Hmmm, let's see. . .Mark N wrote:I would think that anyone in the Library and the other dimensions would have been free of the time loops since they only affected the Milky Way Galaxy and its worlds. The other dimensions are separate from the Universe we are in.Julie wrote:Wouldn't Nudge be older that that? We know that she visited Shellynx in the Time Forest and Nudge interpreted Shelly's instructions to refer to th 57th iteration of the loop...which suggests to me that she was either aware of or outside of the loop somehow...so I'd think she should get the years of repetition added to her age.
The Oedipus incident was when Phix had to take over as librarian and Nudge ran off. The time-looping started some thousand-plus years later. So Nudge would have probably been hiding out somewhere other than the Library when things started looping. She wouldn't have had the Library's immunity to getting reset. We don't know where she was hiding prior to taking the form of a coyote and leading Shelly astray. If it was anywhere in the normal Earth world, then she would have been reset along with everybody else who lived in normal Earth time. She knew about the fact that time was repeating, but has given no definite indication of remembering past iterations. Which would put her in the same boat as half the rest of the cast: most of them were aware that time was repeating, but only a few actually had memories of those past iterations.
As for the Time Forest. . .I don't think that we ever find out just when or how Shelly plotted with Nudge. The geometries of the Earth's timeline and of Shelly's personal timeline are rather odd (to say the least), and involve a good bit of interconnecting. Nudge might not have even ever actually visited the Time Forest, communicating with Shelly in some other way than face-to-face. After all, Nudge would have still been in hiding at the time when she acted on Shelly's instructions, so hanging out in the sphinxes' sacred forest seems rather an odd choice. It's doubtful, then, that Nudge spent much--if any--time in the the Time Forest where she would be safe from the looping.
All the same, Nudge thinking that Shelly specified the fifty-seventh version of Shelly could imply that there was the possibility of Nudge acting on one of the other previous Shellys. Shellies. Shellae. Whatever the heck the plural of "Shelly" is. So, one possibility is that Nudge could have gone back in time with Shelly in the Time Forest. Another is that Shelly Number 57 told Nudge what to do back during some earlier iteration, in which case we then have evidence that Nudge does remember the looping. A third possibility is that there's something else going on that we don't know about.
Or the implication that Nudge could have affected the earlier versions of Shelly could be wrong. Nudge could have known that this was the fifty-seventh time Shelly had existed without remembering those other fifty-six Shellae, and she could have therefore thought that Shelly was specifying this particular Shelly and not some future Shelly (such as Shelly Number 58 or 59 or 385). I haven't managed yet to sit down with Nudge for a chat on her personal interpretation of things, so I really don't know what she thought.
The most that we can say with certainty is at least 2,700 years for Nudge. It's also pretty certain that she's a good bit older than that, but any numbers we come up with are just complete guesses.
