One (The Taking of Planet 5)
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Onefor other, similarly-named pages.
Investigator One was the Celestis' head field agent. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
The Celestis made him from the germ-plasma of their slave class as part of an experiment. He was raised in the doom-creches of Mictlan's Baby Farm, surrounded by ornamental skulls and faceless wet nurses.
After serving the Celestis for a considerable time, One was influenced by the hermit into going rogue. While sent to clean up the Celesti operation in the Seventh Retro War, One intentionally went against his orders and let some pockets of resistance survive. Because of this, Two was assigned to observe One.
The Celestis sent One and Two to find out what had caused a Lord Celestial to not only cease to exist, but to have never existed.
In fact, One was responsible for the non-existence of the Lord Celestial; he was working with the hermit to destroy Mictlan before it would attract the attention of the Swimmers and cause the universe to be destroyed. To that end they arranged for the Fendahl Predator to be released from its time loop prison. Since it fed on concept, and Mictlan was a conceptual construct, the Predator could not resist feeding on it. The inhabitant whose existence it first erased was the one that caused One and Two to be sent to investigate in the first place.
After Mictlan was excised, One met up with the hermit on Earth. He had adopted the form of "an inconspicuous man in a grey suit", but due to "damage caused by sustained staser fire from Xenaria's troops", he was no longer able to fully maintain a physical form: his features were "blurred, like an unfocused photograph of a man". His "brush with death" had left him "sobered, less boastful than before", and he seemed to resent the Time Lords. The hermit asked One to shoot him in the heart to trigger a regeneration so that he could abandon his monstrous form for a more inconspicuous one. One and the Hermit then parted ways. (PROSE: The Taking of Planet 5)
The Book of the War included several references to the term "One" as something of a great and incomprehensible significance to the Enemy, much more than it being the name of a mere representative. For instance, "One" was the word repeated by Umbaste after his vision of the caldera. Similarly, in the Rivera Manuscript, one Great House renegade was imprisoned by mysterious forces believed to be representatives of the Enemy, including something the renegade called "the first, the many, and the indivisible" which "may have been a bad translation"; in parts of the renegade's subsequent praxis-induced vision of the Event, he was accompanied by someone called "One". The Book of the War's commentary noted the shared name with the head Investigator of the Celestis, but did not know what to make of it, as the Celestis themselves did not appear to be involved. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
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