Vapula truly hates it when people tell him not to do something.
For several months, people have been trying to press upon him the idea that time travel is just one of those things that not even angels are supposed to experience. Kronos and Asmodeus have been nipping at his heels constantly, whining about 'temporal paradoxes' and 'undoing fates' and 'end of the world' and other things like that. Vapula puts up a token fight because it's expected of him - after all, the idea that a demon would try to limit his work is somewhat repulsive to him.
Besides, he already knows.
Time travel is a lot simpler than most people think, really. Humans figured it out in the eighties all on their own, albeit in a Star Trek movie. Janus or Eli figured it out as well, apparently, but they're going about it the wrong way. Yes, going faster than the speed of light outside a very rigidly configured magnetic field will do it, but the energy required is astronomical. Not to mention inefficient, what with friction and energy to maintain the magnetic fields and all...
The real trick is to get enough energy together in one spot, then transmute it from one form to another in a very short period of time. This can be problematic, in the sense that the Symphony says that one cannot simply get 100% efficiency when changing energy from one state to another. Attempting to do this will either typically fail horrifically, or will tear a hole in space-time that may prove difficult to close as it manifests in the corporeal plane as a singularity. Most people would look at the movie 'Event Horizon' and see the potential problems with any Technology that involves a black hole anywhere near a planetary system, not to mention on a planet.
Then again, only a true Archangel could watch a horror flick and find divine inspiration.
If the Symphony won't allow 100% efficiency to be achieved, then one simply removes the Symphony from the equation and work from there. It is a well-known fact that after a symphonic disturbance, there are ripples. Using the rock in a pond analogy with the Symphony, one finds that when you drop a rock into a body of water, the water moves away from the rock, but is quickly replaced by the rest of the water rushing in to fill the empty space. If one finds a big enough rock, though...
By (relatively) careful use of the Song of Celestial Cacophony, one can actually throw a metaphorical rock large enough to clear a space outside the Symphony in which to work. If one assumes that a 1000 point disturbance can be achieved by a servitor with 6 Celestial forces for anywhere between 28 to 167 points of Essence, this is infinitely more efficient that Archangel Jean's estimate of 1.2 million essence. Of course, there is less than a second before the Symphony rushes back in, so one must be quick, but it can be done...
Going forward in time is easy, once one has gotten the Symphony out of the way, with its rules of space-time and such. A simple variant of Celestial Motion will get you where you want to go. The Essence requirements are high, but if God had wanted this to be simple, all this wouldn't be required. Still, for a trained Servitor of a great Archangel, going forward is simple. Going backwards, on the other hand...
One uses the same method, really. But there are complications. Once one has come from the future into the past, one finds oneself caught in a loop unless you go back before the time of your creation - the subconscious mind forces you to replay the events that led up to the temporal experiment, which then sends you back to do it again and again and again, ad nauseum.
Since one typically goes back to change a specific thing, there is a way to go back in time without becoming caught in this sort of loop, but it has its own problems. Since it is the fault of the mind replaying events that causes the loop, one gets around this by stripping an Ethereal force which contains some of the memories of future events. This allows you to work with impunity; however, by removing the Ethereal Forces that contain knowledge of the future, the demon in question often has absolutely no idea what it was they wanted to change, only knowing that something didn't go right...
And what happens to those that go back before their creation? Well, most of them have never been retrieved, so very little data exists on what it does to one's mental state. It's assumed that they eventually go insane as their creator brings them into existence, creating a sort of 'Name-Friction', similar to the Word friction of Gabriel and Belial. However, a few Habbalah that were sent back have been retrieved, with interesting results. While they report no abnormalities in their psychology, over time they begin communicating with the Divine more and more often, receiving additional directives from God that they are unwilling to discuss with anyone, even other Habbalah. Vapula has quietly made it a point to discorporate said Habbalah and bind the forces into relics that are then given over to Calabim to be dismantled.
One can only guess at what sort of things Vapula finds heretical...
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