Wapsi Square Forum

GlytchMeister wrote:I believe Jin is the only person native to earth who is personally aware of all of the time loops. So Bud, in her current loop incarnation, is only aware of the current, and final, one.

I thought Phix, and by extension, all other apos, and Bia, and Nudge (?), and all others centered around the library, remembered them all?

lake_wrangler wrote:

GlytchMeister wrote:I believe Jin is the only person native to earth who is personally aware of all of the time loops. So Bud, in her current loop incarnation, is only aware of the current, and final, one.

I thought Phix, and by extension, all other apos, and Bia, and Nudge (?), and all others centered around the library, remembered them all?

They aren't native to earth, or at the very least they don't exist in the same plane of reality as earth for the most part, and as a result they are exempt from the time loop, which only has an effect on the Milky Way. The Library isn't in the same universe as Earth, it exists in Limbo. And Bia is a Titan, so she presumably spent most of her time hanging out with the other Titans who weren't killed or imprisoned after the conclusion of the Titanomachy.

So, as far as I know, and I may be wrong about this because I am not a Wapsi Lore Scholar, Jin is the only being who is native to earth, spends most of her time on earth, and yet is aware of all fifty-whatever time loops.

That's what I've been seeing. I'd been rereading through the archives, and I don't recall anything that would contradict your statement.

How much The Sage of the Forest remembers is unclear . . .

--FreeFlier

FreeFlier wrote:How much The Sage of the Forest remembers is unclear . . .

--FreeFlier

She remembers all of all the loops.

About the Forest.

GlytchMeister wrote:So, as far as I know, and I may be wrong about this because I am not a Wapsi Lore Scholar, Jin is the only being who is native to earth, spends most of her time on earth, and yet is aware of all fifty-whatever time loops.

With those qualifiers, I also think you are correct.

I completely forgot about Shelly... I've been having a tough time remembering things the past few days.

But then, if Shelly was born on Earth, wouldn't she technically be native? I know, I know, still a sphinx. However, something that occurs to me...

If each repeated version of Shelly died (I'm assuming that the first one is the one who became the Sage), then... Wouldn't she be Schrödinger's Sphinx?

Alkarii wrote:I completely forgot about Shelly... I've been having a tough time remembering things the past few days.

But then, if Shelly was born on Earth, wouldn't she technically be native? I know, I know, still a sphinx. However, something that occurs to me...

If each repeated version of Shelly died (I'm assuming that the first one is the one who became the Sage), then... Wouldn't she be Schrödinger's Sphinx?

Shelly's an Earth-native, yes. And, she actually did live through the 80,000-year duration of the Time Loops... but she did so while she was in the Time Forest, which is both outside Earth (and so immune to the Time Loop effect), and is also "backwards". Its time-line is separate from that of Earth, and most of its connections to Earth's timeline are wired up "in reverse".

The Shelly who became (and is now) The Sage, is the Shelly from the final time loop/ She's the same Shelly that we read about from the very beginning of Wapsi Square.

While living in the Time Forest, and slowly transforming into her sphinx form, she met the other Shellys (or their equivalents) from the earlier time loops... but in what we'd normally call "reverse order".

The last one that Shelly-the-Sage met, was Shelly #1, from the timeline which hadn't even been through its first time-loop. This Shelly (#1) is the person who pulled the sword from the stone, cut down the tree, put the artifact back together, and died of radiation poisoning.

The Shelly-sage-sphinx who wept over her body, picked up the artifact, and was then returned to the normal Earth timeline was the final Shelly (#56 or #57 depending on how you count it). She "returned" to her own timeline in the very instant she'd left it... unchanged, except for total loss of clothing, substantial growth of hair, and acquisition of 80,000 years of new memories.

So. yeah, she's a special case. Not quite a Schrödinger's Sphinx, but one with a lot of lives! She ended up learning some things about what happened in the earlier time loops (from Phix, Nudge, and her earlier selves) but since she was traveling backwards in time (and she was trapped in the Forest) this didn't do her all that much good.

I've always suspected that she might have been able to use this knowledge to "tamper with the past" (persuading Nudge to change the final time loop so that Shelly would never become trapped in the Forest) and chose not to do so because it would create a paradox. Instead, she told Nudge to lure her (Shelly's) younger self into the wilderness during her vision quest, to nearly die, and thus create Conscience (who was Shelly's companion and protector in the Time Forest). Shelly chose to accept her exile, rather than trying to prevent it... and I see that as a Heroic decision (and it's a big part of why I asked Paul to draw "Time in the Time Forest").

The whole "timelines run in reverse order, except for that convergence at the end" and "which Shelly is it?" is kinda subtle, and it wasn't really clear to all of the readers when it happened (read the comments!). The first hint about it, when it happened, was what Shelly said as she was dying... that she had to get back... "... the Calendar Machine." This wouldn't have made sense if this was the last Shelly, since the CM had already been destroyed... but it would make sense for the first Shelly to want to get home to prevent the CM from looping time for the first time.

The Sphinx then said "You were the first, as I was the last" and that made it a bit less unclear.

Understanding? Yes? Good. Zathras would not want you to be confoosed.

...I wonder whatever happened to that blade...

Well, Shelly-1 seems to have taken it back off of the artifact handle, in order to insert the plutonium Vimana power cartridge. We didn't actually see her do it, but it must have occurred given what we saw shortly thereafter.

So, I'd guess that the blade itself is still sitting on the ground in the Time Forest... for whatever value of the word "still" applies to a place having a time ordering that's both mostly reversed from ours, and apparently wormhole-looped as well. Non-Einsteinian para-simultaneity on acid... brrr.

It's a pity it's lost, though. I do dearly love Time-ascus steel.

Dave wrote:It's a pity it's lost, though. I do dearly love Time-ascus steel.

Did someone say something?

Dave wrote:Well, Shelly-1 seems to have taken it back off of the artifact handle, in order to insert the plutonium Vimana power cartridge. We didn't actually see her do it, but it must have occurred given what we saw shortly thereafter.

So, I'd guess that the blade itself is still sitting on the ground in the Time Forest... for whatever value of the word "still" applies to a place having a time ordering that's both mostly reversed from ours, and apparently wormhole-looped as well. Non-Einsteinian para-simultaneity on acid... brrr.

It's a pity it's lost, though. I do dearly love Time-ascus steel.

I am totally gonna be thinking of a way for Glytch-the-character to recover that, if only for the metallurgical research samples... But also because Shelly-1, who to the best of my knowledge isn't Sphinx or Titan, was able to cut 75% of a bigass tree from a dead start while the blade was lodged in the wood of aforementioned tree. Which implies it might be the "Perfect Inclined Plane", which is to say, it is geometrically perfectly sharp and perhaps frictionless... Or damn close to both of those things. Because no human has any business pulling a stunt like that without significant help.

GlytchMeister wrote:

Dave wrote:Well, Shelly-1 seems to have taken it back off of the artifact handle, in order to insert the plutonium Vimana power cartridge. We didn't actually see her do it, but it must have occurred given what we saw shortly thereafter.

So, I'd guess that the blade itself is still sitting on the ground in the Time Forest... for whatever value of the word "still" applies to a place having a time ordering that's both mostly reversed from ours, and apparently wormhole-looped as well. Non-Einsteinian para-simultaneity on acid... brrr.

It's a pity it's lost, though. I do dearly love Time-ascus steel.

I am totally gonna be thinking of a way for Glytch-the-character to recover that, if only for the metallurgical research samples... But also because Shelly-1, who to the best of my knowledge isn't Sphinx or Titan, was able to cut 75% of a bigass tree from a dead start while the blade was lodged in the wood of aforementioned tree. Which implies it might be the "Perfect Inclined Plane", which is to say, it is geometrically perfectly sharp and perhaps frictionless... Or damn close to both of those things. Because no human has any business pulling a stunt like that without significant help.

It could actually be a Niven variable-sword with a blade avatar projected so you can seen the blade . . .

--FreeFlier

FreeFlier wrote:[
It could actually be a Niven variable-sword with a blade avatar projected so you can seen the blade . . .

--FreeFlier

That's a very thin thread to base a theory on...

Just Old Al wrote:

FreeFlier wrote:It could actually be a Niven variable-sword with a blade avatar projected so you can seen the blade . . .

That's a very thin thread to base a theory on...

Wire you questioning my theory?

. . .

It's a dynamic theory, not stasis.

--FreeFlier

Ah... I'd thought Sage Shelly was the first, and then experienced all the other loops from the forest in reverse, taking the place of the last Shelly to go through. Dunno why I misunderstood that, now that you've explained it. That was a detail I forgot again, after reading through the archives. It was just a few days ago that I was at that part; now I'm up to the part where Atsali is trying to get a boy's attention.

GlytchMeister wrote:I am totally gonna be thinking of a way for Glytch-the-character to recover that, if only for the metallurgical research samples... But also because Shelly-1, who to the best of my knowledge isn't Sphinx or Titan, was able to cut 75% of a bigass tree from a dead start while the blade was lodged in the wood of aforementioned tree.

Well... on the latter point, Shelly-1 may have yanked it out of the tree and then taken a really good wind-up before the second chop that we saw... that's how I always interpreted what happened.

And, on the first... I think I recall Paul saying in a comment somewhere that Shelly-57 was the first to be Bia's daughter... that this was the only timeline in which Bia had masqueraded as a Comanche girl/woman and married Shelly's father. So, Shelly-1 wasn't part Titan, if I remember correctly.

However... Shelly-Sage implied pretty strongly that Shelly-1 also had Sphinx ancestry. Phix may have had a "fling" with Shelly's grandfather in more than one timeline. If so, that could account for Shelly-1's strength.

In any case, it must certainly have been a doughty blade to chop down a tree that big on one swipe, no matter how strongly swung. Definitely worth recovering and analyzing.

GlytchMeister wrote: I am totally gonna be thinking of a way for Glytch-the-character to recover that, if only for the metallurgical research samples... But also because Shelly-1, who to the best of my knowledge isn't Sphinx or Titan, was able to cut 75% of a bigass tree from a dead start while the blade was lodged in the wood of aforementioned tree. Which implies it might be the "Perfect Inclined Plane", which is to say, it is geometrically perfectly sharp and perhaps frictionless... Or damn close to both of those things. Because no human has any business pulling a stunt like that without significant help.

...and Shelly is going to likely tell you not to do it.

I still like the phrase "Schrödinger's Sphinx," though.

I seem to remember that way, way back in Gunnerkrigg Court, the author commented that a character's sword was sharp enough to cut a shadow off a stone floor.

Whether it's sharp enough to cut the black hole of Dave's debt out of the pun jar is an unanswered question.