Until very recently, any Sburb title attributed to Lord English was baseless wild speculation. We didn’t know about all the canon classes until A6I3, and shortly before that it wasn’t even apparent that he’d ever even played the game. But now that we know better, we can go back over everything interesting we’ve ever seen him do and look for common themes other than “kill everything in your path.”

Here’s some stuff that caught my attention, given that Time (not Doom) is the Sburb aspect most strongly associated with death:

The Felt all have some kind of time-based power that seems to be borrowed from Lord English. Their deaths are necessary for his summoning; their mass slaughter was part of the plan. The Condesce’s servitude to LE “rewards” her with “power and immortality.” It’s not totally clear whether she accepted the bargain under duress as the only way to survive the end of the universe (which happened a few minutes later) or whether the act of killing the Handmaid/Demoness magically passed the curse onto her. It is completely obvious that her lifespan is a lot longer in his service than it would be otherwise. The Demoness’s contract kept her alive despite her desire for death! So long as she was borrowing LE’s magic, she needed his permission to die.

With the glaring omission of Doc Scratch (who we’ll worry about later) we have a strong theme here of underlings living on borrowed Time. Interest on the loan takes the form of servitude, and the debt is only paid off in full with the borrower’s death. Lord English benefits almost unilaterally from these bargains at every step.

This type of exploitation is characteristic of a very active class. More importantly, it gives us a possible verb to work with: A Lord is one who lends.

Let’s see what this means for Calliope. Having the most passive class, rather than being “one who borrows” she would enable lending of Space without her direct involvement, and probably without her consent. She also wouldn’t necessarily benefit from it herself in any way, and if she’s totally incapable of collecting on the “loans,” they might be permanent.

We don’t have to wait around to see a system like this. It’s already here. Remember the mysterious gene sequence that imbues someone with First Guardian powers (ie. mastery of Space)? If that DNA even has an “original” source, it was probably Calliope’s own lime-green blood.

I’ll elaborate more on this later if someone else doesn’t beat me to it. In the meantime I just want to note that if Lord English is lending out mortality, he could be achieving indestructibility just by having others die in his place.