Conspiracy-1263
Conspiracy-1263 was a Clockwork Cherub from the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids. He was an eccentric conspiracy theorist with a feeble grasp of reality; recognised as such by the Crew, he was not usually allowed to use a Fog Ship and travel through the multiverse, although on occasion he managed to circumvent this restriction.
Description
Personality
Conspiracy-1263 was afflicted with a pathological confidence that “the authorities” were up to secret, nefarious plans, especially claiming that whatever statements they made about the real world were hoaxes and cover-ups. He was endlessly inventive in making up bizarre alternative explanations for whatever he came across, and saw himself as a stalwart heroic figure for his endless perseverance in trying to “expose” these deceptions, no matter how few listened and how many times events should have proven him wrong. (PROSE: Rifts Crisis Officially Over!, The Case Against Conspiracy)
Powers & abilities
Though he was not usually allowed the use of one, Conspiracy-1263 proved relatively adept at flying a Fog Ship. (PROSE: The Case Against Conspiracy)
Biography
As Prefect of the Department of Conspiracy Theories
As of 2019, Conspiracy-1263 was the Prefect of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids's Department of Conspiracy Theories. (PROSE: The Case Against Conspiracy) He once proposed that the Cupid Parliament were “a bunch of literal sock-puppets controlled by an enormous caterpillars”, (PROSE: Conspiracy-1263 Publicly Accuses the Gang of the Green Gorillas) leading to his exclusion from Parliamentary debates. (PROSE: Magic Trick)
Another one of his earliest conspiracy theories concerning the Homeworld saw him that the celfoam clouds were actually hot air balloons disguised as clouds. Later, he used the Cupid Suggestion Box to write at length about his newly-elaborated view that the entire existence of the Multiverse was a hoax perpetrated by the Cupid Parliament using holograms and an animatronic Lord Thymon. Not dignifying his “suggestion” with a reply, the Council reflected among themselves that if he carried on trying to “expose” them in such disruptive ways, they'd have to report Conspiracy to the Department of Discipline. (PROSE: The Cupid Suggestion Box)
A little while later, Conspiracy made the headlines of The Cupid Courier Issue #1034 when he travelled to the Prime Earth to tell the Gang of the Green Gorilla, to their faces, that they were “a bunch of fakes in gorilla suits”. The Gorillas retaliated by capturing Conspiracy and leaving him tied up at a carnival on a rack of prizes. He was rescued by other Cupids and interviewed, with his observation that the Green Gorillas had been “rather displeased with the whole situation” being noted as a rare instance of a completely factual Conspiracy quote. (PROSE: Conspiracy-1263 Publicly Accuses the Gang of the Green Gorillas)
In the Triangular Society
Some time later, Conspiracy-1263 was persuaded to join the Triangular Society, a small subversive group founded by Conquest-932 to overthrow the Cupid Parliament and Cupid Prime. As he held the organisation's first officialmeeting in a shed, with everyone wearing dark hoods, Conquest's attempts to strike a sinister mood were frustrated by one of the new recruits' complete misunderstanding of the gathering, demonstrated when he asked “when they'd start bobbing for apples”. (COMIC: A Slight Misunderstanding) Nevertheless, the Society endured. According to one Recorder Cupid, all of the Society's members were known for causing trouble and mischief in the Cupid Homeworld, whether as a team or on their own initiative. Conspiracy was no exception, although the problems he caused mostly boiled down to harassing the Department of Journalism to get them to publish his conclusions in The Cupid Courier. (PROSE: The Case Against Conspiracy)
In a rare instance of some of his writing actually being published in the Courier, he submitted a question to the newspaper's educational Q&A about the Rifts with Doctor Sigma. However, like most Cupids in the Q&A, he simply used the opportunity to rave about his own personal hang-ups, in this case his conspiracy theories according to which the Rifts Crisis was a fabrication of the Cupid Parliament to better control the population. He also indicated his belief that Lord Thymon was a hyperrealistic animatronic rather than an actual eldritch demon. Doctor Sigma did not dignify the rant with an answer. (PROSE: Rifts Crisis Officially Over!)
On Halloween 2019, Conspiracy was seen “off to the side” from where Tracker-764 was telling stories to a group of Mark XVIIs. He was “loudly disputing not only the existence of spirits, but the existence of All Hallows' Eve itself”. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
The Reichenbach IV experiment
By the end of 2021, the Department of Conspiracy Theories had been disbanded.
As Christmas 2021 approached, Conspiracy began fixating on the idea that A Christmas Carol had actually been written by monkeys on typewriters. This was because he had gotten Charles Dickens and Charles Darwin confused, interpreting Darwin's discoveries about apes evolving into men as actually a coded confession about the true authorship of "his" Christmas Carol. Stealing a Fog Ship (though Conspiracy believed the Ship was sentient and wanted to help him of its own accord), he gathered large numbers of apes and typewriters on the planet Reichenbach IV in one universe, and set them to try and replicate A Christmas Carol from scratch, as well (for tradition's sake) as the works of William Shakespeare.
After both experiments wrapped up, having produced nothing but gibberish, Conspiracy headed to the Interdimensional Tavern where he met the Multi-Coloured Medic. They bonded over being outcasts from their respective civilisations. After she stated that she had access to a time machine and was experimenting with altering history, Conspiracy gave her a copy of the alleged Shakespearean text the monkeys produced, sending her to travel back to the Prime Universe in 1623 and get “The Christmas Cacophony” published in the First Folio, thus retroactively ensuring that the experiment was technically a success.
After returning to the Cupid Homeworld, he was interrogated by Judicator-337 of the Department of Discipline. Though initially startled by the accuracy of The Christmas Cacophony, he was able to figure out the truth with further questioning. In the end, Celebration-665 intervened on Conspiracy's behalf and he was not punished for his misbehaviour, which, in Celebration's opinion, had been undertaken in good faith “for the betterment of the holiday”. The Department redacted parts of the interview with Conspiracy before handing it over to the Department of Documentation, obscuring the details of the time-travel incident, as a kind of Christmas gift-slash-prank on the Department of Literature, who were haivng great fun trying to figure out how such a strange thing as The Christmas Cacophony had been published in the Folio with Shakespeare's name attached. (PROSE: The Case Against Conspiracy)
