Hauserkinder

The Hauserkinder were children who, through paradox, oxbow timelines, or bureaucratic failure, survived the destruction of their native realities during time war and appeared from nowhere in stable history. During the War in Heaven, remarkably consistent stories of Hauserkinder appeared in the folklore of every world with an oral culture.

Hauserkinder were occasionally treated as gods or prophets, but far more often they were exploited, abused, and sexually molested. The Cargo Priestess was one particularly common theme. The stories had several commonalities that The Book of the War tried to explain: Hauserkinder seemed to always appear in rural communities because ones in urban environments were not noticed or remembered; they seemed to always be children because adult outsiders were handled by other means; they seemed to never be immediately killed because such stories were too unpopular to spread; and they seemed to always physically resemble the inhabitants of their new environment either because collapsing timelines were localised, because exotic individuals were mistaken for animals or monsters, or because particularly foreign new arrivals died upon arrival. Faction Paradox lore described some displaced individuals exploding from the air density of their new environment.

Faction Paradox was particularly interested in the Hauserkinder. The traditional Hauserkinder story ended with sightings of "strangers", "black women", "bone men", "hooded men", or "death" in the area before the subject's mysterious disappearance. The most common explanation for this was that the Faction would sent agents for either recruitment or assassination; alternately, House Arpexia suggested they were sent to worship the Hauserkinder as living paradoxes. However, The Book of the War commented that none of these explanations matched the Faction's known operating methods, and it instead indicated that the Faction intended to use the Hauserkinder as a new form of bio-terrorism against history itself.

Freud collected extensive notes on the Hauserkinder stories, but he later destroyed them as part of a regular purge. Foucault preserved one tale from 18th century Somerset, "Justine's Story", in his book Madness and Civilisation.

The phenomenon was named for Kaspar Hauser, but in truth he appeared on Earth not from a displaced timeline but as part of House Arpexia's jungle children project. (PROSE: The Book of the War)