Cupid Homeworld
The Cupid Homeworld was a pocket dimension and the homeworld of the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids. (PROSE: Rifts Crisis Officially Over!)
Nature
Locations
The Homeworld's central area was the Mainland Cloud, (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery, The Case Against Conspiracy) home to such buildings as the Cupid Post Office. (PROSE: Acquaintanceship-982 and the Missing Mail Mystery)
Defences
The Cupid Homeworld was very hard for uninvited interdimensional interlopers to breach. One of the defences placed by the Creator to keep intruders out of the Cupid Homeworld was that “the atmosphere and the clouds were all saturated in frankly unreasonable amounts of Love Potion which would make anyone but a Cupid fall deeply in love with the last person they’d met before coming to the Homeworld”. Authorised visitors were immune, and “powerful psychic entities” could also fight it off sometimes.
Additionally, as Pythagoras-858 once explained to Lord Thymon, “the Cupid Homeworld’s reality, and that of anyone in it, is… anchored… (…) Our essence run on more than just gemstones and positrons. As long as we're within the Homeworld, or return there often enough, it’s — stabilized, I think is the word. Whatever else we may be, we remain Cupids”. (PROSE: Magic Trick)
Other characteristics
Time within the Cupid Homeworld was fluid, with the Department of Chronology not bothering to keep in check. (PROSE: Magic Trick) As such, its timestream wasn't “straightened-out” enough to permit the Cupids to travel through their own history. (PROSE: The Book of Evil) The Homeworld also had no day-night cycle, as the Department of Celestial Bodies was disbanded early on in its history, leaving it washed in perpetual daylight with no discernible source; only the Department of Sleep arbitrarily told Cupids when to rest and wake. (PROSE: Magic Trick)
Originally, the passage of time was going to be obvious; “it had been the plan, early on, [for the Cupid Homeworld to have a day-night cycle], but the instructions the Creator had left on how to operate the Clockwork Sun and the Clockwork Moon had been unclear at best, mistakes were made, and the Department of Celestial Bodies had been looking for the Moon for thirty-two years now”. (PROSE: Family Business) Similarly but more effectively, the Homeworld occasionally enjoyed artificial weather whipped up by the Department of Meteorology. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
History
The Creator of the Crew created the Cupid Homeworld to rehouse her Clockwork Cherubs after her garage grew too small to accommodate them. (PROSE: The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids)
On April 29th, a 2019, a Rift appeared in the Cupid Homeworld, linking it to the headquarters of the Faction of the Fooling Fish in the Prime Universe. On two occasions, the Department of Rifts were able to close the Rift, but not in such a way that they could guarantee it would not return. (PROSE: The Faction of the Fooling Fish) A little while later, as part of their Cross-Dimensional Grand Prix, the pan-dimensional speedsters of Lilathia and Brutus briefly passed through the Cupid Homeworld, but the Department of Space-Time Anomalies were out to lunch at the time and missed it entirely. (PROSE: Marksmanship-522 and the Multi-Dimensional Race)
When they analysed the dimensional residue carried by the Pessimist-242, the Drove of the Database-Compiling Dromedaries were able to derive the coordinates of the Cupid Homeworld, but this was of little practical value to them as they did not possess any methods of interdimensional travel at the time. (PROSE: Pessimist and the Dromedaries)
The Collective of the Retconning Crocodiles also discovered how to enter the Homeworld, and sometimes sent representatives to meet the Cupids officially. The first known was a Crocodile showing off a new temporal manipulation device the Crocodiles had developed, the Upstream Staff. (COMIC: Crocodile Time)
After Acquaintanceship-982's Fog Ship gained sentience during a trip to one universe's Land of Oz and elected to stay there, Dorothy Gale sent Acquaintanceship back home instead using the powder of the Magic Belt. (PROSE: The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids in Oz)
Shortly thereafter, another Retconning Crocodile travelled to the Cupid Homeworld, but its plan to take control of the Crew was outwitted by Pythagoras-858. (COMIC: Time Loops & Treachery)
On a day off from the Blue Feather, Pessimist-242 was wandering the Mainland Cloud, annoyed at his own inability to find something tangible to be annoyed about, when he stumbled upon a mysterious magician's hat. He briefly encountered its ostensible owner, a magician who appeared as a faceless phantom, which Pessimist attributed to him being a careless dimensional traveller who had phased nearly, but not completely, into the Cupid Homeworld by accident. He tried to hand the Hat back to the magician, but the magician pretended not to hear him and vanished. Trying to put the Hat out of his sight, Pessimist attempted to bury it, but instead activated its magic as it began to spew out a veritable tidal wave of illusory white rabbits.
The mounting mass of rabbits soon reached the Cupid Post Office and then the Cupid Parliament, becoming such an unstoppable force that the Cupids made for their Fog Ships and escaped en masse to the Euclidean Plane, where the Copper-Colored Council of Elders asked the Geometron Pentagon for asylum. The Cupid Prime, for his part, had escaped to Hawaii in his personal Fog Ship alongside his entourage, but not before telling the Department of Problem-Solving to stay behind and solve the problem. Lord Thymon used his powers to hold off the tide long enough for the Prime-Solvers, and Thymon himself, to take refuge in an empty warehouse.
After three days, having concluded that only a Deus Ex Machina could save the Homeworld, Valerius-1497 told the others that they should summon Aphrodite herself to help. The plan worked, but before she used her powers to make the rabbits and hat vanish, the goddess took out her anger at being summoned without permission on Valerius, turning him into a (mechanical) parakeet. The Problem-Solvers elected not to tempt fate by asking Aphrodite to reverse the transformation, content to add returning Valerius to his natural form to their list of problems to be solved. Juliet located a Psychic Broadcasting Cone in the headquarters of the Department of Communication and used it to summon the rest of the Cupids back to the Homeworld. (PROSE: Magic Trick)
On Halloween, Frankenstein-818's Spirit Realm Gateway, which he used every year to widen a spirit path into a portal into the Prime Universe's Spirit Realm, malfunctioned. His clueless attempt to repair it instead caused it to collapse into a Rift. The Great Ghost took his chance and led his legion out of the Realm through that portal, forcing the Cupids to evacuate using the Emergency Transport Button. Instead of staying in the Homeworld all day only to be inevitably pulled back to the Spirit Realm, however, the spirits stole a flotilla of Fog Ships and then moved on to other parts of the Multiverse. Deducing this, the Cupids returned to the Homeworld, where Frankenstein built a One-Way Forced Spirit Realm Gateway which, when activated, would send everything around it to the Spirit Realm.
However, before he could use it, Frankenstein was abducted by the spirits, who had briefly returned to the Homeworld for the occasion, and forced to build a Reverse Spirit Realm Gateway to replace the Rift, which the Department of Rifts had sealed. After a short mishap with the One-Way Gateway where Foreman-964, Pythagoras-858, Technophile-963, Igor-1612 and Philatel-426 were briefly transported to the Spirit Realm before being summoned back by Juliet-178 using the reverse switch of the One-Way Gateway, the Cupids managed to send most of the ghosts back to the Spirit Realm. When they tried to return through the Reverse Gateway, they were transformed into clockwork toys of which Madame Tarsa took possession. The Great Ghost, meanwhile, was separated from his host body and sent to parts unknown. (PROSE: The Ghosts and the Machine)
