Wapsi Square Forum

This might be inspired by the recent storyline...

---

"Hey mom, I'm home!"

Katherine sighed contentedly as she heard her youngest slam the front door. She'd spent most of the afternoon out in the back garden, tending to a few plants and soaking up the spring that had finally decided to descend on Maple Plain.

"Out in back, sweetie," she called between sips of her lemonade. She put the drink down and sat back on the lounge chair.

"Guess what?" Cass emerged onto the back patio of their estate. "Daylla's back! 'Parently she got stuck in one of the anchors to the World Grid that goes through Gryphon!"

Katherine raised an eyebrow at that.

"She got stuck in the Grid anchor?" She removed her sunglasses to look at Castela. "How in the world did she manage that?"

"She said it got folded over, an' when she disappeared two months ago during our sleepover? She says that was when she fell into it." Cass noted the concern in her mother's face. "Sumthin' wrong?"

"Well," Kath composed herself briefly. "The anchors to the grid are usually not very good for organic matter."

"This is Daylla we're talkin' about, mom," Cass stated with a roll of her eyestalks. "The girl's living metal, 'member?"

"True," was Kath's reply.

"She said that Dustin got the idea to call her on her cell phone to vibrate her out of the fold – which also straightened the anchor." Castela had a seat on a lounge chair next to her mom. "Funny thing is, she says that she never told Dustin to do it. She said it was some other Daylla, from some alternate universe or sumthin'." She looked around the backyard. "Finally got a chance to do some gardening, I see."

"Yep, and I didn't even need Emerauld's help." Kath looked at her daughter for a moment. "How'd she determine that it was her, from an alternate universe?"

"She said she didn't recognize Dustin, and that they weren't boyfriend-girlfriend." She looked over at her mom. "Is there any more of that lemonade in the kitchen?"

"Help yourself," she said. "Rosalita brought it over from the main house. There was a sale at Lund's, and though your grandfather loves the stuff, you know how grandma does with citrus."

Castela made a face as she got up.

"Yeah, couldn't go over to the stables for a week after that." She went back into the house for the lemonade.

"Hmmm. Alternate universe," Kath mused to herself. "Wonder what kind of weird things happen in that one."

M'dear, you do not want to know.

Wolf-who-watches wrote:One agrees. /noselick/

--FreeFlier

jwhouk wrote:This might be inspired by the recent storyline...
---
"Hmmm. Alternate universe," Kath mused to herself. "Wonder what kind of weird things happen in that one."

And thus all the lovely fanfic efforts here in the forum may plausibly branch themselves off from Paul's continuity.

Thinking this through a bit:

The Golem Girls first appeared in the strip in 2005. That is roughly the same time that Timothy was born. What if Tepoz's summoning of the GG's caused the divergence in timelines?

jwhouk wrote:Thinking this through a bit:

The Golem Girls first appeared in the strip in 2005. That is roughly the same time that Timothy was born. What if Tepoz's summoning of the GG's caused the divergence in timelines?

The butterfly may be part of the cause of the hurricane, but the hurricane does not happen the instant the butterfly flaps its wings.

...This is true.

Well, what if that naive girl back in September of 2001 is what pushed all the events into motion where the universes separated, then?

jwhouk wrote:...This is true.

Well, what if that naive girl back in September of 2001 is what pushed all the events into motion where the universes separated, then?

Could be, but... I sorta feel as if Occam's Razor may be called for here.

We know that the Wapsi universe went through a series of time loops, which reset the timeline back by many centuries. The timeline developed differently each time... and yet even after all those centuries, many of the same individuals (or congruent ones) were present each time.

At the least, this tells us that even a long-ago divergence doesn't necessarily mean that the differences between timelines will be huge. The difference that governed the dates of Timothy and Dustin may have been a recent one (e.g. 2001), but it might also have occurred centuries ago, with the timeline differences developing slowly over the decades.

The other possibility that I wonder about, is whether Dustin and Daylla-2's universe is actually one of the earlier Calendar Machine cycles. What if those timelines weren't actually destroyed by the reset? Or, what if the Calendar Machine itself had a tendency to start fracturing the timeline it was in, years or decades before it would trigger a complete reset?

It might be that when the timeline reset, the "alternate universe" went on "pause" until the machine was reset in Universe 57?

...Imagine that: we could be in one of the other 56 universes where M and company didn't fix the calendar machine...

jwhouk wrote:...Imagine that: we could be in one of the other 56 universes where M and company didn't fix the calendar machine...

Didn't fix it.... yet...