Simia KK98 (sometimes stylised Simia-KK98) was an ice planet on the frontier in time. During the War in Heaven, it became one of the few Time Lord colonies.
Geography[[edit] | [edit source]]
Simia KK98 was covered in ice, but it notably had a psychedelic aurora that ceaselessly lit the sky with stripes of brilliant orange and turquoise stripes. (PROSE: Alien Bodies [+]Loading...["Alien Bodies (novel)"]), Dead Romance [+]Loading...["Dead Romance (novel)"]) The reflections of the sky on the ground made the snow look blue and gold. (PROSE: Dead Romance [+]Loading...["Dead Romance (novel)"]) Beyond the aurora was a "Day-Glo yellow sun". (PROSE: Alien Bodies [+]Loading...["Alien Bodies (novel)"])
The sky caused hallucinations in most humanoids, (PROSE: Dead Romance [+]Loading...["Dead Romance (novel)"]) even driving the first Gabrielidean scouting mission to the planet completely mad. To cancel this effect, neural suppressors were wired into the eyes of the human suits of the Nth Platoon. (PROSE: Alien Bodies [+]Loading...["Alien Bodies (novel)"]) In Dead Romance, Christine Summerfield compared the sky to "the front cover of one of those acid-head 'adult' fantasy magazines they used to sell on the top shelf in W H Smith's." (PROSE: Dead Romance [+]Loading...["Dead Romance (novel)"])
The planet was uninhabited before colonisation, although it did support basic fungal life. Cwej's employers built numerous rocky fortresses on its surface, plus one huge central city. There was a six-armed statue of the employers' founder inside the fortress. (PROSE: Dead Romance [+]Loading...["Dead Romance (novel)"])
The planet was located in the Simia system on the edge of the Homeworld's noosphere. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
History[[edit] | [edit source]]
Early in the War in Heaven, the enemy thought the planet had strategic importance, so the Time Lords deployed the Nth Platoon of the Gabrielidean military to attack a small automated enemy outpost there before going to War Zone One on Dronid. They were protected by reinforced humanoid suits (PROSE: Alien Bodies) and temporally-active biodata, but the enemy found a way to sabotage the skin-suits' thermal locks, (PROSE: The Book of the War) and the entire platoon was killed by the enemy's combat satellites. One soldier was visited by the Doctor, who was acting independently of the High Council and spectating the battle. After the Doctor left, enemy agents rescued the soldier and turned him into a Shift. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)
In the early days of Faction Paradox's Remote project, Simia-KK98 was the site of a battle between the Remote and forces from the Great Houses. There, the Remote attacked the arctic fortress of the occupying House agents; however, prepared only by action-packed yet formulaic war transmissions, the Remote's charge embarrassingly failed as they each ran straight into the Houses' defensive positions in the heroic assumption that a one-in-a-million chance of survival was a good set of odds. Since most of them drifted off after the first attack, there were large numbers of survivors, but as they all went their different ways, most of them were never tracked down. (PROSE: The Book of the War)
Later, Simia KK98 was turned into a colony by the Great Houses for use as a hiding place if anything ever befell the Homeworld. The Houses built capital city of mile-high buildings that they peopled with their agents. However, these plans were abandoned when the Houses realised the planet was not secret enough to be secure. Instead, they made plans to move into the Gods' bottle universe, which they kept in a smaller fortress on the planet. The Gods sent thousands of sphinxes to siege the planet and retake the bottle. Khiste and the other inhuman soldiers of the Great Houses prepared for a fight, but hundreds of warships arrived from the Homeworld as reinforcement, and bronze spheres began engaging the sphinxes. Finally, Chris Cwej negotiated a deal with the sphinxes: the Gods would let the employers keep the bottle in exchange for some of the secrets of time technology. Christine Summerfield recorded the event in Dead Romance. (PROSE: Dead Romance)
Homunculette's House spent months sealed into silos under the permafrost of Simia KK98, waiting for enemy probes to finish scanning the surface. They passed the time trying to stop themselves from thinking, by getting drunk or driving themselves mad.
The Time Lords kept Marie in a box on Simia KK98 for the first decade of her life, making sure she couldn't move into the vortex or the physical world. (PROSE: Alien Bodies)