Once Sent to the past, the DOer can take actions that might affect the present-day reality of the Sending witch, the DOer him/herself, etc.
Once Homed back to the present day, the DOer’s actions cannot affect the past reality of the Homing witch, etc.
The DTAP is terra incognita to both the Sending witch and the DOer, must be extensively researched beforehand from historical documents, maps, and scrying.
The destination is perfectly familiar to the DOer but unknown, and nearly unimaginable, to the Homing witch, for whom it is in the distant future.
The DOer is moving from their natural time and place to one where they are an unnatural intrusion.
The DOer is moving from a place where they fundamentally do not belong, back to their natural time and place.
For these reasons, witches think of Sending and Homing as asymmetrical, and fundamentally different, spells. Sending is much more difficult, first of all because it entails more advance prep work if it is not to produce a random result, and secondly because it means working against the natural flow of time.
An analogy might be made to a rubber band connecting the DOer to their natural time and place. When the DOer is Sent to a past DTAP, the rubber band is stretched, which requires more effort and more focus on the witch’s part if the DOer is not to end up in the wrong place. When the same DOer is Homed, it is as if their connection to the DTAP is simply severed by the Homing witch. The “rubber band” yanks the DOer unerringly back to the ODEC from which they were Sent. Indeed, if this were not the case, diachronic operations would not be possible at all. In the case of Dr. Stokes’s colonial Boston DEDE, how could KCW Fitch possibly have returned Dr. Stokes to the ODEC in modern-day Boston—a time, place, and environment beyond her imagining—if not for this “snap-back” effect?
The “rubber band” feature of Homing is therefore fundamental to DODO’s ability to do anything at all. But there is a catch: if the DOer has experienced eight hours, or seventeen days, in the DTAP, the “rubber band” yanks them back to the ODEC eight hours or seventeen days after they departed.
Compressing mission time by returning the DOer to an earlier moment is, therefore, not simply a matter of using the Homing spell in a different way—turning the knobs to different settings, as it were. It would require a different spell altogether. And the witch performing it would have to have some prior familiarity with the future DTAP in order to “aim” the DOer in the correct “direction.”
2. SHEAR RISK:
Witches appear to have a nose for situations apt to produce Diachronic Shear. Mission duration compression seems to be one of those. If a homebound DOer can be Homed back to the “wrong” time (i.e., earlier than the natural snap-back time) then they could just as well be sent home before they departed, which would lead to a situation in which two copies of the same DOer were existing in the same time and place.
Other absurd or paradoxical situations could be imagined. Let us say that a twenty-year-old DOer were Sent back to a DTAP where they lived for sixty years, then Homed to a point in time only a fraction of a second after their departure. From the point of view of an observer in the ODEC, it would be as if the twenty-year-old were instantaneously replaced by an eighty-year-old.
Such possibilities are deeply distressing to witches, who seem to see in them a kind of moral and aesthetic abomination.
To sum up, it appears that the idea of compressing mission duration is a non-starter. From the witches’ point of view, it requires getting a compliant witch in the distant past to undertake an unfamiliar spell of extreme difficulty, all to achieve an end result that is viewed as both insanely risky and viscerally repugnant.
We are, therefore, stuck with UDET for the foreseeable future, and it seems safe to say that our adversaries are in the same boat. DODO personnel planning the kalonji seed DEDE, or other time-consuming missions, will have to take that reality into account. Fortunately, we have the luxury of time at the moment since we are awaiting the completion of the Chronotron.
DODO MEMORANDUM
POLICY ON OFFICIAL JARGON AND ACRONYM COINAGE
BY MACY STOLL, MBA
POSTED Day 623
Now that I’ve had time to settle in to my new role as head of C/COD (that is DODO’s Conventional/Contemporary Operations Department, for those of you who have been tucked away in exotic DTAPs during the recent organizational upgrades), I’m beginning to see opportunities for optimizing and perfecting the way DODO operates on a day-to-day basis. In coming weeks we’re going to be challenging ourselves to implement new procedures and policies that will help ensure that the taxpayers get the most for their hard-earned dollars, even though hopefully none of them will ever know of DODO’s existence.
Communications becomes all-important in a large organization. Informal practices that worked well when it was just a few friends sitting around a table at the Apostolic Café may no longer be well adapted to a large agency that spans not only the globe, but most of recorded history as well.
In that spirit I would like to take up the subject of jargon and acronyms.