Auteur
- You may be looking for the series.
Godfather Auteur was a skeletal Homeworlder. After joining Faction Paradox, he declared himself the Homeworld's "Observer Effect" wrought flesh and took the title "Author of the Spiral Politic", believing that everything they wrote really happened and that anything he hadn't written about which did happen was "not valid". (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine, Going Once, Going Twice)
In a prior, female incarnation who had not actually joined the Faction yet, Auteur tricked the "death-cultists" into thinking she was already one of their own, and used this influence, as well as an artefact stolen from her people, to orchestrate an ambitious plan to end the war by siphoning off the "narrative power" of the 10,000 Dawns. This plan, which informed her posing as "the Emissary" in Spiral (PROSE: White Canvas) and "the Goddess" on the planet Gendar, (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy) was eventually foiled by Graelyn Scythes, (PROSE: White Canvas) whom Auteur nevertheless retained affection for, viewing her as an adopted daughter. (PROSE: Birthdays are Made for Memories)
History
Early life
Origins
- Main article: First Auteur
Auteur once claimed to Graelyn Scythes that her original incarnation was a little girl, who grew up quite lonely because at this point in her Homeworld's history, even looming her as a child at all had been "something of an experiment". (PROSE: White Canvas)
According to rumours, Auteur was in fact a Mapper of early Great Houses history, one of the first product of the looms, who was driven insane following being forced to watch the outside Spiral Politic from an office on the Homeworld and map it via the observer effect. Before even sprouting a second heart, Auteur realised that he could abuse the Observer Effect to make anything real if he looked in the right place. Similar to the naming conventions used by other renegade Mappers, Auteur then took a name which was a variation on the word "astrolabe". (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice) Notably, the Sixth Doctor repeatedly faced a Renegade Time Lord known as Astrolabus, who resided in a tall tower-like TARDIS, claimed to have mapped out the stars, (COMIC: Voyager) and had his skin ripped from him during his last face-off with the Doctor. (COMIC: Once Upon a Time-Lord)
However, Intrepid believed that this rumour had been started by Auteur himself and his "drinking buddies" in order to give his Observer Effect-based abilities "some more gravitas", and that he had later started believing it himself out of habit, whereupon it became valid history for him due to the Observer Effect. The official word from the Eleven-Day Empire had simply been that Auteur had been one of the Homeworlders drawn away from the Great Houses by Grandfather Paradox in the early days of the Faction. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice)
After twenty years studying under him at the Plume Coteries' Library, Roland got Auteur to admit that he wasn't really "him". Auteur admitted that the lie had been getting old by that point. However, he insisted that he was really an Archon; he briefly entertained the thought that he might have been l'Autre before correcting the notion to simply being "a bit of him". (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"]) Gideon seemed to remember growing up with Auteur on their shared homeworld. When Auteur recalled how she used to write prophecies, he corrected that she "wrote short stories about how people [she] didn’t like had bad things happen to them", which "annoyed everyone back home". On another occasion Auteur mentioned having written "a lot of fanfiction" when she was the same age as a then-preteened Graelyn Scythes. (PROSE: White Canvas)
Early adventures
When Auteur was banished from the Homeworld for his beliefs, he left with his House cousin Gideon. (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine) However, the two grew apart; Gideon eventually left Auteur to join Faction Paradox. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice) Over the years, Auteur had various faces, genders, and "a lot of other things". She later claimed that she "didn’t even like" most of her past identities, but felt that to such an incredibly long-lived being as herself, "different can be enough". By the time of her twelfth incarnation, Auteur had "been a mother and a father before, and a parent". (PROSE: White Canvas)
Twelfth incarnation
Eventually, the renegade, in her twelfth incarnation, ended up as a tall woman with red hair styled in a "lulu cut" and striking green eyes. (PROSE: White Canvas) She generally liked this form, but was not very happy with the nose. (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy)
As the Goddess of Gendar
Wanting a comfortable "day job" from which she could plan out her next moves, the renegade Homeworlder eventually teamed up with Gideon as well as Virtuoso (an exiled member of the Firmament, their species' equivalent in another reality) to build up a civilisation on the barren planet Gendar which should not rightfully have existed. While Virtuoso posed as a native and became the perpetual leader of the government, Auteur and Gideon became "the Goddess" and "the God", worshipped and pampered all day long. While the history they'd engineered spanned a billion impossible years, the Goddess and God spent around a hundred subjective years on Gendar, during which they supervised the construction of a skycraper-sized statue of the Goddess in the foundations of which Auteur hid a number of secret workspaces and stashes. (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy)
Impersonating the future
In this incarnation, the renegade Homeworlder discovered that at some point in her subjective future, she would join a group of "death-cultists" with a deep knowledge of rituals and blood magic. With the help of Gideon, who was already a member, she tricked them into believing that she was a version who had already pledged her loyalty to them, beginning to operate under her future chosen name of "Auteur". (PROSE: White Canvas)
The 10,000 Dawns gambit
Auteur hatched a plan to turn the entire 10,000 Dawns into fiction and then fuse their contents, now malleable to her whim, into a fully consistent "alternate history" which she could superimpose over her own universe to overwrite the war with a peaceful version of reality where she would be dominant. Having diverted resources from the cultists, (PROSE: White Canvas) she plotted from her Gendar hideaway to steal a powerful gauntlet which could turn things into fiction from the weapons-store of her homeworld. (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy, White Canvas) She wrote a fake prophecy according to which the 10,000 Dawns would be the undoing of the Original Mammoths and arranged for them to find out, manipulating them into sending out the painted warriors to the 10,000 Dawns and taking their entire population out of time to avert this fate, starting with the Firmament. (PROSE: White Canvas)
As part of this conspiracy, she teamed up with several other individuals, including a rogue Firmament and two Knight of Sky. One of them was Artillo Brinzo. After they retrieved an urn from Vo'lach Prime which allowed Auteur to regain access to her stash of notes on Gendar after Virtuoso had sent it to Vo'lach Prime to prevent the cache from being opened, Auteur and Brinzo decided to dispense with the excess of members, and tried to kill the three other conspirators. The other Knight was thus left dead in a pit on Vo'lach, alongside another one of the conspirators. The rogue Firmament, however, managed to survive by leeching the life-force of others.
However, he was unable to get to Gendar before Auteur, who successfully recovered her notes preparing for a great heist (PROSE: The Gendar Conspiracy) and sent Brinzo to steal the gauntlet. Then, posing as "the Emissary", an orthodox agent of the Houses, she travelled to Spiral and asked Kinan Jans to put their best people on the case of "recovering" the gauntlet. Graelyn Scythes and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe caught up with the Knight and got the gauntlet from him, but he was abducted by a painted warrior before he could reveal the truth about who had hired him. Returning to Spiral, they found that the gauntlet had danger locked itself to Graelyn, preventing her from immediately giving it to the Emissary, who was thus forced to tag along as she, Archimedes and Lady Aesculapius investigated the painted warriors. With Coloth's help, they eventually found their way to the alter-time realm of the mammoths. With the mammoth leader Taranis realising Graelyn was not his enemy, the danger lock released and the Emissary recovered the gauntlet for herself, revealing her true identity.
Auteur wasted no time in unleashing the gauntlet's true power — reducing the painted warriors into mere works of art, Archimedes into a box-set of action films, Lady Aesculapius into "a pile of 276 Blu-Ray disks", and most people simply into books describing their linear life story. Taranis, regretting his mistake, decided to make it up to Graelyn by transmuting himself into a secretly-alive stuffed toy before Auteur got to her. Graelyn, meanwhile, tricked her by writing a few "final lines" on her own arms as her last act before being fictionalised: this resulted in these lines appearing at the extreme end of her book, after "And Graelyn wrote on her own arms:". Because of the way she'd written them, her book had no ending, which destabilised Auteur's grand ritual and caused the books she'd accumulated to collapse into an expanse of hostile blank reality called the White Canvas. As she'd written in the book, Graelyn then turned back from a book to a baby. (PROSE: White Canvas)
Creating the Town
While Auteur's cousin and co-conspirator Gideon advocated for simply killing the baby, Auteur was convinced that her grand ritual could not move forward until Graelyn completed her part by writing an ending to her book of her own free will. Intending to manipulate her into writing an ending that would fictionalise her after all, Auteur gathered a few hundred members of her cult in the White Canvas and created a Town where she would raise Graelyn over again. She nursed and cared for Graelyn until she was old enough to walk, at which point she left Graelyn to live on her own and transitioned to acting as Graelyn's "art therapist" to keep tabs on her. Thus, Graelyn grew up over again in a Town with barely any other children, not knowing that it was abnormal for a little girl to live alone without any parents or guardians or friends — in a reflection of Auteur's own childhood. To prevent her from getting too lonely, Auteur often allowed her to walk her robotic dog F.I.D.O.
While they were at it, in later years, Auteur and Gideon also brought a few other "projects" to the Town, including the Hollow Childe, a prophesied Antichrist into whom Gideon had taken an interest, and Citizen 176, a young artist saved by Auteur from the guillotine in the French Revolution and whom Auteur hoped to mould into an "artistic spirit of vengeance". (PROSE: White Canvas)
Graelyn's dreams
As she grew, Graelyn was not entirely unaware that the adults were lying to her about there being no world beyond the White Canvas, and, thanks to Taranis's totemic influence, was able to gradually remember her earlier life — first mere inklings that the sky ought to be blue and that Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, far from a mere fictional character, ought to be her best friend; but then, by the time she was ten, full memories of the mission leading up to the White Canvas's creation, manifesting in chunks as dreams.
When she told Auteur about them, Auteur tried to take advantage of this to bully Graelyn into writing down that she wanted to be fictional like Archimedes in the journal, but misjudged her words and ended up prompting Graelyn to recognise Auteur as the only person left who cared about her and was there for her. Finding that, in spite of her better judgment, she did feel something like love for the girl, Auteur accepted her invitation to spend Christmas Eve together, and rethought her plans, taking on a more guardian-like role to Graelyn for the next five years. Following F.I.D.O's advice, Graelyn also befriended the Hollow Childe and Citizen 176. (PROSE: White Canvas)
The unmaking of the Town
After five years, Graelyn Scythes abruptly had a further "dream" continuing the narrative of her earlier ones, which surprised her as she'd almost forgotten them. When she confronted Auteur about it, the woman was cagey, and admitted the existence of a world beyond the Canvas while refusing to tell her more about her own part in Auteur's plan. Later that same day, she went with Hollow and 176 to the screening of a new Archimedes movie, only for Graelyn to manage to communicate with Arch through the screen, which prompted an irate Auteur to interrupt the screening.
Finally, two years later on Christmas Eve, Graelyn woke up in the middle of the night with the final piece of the puzzle having popped into her mind. After scribbling it down, she hurried to meet Hollow and 176. With their help, she snuck into the cinema (where an illegal screening of a movie from outside was being held by Skinflint). They hid in the bathroom until everyone left and then screened the 10,000-Dawns-based films one after the other, awakening the people trapped within them and coaxing them out, back into relative reality. Graelyn then confronted Auteur, flanked not only by Archimedes, but by Taranis returned to his full size, while all the other 10,000 Dawns inhabitants desecended on the Town, incapacitating the cultists.
However, when Auteur admitted defeat with surprising ease, Graelyn's belief that the adventure was "over" triggered the original conditions of the ritual, transforming the entire Town — cultists included — back into fiction and leaving only Graelyn and Auteur. Explaining that she had genuinely come to love Graelyn like a daughter, Auteur, instead of threatening to kill her as Graelyn was now expecting, offered her the chance to become her "co-author". Thinking quickly, Graelyn pretended to accept on the condition that Auteur even the playing field between them by fictionalising her own home as well as the 10,000 Dawns, so that neither of them would have a home and they would be on an equal footing "playing" with universes foreign to them both. Auteur thoughtlessly accepted, realising too late that despite all her hubris, she was still part of the wider story of her universe, and was thus pulled along into fictionality.
With the gauntlet not being capable of fictionalising itself, it was left behind in what was left of the White Canvas; Graelyn picked it up and used it to reverse everything it had done, restoring all 10,001 fictionalised universes and sending Auteur back to her correct point in the timelines. (PROSE: White Canvas)
Later fate
After the dust cleared, F.I.D.O found Graelyn in what was left of the White Canvas. He explained that he believed that, striving to recapture the godlike power she'd briefly wielded, he expected Auteur to soon push herself beyond her limits and wind up putting herself in mortal peril.
This grim prediction was fulfilled, with the female Auteur soon getting killed, and using her final remaining life to return as a man. (PROSE: White Canvas)
Thirteenth incarnation
Auteur's final regeneration in their original allotted life cycle was a man, (PROSE: White Canvas) presumably the "wizened old man with a greasy beard and two clumps of white hair on either side of his bald head" (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice) matching the appearance of Astrolabus as encountered by the Sixth Doctor (COMIC: Voyager, etc.) who was documented in another account as a having propensity for saying phrases in French and once scribbled into a grimoire by candlelight, notwithstanding Intrepid's suspicions that this entire aspect of Auteur's past was a fabrication which had only later become real due to the Observer Effect. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice) He was known as Papa Noël. (PROSE: The Two Auteurs)
Again matching the documented history of Astrolabus, (COMIC: Once Upon a Time-Lord) this story further asserted that in his final life, Auteur had attempted to cheat death by stealing star charts from an agent of Life, (PROSE: Hark! The Herald Angels Sing) leading to "Life itself" taking his skin from him. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice)
One way or the other, a flayed Auteur found himself at the end of his rope in a "crumbling reality bubble of his own making". (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice, White Canvas) However, he was found by F.I.D.O and Graelyn Scythes, who had travelled forward in time from the day of the White Canvas's unmaking, based on F.I.D.O's intuition that his Mistress — now Master — would place himself in mortal peril in the future in an attempt to recapture the glory of the failed plan. With F.I.D.O helping to stabilise his condition, they took the dying man back to the White Canvas and then notified Gideon. Auteur noted that by this point, he couldn't even remember whether he had properly been initiated into the cult yet. (PROSE: White Canvas)
Godfather of Faction Paradox
Joining the Faction
The dying Auteur was then found by the Faction. Laughing madly despite his injuries, he claimed that "Life itself" had stolen his skin from him. Gideon, who pleaded with his compatriots for Auteur to be allowed to join the Faction, (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice) highlighting him as "the greatest artist there is", so that they could save his life. (PROSE: White Canvas)
Taking the name "Auteur", he replaced his missing skin with shadow-skin. Instead of having a conventional ceremonial mask, Auteur allowed the shadow-skin to peel off at his head and reveal his actual skull. (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine)
Imprisonment
Though they initially made him no less than a Godfather, the Faction eventually got annoyed with Auteur and his beliefs and imprisoned him at the top of the Shadow Spire, (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine) ruling that even though his beliefs were incompatible with Great House orthodoxy, they still involved "mastery" of history, and were therefore anathema to the the Grandfather's dogma. Mother and Father were assigned as his wardens. (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice, The Story So Far...)
Even then, Auteur continued writing and scheming as he listened to the whispers of the loa that teemed around the tower. He incorporated what he learned into his writings and home videos of history and alternative histories. (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine) During his imprisonment, Auteur wrote an Abecedarium (PROSE: Auteur's Abecedarium) as a result of a deal made by a later version of Auteur with the Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles. (PROSE: Resurrection of the Author) It was later found on the Cupid Homeworld during Christmas, 2020. The inhabitants, the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, regarded it as a Christmas miracle, despite Lord Thymon suspecting that there was something wrong. Celebration-665 gave a reading of the abecedarium to the other Cherubs, but partway through, he read a warning message broadcast over a metamedial network, which warned not to let Auteur to have access to their reality's story. Celebration-665 dismissed it as part of the story. Celebration was left baffled, and the other Cherubs without words. Bibliophile-962 confiscated the book, storing it away in the restricted section of the Cupid Archives. Celebration then won back the Clockwork Cherubs with offers of cake. (PROSE: Auteur's Abecedarium)
Gideon sometimes visited Auteur, but as time passed their relationship grew more distant and the visits became less frequent. On the day of Gideon's final visit, Auteur was inspired by a recording of Morlock (and the usual loa whispers) to write a story about Lolita manipulating Count Dracula into becoming the Enemy. Auteur took delight in the premise, angering Gideon. After Auteur finished the story, Gideon left the Spire only to be consumed by Auteur's loa before returning to the wider universe. (PROSE: A Bloody (And Public) Domaine)
While still focused on Dracula, Auteur received a message from Archimedes Von Ahnerabe, asking for everyone Graelyn had met and befriended across the realities to send her video greetings to make up for her having to spend her birthday in quarantine. Auteur claimed that he had tried to arrange for Dracula to meet Graelyn as a birthday treat, but he had refused; he had subsequently been "informed by Father and Mother that [he] was simply talking in [his] sleep". After explaining this in the video, he devolved into ranting about how he would make an encounter between the two happen yet, using his full powers as a storyteller. Graelyn, somewhat disturbed, cut the video off without watching the rest of it. (PROSE: Birthdays are Made for Memories)
The Family of the Shadow Spire
After the destruction of the Eleven-Day Empire, Auteur's prison became a haven for surviving members of Faction Paradox, (PROSE: Hark! The Herald Angels Sing) who took on the name of Family of the Shadow Spire. Although nominally still a prisoner in the lantern room of the Spire, Auteur was one of the leaders of the Family, with Mother and Father having, by then, degraded into mere shadows of their former selves who acted like fanatical loyalists to the Faction's propaganda, but were easily manipulated by Auteur.
At the time of the Armistice, Auteur attempted to free himself from the Spire and ascend beyond time to become the indisputable author of history. Having already written the narrative of things to come, Auteur waited in the Spire with Mother and Father as Kifah and Gustav obtained the Unanchored Osirian Apep in the First Auction in Heaven. Once Apep was in his grasp, Auteur ordered his loa to kill Mother and Father and began a ritual to bond his biodata with Apep's.
However, Apep had already been snaking through Auteur's narrative and altering its outcome; in the last moment, Apep sucked Auteur's shadow-skin away from him. After he began painfully falling apart, Apep snapped his jaws around him, seemingly killing him. Due to the temporal disturbances caused by Apep's arising, an echo of Auteur still managed to speak to Intrepid for a few moments more. Aware that "this wasn't [his] story anymore," Auteur spent his time taunting Intrepid, speaking in his true voice ("gargled shards of glass, more like the crunching of arthritic bones than voice") with no French or other eccentricities.
After one last grumble about "…characters, never staying to the f*cking script,” Auteur faded away "into the past; never again to touch the future". (PROSE: Going Once, Going Twice)
Return in the post-War universe
During V-Time, Chris Cwej and his Superiors knew of Auteur. Although they knew him to be currently dead, they also knew that he would eventually be resurrected, and that at some point in this future life, he would find himself wandering beyond the Totality. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"]
Indeed, Auteur resurfaced in weakened form. Without his shadow-skin, he had been reduced to a "tangle of blackened biodata" inhabiting his own battered, badly-repaired skeleton. Auteur put together a new plan and used a "Noble-woman" to alter the structure of history, creating a twisted parallel world. However, the woman rebelled, restoring the proper course of history despite Auteur's attempt to stop her by "vandalising a sad and ancient thing".
Because he'd physically followed the woman into the altered timeline, rather than simply projecting his mind backwards like she had, Auteur remained trapped in the parallel world even as it faded away, collapsing into an empty oxbow timeline. Although he was lost and dying, Auteur rejected this ending for his "story". He cried tears of ink and used them to write down a message on the pavement which would ensure his eventual survival: "This is only the beginning". (PROSE: Resurrection of the Author)
Trapped outside the universe
Resurrection by the Retconning Crocodiles
After several centuries passed, during which Auteur's consciousness became dormant, his salvation came in the form of three Retconning Crocodiles, who came to inspect the oxbow timeline in the hopes of making it into a new base for their organisation. They found Auteur and recognised him. To speak to him, they temporarily regressed his body to an earlier state, that of the bearded old man. The Crocodiles then offered him a more lasting resurrection in exchange for his helping them to attempt to defeat the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids.
Auteur accepted the Crocodiles' deal after making them swear on their own canonicity that they would uphold their end of the deal. The Crocodiles thus retroactively allowed the version of Auteur trapped in the Spire to write a cursed Abecedarium with which to "destabilise the Cupids' story". He then woke up back in the "present," finding that he was in a rejuvenated version of his skeletal body, with his shadow-skin and vitality having been returned to him — alongside his old grimoire and his favourite quill. (PROSE: Resurrection of the Author)
Imprisonment in the Sanctum of the Heretic
Though resurrected, Auteur found that he was still trapped in the oxbow reality, as a mocking message from the Retconning Crocodiles highlighted. Scholars later dubbed this reality "the Sanctum of the Heretic". (PROSE: Resurrection of the Author)
After two years, Herodotus-724, the custodian of the Cupid Archives, opened the Abecedarium. This link allowed Auteur to step through from his "crumbling little oxbow" into the Cupid Homeworld, where he sought to acquire one of the Crew's Void Ships, the Fog Ships, in order to fly it back to his home universe. He made his way through the Homeworld jumping from shadow to shadow, even shrugging off an attempt by Lord Thymon to stop him, but Sigma-063 was able to stop him from entering the Fog Ship hangar by switching on all the lights in the building at maximum intensity, creating vast stretches across which he could not move in his shadow form. Trying a different approach, he gave life to all the fiction within the Cupid Archives, causing a pandemonium of fiction across the Homeworld as Cupids merged with fictional characters. However, before he could make his escape, Herodotus leveraged his own spell by stamping the Abecedarium as "REJECTED from collection", which, under the current state of reality where everything in the Archives came true, physically expelled Auteur from the Homeworld. Herodotus then chained up the book so that it couldn't be opened again and locked it in a drawer. (POEM: Auteur and the Homeworld)
Trip to Gongen and capture by the Letharchy
Now wandering the Multiverse, Auteur was "discreetly" "picked up" by Lady Aesculapius from this point in his timeline, which lay in the relative future of Chris Cwej and his Superiors' V-Time, in order to help with a ritual Cwej and Aesc were setting up on Gongen in a "backwater universe" called the Warsong, rebooting the Professor X series in an effort to bring Grant Markham back into existence. Though against the normal rules, this use of a future Auteur by Cwej was sanctioned by his Superiors in the person of Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn. Aesculapius also brought in Graelyn Scythes to help with the filming, and, viewing the skeletal version of her erstwhile parent as mentally ill more than anything else, she slotted into the role of carer for him. She had mixed feeling on the use of Auteur's writing for the project, feeling that they were "enabling" his dangerous obsession. Auteur himself, however, was enthusiastic, though his scripts took many liberties with the truth as Auteur followed his whimsical inspiration.
Eventually, as they were filming the finale, he revealed that his way of implementing their request was not to summon Grant back to life, but rather to summon whatever power had removed him from existence — in point of fact, the Letharchy — leading to them taking Aesc, Cwej and friends to the same place, from which they would hopefully be able to rescue him. Onboard the Letharchy's prison ship the Point of Know Return, Auteur had his memories erased like the other prisoners, and was forced to perform various menial tasks. Eventually, Cwej, Jhe Sang Mi and Aesculapius managed to start a rebellion with the help of Grant Markham himself, eventually bringing down the Letharchy and returning their memories to all the prisoners. Auteur thus recovered the memories he'd lost, though they were not necessarily memories of things which had really happened. (PROSE: And Today, You [+]Loading...["And Today, You (novel)"])
In the Plume Coteries' Library
After their TV-making adventure, Auteur wanted to return to his area of expertise: regular books. At his request, when she returned him to his own era, Lady Aesculapius dropped him off at the Plume Coteries' Library, though at the Void Gate — meant for visitors from outside the universe — rather than the Cosmic Gate through which an Archon would normally enter the Library. Resurrecting his old pretense of being the last of the Mappers, Auteur disguised himself as a non-skeletal version of him using a false beard, thick tinted glasses, and dead flesh and skin stolen from an unknown victim. Announcing his arrival with panache to receptionist Baligant Caulphin, he began claiming that he had in fact been exploring and charting the Multiverse for all these eons, and was unaware of anything which had happened in the universe since before the coup against Urizen.
Declaring that his last task before he allowed himself to return home was to map out the Library, he spent twenty years among the Bookkeepers, teaching their elders advanced papyromancy and creating a number of partial maps of the Library, including the one which later came into Callum's possession. He even took an apprentice, Master Librarian Roland, ten years into his twenty-year stay in the Library. However, Roland began to suspect that the "Mapper" was not who he said he was, and that his explorations of the Library were not random. In fact, Auteur was searching for the Bookwyrm, a "primordial god-serpent" residing within the Library, in the hope of "riding [it]" back into the proper universe as he made a "triumphant return". He ended up attempting to sacrifice Roland's firstborn in a ritual to summon the Bookwyrm. Roland stopped and confronted him, forcing him to reveal his true appearance and identity. Identifying Auteur as an existential threat to the Library itself, Roland took extreme measures and set fire to the whole of Floor 899,167,435,042, burning Auteur down to ash in the blaze. He marked his passage on that Floor on the map, but did not write down any details about what could be found there. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Seventeenth incarnation
Reborn from the ashes
258 years later, the cryptic notes on the map led fugitives Callum, Maritsa and Coloth to try and get to Floor 899,167,435,042 from a higher floor, with a Master Librarian in pursuit, none other than Roland's grandson and heir, Naimon. Naimon ended up falling to his death down the elevator shaft. There, Auteur's scattered ashes came alive upon being supplied with his spilled blood, which they used as ink to write down Auteur's name over and over in fractal patterns. This allowed Auteur to enact a regeneration, his sixteenth, reconstituting himself out of scattered fundamental particles into a new skeletal body. This new form largely identical to his previous one, although the robe he wore was now black and tattered, having been coagulated out of "shadows and grime". (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Swallowed by the Bookwyrm
By the time Callum, Maritsa and Coloth made their own non-lethal way down to Floor 899,167,435,042, Auteur was waiting to greet them. He was particularly excited to meet Coloth, as he had met an older version of Coloth out of synch during the Gongen affair. To the children's horror, he revealed that, having anticipated their meeting, he had taken advantage of his stay in the Library to retcon several aspects of their history, most notably altering the spelling of Marissa's name and destroying their Birdhemoth friend long before he could meet them, because Auteur believed that it made a more interesting story for the trio to be on the run in the Library for months without a means of instantaneous escape. Before the children could do anything to stop him, Auteur then put Naimon's blood to a new purpose, using it to complete his original ritual to summon the Bookwyrm.
The Bookwyrm, however, had no interest in serving as his steed; appearing out of nowhere, it expressed its annoyance at how long this had taken, and promptly ate Auteur. The Bookwyrm would go on to tell this story to a human who had wandered into the Library, an unclear amount of time later; only revealing itself as the Bookwyrm quite late in the telling, the creature had previously made several asides implying that Auteur had survived being eaten, and that the Bookwyrm regularly had conversations with him, describing him as "a man, even now, very close to my heart", some of whose ideas he found "harder to digest than others". For example, the Bookwyrm once asked Auteur why he spoke French, and specifically, whether he was just being pretentious, to which Auteur replied: "Pretentious? Moi?" and then laughed without further elaboration. (PROSE: The Cactus and the Corpse [+]Loading...["The Cactus and the Corpse (short story)"])
Legacy
One of the landmarks on the planet Gendar, whose religion worshipped the Sun Builder as gods, was Auteur's Babbling Bibliothèque. During her time working as a tour guide on Gendar, Maxie Masters recalled giving guided tours of the Bibliothèque to various alien tourists, such as electromagnetic barnacles. (PROSE: Out of the Box)
Auteur appeared as a character in a BBC TV series whose title was made up of two words, beginning with F and P respectively. His skeletal "thirteenth reincarnation" was portrayed continuously from 2067 and 7898 by a single performer, (PROSE: Auteur's Abecedarium, Resurrection of the Author) except for the 200th Anniversary Special of 6267, where he was portrayed by the actor David Bradley wearing a rubber mask. (PROSE: Resurrection of the Author)
Undated events
At an unclear point in their personal timeline, Auteur received an invitation to Lady Aesculapius's funeral, but did not attend, instead sending a "lovely message" apologising for not being able to make it. This slightly wounded Aesculapius, who was in fact alive in a new body, and had organised the funeral herself as part of a plot to figure out who had been behind the "murder" of her previous incarnation. Reading the eulogy while posing as Aesc's imaginary cousin "Lady Raesculapius", she mentioned Auteur and his message, muttering under her breath "I mean, I was able to be with us here today and it's my funeral but whatever". (PROSE: Life After Death)
Behind the scenes
Auteur is as heavily implied to have once been Astrolabus, a recurring antagonist of Doctor Who Magazine's Sixth Doctor comics, as can be achieved without impeaching on the character's copyright. However, this was never explicit due to Obverse Books not having the license for the character of Astrolabus, which lies with Steve Parkhouse, writer of COMIC: Voyager.
Dee Dodebier's depiction of Auteur was largely based on the Skeskis from the film The Dark Crystal and also on an abstract self-portrait by Paul McCartney.[1]
Information from invalid sources
The character of Auteur, licensed from his creator Jayce Black, made a further appearances in Aristide Twain's A Better World, a short story released on the Doctor Who: Lockdown! website as part of the Lockdown Fan Gallery. While not mentioning any BBC concepts by name, it placed a post-Time War version of Auteur in the background of the events of Turn Left. Upon spotting the way the timelines seemed to be converging on a "Noble-woman", Auteur sensed an opportunity to create a world without "the Renegade", and was the one to advise the fortune teller to feed the woman to her beetle. His plan was successful, and a new timeline is created, with Auteur following the woman into it. However, the "Wolf-girl" stops Auteur from reaching out to the implied-Donna and convincing her to let this new history take its course.
This story formed the first part of a trilogy completed by Auteur's Abecedarium and Resurrection of the Author, the two crossover guest appearances of Auteur in The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, with the latter also being written by Twain. However, unlike those two stories, it has not, to date, been released in a professional context, with the Lockdown Fan Gallery being an explicitly non-commercial medium of release. As a result, A Better World is not covered on this Wiki, unlike its two sequels.
