of the
area, to something that has always had that particular flavor in the space-time
continuum. Granted, it's functionally
equivalent to the past being changed, but it's not actual time travel.
How far does the effect propagate? As far as it needs to: you should know that
for the most part the smaller the disturbance the smaller the rewrite... which
means the smaller the effects. For
example, it'll make very little difference to the universe if the father of the
owner of a Teaneck gas station had a mustache or a beard, so most people
wouldn't be affected by a rewrite that incorporated that change. But, because everything is connected to
everything, everything that would be changed is changed. Eventually.
Tchtokes exist because of that 'eventually'. The Symphony is efficient - or lazy; I can never
decide - so it doesn't bother changing things around until it's necessary. 'Necessary' being defined as 'something
corporeal might notice': angels, demons, ethereals... we're sort of immune to
the effects. So, if you find, say, a
newspaper article that talks about the second term of Jimmy Carter, you can
show that to another 'supernatural' type, as long as he, she or it wasn't born
a human. The second that a human sees
it - wham! It gets reconfigured and the article's about Reagan or
something. Humans who know about the
phenomenon - there have been a couple; they usually don't believe you, and how
can you blame them? - and who know something about quantum mechanics start
muttering about collapsing the state vector, which is correct, but only by accident.
Now, it is pretty obvious that Tchtokes can be
useful items to have around. First off,
if you can find one (and they don't register as supernatural, so figuring out
that you have one can be a chore in and of itself) there's enough of a link to
let somebody use the Corporeal Song of Affinity to track the origins of the
disturbance that caused it. It can also
be a useful information source: reproductions of the item suffer the same
effect, but an angel could take, say, a book of poems that Shakespeare no
longer wrote and transcribe them out by hand.
There's a bit of a market for that sort of thing - assuming that you can
find somebody who's willing to believe your story - you have to understand,
everything that I'm telling you would scream 'lie' to a Seraph - which is kind
of funny, as I'm a Seraph and I'm not suffering dissonance for
this. Take it from me: don't try to
think about that too hard. And, of
course, you could use it as a human being detector. If the item doesn't change when a particular person looks at it,
you've got a human. Or a Grigori. I think.
Anyway, useful items... and the Host won't talk
about them, and neither will the Horde.
Sort of makes sense; after all, it'll disturb a lot of celestials to be
informed that reality is routinely changing around them, especially when they
can't detect it normally. Granted, most
angels wouldn't have a clue about who was President of the United States in
1894 or where the phrase 'hat trick' comes from anyway, which is the major
reason why this effect isn't widely known.
The people that we rely on most to make sense of the corporeal world are
the ones being affected by this, and even Yves' Library isn't immune. There's also the problem that it's a lot
easier for Heaven to keep its loyal servants from messing around too much with
disturbance if they don't know the whys and wherefores. Heck, I can see you calculating angles right
now: forget about it. Now that you
know, you're stuck. They'll expect you
to be extra careful - but they can't watch everybody. Well, maybe Dominic can, but is it fair to give him more
work?
But the real reason why they don't talk about the
effects of disturbance, or Tchtokes, is because of something that they call a
'cascade'. You see, normally the
Symphony can work around even a fairly large disturbance with only minimal
changes. But sometimes a larger change
is necessary - and while it's usually more likely with a large amount of
disturbance, even the smallest alteration can have massive effects. The worst of them are the dreaded cascades,
and they can alter large swathes of reality.
They're seriously bad news, in other words: if you don't believe me, go
ask the Archangel Hermione.
Yes, that's my point exactly.