“Family Business”

The house of Lord Thymon was like no other building in the Cupid Homeworld. Things happened here that never happened anywhere else. Having an eldritch abomination living, sleeping, dreaming there on a daily basis… did things to a place.

So, it was no wonder that the crooked, shifting home had been the stage of what had occurred last night.

It had begun simply, with a scenic jaunt along the shore of the Chronon Sea — then continued as dinner for two in the Great Hall of Thymon’s house — and, to the surprise of all involved, had even found its way to the master bedroom. In short, a fairly ordinary date for a pair of lovers who were well into their courtship.

But that was precisely what was quite extraordinary under the circumstances.

The oddest part was not, as such, that one party to this relationship was Lord Thymon, Eldritch Embodiment of Time in the Void Between Worlds, and the other an incarnation of Jenny Everywhere, the Shifter, the intrepid multi-dimensional adventuress. It might have seemed that way to Earthlings, but from the point of view of the Cupid Homeworld, Jenny was a fairly inconspicuous visitor, and Thymon was positively ordinary.

No, the simple and remarkable fact about the date which had occurred on the night of June 17th, 2022 (Prime Earth Time) was this: it was the first of its kind ever earnestly carried out in the Cupid Homeworld. In point of fact, as far as anybody could tell, no one had actually been in love in the Cupid Homeworld before. Of course, there was that time Juliet-178 had pretended to go out with Romeo-1020 for a while — but anyone who knew Juliet had realised long ago that she’d just wanted to see how long she could bluff the rest of the Crew into believing that she was not only the first and only female Cupid, but also the first and only alloromantic one. As for Romeo, he’d mostly been in it for the free movie tickets.

Even more startling was the fact that this date had not actually occurred with either participant under the influence of a Love Potion. Lord Thymon and Jenny Everywhere had crossed paths by pure coincidence in 2020, amidst all that nasty business with Joybuzzer, Emperor Steer and the Interdimensional Toymaker. After going their separate ways, they’d started texting regularly, and little by little, something had blossomed between the ancient god and the ageless wanderer — something that had brought Jenny back to the Homeworld on six previous occasions. This was the seventh and most advanced of their dates, and, by now, multiple Departments of the C.I.I. followed the interdimensional love-birds’ every move whenever they met up in the Homeworld, trying to learn more about what love was actually supposed to be, anyway.

Fortunately for everyone involved, it was essentially impossible to spy on the inside of Thymon’s house from the outside. The windows were opaque, or reflected the wrong rooms entirely; cameras and microphones caught fire; scrying spells blew up in the caster’s face.

Therefore, it was in the relative privacy of a strange bed that Jenny Everywhere slowly came to, in the small hours of the morning. She stretched herself lazily under the covers, enjoying the way the fabric of the covers felt on her skin. She was fairly sure it wasn’t actually fabric, but some other substance, which did not obey the laws of conventional reality. That would explain how it could be so soft. Maybe if she were more alert she could sift through her other selves’ memories, take a stab at identifying the material, but… frankly, she just felt like enjoying it.

Feeling wakeful energy slowly taking hold of her, she rolled on her side a few times, testing the width of the bed. She quickly confirmed she was the sole occupant of the eldritch mattress. So, her date from the last night must already be up. Probably making breakfast. Unless she’d slept in later than she’d meant to? She licked her lips, tasting the air. There was something peculiar about time in this house. Like the fabric of space-time was… tangled, here. Now why —

“gOoD mOrNiNg,” said a chipper, echoing voice.

Oh yes. She remembered now.

“Hey there, Thyme,” she returned the greeting, smiling, as she sat up.

Lord Thymon’s preferred physical form was 10% inhuman, hypnotic eye, and 90% tentacles, which left little room for clothing as ordinary mortals understood the term; but there was something intimate about his current state of undress, all the same; vulnerable, private. To wit, the spot directly atop his great staring eye socket was bare.

No hat.

He had yet to rummage through his closet to select his hat for the day. Thymon, as he’d related to Jenny, made a point of never wearing the same hat on two consecutive days. None of the Cupids ever noticed, because, on work days, he always selected largely identical red hats inscribed with the name of the Cupid Post Office. All the same, they were all different in subtle ways; the minute differences in the patterns of their molecules, identical to the naked eye, mattered a great deal to an entity like him.

Or to an entity like Jenny, for that matter.

“…Sleep well?” she asked, pulling herself off the bed.

The soles of her feet landed on freezing black marble, and she recoiled instinctively — then in the blink of an eye there were socks on her feet. Then shoes.

“eXcEeDiNgLy WeLl, ThAnK yOu,” the demon rumbled mildly. “CoUldN’t YoU tElL? nOt OnE pArT oF tHe HoUsE cOlLaPsEd In ThE nIgHt!”

“Oh? Does that happen… often?” Jenny asked, buttoning up a shirt that she hadn’t been wearing a second ago.

“oH, yEs,” Thymon explained. “MoSt EvErY nIgHt. bUt It AlL gRoWs BaCk, So It’S rEaLlY nO tRoUbLe, As SuCh.” He sighed. “sTiLl, It Is GoOd To GeT a QuIeT nIgHt Of SiMpLe, QuIeT sLeEp, FoR a ChAnGe.”

“Yep. The harbinger of quiet, that’s me,” Jenny chortled. “People call me that all the time.” The corners of her eyes narrowed in a playful smile. “So, Thyme, would you say you slept like a baby because of the purity of our love… or did I manage to wear out a god’s strength last night?”

Thymon’s heart contracted, sending a rush of reddish ichor throughout the blue tentacles that made up his upper body. He blushed — purple.

“i. UhM. eR.” This was not the sort of question for which his eons spent as the anthropomorphic personification of a spatio-temporal constant had prepared him. In fact, until Jenny had suggested them to him, he had never suspected that a being like himself even had the ability to partake in such exertions as last night’s — and that went for the things both after and before Jenny had lured him into bed. Speaking coherently about them was, he felt, quite beyond his power. After muttering for a while, he opted for a deflection: “wElL, tEcHnIcAlLy sPeAkiNg, i Am NoT a GoD aNyMoRe, yOu KnOw.”

“Semantics.”

“nO, nOt JuSt,” Thymon insisted. “Oh, I CoUlD rEtUrN tO tHe VoId yEt. rEcLaIm My OfFiCe. tHeRe Is StIlL… TiMe, iF yOu’Ll FoRgIvE tHe ExPrEsSiOn. bUt iF tHiNgS CaRrY oN aS tHeY hAvE… wHeElS aRe In MoTiOn.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She made a show of looking past him, towards the door that would, hopefully, lead to a kitchen table. “So,” she asked, “are we having breakfast or what?”

“oF cOuRsE,” said Thymon. “tHaT’s WhAt I cAmE hErE tO tElL y—”

He stilled, his glowing pupil contracting.

“oH, nO.”

*********

Thymon and Jenny’s mad dash to the kitchen came too late to rescue the two slices of toast from the flames. The demon, of course, intimated that he could locally turn back time to return the bread to its optimal state of toasted-ness — but Jenny declined, muttering something about chronitons giving her indigestion.

Instead, they set a couple of fresh slices of bread in the toaster and killed the time digging into the dishes from last night’s dinner — both host and guest having been much too otherwise engaged to see to them at the time.

Thymon had no interest in a mechanical dishwasher, being able to scrub multiple plates at once thanks to his proliferation of tentacles. At her lover’s display, Jenny, piqued, made a show of snapping her fingers and shifting the grime off a few pieces of cutlery, beads of sweat forming on her forehead as she concentrated. Impressive it was, but not what one might call productive; two spoons and one knife in, she gave up with a shrug and a sheepish smile, and turned on the tap.

“How does this house have running water, anyway?” she asked conversationally. “It’s built on a cloud!”

“tHaT’s NoT AcTuAlLy My DoInG, aS iT hApPeNs,” he replied. “It’S tHe CuPiDs; ThEiR dEpArTmEnT oF pLuMbInG. tErRiBlY cLeVeR, tHe CuPiDs. LoVe ThOsE GuYs, LoVe ‘Em.”

Jenny was about to point out that this didn’t actually answer her question when her finely-attuned olfactory sense informed her that the bread was just right. Abandoning a final dirty salad bowl to its fate, she whirled round and whisked the two lightly-browned rectangles out of the fire and onto a couple of obsidian plates.

She licked her lips — but something was missing, and she had to act quickly.

“You got any butter in this joint?” she urged Thymon.

Not missing a beat, the eldritch being produced a lump of fatty light-blue substance, elegantly set on a silver tray inscribed with fell runes. She first sniffed it like a suspicious squirrel, then beamed, much to Thymon’s relief.

“Star whale butter,” she confirmed. “Now that’s the stuff. I knew I liked you for a reason.”

Wasting no time, she cut fine slices of the substance and pressed it onto the hot bread — first Thymon’s, then hers. She watched greedily as it began to melt, gaining a lavender tinge as it did so, and finally dug in.

She quickly finished her slice — Thymon, for his part, was still rending his into crumbs and chucking the crumbs into the black void that surrounding his eye, one by one — and, still hungry, got up again and headed for the toaster. It was nowhere to be found. Where she’d previously left it, on the iridescent black worktop, was a little girl.

She seemed to be about six or seven years old, with warm brown skin, about the same colour as Jenny’s. Her feet were laced in simple, sturdy sandals; her blue-jean shorts were short enough to expose knees that had been lightly scraped and scabbed over multiple times already. The restless kicking back and forth of the legs as their owner sat there indicated that they were eager to get into more scrapes yet, the sooner the better. The slightly-oversized green sweater’s many stains also spoke of a penchant of adventure which, truth be told, went some way towards explaining what this child was doing on the kitchen countertop of one of the most dangerous beings in the Multiverse.

Most striking, as concerned the face, were the long, thick locks of navy-blue hair that framed it, matching her eyes. The girl’s eyes weren’t quite glowing, but they were a blue that eyes should not be. Not sea-blue or steel-blue or sky-blue, but the bluest blue, an intense, darkly electric hue; Fremen blue.

She was smiling.

“…Hello, there,” Jenny said, returning her smile. “Have you seen the toaster? It used to be there.”

The girl’s smile wavered, her lips tightening. She shook her head in a silent, slightly desperate ‘No’.

“That’s okay,” said Jenny. “Do you have any idea where it might be?”

The child nodded slowly.

“Can you tell me?” she asked.

After a moment’s hesitation, the girl shook her head again, her big eyes still wide open.

“Hey, that’s okay. It’s okay. Let’s just —”

Jenny felt a tap on her shoulder, from one of Thymon’s tentacles.

“jEnNy. YoU sHoUlD aSk HeR wHo sHe Is,” he reminded her in his best approximation of a whisper.

“Oh yeah, good point,” she agreed and turned back to the child, whose face was taking on a slightly worried expression. “Hey, Thyme and I were just wondering what your name is. Can you tell me that?”

The child nibbled at her lower lip; her hands, already tightened into fists, wound themselves tighter for a moment; then she brought them and, in a fluid motion, signed:

I can’t talk right now.

Jenny blinked.

Somehow she’d understood the hand signs at once, and yet she didn’t recognise them as either American or British Sign Language — at least, from what little she remembered of her teenaged stabs at learning both. It wasn’t like any sign language she’d seen before, in fact; the movement of the fingers was stranger, more independent. There was comparatively little movement of the forearms — a lot more in the details of the fingers, curling and uncurling in complex, asymmetric patterns. Nothing she’d ever seen on her or any other Prime-adjacent Earth.

Knowledge from her other selves bleeding through, then. It happened — but not usually so readily. She experimentally brought her own hands up, and as she thought of what she wanted to say, the gestures came to her just as naturally:

Would you like it better if we talked like this? she suggested.

The child replied with a dismissive gesture, more a simple hand-wave than a sign. The expression on her face was clear enough: primly wounded childhood pride at the very idea that she might be unable to hear, simply because she was unable to talk.

“Alright!” Jenny accepted at once, throwing up her hands in surrender. “Alright.”

I’m not deaf, the girl felt the need to clarify in staccato gestures. And I’m not really mute either. I just… can’t talk right now. Okay?

“Why not?”

Bad things happen, she signed ominously, making her eyes as big as they’d go.

“jEnNy —” Thymon began.

“Gimme a minute, Thyme.”

“bUt jEnNy —”

“Shh. Hey. Kid. This is important — what precisely happens when you speak? Can you explain?”

The girl started kicking her legs again, something mischievious now in her strange blue eyes.

I — I could show you, she signed quickly.

Then, without any further warning, she opened her mouth, but it wasn’t a sound that came out.

“𝔗𝔬𝔞𝔰𝔱𝔢𝔯.”

The word was a wave of power. Jenny felt herself physically kicked back, tumbling into Thymon’s skirt of soft blue tentacles, which gripped her as she collided, softening the impact and stopping her being hurled further. She thought she went blind for just a second — and now her ears were ringing.

Standing, now, between herself and the rather guilty-looking girl was a tall, malformed, blackened shape, embedded in the black-and-white marble tiling of the kitchen like a tree that had grown from a sapling in a crack, and reshaped the floor around it as it grew. The object twisted itself several times over, and seemed to be an aggregate of patches of many textures, many of them metallic. Towards the top were two jagged, parallel slits, belching sulfuric smoke.

There was a ding song and something was ejected from one of the slits.

It was large, squarish, and light brown.

It landed on the floor, a few paces to Jenny’s right, with a sickening welt squelch. Then it picked itself up on a myriad of uneven legs and skittered out of sight.

“…Ah. Gotcha,” Jenny said, forcing herself to grin.

She looked up at Thymon, untangling herself from his manifold embrace.

“Soo. Thyme. I don’t suppose you could freeze time real quick? You and me in, her out?”

“i DoN’t ThiNk tHaT wOuLd WoRk On HeR,” he muttered back. “WhAt AbOuT yOuR iNfInItE?”

She gave a sharp nod and grabbed one of his tentacles firmly.

In an instant, the fluid warmth of iridescent shifter energy washed over the two of them, and they found themselves in the starry void of that secret realm beyond Time and Space where only Jenny Everywhere and those she chooses may enter. A scintillating silvery moon dominated the view — distant, but not so distant as Earth’s Moon is from Earth itself. Above and below were other Jennies and their companions, milling about or simply passing through, but Thymon’s Jenny had chosen her spot well, an empty pocket of space where they could talk quietly without being overheard.

“…So,” Jenny said bluntly. “She’s definitely our daughter, right?”

“oH, yEs, InDuBiTaBlY.”

“100%.”

“sHe LoOkS lIkE yOu.”

“She has your voice.”

“yEs.”

“And your… hair.” She gestured at Thymon’s tentacles, which did look an awful lot like the girl’s blue locks.

“sO iT wOuLd SeEm.”

“And time-shifting powers, presumably.” She blinked. “Right. Yeah. …How did that happen?! I mean, first off, no offence, but someone like you and someone like me — I didn’t think we were. Compatible.”

A ripple made its way down the length of Thymon’s body, his version of a shrug. “i DiDn’T kNoW eItHeR, bUt I’m NoT rEaLlY sUrpRiSeD. aS yOu SaId yOuRsElF, I aM a GoD, oF a SoRt. GoDs HaVe AlWaYs BeEn AbLe To BrEeD wItH mOrTaLs, In WhAtEvEr FoRm.”

Jenny made a face. “Breed? You make it sound so…” A hand brushed against her stomach — she dropped the sentence, refocusing on Thymon. “And anyway, you could have warned me!”

“i’M sOrRy! I’m SoRrY,” he pleaded. “oH, dEaR, oH, dEaR,” he fretted. “aRe YoU… uNhApPy? DiDn’T yOu WaNt ChIlDrEn?”

“What’s — it’s —” She threw up her hands, shouting. “I don’t know! I never really… thought about it, you know? In this body, I mean. Obviously other mes have been mothers. Fathers, even. But me-me… well, it wasn’t an issue, right? I’ve mostly dated girls. Not, like, on purpose, you’re not some weird exception, I’ve always known I liked boys and stuff as well, it just didn’t work out that way — like, Laura’s a woman, obviously, and then there’s Pristine, who’s a pixie, and fairies can’t really have kids with humans anyway, that’s kinda why the whole changeling thing happens, and then I guess there was Jimmy for a couple of weeks, but with him things got — complicated —”

“jEnNy,” Thymon halted her gently, coiling a soft tentacle around right her hand. “yOu’Re SpInNiNg OfF. cAlM dOwn.”

She took a big breath and blew it ought, dejected. “Ugh. You’re right. You’re right. Well, I guess she happened, one way or the other. Or is going to happen. But, like, inevitably.”

“iF yOu DoN’t WiSh…”

“No, no,” she interrupted. “It’s fine. It’s happening. She seems like a sweet kid — hey, I’m sure we’ll have fun. I just wish I’d had more time to get used to the idea, you know?”

“wElL, i CaN’t ImAGiNE sHe’S gOiNg tO StAy In OuR TiMeZoNe iNdEfiNiTeLy. SuReLy sHe’S jUsT… vIsItInG. OnCe ShE GoEs HoMe, I iMaGiNe yOu’Ll HaVe ThE nOrMaL aMoUnT oF mOnThS tO dWeLl On It.”

She sniffed, stretching herself. “Ech, good point.” There was a satisfying crack of her shoulders and she relaxed, opening her eyes. “God, I’m going to have to send out announcements. Tell people. …You’ve got family too, right?”

“oH yEs.”

“Right.” She thought for a moment. “Say, while we have Little Miss Preview around, what say we just… introduce her to everyone? I mean, only if she wants to, of course —”

“i LiKe It,” Thymon replied.

“Right! Great!” She paused again. “Ugh, we wan’t keep calling her that, though. We gotta figure out her name. Urgh. That’s going to be a tricky.”

“NoT hArDlY, mY dEaR,” Thymon hummed, a little smugly. “yOu MuSt ThInK fOuR-dImEnSiOnAlLy… DoN’t YoU sEe? NoW tHaT wE kNoW wHo sHe Is, We DoN’t nEeD hEr To TeLl uS hEr NaMe. HeR nAmE iS tHe NaMe wE wIlL hAvE cHoSeN, iN tHe CoMiNg MoNtHs. So—”

“—so we only need to decide now what we name her, and… that’s it. That’s the name. Oh, brilliant.” But her grin fell just as quickly as it had appeared. “Well pooh, now I can’t think of anything.”

“wElL, lEt’S sTaRt SiMpLe. WhAt LaSt NaMe ArE wE gOiNg WiTh?”

“Makes sense. Well, Everywhere would just be confusing. And ‘Thymon’ — I might be wrong, but it’s more a mononym than a family name, right? Your name is Thymon. You specifically.”

“Mh. WeLl, ThAt’S a LiTtLe tRiCkY. bUt BrOaDlY, yEs.”

“I guess I could go with Everton,” she continued musing. “That’s my name, you know — my legal family name, in this incarnation. Jenny Everton. But it’s not really a name I go by anymore. I guess she could use a nickname just like I do… She time-travels, it looks like. But we can’t do ‘Anytime’, people would think she’s Jimmy’s daughter. Other-Jimmy’s, I mean.”

“i AlWaYs tHoUgHt HyPhEnAtEd NaMeS hAd A cErTaIn Je-Ne-SaIs-QuOi AbOuT tHeM,” Thymon said brightly. “wHaT wOuLd yOu SaY tO ‘EvErYwHeRe-ThYmOn’?”

Jenny frowned playfully. “Well I’d say —” Her eyes widened. “Wait, that’s it!”

“WhAt Is?”

“Everytime!” she shouted victoriously. “She can go by Everytime! Always wanted to meet someone called Everytime. Ooh, now we’re a full set, aren’t we? We could make a club of it. The League of Adverbial People, or something.”

Thymon frowned thoughtfully. “ThErE’s A jEnNy ElSeWhEre?”

“Course there is. She’s Somewhere’s nemesis, I… think,” she trailed off. “I don’t actually see her around so much, now you mention it. Huh. But yeah, no, she’s a thing.” There was a moment of thoughtful silence. “So. Everytime. Does that work for you?”

“YeS, i ThInK i LiKe It,” Thymon ruled. “AnD tHe FiRsT nAmE?”

“Well I’m not callin’ her Jenny Junior, that’s for sure,” she laughed. “Nice name, don’t get me wrong, but there’s way too many of us already.” There was another pause. “God, I’m stuck. I am properly stuck.”

“i BeLiEvE iT iS TrAdiTiOnAl, In SuCh InStAnCeS, tO cOnSiDeR tHe NaMeS Of ImPoRtAnT PeOpLe In OnE’s LiFe. GrAnDpArEnTs, FrIeNdS, ThAt SoRt Of ThInG. nOt ThAt I WoUlD kNoW.”

Jenny snickered. “Friends? I have very weird friends. ‘Illumination Anywhere Everytime’… not going to win any awards, is it. I dunno. What was your mother’s name?”

“sPaTiUm,” he answered.

Jenny blinked. “Isn’t that your sister’s name?”

“i ToLd YoU iT wAs CoMpLiCaTeD.”

“Okay. Well, my mum’s called Molly. My adopted mum, I mean — this me’s mum. But I’m not feeling it. There’s grandmothers, I suppose. Do you have any grandmothers?”

“oNe. HeR nAmE wAs —”

“Spatium. Right. Okay. Stupid question. Okay, my grands then. On my dad’s side there’s Clytemnestra. Not doing that. But Granny Stropcliffe — my mum’s mum — her name was Sophie. How’s that sound?”

“sOpHiE eVeRyTime,” Thymon voiced.

Thymon’s voice, though strange and echoey, did not have the same devastating effects as that of the girl whose name was now Sophie. Having had a lot more practice, he knew how to modulate his voice, to mitigate the sheer power that the words of a being such as himself always carried. But as he gave voice to the name, something resonated across the fabric of the Infinite, taking root in the endless story of the Multiverse. Yes. This was her name. It was so obvious now.

“Sophie Everytime,” Jenny tried out in her own voice, delight evident on her face. She looked at Thymon. “Our daughter.”

“oUr DaUgHtEr,” he repeated.

They joined hands and tentacles, and let the shifting energy envelop them a second time.

*********

They’d barely been gone for an instant — the kitchen was just as they’d left it. There was the eldritch toaster, still smoking, its lower levels already beginning to melt into non-specific goo. There was Sophie, still sitting on the countertop, looking a little frightened.

Please don’t be mad, she signed quickly.

“Hey. It’s okay,” Jenny said, gesturing at the parody of an appliance. “I’m the one who asked you to show us, right? It’s not your fault. And no one got hurt.”

“i’Ve DoNe WoRsE tHiNgS tO tHiS hOuSe’S InTeRiOr DeSiGn In My SlEeP,” Thymon added. “BeLiEvE mE.”

“Listen,” Jenny said, “Thymon and I, we think we’ve figured out who you are. You’re… Sophie, right? Sophie Everytime?”

Sophie nodded enthusiastically, a cautious smile now brightening her features. Jenny let out a sound somewhere between laughter and a sigh of relief.

“Oh! Oh, Sophie,” she said, opening her arms in an offer of a hug. “I do believe I’m your mum. C’me here.”

Sophie didn’t have to be told twice — she leapt off the countertop and into Jenny’s arms, her own, shorter arm tightly gripping Jenny’s shoulders. (Jenny thought she noticed the child’s blue “hair” shivering in ways that the mere movement of her body could not account for.)

“aNd I’m YoUr FaThEr,” said Thymon, a dozen or so tentacles fanning out to embrace mother and child all at once.

Sophie was laughing. As she moved to end the hug, with Jenny and Thymon quickly complying, she pointed first at Jenny, and with an obvious effort of will, she said:

“jEnnY. MuM.”

Then pointing at Thymon:

“dAdDy… ṯ̴̡̅͆H̸̗͎͊YM̵͔͌́͜o̷̦̎n̸̻̔́!”

“Oh, well done, Sophie!” Jenny clapped. “I barely felt anything shifting on the astral plane, this time. That’s very impressive.”

Sophie beamed at the praise. Meanwhile, Thymon still seemed to be in mild, delighted shocl:

“…wElL i’Ll Be DaMnEd,” he finally explained. “sHe CaN aCtUaLlY pRoNoUnCe It RiGhT.”

This time it was Jenny who laughed.

*********

Sophie remained elusive on the specific circumstances that had led to her shifting back to before she was born — but one thing she did make clear soon enough was that she hadn’t eaten before coming. It turned out, to no one’s particular surprise, that she had nothing against buttered toast, and both of her parents indulged in a second slice while the girl happily gobbled hers. Breakfast was topped off by generous shots of blue orange juice, over which Jenny exposed her and Thymon’s plan of taking Sophie on an outing to meet her parents’ family and friends for what would, to them, be the first time.

Sophie, unsurprisingly, signed that it sounded like a barrel of fun, and raced through what remained of her breakfast in her eagerness — then hopped off her seat and stood straight as a picket, with her right arm extended, palm open and waiting for another hand to grip.

Clearly she’d shifted with her mother many times before. It brought a smile to Jenny’s face as soon as she realised. She felt her heart beating louder as she extended her own hand and gently closed it around her daughter’s. Thymon placed himself on her other side, wrapping a token tentacle around her remaining hand — though he surely could have followed on his own powers, without needing to be shifted.

“A fAmIlY oUtInG,” he commented cheerfully. “wHaT fUn. wHeRe To FiRsT?”

Jenny’s breath caught.

“Oops. I hadn’t actually thought of that,” she confessed. “Mh. Shall we alternate? One of your friends and relatives, one of mine?”

Thymon hesitated. “wElL, wE cAn StArT tHaT wAy, I sUpPoSe. BuT jUsT mY cLoSeSt ReLaTiVeS, eH? sOmE oF mY fRiEnDs… It WoUlD bE bEtTeR iF I eXpLaInEd ThE sItuAtIoN tO tHeM bY mYsElF bEfOrE tHeY mEeT sOpHie.”

Sophie looked up curiously, waving a quick sign for “Why?”.

Thymon bobbed his head back and forth, awkwardly. “wElL, tHeY’rE… sOmE oF tHeM…” His head bobbed down, drooping, as he admitted: “i’M rAtHeR aFrAiD tHeY’d GeT tHe WrOnG iDeA fRoM sOmEoNe EnTeRiNg ThEiR dOmAiN uNpRoMpTeD, bRiNgInG tHeM a ChIlD.”

Jenny grimaced. “Makes sense. Okay then. Let’s start with one of mine, shall we? One of my other partners, maybe?” She looked at Thymon. “Er, that doesn’t bother you, does it?”

Thymon gave her a blank look. “JeNnY, i’M aN eTeRnAl EnTiTy FrOm BeYoNd TiMe AnD sPaCe. i ThInK yOu CaN aSsUmE i’M a LiTtLe BeYoNd YoU hUmAnS’ pEtTy, PoSsEsSiVe ObSeSsIoNs.”

Jenny smirked. “Thymon. You collect stamps.”

“Wh — WeLl I — I — tHaT iS — wElL —” He drooped again, defeated. “oH, nEvEr MiNd. ThE pOiNt Is ThAt I ShOuLD bE dElIgHtEd tO MeEt wHoEvEr ElSe In ThIs SiLlY oLd MuLtIvErSe HaS bEeN WiSe EnOuGh To SeE wHaT I sEe In YoU.”

Jenny squeezed Thymon’s tentacle more tightly, losing herself in his single eye —

— and was interrupted by a high-pitched wave of psychic force that sounded something like:

“cAn̵̞͖͒ ̶̲́W̴̞͔̒̉̊̂̂̑̕͠͝e Go̵̘̲̱̹̒͠͝ YET̵̨̑̓̏͑͛??̴͇̒?̷”

She looked down to find a guilty-looking, blushing Sophie had reflexively clasped her hand over her mouth.

Jenny giggled.

“Yes, sweetie, don’t worry. We’re goin’, we’re goin’.” She smiled her most daring smile, and — shrugged her shoulders awkward. “Er. Thyme, goggles, please?”

Not missing a beat, Thymon sent another quick, thin tentacle out of the mass of his body and sharply pulled Jenny’s goggles goggles, eliciting a small “a-ha”.

“Alright, everyone. First stop… outer space!”

*********

Dating celestial bodies was a tricky business.

Now, anyone with a decent ziggurat could marry the Sun, and most everyone fell in love with the Moon, just a little bit. Even wild dogs.

And there are dimensions where the stars and planets walk and talk as men do. This is more tractable, at the cost of taking all the challenge out of it.

Leave it to Jenny not to be satisfied with either option. Or perhaps it had just been rotten luck.

When Jenny had mentioned that she’d had something going on with a comet in the 659433585786388480th Universe, Thymon had naturally assumed she was referring to some deity or avatar; perhaps an embodiment like himself.

He stared in bemusement at the car-sized flaming lump of stone and ice.

It was hanging still in the air, its shimmering tail mysteriously not disappearing despite the lack of momentum.

“H-hi, Jenny,” a voice said. It seemed to be coming from the glowing rock. “Tell me, am I dreaming, or am I… am I… standing still?”

“Yup,” Jenny nodded. “Not dreaming. I’ve shifted into dreams before, felt nothing like this.”

“How is this possible?!” the comet asked.

She elbowed Thymon proudly. “Well I reckon my boyfriend here just froze time. Handy, huh?”

“…Boy…friend?” The comet’s voice sounded quizzical, but not offended.

“Yeah. Hey, I told you this thing wasn’t exclusive.”

“That, I quite understand. We are, all of us, in the fields of attraction of many different bodies. And that is quite alright. To be pulled in by a single one is to plummet to your doom. But what do you mean, ‘freeze time’?”

“I should do the introductions, shouldn’t I? Thymon, this is Comet Theta. Theta, this is Lord Thymon, Embodiment of Time in the Void Between Worlds. As you probably figured out by now, he can manipulate time because he’s pretty much made of the stuff.”

“eR, aCtUaLly…”

“What?”

“I cOuLd HaVe FrOzEn tImE,” Thymon said, “bUt I DiDn’T.”

“What? Then how…”

Jenny and Thymon’s gazes snapped to Sophie, who was sitting cross-legged at the bottom of the bubble of air Jenny had summoned around them upon their materialising in this dimension. She had crudely finger-painted a ring of glowing blue sigils in mid-air, and was peering at it critically.

“Who’s that?” asked Theta.

“Oh yeah, forgot to tell you,” Jenny replied, ruffling Sophie’s strange blue hair. “Theta, meet my daughter.”

*********

“So! Thymon’s your brother, is he?”

“yEs,” said Psykha. “cOuLdN’t YoU tElL?”

The Embodiment of Thought’s physical form was similar to Thymon’s in broad shape; but instead of tentacles, their vertical, column-like body seemed to be made of endlessly-shifting, conjoined bubbles, enmeshed in a net of neurons and dendrites. Their eye, shaped not unlike Thymon’s, was a particularly large bubble, with a multi-coloured, vertical coil of neural matter in its axis for a pupil. They, too, wore a hat.

Not wanting to stare too much and be rude, Jenny shifted her gaze and looked around the room, feigning appreciation. Squire Psykha’s sanctum in the Void was a vast, empty room with no windows or doors, every surface a blinding white. Far in the distance was a single rectangular block of whiteness, which she supposed might have been a bed.

“I say, what you’ve done with this place,” Jenny began. Her words caught in her throat — it had occurred to her that this was probably not an entity to whom it was a good idea to lie. “It’s very… clean,” she finished.

“iT hElPs Me ThInK,” said Psykha. Their eye gyrated to consider Thymon. “yOu SeE — sOmE oF uS,” they commented, “hAvE rEsPoNsiBiLiTiEs. DuTiEs To UpHoLd.”

A few of the smaller tentacles jutting out on either side of Thymon’s head stiffened.

“sOmE oF uS, oN tHe OtHeR hAnD, hAve FoUnD lOVe,” he said, withering. “pSyKhA, tHiS iS JeNnY.”

“i KnOW wHo ThE sHiFtEr Is, bRoThEr. I kNoW eVeRyThInG.”

“Well, I’m very happy to see you again, Squire Psykha,” Jenny said loudly and quickly, trying to wedge herself into the conversation and stop the argument, “and to meet you for the first time in this incarnation. I —”

Her offered hand was resolutely ignored.

“pSyKhA,” Thymon started again, “wHaT i Am TrYiNg To TeLl YoU iS tHaT yOu’Re A…”

He paused and turned towards Jenny.

“JeNnY, wHaT dO yOu CaLl sOmEoNe WhO’s… LiKe An AuNt, Or An UnClE, oNlY wItHoUt A gEnDeR?”

“What, like a…?…” She came up empty. She attempted to force the word out, trying to beat her tongue into submission. “A c… an ant… a pi…bling?” She blinked. “Pibling? That can’t be right.”

“hOw Is ThErE nOt A wOrD fOr ThIs?”

“bEcAuSe I jUsT oBsCuReD tHe WoRd FrOm BoTh YoUr MiNdS, oBvIoUsLy,” Psykha sniffed.

“What? That’s so rude! What would you go and do that for!”

“BeCaUsE i DoN’t WaNt To HaVe ThIs cOnVeRsAtiOn,” Psykha droned in a slightly louder voice than before — a veritable shout. “My DeAr BrOtHeR iSn’T a ShApEcHiLd AnYmOrE — iF hE WaNtS tO DeSeRt HiS lEgAcY, aNd cAvOrT wItH tHe FlEsH, wElL, So Be It. bUt lEaVe mE oUt Of ThIS. tHe hAlF-bReEd SpAwN aNd I HaVe nOtHiNG tO sAy To EaCh OtHeR.”

“Hey!” Jenny protested. “Maybe you can’t think of anything to say to her, but it’s Sophie’s call whether she has something to say to you. Not yours! Sophie — I know Psykha’s being rude, but what do you think?”

Sophie hesitated for a moment — then ran out from behind Thymon’s skirts where she’d taken refuge, dashing at Psykha. Before the second Embodiment could react, two determined arms had wrapped themselves around the base of their body in an opinionated hug.

“sToP! nO! yOu WiLl DeSiSt–!”

After a few seconds of squeezing, Sophie fell forwards. She spread her arms, confused at finding nothing between them, and turned around to find that the base of the Squire’s tubular body had simply disappeared.

She brought hands up in front of her chest and signed, contrite:

Oh. Hugging bubbles. Not a good idea. Got it. Sorry…

Psykha concentrated, and a flurry of new bubbles grew from the base of their hovering torso, filling out their complete silhouette once again.

“hMf,” Psykha grunted. “SeE? tHiS iS wHaT hApPeNs WhEn YoU lEt YoUrSeLf HaVe DeAlInGs WiTh GrOsS mAtTer.”

“Oh, CoMe NoW, sIbLiNG,” Thymon chuckled. “iSn’T iT tHe ThOuGhT tHaT cOuNtS?”

Psykha stood very still, staring at Thymon, Jenny and Sophie — then shouted:

“GET OUT OF MY HOUSE!”

There was a crackle of psychic energy and the three found themselves back in the Void Between Worlds, the sterile interiors of Psykha’s home nowhere to be found. They looked at one another, bemused.

Jenny sighed. “Okay, that could have gone better.”

“i ThOuGhT ThEy ToOk It SuRpRiSiNgLy WeLl, MySeLf.”

“…Oh.”

“AnD To ThInK, bAcK iN tHe DaY, bEfOrE tHe CuPiDs, PeOpLe ThOuGhT pSkYkHa WaS tHe NiCe OnE.” He sighed. “sHaLl We Do AnOtHeR oNe Of YoUrS, JeNnY?”

“Sure. Let’s —” She felt Sophie tugging at her sleeve and looked down. “Oh, you’ve got an idea?”

Sophie nodded.

Aunt Pixie! Aunt Pixie! she signed enthusiastically.

Jenny thought for a moment and grinned.

“Ah. I think I know why. Alright!”

*********

“Hiya, Jenny. Hi, kid. Want some bubblegum?”

Pixie Pristine was leaning nonchalantly against the frame of the door to her dressing room, utterly unsurprised at the Shifter, Time-Shifter, and Time-God who had just materialised in front of the door in question.

Jenny smiled as Pristine handed a packet of bubble-gum to the enthusiastically nodding Sophie — and, at his non-verbal request, another one to Thymon.

“Keeping up with the old clairvoyance, I see?”

“Actually, I lost my crystal ball a couple of days ago,” the Pixie replied, smirking. “I just have a sixth sense for, well, you. Had a feeling you were gonna drop in on me.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, it never fails — whenever I’m about to do a show, you turn up,” she finished.

Jenny’s eyebrows shot up.

“Ah, dang — I’m sorry — if it’s a bad time we can come back later —”

“Nah, it’s fine,” said Pristine, letting go of the doorframe and walking back into her dressing room, motioning for Jenny and friends to follow. “I can spare half an hour to catch up with my first fan, eh?”

Jenny followed Pristine into the dressing room, with Sophie and Thymon in tow. It was much bigger on the inside than it looked from outside — in fact it looked less like a room and more like a small grove, with strange, multi-coloured orchids coiling themselves around all the trees. Sparkling garments, props, and discarded sheet music were strewn about the floor, or hung from the branches. In the centre of it all was a huge reflective crystal, looming over a modern, chrome dressing table that looked quite out of place.

Pristine spread her blue butterfly wings, took flight, and brought chairs back from the canopy, setting them down in a loose approximation of a circle.

“Well? Sit down, gang!” she said, leading by example as she landed, her wings folding up again. “Jenny, you doin’ the introductions?”

“Right, okay. Sophie, Thymon, this is Pixie Pristine. She sings.”

“Most successful pop-star in the world, babe!” said Pristine, striking a pose as she dramatically brushed her single lock of electric-blue hair from over her right eye.

“I helped her get started,” Jenny explained, “some years back. She’d gotten in some trouble with the faerie bigwigs a couple universes over, some jerks wanted to take her voice away as payment for… something or other. So I shifted her here, introduced her to a few people, and, well, she really took off. I mean really took off.”

Pristine smirked saucily. “Also, somewhere along the way, we started —” Her eyes fell on Sophie, whose innocent blue eyes still seemed fixed to Pristine’s folded wings as the girl chewed on the piece of gum the Pixie had given her. Pristine paused for a moment. “—er, kissing. Yeah.” She blinked. “Right, so, who’s the kid, anyway?”

“That’s actually what I’m here to talk to you about, Priss,” said Jenny. “She’s… my daughter.”

Pristine’s eyes were round, her wings snapping open in shock.

“Fu–— she’s not mine, is she?”

“What? No!” Jenny quickly reassured her. Her brows furrowed in concern. “Wait, that’s possible?”

“I mean, you tell me!” Pristine replied. “Not if I slept with some random mortal, in my or this world. But you’re… you. To use the technical lingo, sometimes, when the Fae get busy with interdimensional, heroes of destiny, weird sh-t just happens.”

“Oh, okay,” Jenny nodded. “Well, no, don’t worry. You’re just an… aunt, or whatever you want to be. Fairy Godmother?”

“Nah, Aunt is good.”

“Right.”

“So who’s the father?”

Thymon waved a tentacle, almost timidly. “hElLo!”

Pristine looked at the mass of eldritch tentacles, at Jenny, and back at the abomination.

“Blimey,” she said. “And I thought I had wide-ranging tastes.” She stared. “Er, no ‘fence. I mean, you know what, I’d give it a shot. Sure. But — look at it this way. If the paparazzi learned that there’s a girl out there who could have Pristine any time she wants, and she went and romanced… what’s your name, exactly?”

“LoRd ThYmOn, LaDy PrIsTiNe,” said Thymon, politely doffing his red hat.

An instant change overtook the Pixie’s features. Her wings unfolded again, her whole body tensing up as if she were about to take off.

“Woah,” she shouted. “Woah. Woah woah woah. Woah.”

After she repeated it a significant number of times, Thymon discreetly turned towards Jenny.

“…iS sHe TrYiNg To CaSt A sPeLl??” he asked in his version of a whisper. “I’m FaIrLy SuRe tHaT tHaT gOeS ‘A-bRa-Ka-Da-BrA’.”

Jenny took hold of one of the faerie’s hands.

“Hey. Priss. Pristine. It’s alright.”

Gradually the flapping of the Pixie’s wings calmed down.

“Okay. Woah,” Pristine breathed out, slowly regaining control of her voice. “Jenny, just checking. You do know Lord Thymon’s, like, an elder god, right? Like, beyond mortal and immortal ken alike, unknowable guardian of the Outer Void kind of elder god? He Whose Breath Consumes Eternity?”

“Eh? I guess?” Jenny shrugged. “I don’t think you’re getting the full picture.“

“Oh yeah? What am I missing?”

Jenny counted on her fingers for a moment. “Well, for example, he does great buttered toast.”

“…Never mind.” Pristine ran a hand over her face, sighing. “So. The kid’s his spawn, is she?”

“i PrEfEr ThE wOrD ‘dAuGhTeR’, MySeLf,” Thymon said frostily.

“Her name’s Sophie,” Jenny offered. “Everytime. She’s sort of not actually born yet, but she… shifts through time. Sort of dropped in on us. We thought we’d introduce everybody to her. She already knows everyone, so we thought it’d go easy.” She grinned at Pristine. “Apparently, she really likes you.”

Just at this moment, Sophie blew out a large bubble of gum. It had somehow come out blue, even though the gum Pristine had given her had clearly been pink. Instead of popping, the bubble floated up, free of the girl’s lips, until it was on a level with the tops of the trees; only then did it disappear in a shower of blue sparks.

Pristine looked up in wonder for a moment at the spot the bubble had been, then looked back at a grinning Sophie.

“You know what, kid? You’ve got style. I think I like you too.”

*********

They stayed for the show, of course. Pristine owned the stage, dancing, singing, flying. Glitter had nothing on actual pixie dust, and the songs were magic itself, with lyrics in a language which no one in the audience had ever learned, but everyone understood.

All too soon, it came to an end. Jenny, Thymon and Sophie walked out into the plaza outside the theatre venue, attracting only a few odd glances from the Pristine fans slowly filtering out of the building. It was getting dark, everyone was still a little overwhelmed from the experience, and in any case, Pristine hardcores tended to be an odd bunch already. A girl who proudly showed off a pair of wings in front of the cameras tended to attract a certain kind of audience. Jenny had spotted a number of telltale humps under people’s coats, a few tails that tore themselves free of trousers and skirts to wag in time with the beat of the more rousing songs.

Jenny noticed Sophie was swaying slightly on her feet, and her eyes had a certain bleariness now, even as she continued to grin, silently mouthing off words from the songs to herself.

“’You getting tired?” she asked, crouching down and putting a gentle hand on the girl’s cheek.

Sophie hesitated for a moment, then, steeling herself, shook her head vigorously. Jenny smiled. She knew that look from inside out.

“Heh. Okay. One more?” she offered. “Then you’ll have to get some sleep. You can pop back to your own time whenever, right? With no time passing for the future versions of us as far as we know?”

She nodded confidently.

“Right. Well, then, one last visit for now, and then we can pop back to the Homeworld and find you a bed at Daddy’s house — right, Thyme?”

“oF cOuRsE,” Thymon said sagely. “i’M sUre I hAvE sOmE iN sToRaGe. We’Ll JuSt HaVe To cLiMb Up To ThE cElLaR aNd—”

Wait, Sophie signed, interrupting him. She was frowning in concern. Wasn’t it mornings for you guys when I showed up? I can’t go to sleep, what are you going to do all day?

“wElL, I, fOr OnE, Do HaVe A jOb. I’lL gO RePoRT To ThE pOsT OfFiCe.”

What about Mummy? asked Sophie, still suspicious. Won’t she be bored?

“That’s never been much of a problem for me,” Jenny chuckled. “I’m sure I’ll find places to go, people to see. Or something will just turn up.”

Sophie thought about this for a moment, then nodded.

“Okay,” said Jenny. “One last trip for now. Thymon, who’s next?”

“mY sIsTeR, i ThInk,” he replied. “ThE lAdY sPaTiUm.”

“Got it. Hands, everyone!”

She felt, once again, a tentacle coiling itself around one hand, and a child’s hand grasping the other; she let the shifter energy envelop them —

— and —

— and instead of the satisfying shifting noise, there was a screech, nails on a chalkboard magnified a hundredfold, coming from every direction —

— she screamed, Sophie screamed, Thymon screamed, their eldritch voices adding to the wrong, wrong, wrong sound surrounding them — the stars of the Infinite glimmered briefly but winked out, swallowed by an inky blackness — the three of them were holding onto each other, holding firm, as they spun and spun through the dark, screaming —

— something tugged at Sophie, or perhaps it was just the centrifugal force, but some force was pulling her away, her daughter, away from Jenny —

— she clung as tightly as she could, but soonSophie went tumbling away into the darkness, speeding away like a blue shooting star, still screaming in panic —

— Thymon tried to send out a long, long tentacle after her — but the eldritch limb tore itself, snapping like an over-extended rubber-band, the extremity closest to Sophie zooming off into the distance while the half still attached to Thymon snapped back, lashing Thymon’s face, coiling itself around him as he and Jenny continued to spin —

Arms free now, Jenny embraced the mass of Thymon’s body, clinging for dear life.

“w-W-wHaT’s HaPpEnIng?!” Thymon finally managed to howl over the deafening screech.

“I don’t know!” Jenny shouted back, unsure whether Thymon could even hear her, even as close as he was. “Shift interference — I can’t steer — I’m trying to shift, I’m trying right now, it’s not working, in every dimensional direction it’s just more of this — blackness — Thyme, Sophie, we’ve lost Sophie, we have to —”

She never finished her sentence as her and Thymon’s intertwined bodies violently met what seemed to be the surface of an icy body of inky water. They’d been falling, and they fell deeper still, into the depths, and…

…and…

*********

Jenny jolted awake, feeling an unpleasant electric buzz crackling all through her bones. She felt cold and damp, the ground beneath her a squelchy muck — she was lying on her back, arms and legs splayed out, her scarf bunched up underneath her head like a pillow.

Standing over here was a familiar mass of blue ribbons, streaming down from around a single, worried eye. One of Thymon’s tentacles, separated from the mass was touched to the exact centre of her forehead, and still crackling with static energy.

“jEnNy! yOu’Re AwAke,” he cried joyously.

“…Yeah,” she said, surprised at how hoarse her voice sounded. “Mostly. What’s… where…?”

She sat up and quickly picked up her scarf, looping it back around her neck where it belonged. It was wet and covered in grayish mud, but then again, so was the rest of her, apparently.

She looked around. The sky overhead was stormy, though it wasn’t raining. They appeared to be on some kind of beach or river-bank, some distance away from the edge of the water — if the inky black substance was even water. In the opposite direction was a thick wall of dead, grey trees, growing in grotesque shapes, their twisted branches slowly dripping black slime.

“i DoN’t KnoW,” said Thymon. “i’Ve BeEn tRyInG tO tRaNsPoRt uS oUt… No LuCk.”

He gestured at a huge ritual circle he had drawn in the gray mud. The lines were already beginning to lose their sharpness, with the liquid mud slowly filling the gaps.

“i SuPpOsE yOu StIlL cAn’T sHiFt, EiThEr?”

“…Hang on. Let me check,” she said. She steadied herself, closed her eyes, tried to focus on the sound of her breathing, to clear her thoughts. But… “No luck,” she quickly admitted. “I can’t even feel my connection to my other selves. There’s nothing there. Nowhere for me to aim. What the heck is this place?”

“i CoUlD tAkE iT aPaRt By FoRcE aNd FiNd OuT,” Thymon said thoughtfully, “bUt ThAt DoEsN’t SeEm VeRy WiSe WiTh YoU iN iT.”

Jenny coughed. “…And Sophie!” she added, her voice still raspy. “She must still be in this universe somewhere.”

“iNdEeD,” said Thymon. “wE mUsT FiNd HeR.”

“Yeah,” Jenny agreed. “Yeah,” she said again with more determination, getting up. “That’s what we’re going to do. Explore this place, find her, figure out what brought us here. And bring her home.” She paused. “If she doesn’t escape first, of course.”

“sHe DiD sEeM a ReSoUrCeFuL cHiLD, yEs.”

She looked defiantly at the foreboding forest.

“Into the woods?” she asked.

Thymon nodded. “iNtO tHe WoOdS.”

*********

The woods were not much more pleasant than the beach. The trees were all the same sickly, knotty things, with no variation to draw the eye, no curious botanical phenomena to capture the attention; the ground was still the same grayish, clay-like sludge, squelching with every footstep, unpleasant in the extreme to walk on barefoot. (Jenny had, it seemed, freed herself of her shoes while she was trying not to drown in the inky sea — a decision which probably made sense at the time, but which she was now regretting.)

Worst of all was the complete stillness, except for the slow dripping of inky drops. Nowhere was a living thing to be seen.

After a few tense minutes walking through that silence, Jenny began to sing. At first it was just a hum, then, growing bolder, she started outright to repeat one of Pristine’s songs. At the second chorus, to her surprise, Thymon joined in — in a low, wordless, bassoon-like hum, strange but perfectly harmonious, quite unlike the gurgling roar of his speaking voice.

They sang their way through the forest, the dripping sound seeming to fall in line with the beat of the ballad, even the branches swaying in time. It would have been a stretch to say Jenny was happy — but she could feel a weight lifting off of her and Thymon, a heaviness in the atmosphere of this world dissolving.

When they reached the last bar of the song, they only hesitated for a second before beginning another.

They’d nearly gone through the whole concert again when they reached a sign.

It stood in the centre of a clearing, and looked like an ordinary, old-fashioned street sign — a tall metal pole with a horizontal plaque at the top — except that the words ‘DROP IN ANYTIME’ were written, in serifed white letters, instead of a direction.

Just next to the sign was a circular, pitch-black well, about as wide as Jenny was tall.

She stared at the sign, then at the pit, and back again at the sign.

“…Don’t think I will,” she said.

At once, an echoing, moaning wail wafted up from the depths of the pit, making Jenny jump.

“Gah!”

The moaning continued, plaintive and forlorn.

She walked cautiously to the edge; Thymon, shadowing her, wordlessly coiled a protective tentacle around her waist, ready to drag her back, just in case.

“There’s someone down there,” she commented.

She peered over the edge, but she could see nothing but darkness. She pulled her goggles over her eyes, to no improvement.

“SoMeOnE… oR sOmEtHiNg,” Thymon cautioned. “I dOn’T tRuSt ThIs PlAcE. lEt’S jUsT—”

“No,” Jenny said, standing firm. “It’s definitely someone. And they don’t sound happy. They sound like they need help.”

“tHeY dOn’T sOuNd LikE sOpHiE.”

Jenny glared at him.

“…aLrIgHt, AlRiGhT,” he said. “lEt Me HaVe A lOoK.”

Thymon shook his head briefly, and suddenly the pinprick of bluish-white light that shone from the centre of his great black eye-socket grew into a blinding white sun that filled the socket almost entirely. Then he did — something — and the light from the eye narrowed into a beam like a search-light. He bent over the edge of the pit, shining the light down into its unknown depths.

The moans stopped and transitioned into a terrified and very human scream.

Thymon ducked out from over the opening, looking very guilty, his eye shrinking back into a distant dot.

Jenny looked at him patiently. “It’s just a guy who fell down the hole, isn’t it?”

“…yEs.”

“What does he look like?”

Thymon shrugged. “HuMaN? aBoUt So HiGh?” He seemed to think quite hard about the next bit. “hE hAs TeN fInGeRs, If I CoUnTeD rIgHt.”

“Never mind,” Jenny said with a fond eye-roll. “Can you help him up?”

“If YoU iNsIsT,” said the demon, in the voice of someone who’s been talked into dong the dishes.

He threw down a sturdy tentacle like a rope, unspooling it into the unknowable depth of the pit, and bent down over the abyss again to shout:

“yOu, DoWn ThErE! gRaB oNtO tHiS, wIlL yOu? Or I’Ll HaVe To GeT DoWn AnD GeT yOu!”

The visible end of the tentacle tensed as a significant weight tugged on it. With the ease of some mechanical pulley, Thymon proceeded to pull the incredible length of blue pseudo-flesh back into his own being, rising and rising until finally the human figure hanging onto the tentacle for dear life appeared on the surface and, letting go of the tentacle, clambered onto solid ground.

He rose to his feet, a little uncertainly but with obvious relief.

Before Jenny and Thymon stood a broad-shouldered, white man with gray-blue eyes, clad in the torn, muddy remains of a dark gray T-shirt and a matching pair of of jeans. His platinum-blond hair was disheveled, and his beard had grown out in its natural dark-brown colour.

“Jenny,” he croaked out, tears welling in his eyes, “you found me. You came for me. Please, please, you have to get me out of here.”

Jenny awkwardly tried pull free of the the haggard prisoner’s overly familiar embrace.

“Er, it’s nice to see you too, Jimmy,” she said, a little formally. “Uhm. Taking you out of here… believe me, I’d like nothing more, but the thing is, I really don’t have a clue where ‘here’ is, either. Or how to get out.”

“…Oh,” Jimmy said in a small voice. He swallowed. “Blargh. Ah well. Still beats sitting in that sodding pit.”

“How long had you been in there?”

“Awh, I dunno,” said Jimmy, stretching himself wearily. “Too long. Y’see, I was —”

“LeT’s StArT aT tHe BeGiNnInG,” Thymon interrupted. “fIrSt, WhO ExAcTlY aRe YoU?”

Jimmy took a step back as he found himself once more the subject of attention of nine feet of cyclopean eldritch power. Jenny hurried stepped between them.

“Sorry, sorry, should’ve done the introductions sooner,” she said. “Ugh, and now I’ll have to do them all over again once we find Sophie…”

“Sophie? Who’s —” Thymon shot Jimmy a look and he closed his mouth again.

“Right, so,” Jenny began. “Jimmy, this is Lord Thymon, retired Embodiment of Time. Currently my boyfriend, and, apparently, the father of my child in the future. The child is Sophie Everytime, who’s a time-shifter and dropped in on us this morning. We were separated from her as we were all shifting together, and now we’re… here.”

Jimmy gulped, but nodded, taking all this in.

Jenny turned to Thymon. “Okay, this is where it gets complicated,” she began. “Thymon, meet Jimmy Anytime. The other time-shifter I know.”

“cHaRmEd, I’m SuRe,” Thymon said — which wasn’t a lie, so long as one was thinking of the kind of charms that are used to turn princes into romantically-frustrated amphibians.

“He’s not,” Jenny stated firmly, “one of my boyfriends.” Jimmy looked down, dejectedly. “Look, I’m sorry, but you’re not. See, he’s a clone, of this guy called Jimmy Wherever, who I was dating. One of my archnemeses, she kidnapped Jimmy W, grew a clone with time-shifting powers, hypnotised him to think he really was my Jimmy, and sent him back in time to disintegrate the real Jimmy thinking he was the evil clone, and then take his place, to rewrite time so that I’d really been dating the clone all along. Then, right when we were in her evil lair, right, it was this abandoned canned tuna factory at the edge of town? Anyway, Jimmy and me were about to beat her, and she switched off the hypnotic suggestion and ordered him to kill me.”

Thymon frowned at Anytime. “yOu DiDn’T dO iT, dId YoU?”

“What? No!” Anytime cried. “Of course not! How could I? My life may have been a lie, but my feelings for Jenny, her feelings for me, were the realest thing. The only real thing. I punched my wicked creator instead.”

“Yeah,” Jenny said. “But also, no. Jimmy. I keep telling you. I’m very, very sorry, but it’s not… you I was dating. It was the other Jimmy, from the other timeline. The memory of him that you were impersonating. It’s not your fault, never your fault, but you and me… this me and this you, I mean… it can’t work, okay?”

Anytime breathed out, sadly, through his nose, avoiding her gaze like a pouting child.

“lEt’S fOcUs,” said Thymon. “HoW dId YoU fInD yOuRsElF hErE, cLoNe?”

“Jimmy’ll do, thanks,” said Anytime, with more bravado than bravery. “Well. Er. I don’t know, man. I was just… shifting, you know. Phasing through the fabric of Time? And then something goes wrong, I hear this horrible noise, and next thing I know, I’m nearly drowning in a literal Black Sea. I made my way to land, started exploring in search of food. I found a sign with my name on it. I tried to get a closer look — and bam, this hole just… opens up beneath me, alright? I’m lucky for my engineered clone constitution, I’d have broken my neck right there and then. And… and then it got really boring for a while, and then you two found me.”

“…Shoot,” said Jenny once it was clear Jimmy was done with his story. “I mean, thanks. Not your fault. But that’s… startlingly unhelpful. Our story’s pretty much the same thing, as we said. You really didn’t see or hear… anything else? Anything at all?”

The time-shifter scratched at his bead. “I don’t… well, there is one thing,” he said at last, “but you have to promise not to laugh.”

“Oh, come on,” said Jenny. “Have I ever laughed at you? I mean ever?”

They both remained silent for a moment. Jenny frowned ruefully. “I mean about important things. The strawberry salad incident doesn’t count.”

“Fine,” Anytime sighed. “Well, while I was down in the pit, I just got this… sense, right… that she was here. Watching over me. Laughing at me. I couldn’t see, and I don’t think I really heard anything. But it felt like her, okay?”

“lIkE wHo?” Thymon pressed.

“Like… my creator,” Anytime said, biting his lip. “It… it may be nothing. I — I tend to think of her, when I’m… when I’m alone in a dark place.”

“nEvEr TrUsT a CoInCiDeNce,” Thymon said. “tAkE iT fRoM a GoD oF tImE, cOiNcIdEnCe Is ThE fAlSe BeArD dEsTiNy PuTs On WhEn It’S tRyInG tO pUlL a FaSt OnE.”

“But it can’t be her,” Jimmy said, desperately. “She’s dead. Jenny, you were there — I punched her, I pushed her into the fish-bone grinder. We saw her fall.”

Jenny had gone very still a few sentences back.

“Jimmy, I’m sorry, but she isn’t dead,” she said at last, in a hollow voice. “She never has been.”

“What? You knew — how do you know that?”

Jenny gulped.

“Because… she’s my sister.”

*********

“I̵̧͘ ̷̞̓d̶̈͜o̸̜̊n’t li̴͈̇k̴̞͛e̵̹͒ ̷̿ ý̸̲o̶̰͝u.”

The statement was a gust of force, which blew towards its target, knocking her down from her chair and scattering the papers that had been covering the surface of her mahogany desk.

“Little brat,” muttered Jenny Nowhere.

She got up again and, without even turning to look at her prisoner, snapped her fingers.

There was a shifting noise, and Sophie Everytime felt something slimy and bulky appearing in her mouth. She choked, retched, and, with no small amounts of disgust, finally coughed up a very confused frog. The amphibian wasted no time in squeezing through the bars and leaping out of the suspended metal cage, landing safely on the chessboard-tiled floor.

Nowhere looked up at Sophie with venom in her glare.

“You try that again,” she threatened, “and I’ll make it a porcupine.”

Sophie looked as affronted as she did frightened.

“…Y̸̻͂ou’re still my ḷ̷̃è̴̡ast fav̵̳̿ouri̶̖͂t̷͈̍e a̷u̶n̸t̷,” she mustered, successfully keeping her powers in check just for the satisfaction of saying it out loud without repercussions.

Nowhere simply scowled.

She was gathering her maps and charts again, trying to lay them out on the desk in the order she’d had them in before. She cursed as the frog hopped onto one of the maps, leaving a big stain of greenish mucus in the middle of it before bounding away again.

Sophie laughed.

“Stop that!” Nowhere shouted, her eyes flashing. “You little runt!” She halted and breathed out slowly, running a well-manicured hand through her long, smooth blond hair. “Never mind. We’ll see how your attitude fares when your ridiculous parents get here.”

She met Sophie’s surprised eyes with a malicious grin.

“Oh, yes, you’ll be seeing them soon. I have something very special planned.” She blinked, breaking eye contact. “Not just yet, though. We’re not done playing. So my darling sister rescued the clone, eh? We’ll see how she likes what I have in store for her next.” She returned to her maps, gleefully tracing Jenny, Thymon and Jimmy’s progress with an index finger. “She might be landing in hot waters, if you see what I mean…”

*********

Having exhausted the investigative possibilities of the clearing and pit, and rested a while, the trio set forth once again into the unchanging grey woods. They didn’t have a particular direction in mind, save to avoid retracing their steps and returning to the beach, which was, they felt sure, just as they’d left it. Instead they opted to keep cutting through the woods in a straight line, hoping they would eventually reach the other side.

They didn’t sing, this time — instead Jimmy told jokes. They weren’t very good, but he told them with energy and conviction, which got the job done. Many miles and knock-knock punchlines later, however, the two humans were beginning to feel their journey’s toll.

“I’m so thirsty,” Jimmy moaned.

It took Jenny and Thymon a moment to recognise this as a statement of fact, and not the setup to yet another joke.

“Actually, I am too,” Jenny replied. “But — what about you? I thought you had an enhanced clone metabolism and… whatnot.”

“Sure, I’m not about to die of thirst,” Jimmy explained, “but I still feel it. Your sister designed my biology, remember. She didn’t have comfort in mind. Also, I was in that pit a while.”

“Oh,” said Jenny. “Well, enough about the why. What are we going to do about it?”

“I dunno,” Jimmy sniffed. “It may feel like water, but I’m not about to try drinking that black stuff.”

“Yeah, I’d rather not,” Jenny agreed. “Ugh. I have no idea what to do. This never happens to me! I’ve never had to look for drinking water. I’d just —” She snapped her fingers demonstratively.

There was a crackling sound, and a zig-zagging pattern, glowing like red-hot metal, appeared on the ground a few paces ahead of them.

The glow subsided as quickly as it had come, leaving behind a simple crack in the ground. The wet clay of the soil appeared to have been baked solid in a small radius around it.

“…jEnNy, My LoVe, Do YoU sUpPoSe ThAt yOu CoUlD yOu Do ThAt AgAiN?”

Jenny, wide-eyed, snapped her fingers again.

The crack glowed again and widened, its halves slowly parting to reveal a pond of clear, if boiling, water. The energy began to show signs of wavering —

“kEeP sNaPpInG!” Thymon pressed her at once.

“I don’t know what I’m doing!” a harried Jenny shouted, snapping her fingers over and over. “This isn’t how shifting works!”

“I have no idea either,” Jimmy said, “but keep doing it!”

Beads of sweat formed on Jenny’s forehead as she put all her focus into trying to summon water from other universes she could not sense, the fabric of this one somehow responding to her efforts by widening the patch of scalding water more and more. With every snap it doubled, again and again, widening from a puddle into a pond. Perhaps too late, Jenny ceased snapping, but it continued to grow.

“…Get back! Get back!”

The three travellers scrambled to get clear just in time as a further doubling of the impossible pond’s surface engulfed the piece of land they’d been standing on a moment ago. It doubled a couple more times before stabilising, the golden energy fading from its edges.

Jenny, Thymon and Jimmy now stood on the shore of a lake which had not been there a moment ago — a lake so wide the other side of it was impossible to see through the mist that rose from its still-boiling water.

“Well that was… a thing,” said Jimmy.

Thymon was frowning.

“yOu HuMaNs CaN’t DrInK bOiLiNg WaTeR, cAn YoU?”

“Er, no,” Jenny replied.

“jUsT cHeCkInG,” he said. “aLrIgHt. LeT’s SeE…”

He waved a number of his tentacles in a complex patter. Slowly, a large blob of clear water, still boiling, rose from the lake, levitating in mid-air. In one smooth movement, Thymon looped two tentacles around the bubble and started spinning it very fast. As it whirled, the bottom hemisphere began to harden and reshape itself, until Thymon was able to levitate what was now a cauldron of ice, filled with cool liquid water, down to the ground in front of his astonished companions. He repeated the operation with two smaller blobs, shaping two ice cups which he delivered right into the waiting hands of Jenny and Jimmy.

“How did you…”

“Oh, YoU kNoW,” Thymon replied with clearly-feigned modesty. “eNtRoPy, TiMe, It’S aLl MuCh ThE sAmE tHiNg.”

Jimmy Anytime wasted no time in drinking his fill, gulping down three cups in succession before he was satisfied. Jenny had just one, which she found quite refreshing, though it was no Quasi-spiraled Moonduster, before wandering off down the length of the newly-created shore as a condescending Thymon began to explain the principles of his advanced temporal manipulation to an eager Anytime.

The waters of the lake were still boiling even now — in contrast to her earlier assumption, it seemed the heat was nothing to do with the crackling yellow energy of the magic that had summoned the lake into existence. It came from something in the lake’s murky depths, something near the centre of the lake, it seemed, for the bubbles seemed densest there.

She considered this for a moment, then bent down, compacted a ball of grayish clay in her hand, and threw it at what seemed to be the epicentre.

For a moment she thought it had been for nothing — but suddenly the waves became wilder, and the bubbles denser still, as a great, colourful shape, still hazy through the boiling water, became visible. It was getting larger, rising from the depths of the lake at speed. Her reflexes catching up with her, Jenny ran from the shore and shouted for her friends to do the same, just in time as the shape exploded out of the water, sending a tidal wave of scalding water splashing in a wide radius.

It was a huge, draconic form, a mechanical monstrosity with a body the size of a small house, purple and metallic, resting on four sturdy mechanical legs. On its back were golden appendages that had been fins a second ago, but were quickly reshaping themselves into the classic bat-like wings; a long tail curled out of the water, whip-like; its reptilian head had two crimson lenses for eyes.

They focused on the small band of Jenny, Thymon and Jimmy, and narrowed.

The beast opened its jaws, revealing the mouth of a concealed cannon.

“…Duck!” Jenny shouted, again just in time, as a the dragon spat a stream of white-hot stuff in their direction.

“What is this stuff?!” Jimmy shouted in alarm as he took cover behind a thicket of gray trees. “Plasma?”

“iT dOeSn’T sMeLl LiKe PlAsMa,” Thymon muttered.

The dragon took notice of the exchange, and seemed offended that they were misunderstanding the nature of its attack. It reared up on its hind legs, in the manner of a bear, allowing them to see its underbelly, a ridged surface whose most striking feature was a large, smooth metal panel, clearly separate from the rest of the armour, looking almost like a squarish vault door. Near the top of that panel, two words were embossed:

‘L A V A D R A K E’

“…Lava!” Jimmy shouted in dawning understanding, a good few seconds after the other two had caught on. “This thing spits lava!”

Satisfied that its prospective victims now knew the nature of their doom, the Lava Drake dropped back down on all fours, sending another, smaller splash of boiling water towards them. It opened its jaws again, the lava cannon vibrating as it prepared to fire again.

“Thymon! Do the ice thing again!” shouted Jenny as she ran for cover again.

“oN iT!”

Thymon wasted no time in levitating a second bubble of water, larger than the first. The process was quicker this time, less refined: with just a few spin, he froze it into a ball of ice of just the right diameter. The Lava Drake blinked at it, puzzled, as it hovered between him and Thymon, before the Time Demon sent it flying forward into its mouth with a wave of a tentacle. It lodged itself firmly in the mouth of the cannon, and the displeased Drake began shaking its head back and forth, then thrashing its whole body, trying to dislodge the boulder that was choking out its offensive capabilities.

The Drake shook and shook, the glow of its eyes becoming brighter, emitting a noise not unlike a boiler dangerously close to overheating — until finally the build-up of lava vaporised the ice-clog, an unfocused spray of molten rock spraying out in an arc through the steam of the evaporated ice.

Thymon was standing fast, facing down the Drake, and seemed unharmed as multiple globs of lava hit his body directly — but a great scream of pain erupted from another direction. Jenny, who was partway through climbing one of the gray trees to get a better view despite the distance she’d put between herself and the lake, turned to see that a small, stray droplet of the incredibly hot substance had managed to hit Jimmy. Or, rather, it had gone through Jimmy, burning a hole right through his shoulder.

“Aaah! Aaaaaaaah!! Aaaaaaaaaah!!!”

“Thymon!” Jenny called out. “Go help Jimmy!”

Thymon turned to Jenny, who had now reached her tree-top. The lava that had hit him had already calcified into rock, then cracked, leaving him free; he was in the process of creating a new ball of ice, larger than the first one.

“…dO i HaVe To?” he complained. “He’S VeRy IrRiTaTiNg.”

Jenny decided against arguing with that, and instead answered:

“Yeah, well, he’s more annoying when he’s screaming than not, alright?”

“…PoInT tAkEn,” he admitted gruffly.

With a half-wave of a tentacle, he flicked the bubble of liquid water into the Lava Drake’s face — ineffectual, but satisfying — before turning on his axis, building momentum and dashing through the distance between himself and Jimmy within an instant, in the manner of a spinning top.

Jimmy, who was still screaming in pain, watched not without fear as the Embodiment of Time bent over him, clearly annoyed with what he was doing, and began drawing complex runes in mid-air with the tip of a hair-thin tentacle, each sigil shrinking down once it was fully-rendered and embedding itself around Jimmy’s wound like a tattoo. In less than half a minute, a circle had been completed around the gaping wound, and Jimmy watched in amazement as it closed completely, leaving behind skin that was as smooth as before; even his shirt repaired itself.

“That’s incredible,” he breathed out.

“It’S eLeMeNtArY,” Thymon grumbled. “bY tHe FrOgS, i HoPe My DaUgHtEr GrOwS uP a FaStEr LeArNeR tHaN yOu.”

“Hey! I resent th—”

Thymon had already gone, twirling back the way he came.

When he ceased spinning on the shore of the boiling lake, however, he found that the Lava Drake had not waited for him. Instead it was turned the other way, in Jenny’s direction; its wings were spread out flat, as if supporting themselves on imaginary handrails, as it climbed halfway out of the lake and extended its segmented neck, trying to reach Jenny. The Shifter was still balanced perilously on a treetop, and had bunched up her body in such a way as to cause the tree to bend, trying to reach and move over to another tree close by.

To Thymon’s surprise, she was not trying to move away from the Drake’s snapping jaws, but towards them.

“Thymon!” she called before he could ask her anything. “Can you distract it?”

Trusting that she must have some sort of a plan, the Time-Demon nodded and, gathering his wits, he created a whirlpool in the lake, around the Lava Drake’s hind legs. It was not enough to topple the colossus, but it closed its jaws and angled its head downward in confusion — giving Jenny just the edge she needed to leap from the last tree-top and onto the apex of the dragon’s skull.

She grunted as her bare feet connected with the scalding-hot metal, and again when, as she fell to her knees in an effort to avoid falling off, the palms of her hands did the same.

“Ow! Hot hot hot hot! Hot!” She looked down at Thymon, repressing tears forming on their own accord in the corners of her eyes. “Thyme, I’m — ow — I’m gonna — aaagh — I’m going to need you do that… that reversey… time-healy… thing again once I’m — argh — once I’m done with this.”

“oF cOuRsE, mY lOvE, bUt — BuT wHaT iS ‘tHiS’?!” Thymon cried out. “i DoN’t UnDeRsTaNd!”

“Shut up!” Jenny shouted, more violently than she meant to as her words degenerated into a further yelp of pain. She was now trying to climb down the ridged neck of the beast, who had risen again to a bipedal stance in a futile effort to swat her off with its too-short arms. “Just keep distracting this thing!”

“aLrIgHt, AlRiGhT!” Thymon accepted, alreadin levitating a few water-bubbles. He turned to glare at the healed Jimmy, who was still hiding behind a thicket a small distance from the lake. “yOu! ThE aMaTeUr! YoU hEaRd HeR!”

“…W-w-what do I do?” asked Jimmy, caught like a deer in headlight by Thymon’s cyclopean glare.

“wH — wElL I dOn’T kNoW!” Thymon shouted, exasperated. He hurled an ice-pellet at one of the Drake’s wings, piercing straight through the thin golden membrane. “sOmEtHinG dIsTrAcTiNg! I tHoUghT yOu WeRe RaThEr GoOd At ThAt!”

Jimmy stood still for a moment more, then nodded quickly and began cartwheeling towards the lake, shouting —

“Ooooeeeeoooooo…”

No, singing — singing, terribly off-key —

“…dooooweeeooooooooo…”

“oH, gIvE mE StReNgTh,” Thymon muttered, rolling his single eye.

But the time-shifter’s shenanigans seemed to be doing their part. The Lava Drake cocked its head to glare at the noisy disturbance, only to be hit squarely in the face by a large diamond-shaped ice projectile, cracking one of its crimson electronic eyes.

Jenny had safely made her way onto the shoulders, and now was in the process of climbing down the steep underbelly, clinging to ridges and other protrusions as best she could, gritting her teeth through the pain of the heat and muscle strain. Her eyes were watering, too, in this hot air — she really wished she’d thought to actually put on her goggles before taking her leap of faith. But it was a little too late for that, bother hands being occupied with preventing her from falling down into the boiling lake to either be stomped flat by the Drake or cooked as pot-roast.

“jEnNy, WhAt ArE yOu DoIng?” Thymon pressed her again.

“This… is… somebody’s game,” she explained in a hoarse voice. “And I’ve cracked the riddle!”

She dropped herself down again, catching herself with her left hand on the upper side of the metal panel she’d noticed earlier — her target. Her free hand was now positioned just on a level with the ‘LAVA DRAKE’ inscription.

She fumbled blindly in her parka’s pocket and withdrew a piece of chalk — reduced, it was true, by her adventure at sea, but still usable. As quickly and steadily as she could, ignoring the burning heat under her left hand, the ache of her shoulder, the pulsing pain stinging her soles, the rush of empty space below her — she wrote.

Not much. Just a single letter, in that conspicuous blank space between the V — what they’d thought was a V — and the A.

She was too close up to see the results of her handiwork in full, but from the ground level, both Thymon and Jimmy stared as the corrected inscription suddenly glowed with yellow power:

“LAURA DRAKE”.

All at once, the Dragon stopped thrashing, shaking, roaring — stopped moving altogether, turning into a mere metal statue. Without its limbs constantly shifting to accommodate its weight, it began to tip backwards, slowly at first, then more quickly — Jenny clung as tightly as she could to the border of the panel, dropping the piece of chalk —

“Awowwwwwwwww—”

— until the ‘Lava Drake’ fell flatly on its back with a final great splash, wings and arms splayed out.

Jenny lay despondently on her belly for a moment, enjoying the sensation of her shoulder no longer feeling like it was being stretched on a rack, until there was a subtle mechanical clicking sound and the panel she was standing on suddenly retracted into the machinery, dropping her down into the compartment below.

The compartment below turned out to contain a very familiar red-headed woman, her hair a mess and her clothes covered in soot, bound to the points of a square metallic frame by her ankles and wrists.

“Urgh,” said Laura Drake as a hundred and fifty-something unexpected pounds of Jenny fell on top of her.

Jenny looked into Laura’s eyes, closer to hers than they’d been in a while.

“…Hi, Laura,” she said simply.

Laura’s eyes widened as her brain caught up with the reality of the situation.

“Jenny! It wasn’t me trying to kill you,” she said quickly. “This time. I promise!”

“I know,” said Jenny.

“It’s your sister. Nowhere. She intercepted my transport beam, brought me here —”

“I know,” said Jenny.

“She plugged me into this machine, seemed to hoped you’d destroy me without realis… what?”

“I said, I know,” said Jenny. She leaned forward just a little bit and kissed Laura’s forehead. “It’s okay. I knew it was you. I know it’s not your fault.”

Laura Drake inwardly cursed, not for her first time, the twist of fortune that had seen her born with a redhead’s complexion. Well, at least, in this heat and this excitement, she could pretend the rush of blood to her cheeks was a mere physiological reaction to her surroundings.

…Oh, who was she kidding.

She craned her head up and kissed Jenny on the mouth, letting the stress of her near-demise melt away. It had been at least thirty seconds when they broke apart.

There was a moment of silence as neither woman thought of anything to say. Finally, Laura settled on making a show of tensing her back-muscles, pulling on her restraints to no avail.

“Right,” she said, “I don’t suppose you’d consider untying me?”

*********

“I designed it, you know,” said a forlorn Doctor Laura Drake, standing on the shore, her fingers entwined with Jenny’s. They were looking out at the ruined mechanical dragon, which was slowly sinking into the depths of the slowly-cooling lake. “The Mark I Draconic Exosuit.”

“I’m guessing it was supposed to respond to your mental inputs, yeah? Not use your life-force as a battery.”

“You would be correct,” said Laura with a rueful chuckle. “Nowhere hacked it, reprogrammed it. Or she got someone else to do it for her, I don’t know.” She snorted. “I was going to do such cool things with this one.”

“Like fight me?” Jenny said with a smirk.

“Well, yeah,” Laura laughed. “I had this whole plan worked out. I was going to create a whole new alter ego, right? A proper supervillain identity. So you wouldn’t know it was me until the coup de grâce.”

“Laura,” Jenny said in the cajoling tones of a concerned preschool teacher, “it’s purple.”

“I — well — that’s —” She crossed her arms huffily.

“Never mind. What were you going to call yourself?”

Laura hesitated for a moment before confessing: “…Doctor Draconic.” She frowned and glared at her sometimes-nemesis, sometimes-girlfriend. “Look, it sounded better in my head.”

Jenny burst out laughing.

“Aw, come on! It was just a beta. I’d have come up with a better name later! …Maybe. Probably.”

Jenny kept laughing.

The Draconic Exosuit chose this moment to fully disappear from sight with a loud rumble.

“C’mon,” said Jenny, leading Laura by the hand. “I’ve got some people I want you to meet.”

**********

They found Thymon and Jimmy engaged in business of their own. Having decided that they had better bottle some water to carry with them while they had the chance, and that ice would be impractical, Thymon had made up his mind to try and accelerate the gray clay until it fossilised, creating a range of bottles and other containers, which he was now filling with water from the lake. Jimmy, meanwhile, had decided on his own spin on this idea, and moulded several swords and spears from the clay, which he was now attempting with clumsy words and clumsy gestures to harden as Thymon had his pots and pans.

Thymon looked up as he heard the two women approaching.

“JeNnY! aRe YoU aLrIgHt?!”

Jenny held up a hand in greeting, a gesture that would have been more reassuring had her palm not been a bloodied, burnt mess.

“Oh, you know, doin’ alright,” she joked, “give or take some second-degree burns. Listen, I don’t like to self-pity, but could you do the… thing? Please?”

“yEs, YeS, oF cOuRsE!!” Thymon fussed.

Jenny lied down, and Thymon worked quickly and well under Laura’s curious gaze. Soon the burns and blemishes disappeared, restoring Jenny’s limbs to working order. She even felt more energised than she had before this whole adventure.

“Incredible,” Laura breathed out.

Thymon looked up and seemed to notice the redhead for the first time.

“WhO’s ShE?” he asked — not even angry, merely quite surprised.

“Doctor Drake!” Laura answered, business-like, holding out a hand. “Laura Drake. Inventor. That was my mechanoid that you and Jenny just destroyed.”

Thymon had been about to meet the offered hand with a tentacle of his own, but he withdrew it just as quickly, frowning.

“wHaT?!”

“No no no!” Jenny intervened. “It’s alright. She wasn’t actually piloting it. My sister, she kidnapped her and put her inside.” She smiled. “In fact, by fighting the dragon, we weren’t just saving ourselves… we were saving her.”

“…oH,” said Thymon.

He raised a tentacle again and cautiously shook Laura’s hand, which had remained stubbornly in place, waiting to be accepted.

“lOrD tHyMoN,” he said. “eLdEr GoD. tHaT wAs My GiRlFrIeNd YoUr MeChAnOiD aLmOsT dEsTrOyEd.”

“Really,” said Laura, eyes wide. “Jenny? You and him…?”

“Yup,” she nodded. “And he‘s never even plotted to kill me!”

Laura affected a sympathetic pout. “Aw, really? Why, Jenny, I do believe your standards are dropping.”

Jenny attempted a saucy wink, which, on her overly-earnest face, somehow came across as a parody of one. “Not the only thing I’d drop if you asked,” she said in her idea of a seductive voice.

Laura giggled. “That was a terrible one. Do another.”

“…sHoUlD i Be WaTcHiNg ThIs?” Thymon asked.

Laura turned to look at him with a simple, curious smile. “I dunno. Do you want to? Make an official trio of it, I mean. It’s a pretty open thing Jenny and I have. And I’m always open to new experiments.”

Thymon frowned. “dO yOu MeAn ExPeRiEnCeS?”

“I know what I said.”

“She does,” Jenny nodded sagely. “But, er, Laura, there’s something you don’t know.”

“That’s outrageous,” Laura said in what an outsider could very easily have mistaken for an actually offended tone. “It must not occur again.”

Jenny breathed in and said very calmly: “Thymon and I… have a daughter.”

Laura froze. “…What?” Her brows furrowed suspiciously. “You’re saying you two went and adopted a kid? Oh, Jen, you always were —”

“No. Laura. Listen to me.” She looked her straight in the eyes. “I’m pregnant. Right now.”

Laura cocked her head at Jenny, frowning in concern. “You don’t sound happy about it,” she noted. “You know, if you don’t want this, I’ve been working on some very safe teleportation-based options for —”

“No, no!” Jenny interrupted this train of thought. “That’s — very kind. Really. But that’s not it at all. Y’see, we’ve met her. That daughter we’re going to have. Time travel, you know how it is.”

Laura nodded without hesitation.

“And, er, she’s been taken by Nowhere too,” Jenny admitted. “We’re sort of looking for her right now.”

“What?! Why that conniving, dishonourable little —”

“Yeah. That,” Jenny cut her short. It wasn’t that she disagreed, but it was best to nip it in the bud when Laura seemed on the cusp of one of her ranting episodes. Especially when she had something very specific, and not that easy to swallow, to tell Laura. “Any help in finding her is welcome. But first… about, you know, squaring the hypothenuse between me and Thymon and you… look, you know what I’m getting at. I love you, Lor, but you’re just not parenting material.”

“What?” Laura shot Jenny a betrayed look. “Jenny, you can’t do this to me! A time-shifting baby — do you have any idea how much I could learn —”

“Yeah, that’s kind of my point,” Jenny said wryly. “I mean, let’s face it, if you had boundaries about this sort of thing, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

Laura crossed her arms again and muttered something inaudible about progress knowing no bounds.

“What does that mean?” Jimmy Anytime asked curiously — looking up from a cutlass that he’d almost finished fossilising, although it had come out a bit crooked.

Jenny blew out her cheeks. “Long story. Looong story. But I guess the short version is… Jenny Nowhere may have created you, Jimmy. But… but Laura was the one who made Jenny Nowhere.”

*********

“That impudent minx!” Jenny Nowhere shouted to no one in particular. “No one created me!”

Sophie knew better than to talk, but she shot her captor a very pointed look that said: Yeah, right. I know whose word I’m taking.

“I made myself!” Nowhere insisted. “I cannot be unmade!”

In the mouth of another, it would have been a boast, but coming from Nowhere, it sounded as though there was more there. Sophie wondered. She’d rather have been curious about almost anything else, but areas for investigation were few and far between for a child who had been sitting in a bird cage, hanging from the ceiling of a sparsely-furnished great hall, for the better part of a day.

“…And you’ll find that out for yourself soon enough, you insufferable little imp,” Nowhere finished in a low growl.

Sophie was curious about that, too. Curious, and rather worried. Aunt Nowhere kept saying things like that, dropping little hints, but stubbornly avoided getting drawn into full-blown monologues, leaving Sophie to chew on tantalising, insufficient clues as she tried to guess her wicked aunt’s masterplan.

“Not yet, though,” she hissed, caressing her crystal ball, which still glowed a faint bubblegum-pink. “Not yet. I’m entitled to my fun… and the family reunion is not yet complete.”

Sophie strained to see from her cage. Even her superior, inhuman eyes had trouble making out the three — no, four — shadowy figures walking through the woods in miniature within Aunt Nowhere’s crystal ball. It did her good, already, to know that one of them was her Mummy, another her Daddy, and yet another her Auntie Laura. That they were coming for her, undeterred by everything Aunt Nowhere threw at them.

But she’d have given anything to see their faces.

*********

“So, Lor,” Jenny asked as they walked, once again, further into the woods. “This place? What do you think?”

Laura hesitated a moment before answering: “Well, I mean, I’ve seen homelier.”

Jenny scoffed pleasantly. “No, as a scientist, I mean,” she explained. “Any theories on what’s going on? What could be blocking my powers like this?”

“And mine!” Anytime added.

“aNd… SoMe Of MiNe,” Thymon said.

“Oh, that,” said Laura. “Look, Jenny, I’m not like you. I don’t just… know things. That’s not how science works, not even mad science. I have to run tests, formulate experiments. And I don’t have any equipment with me. I’m assuming you can’t summon things either?”

“Nope,” she replied. “You think I’d still be walking around barefoot if I could?”

She eyed Laura’s mostly-intact black boots with obvious envy.

Laura raised her eyebrows, apologetic. “You know I’d lend them to you if it would help,” she said, “but our sizes really don’t match.”

“Bummer,” Jenny said, though she hadn’t been expecting much. She stared at Laura’s feet for a few steps more before continuing: “See, though, that’s what I’m talking about. You notice things. All these years we’ve known each other and I’ve never actually noticed we had different shoe sizes. I didn’t think the opposite, I just — it never crossed my mind.”

“That’s not me being observant, my dear,” Laura laughed, “that’s you having your head in the clouds all the time.”

“Says the girl who invented the one-woman Lauracopter.”

“Oh, shut up,” Laura laughed. After a moment, she added: “Really, though? You never noticed I had tiny feet compared to you? Accepting the premise that you never actually look at what’s right in front of you — isn’t there, I don’t know, a Cinderella version of us out there?”

“Sure, lots,” Jenny replied. “But in the ones I’ve seen, most of the time I’m the poor girl and you’re the prince… -ess, as the case may be.”

Laura nodded at the new information. “Interesting. I suppose that makes sense. Who’s the Fairy Godmother?”

“Me too,” Jenny answered, “most of the time. An older, more experienced me.”

Laura nodded thoughtfully.

“You know what?” Jenny continued. “Once all this is over, I should try to find one of the Cinderella-mes. Try the Fairy Godmother part. Might be fun.”

“Hey, tell you what,” Laura proposed, “if you find a good world for it, why don’t you let me try it?”

“You? But how would you —”

“Oh I’d love to turn a pumpkin into a vehicle with science. And I can do the midnight thing, no problem. I’m always programming self-destruct sequences into things.” She frowned. “Come to think of it, I don’t know why I keep doing that. I should try and cut down.”

“I do believe it’s so I can dramatically pull you out of the burning wreckage of your hubris,” Jenny observed with a fond smirk.

“You make it sound so deliberate,” Laura giggled.

“Isn’t it?”

“I didn’t say that…”

“yOu KnOw,” Thymon piped up, “I rEaLlY aM aLl FoR tHiS pOlYaMoRy BuSiNeSs In PrInCiPlE, bUt I’m BeGiNnInG tO fEeL lEfT oUt Of ThIs CoNvErSaTiOn.”

“How do you think I feel,” groaned a sullen Anytime. “I mean, where are we actually going? …Gyaaaagh!”

The last inarticulate yelp was a product of a sign, similar to the one that had stood over his pit, suddenly sprouting up out of the ground in front of him, as if in answer to his question.

It proudly proclaimed:

‘OVER THERE.’

Anytime had jumped back, landing on his posterior, legs splayed out in a V on either side of the base of the sign. He looked up at it in stunned confusion.

“That… that could have speared me right through!” he cringed.

“aCtUaLlY,” said Thymon, “iT dId.”

“What?”

“oH yEs. StAbBeD yOu LiKe A rOtIsSeRiE gLaPfNoRg. YoU bLeD oUt In SeCoNdS. tHeN, aT jEnNy’S iNsiStEnCe, I rEvErSeD tImE bY a MiNuTe Or So AnD mAdE sUrE yOu WoUlDn’T gEt KiLlEd tHiS tImE.”

“…w-what?” Anytime asked in a shaken voice, before suddenly frowning. “Wait. Not a word of that was true, was it?”

Thymon leaned towards him to put his eye on a level with Anytime’s human ones.

“pErHaPs,” he said smugly, “If YoU lEaRnEd ThE fIrSt ThInG aBoUt ThE ArT oF tImE-mAnIpUlAtIoN, yOu WoUlD bE AbLe To FeEl ThE AnSwEr To ThAt QuEsTiOn.”

“…You bastard.”

“Oi! Boys!” Jenny called. “Stop pulling each other’s hair and start thinking practically. The sign is there, and it’s not killing anyone, and I’d like to know what it means, please.”

Laura was staring at the metal pole. She knocked on it softly, listening attentively to the sound it produced; then she gave it a quick lick.

“Okay, it seems like metal,” she said. “I don’t know how it just grew out of nowhere — that wasn’t even teleportation, was it? But it’s not organic, anyway.”

“Eh, I don’t think any of us were seriously worried about that, to be honest,” Jenny replied.

“…Is what a lot of idiots say moments before being eaten by a shapeshifter,” Laura finished. “Outside probability, I know, but it’s always worth testing.”

“fAiR eNoUgH,” said Thymon. “aNyThInG eLsE?”

“Hang on,” Jenny said. “The first sign was a pun, yes? And so was the riddle on the mechanoid. There must be some tricks to the words here. Over There…”

“…Lover There?” Jimmy suggested. “Maybe another one of your girlfriends is buried under there, or something.”

“Mmh,” Jenny mulled. “I don’t think so. Nowhere wouldn’t have two different people underground under signs, she’s not that unimaginative.”

“Tut tut. Test first, talk later,” said Laura, taking out a purple marker from her breast pocket. She stared dumbly at the sign, which was a bit taller than her arms could reach. “Could somebody…?”

Thymon waved a few tentacles at her and she found herself levitating those needed couple of feet off the ground.

“…Thanks.”

She carefully drew an ‘L’ in front of the ‘OVER’ — but nothing glowed or click. Nothing happened at all.

“Aw,” said Jenny as Laura floated back down. “Ah well.”

They stood around, wracking their brains, occasionally cocking their heads and leaning at odd angles as if looking at the sign in a funny way would yield novel insights.

Which it did, eventually, when, having craned his neck at a really preposterous angle in an effort to follow the line of sight suggested by the angle of the sign’s panel itself, Jimmy caught a flash of red in the corner of his eye.

“Over there!” he shouted, getting back up.

“Yeah, we can, actually, read,” Laura said flatly.

“Ugh, no, I mean, literally, look over there!” he explained, pointing.

Now that the sign wasn’t taking up all their attention, all four could now see a small, human-shaped figure dangling from the branches of one of the grey trees, something like two hundred metres away. They hurried in crossing the distance, wasting no more time on idle talk.

What they found was this: a very irritated-looking, skinny woman wearing dark trousers and a red cardigan, bound and gagged, swaying upside-down from a high grey branch like a particularly stroppy piñata.

“I told you these would come in handy,” Jimmy said proudly as, without missing a beat, he cut her down using one of the clay swords he’d fossilised.

Jenny bent down and gently removed the gag while Thymon fussed with the many knots of the length of gray rope coiled around the woman’s body.

“Oh finally,” she blurted out. “Phew. Not your fault, guys, but watching you work it out made for a very frustrating ten minutes.”

Laura frowned. “Could you really see us and the sign from here?”

“Not with my eyes,” the new girl explained, rubbing her wrists as they were finally freed. “But I have this… power, you see. To know where stuff is. Including people. So I could tell you four were just over there.”

“I thought you were Over-There,” Jenny Everywhere said with a smirk.

The woman in red looked irritated.

“What?” asked Jimmy, quite confused.

“What?” Jenny Everywhere repeated. She slapped her forehead. “Ooh! Right! You don’t know her. Sorry. Laura, Thymon, Jimmy, this is Jenny Over-There, from the 925th Universe.”

“No relation,” said Over-There, “if you can believe that.”

“She’s cool!” Jenny said. “I met her at this really great party she organised at Helvetius’s a couple of months ago. A bunch of Jennies were there — a bunch of mes, I mean, not just a bunch of people coincidentally named Jenny. Well, I say that, but Jenny Anywhere was there too, technically. Uhm.”

“Focus, Jenny,” said Laura.

Over-There looked up. “What?”

“Not you, my Jenny,” Laura said with an eye-roll.

“eNoUgH!” Thymon boomed, eye flashing. “ThIs Is GeTtInG tOo CoNfUsInG. jEnNy EvErYwHeRe, yOu’Re ‘JeNnY-E’, oR jUsT jEnNy FoR sHoRt. jEnNy OvEr-ThErE, yOu’Re JeNnY-O. gOt It!?”

Jenny-E and Jenny-O nodded meekly.

“GoOd.” He focused on Jenny-O. “NoW, i WoUlD aCtUaLlY lIkE to FiNd My DaUgHtEr bEfOrE sHe DiEs Of OlD aGe, So — If YoU wIlL pErMiT mE tO gEt ThIs InVeStIgAtIoN bAcK oN tRaCk… JeNnY-O, wOuLd yOu MiNd TeLlInG uS wHaT yOu ReMeMbEr AbOuT hOw YoU fOuNd YoUrSeLf HeRe?”

Jenny-O rolled her eyes. “Oh great, answering questions, my favourite thing,” she muttered. “Fine. I was at the Multidimensional Finders Service office as usual, taking calls on the R.I.T., and I got this one call from this woman, and her voice sounded… wrong. Not, like, echoey like an Elder God, or anything like that, just uncanny. I don’t think you’d get the effect in a recording, but hearing it live, it sounded… I don’t know. Hollow. Grey, is the word that came to mind.”

“So, you hung up?” Jimmy guessed.

“What? No. I asked her if she was related to my boss,” said Jenny-O with a mirthless chuckle. “I don’t think she had any what I was talking about. But it wasn’t a wrong number. She asked me where to find…”

“Sophie Everytime?” Jenny-E pressed her.

“No, who the heck is that?” Jenny-O shook her head. “She asked me where to find Pixie Pristine’s crystal ball.”

“Wh — AnD yOu ToLd HeR?!”

“Look, it’s my job! I don’t get to turn down requests just because they sound a bit fishy. Hey, for all I knew the mystery woman was this Pristine herself, looking for her own lost crystal ball. How should I know?!”

“Trust me,” said Jenny-E, “Priss’s voice sounds anything but ‘wrong’. You know, you could book her for your party next year, if you’re making a habit of them.”

“Oh, she’s queer, this Pristine person?” asked Jenny-O, nodding appreciatively.

“Yeah, kinda,” Jenny-E chuckled. “I mean, let’s be honest, do I actually know anyone who’s straight? Socially, I mean?”

There was a pause as everyone paused to look at Jimmy Anytime, who looked quite offended.

“Wh — I’m bi, thank you very much.”

“Oh, sorry,” Laura mumbled.

“cOnTiNuE yOuR sToRy,” Thymon commanded.

“Well, there’s not much after that, really,” she admitted. “I told her where to find the crystal ball, and a few seconds later, instead of hanging up, the Red Interdimensional Telephone starts glowing, and heating up, and emitting this weird gray smoke… and suddenly this woman with a black cape appears right there in the office. I tried to ask Thor for help or go for the teleportation ray —”

“You have a teleportation ray?” asked Laura, suddenly very invested. “How does it work?”

“sHuSh.”

“— but before he could get to me, she grabbed onto me and transported me here. Which wasn’t fun, but the worst thing was, she didn’t even say a word to me — barely looked at me. She strung me up as casually as if she’d been hanging up interior decorations. Maybe some new curtains.”

Jenny was frowning. “Ugh. Yeah, that does sound like her.” She bit her lips. “What did she look like?”

“Besides the cape and the aura of overwhelming inhuman evil?” Jenny-O asked, deadpan. “Uhm. Tall. Long, blonde hair. Her eyes were — weird. But even besides that, she was… it’s hard to describe… if she were an actress, or something, you’d say she was beautiful? But she isn’t. And not in a features-twisted-with-rage way. It’s just…”

“It doesn’t feel like a real face? It feels somehow like she’s just wearing some kind of mask, even though she clearly isn’t?” Jenny prompted.

“Yeah, that’s a good way to put it,” said Jenny-O, seeming a little disturbed.

Jimmy Anytime, for his part, seemed very disturbed. Thymon gently patted him on the shoulder with a tentacle — which he didn’t appear to mean as a joke, this time, although it was anyone’s guess whether the clone actually found it soothing.

“Yep, definitely Jenny Nowhere,” Jenny Everywhere concluded. “And not just any Jenny Nowhere. My Jenny Nowhere.” She looked at Jimmy and Laura. “The one from our world. Whatever this is, it’s personal.”

“hM. cAn YoU tElL wHeRe ShE iS nOw?” Thymon asked.

“I can try,” said Jenny Over-There. “I can’t seem to focus on locations outside of this island, let alone universe… but I think I can manage to find things within it.” She dramatically put her index fingers on each temple and squeezed her eyes shut. She stood there for a moment before dramatically pointing in the distance. “That way! Her castle is that way.”

“Finally, an actual direction!” Jimmy clapped in relief.

“Well, no time to lose, comrades,” said Laura, picking up one of Jimmy’s crafted weapons, a mean-looking dagger.

“Wait,” Jenny Everywhere cautioned. “We have to make sure. Maybe Nowhere is in the castle, but — Sophie. Is she actually there with her? Are you certain?”

“Let me check,” said Jenny-O. “Sophie Everytime’s the name, you said, right? Let me just —”

She put her hands on her temples again — and suddenly jerked back, as if someone had slapped her with great force, narrowly avoiding an actual fall to the ground.

“Yoww,” she yelped, clutching her forehead. “That was brutal. Who is this Sophie Everytime person?”

Jenny Everywhere and Thymon clasped a hand and a tentacle together, and answered in unison:

“Our daughter.”

Jenny Over-There boggled at them.

“Seriously? You two…?” She sounded more than a little on-edge. “Well no wonder! Daughter of the Shifter and the Embodiment of Time, that’s not a target, that’s a cognitohazard waiting to happen. Ought to be a law. Please tell me somebody here at least has an aspirin?”

She looked pleadingly from face to face, with no luck.

“Oh, brilliant.”

“SoRrY aBoUt ThE iNcOnVeNiEnCe,” said Thymon, not sounding very sorry at all. “BuT dId YoU sEe HeR? iF oNlY bRiEfLy? Is ShE aLrIgHt”

“You could say that,” she replied, still rubbing softly at her forehead. “Yes, she’s in Nowhere’s castle, I think. I thought she looked alright. I mean, her eyes were all weird and blue before this, right?” Jenny-E and Thymon nodded quickly. “Okay, good. Just making sure. Then yes, she’s alright.” After a moment, she added: “Well, she’s in a cage suspended from the ceiling in the Great Hall.”

“Wh — and you call that alright?!”

“Hey, five minutes ago, I was hanging upside-down from a tree with a black handkerchief stuffed in my mouth. It tends to shift one’s perspective a little on the relative badness of kidnapping situations. So does working for the Man in Grey for extended periods of time, for that matter.”

“Fair point,” Jenny accepted.

“Alright, then, team,” Jimmy declared, raising a sword dramatically. “To the Castle of Nowhere!”

He abruptly looked down, feeling a sharp, if not yet painful, pressure in the small of his back.

He whirled around with surprising nimbleness, finding Laura Drake holding the other end of the dagger.

“Right, I just want to make one thing clear,” said Laura. “Yes, we are going to storm Nowhere’s castle, that’s agreed. But we’re doing it because it’s the obvious idea, not because you just said that. You —” She poked his stomach, softly, with the point of the dagger, “— are not in charge. Got it?”

He nodded slowly, eyes not leaving the dagger.

*********

It was hours yet before they reached the Castle; it should have been night by now — but there was no sun to be seen in the sky, no dimming of the even, grayish light. The four travellers stepped finally out of the oppressive grey forest onto a barren plain. At first they thought they had simply reached some great, black wall, before Jenny Over-There suggested that they all look up.

There stood the Castle of Nowhere — perched on top of a craggy black peak, which was not quite a mountain but certainly more than a hill.

Though the perspective made it hard to grasp its exact shape, they could see that the Castle was high and narrow, its towers bunched up together like the pipes of an organ. It seemed that it had been cast entirely out of solid silver, shining eerily in the inhuman light.

Laura let out a cry of frustration — which sounded just a bit like the roars of the Lava Drake.

“Not a fan of climbing, I take it?” asked Jenny Over-There.

“No, not really, but that’s not the point,” Laura grumbled. “It’s just… I mean… of all the days to be caught without a lightning cannon…”

The professional Finder gave her a blank look.

“What!” the scientist eructed, affronted. “Silver? Most conductive metallic element? No?”

The other woman shrugged, a little taken aback by Laura’s scientific outrage. “Sorry. I wasn’t the best student in school, and I really don’t remember much from…” She smiled and cringed at the same time as she guessed: “Chemistry class?”

“Physics, dammit!” Laura corrected in a shriek.

The scientist threw her head back in frustration and turned away from Jenny Over-There.

“Urgh! Never mind.” She elbowed Jenny Everywhere, who seemed to be lost in thought. “So! Jenny. What are we thinking?”

“Well… Climbing seems a no-go,” she said, trailing, with the tip of an index finger, an almost invisible edge jutting out from the black surface by less than an inch. “Not much to step on or grab onto, and the edges are sharp. You’d have to have chainmail gloves and socks to climb that.”

“I don’t suppose anybody’s powers have started working again?” Jimmy suggested. “Jenny-O could feel things within this world, right?”

“Still can,” the Finder confirmed. “Jenny Nowhere’s up there now. She’s…” She thought for just a moment. “She’s in some sort of keep, gathering… diamonds? Wow. Yeah, that is a lot of diamonds for one woman. She —”

“Never mind that,” Jimmy interrupted her and looked at Jenny Everywhere. “Maybe it’s worth testing if you can shift short distances, while staying in this world?”

“You know, that’s actually a fair point,” Laura agreed.

Jenny squinted, her whole body tensing.

“…Nope,” she said, the tension deflating. “Still nothing. But fair enough, it was worth a try.” She looked around, scanning the barren landscape for ideas. Her eyes landed on Lord Thymon. “Oh hey. Thyme. You can fly, right?”

“…yEs,” said the time-demon in a guarded tone.

“Well how about you fly up there, land on a cornice, and send down three of your longest tentacles so the three of us can rappel up?”

Thymon stared at her.

“Y’know, sort of Rapunzel this thing.”

He stared at her again.

“…jEnNy, I hAvE bEeN cOmPaReD tO mAnY eNtItIeS oF lEgEnD, bUt I hAvE tO aDmIt ThAt ThE pRiNcEsS rApUnZeL… iS a FiRsT.”

“Okay, but it would work, though, right?”

“wElL, i SuPpOsE sO,” Thymon allowed, more seriously. “bUt I wArN yOu ThAt I dOn’T sImPlY… hOvEr. An EmBoDiMeNt In FlIgHt TeNdS tO iNvOkE, uHm, A lOt Of… ArCiNg LiGhTnInG aNd ThInGs. CrEaTe SoMe MiNoR rIfTs iN iTs WaKe, EvEn. We WoUlD, i FeAr, AlToGeThEr LoSe ThE eLeMeNt Of SuRpRiSe. ”

“I don’t think that’s a concern, for better or for worse,” Laura pointed out. “The puns, the solvable challenges — it seems that Nowhere is toying with us. As I know her, she is not the type to set up jokes with no way to enjoy them. Ergo, she must be tracking us already, somehow. She will know we’re coming. She may be watching us even now.”

“aH.”

*********

“Clever girl,” Nowhere said through gritted teeth as she overheard Laura’s words on the crystal ball.

It was still on Nowhere’s desk, unlike Nowhere herself, who had moved on to arranging a ring of curious multi-faceted crystals in a complex circular shape on the floor of the great hall, with the vertical shadow cast by Sophie’s cage as its centre.

As she crossed the shadow, Nowhere seemed to be reminded of the actual Sophie’s existence. She took a step back so as to be within the girl’s field of view and looked up at her.

“Don’t imagine they’re coming to save you, girl,” she warned. “Oh, that may be what they think they’re doing. But I’m ready for them. Without their powers and their weapons, the clone, the Finder and the scientist are no threat to me. I’ve beaten them before, and I’ll do it again. Your mother — well, we’ll see. But she doesn’t have any of her tricks either. And as for your father…” She caressed one of the prisms, an evil smirk flashing on her otherwise-blank face. “…Well, he may be in for a little surprise.”

Jenny Nowhere stood there, waiting for a reputation.

“Hello there? Sophie? I’m talking about horribly maiming your closest loved ones as a prelude to wiping out your entire existence. Any thoughts? Feedback? Anything at all?”

She was met, once more, with silence.

“Answer me, you filthy little—!”

She paused.

A simple fact had just caught up with her brain: the little girl in the cage was not meeting her gaze with her curious blue eyes. In fact, she was curled up on her side in a fetal position. Not quite still — her chest gently heaving. If Nowhere had bothered to float up closer to the cage, she could have heard a very faint snoring sound.

“…Oh. Right. Little children.”

Before the wicked shifter could return to her work with the Prisms, however, she noticed that the cage containing Sophie was swaying slightly. Shaking. Vibrating. It hadn’t been doing that a moment ago. Her eyes narrowed, trying to get a better look at the sturdy length of metallic rope that anchored the cage to a hook on the ceiling, but before long she realised that it wasn’t just the cage — the entire room, the entire castle was shaking.

She could now hear, quite clearly, a deep, rumbling sound, which she’d earlier dismissed as just the wind. But how could it be? There was no wind in this place.

“What now? What are they doing?!”

She ran across the room and violently wrenched the crystal ball free of its pink porcelain support, holding it right in front of her face, trying to make out what was going on. The clever artefact had panned out to a wide, aerial view of the entire island, with the silvery shape of her fortress right in the middle, as it should be. But did it look like it was… shrinking? No.

“No… No! They can’t do this to me!”

She threw the crystal ball in a rage. It didn’t shatter, but it did crack as it hit the metallic ground, and a fine purplish vapour began releasing with a slow hiss. Nowhere boggled at this for an instant and let out an almost feral shout.

Nowhere began to turn away, poised to sprint out the main doors of the Hall to confront Everywhere’s gang, but suddenly felt as though a bag’s full of marbes had been dumped on top of her, pummeling her to the ground. Overhead, the tinkling laughter of a child was ringing out, strangely amplified and echoey.

Then, before Nowhere could get up again, Sophie, roused by the commotion, began singing, barely bothering to keep her powers in check.

“M̶̨̍umm̸̪͋y ̷̞̕an̴̖̿d ̵͈̑D̴̗͊å̶̫ddy̵̪̍ ̶͊ͅã̴̗re̶̦͛ ̷̟̽ċ̶̩ō̷͉m̸̢̉iṇ̷͋g! Mu̶͙͐m̵̗̏my ả̸̡nd̴̝̈́ D̴̗͊ad̴͇̎ḏ̷́y̵̪̍ ̶͊ͅare̶̦͛ ̷̟̽cō̷͉miṇ̷͋g̶̹͘!̵”

*********

This was not, strictly speaking, accurate.

The considerable relative distance, most of it vertical, that separated Sophie Everytime from her parents — was indeed closing. But they weren’t getting closer. She was.

Lord Thymon stood in place at the base of Nowhere’s Peak, tall and unmoving, every bit the mountain that the Peak was fast ceasing to be. His eye was shining with the all-consuming grey light of entropy, his words and the intricate gestures of his many tentacles speeding time up. Not for himself, and not all around him, but for a particular object.

The mountain beneath the Castle.

Laura, Jimmy and the two Jennies could only look on in amazement, covering their eyes as they could, as the mountain shrank from underneath Castle Nowhere, collapsing into an even spray of grayish dust blowing outward from the base.

It had been some time since the retired Lord of the Outer Void had exerted his powers to this degree. It was hard work. But, oh, he was enjoying it.

He’d have smiled with pride and relief, too, had he possessed a mouth, when he felt a bit of power from inside the Castle joining with his. Words that had the power to reshape reality, a girl demanding to be reunited with her mother and father.

He tensed as the last few dozen feet of rock wore away, the huge silver structure about to rest level with the grayish soil of the plain.

“…aNd WhEn ThE eNtIrE mOuNtAiN iS cHiSeLeD aWaY…” he let himself intone in understandable English, and the last of Nowhere’s Peak collapsed into nothing.

There was a deafening thud as the Castle landed in the mud.

Not missing a beat, Thymon pounded loudly at the tall black gates that now stood right in front of him.

“…tHe HoUr Of YoUr ReCkOnInG wIlL hAvE cOmE!” he finished smoothly. When the doors failed to immediately part, he added, a little louder: “wElL? oPeN uP, cHilDsNaTcHeR!”

“Yeah! Gimme my daughter back!” Jenny Everywhere added a shout of her own, overplaying it a little.

“And after that, you have much to answer for,” Laura added, still not over the loss of her mechanoid.

There was a pause. Feeling he ought to say something, Jimmy Anytime brandished one of his clay claymores and declaimed:

“Aye! Come and meet justice, foul… villain!”

“…Theirs sounded better,” Jenny Over-There observed.

“That’s fair,” said Jimmy, deflating and bringing down the clay sword.

Slowly, the doors, twice as tall as Thymon at his tallest, parted.

In the middle of that huge gate, standing under Thymon’s gaze, Jenny Nowhere looked underwhelmingly short. Her platinum-blond, waist-length hair wasn’t as smartly combed as it had been a few hours ago; there were real eye-bags showing under her evil eyeliner; and she was starting to look a little sweaty after running around her Castle all day in full black-leather regalia.

She stared up at Thymon, her face twisted in an expression that could have been termed wrath if she’d been more presentable, but which, in her current frazzled state, just looked stroppy.

“You. Why did you do that for?! Do you know how much work it is shifting a mountain from one universe to another? Do you have any idea at all?”

“That raises an interesting question,” Laura spoke up before Thymon could voice his reply, which would, no doubt, have gone along the lines of ‘Well, why did you kidnap my daughter’. “If it’s so much work, why did you bother setting your castle up on a mountain in the first place?”

“I — well —” Nowhere glared at Laura. “Having the high ground is strategically sound. Ask any medieval lord.”

“Wh — but we’re on a freaky nothing-island in the literal middle of nowhere!” Jenny Over-There jumped in. “Trust me, I can feel it. There’s nothing around us beyond the Black Sea. Literally nothing. Who exactly do you think is going to lay siege to your stupid castle?”

Jenny Nowhere looked non-plussed. She gestured at Jimmy Anytime, and at the impressive collection of hand-made melee weapons he was carrying over his shoulder.

“…Oh yeah, fair point,” Over-There said, sheepish.

Nowhere groaned.

“Ugh. Fine! Whatever. Doesn’t matter. Defenestration’s overrated anyway. Look, just… come in. I have a lot of monologue to get through.”

She kicked the air irritably as she spun on her other heel and walked back into the Great Hall of the Castle. Jenny Everywhere and friends looked at each other in silence for a moment, and, just as silently, filed in after her.

Inside, they found the vast, largely empty hall where Sophie had been held captive all the while. The cage drew the eye first of all, hanging as it did in the exact centre of the room, but, having spotted the girl and made sure she was fine, the adventurers allowed themselves to look around at the rest of their surroundings. Despite the place’s medieval stylings, no tapestries hung from the walls, just drapes of black velvet. There was a slightly raised platform on the opposite wall, bearing Nowhere’s desk and its many charts; somewhere close by lay Pristine’s crystal ball, still leaking magic.

The floor, meanwhile, looked like a miniature menhir field, with row upon row of softly-glowing prisms arranged in concentric, circular patterns.

“Heh. Someone’s found a new hobby,” Jenny teased before looking up and waving at Sophie, who waved back. “Hullo there, kiddo! Should have you home in no time. Just finishing up with mean Auntie Nowhere here.”

An expression of mild disgust passed over Nowhere’s face at Jenny’s motherly warmth.

“That’s enough of that.”

She snapped her fingers dramatically and, with an all-too-familiar shifting sound, thick black chains appeared wrapped themselves around Laura, Jimmy and the two Jennies, keeping them in place.

Thymon immediately moved to wear down the chains to dust — but Nowhere picked up a prism and threw it at him, incanting an ancient and forbidden word. There was a flash of blue light and Thymon’s tall form vanished, leaving behind just his hat. Now the Prism seemed filled with blue smoke, the colour of Thymon’s body. The time-demon’s single eye, refracted and fragmented, stared out of every facet of the magical gem.

A shout of alarm rang out from overhead.

“𝔇𝔞ddÿ!!!”

“Nowhere, stop this!” Jenny Everywhere demanded, straining against the chains.

“Oh yes, stop this, stop this, sister, please! Help me!” Nowhere parroted, her eyes darker and crueler than ever. One of her gloved hands cupped Everywhere’s cheek in a gesture that should have been tender, intimate, sisterly — and felt anything but. “Sounds familiar, doesn’t it?”

Jenny Everywhere bowed her head, as much as she could with the thickness of chains coiled around her upper body.

“Sister,” she said. “I — I’m sorry. You know that. You know I tried to —”

Nowhere slapped her; without her arms to balance herself, the other Jenny narrowly avoided being knocked to the gorund.

“You should have tried harder!” Nowhere shouted.

She drew away from the shaken Everywhere and dispassionately considered the Prism containing the captive Thymon.

“Now we’ll see if you’ll listen when it’s your ridiculous spawn begging you for rescue, hm?” she said in an icy voice. “Call it an empirical replication experiment.”

Laura’s eyes widened. She felt a great need to dramatically take off her glasses, which was thwarted by the chains still keeping her arms firmly at her sides.

“Surely you can’t be implying…”

“Oh yes, Doctor Drake,” Nowhere said with a mirthless smirk. “It’s time you learned —”

“Okay okay. Time-out,” Jenny Over-There said loudly.

Everyone else turned to look at her, vaguely affronted.

“I have no idea what’s going on,” she explained. “I feel like I’m missing some key point of background. If you’re going to go for an evil monologue, could you at least make it intelligible exposition? I mean, worldbuilding allusions to a vast unseen backstory are all very well in moderation, but — mfff.”

The Finder’s eyes widened in outrage as she felt a gag reappearing in her mouth.

“Leave the Fourth Wall alone, Red,” Nowhere said. “Now is not the time or the place to weaken the structure of reality just for the hell of it. But perhaps your question is not unwarranted. My sister never told you, did she? What happened, so long ago, between me, her, and Doctor Laura Drake. How I became what I am.”

“It wasn’t… that long ago,” Laura huffed.

“Oh, if only you knew, Doctor,” Nowhere said in an unspeakably weary voice. “It’s been lifetimes. But I should start at the beginning.”

Nowhere flicked a hand, and a large map flew off her desk to hover just next to her, as though she were giving some kind of PowerPoint presentation. It was a yellowing tourists’ map of what appeared to be a small city on the American West Coast.

“Let me set the stage. The city of New Flaversham, on a little-regarded Prime-adjacent Earth, numbering… somewhere in the 38000s.”

“38167th,” Jenny Everywhere specified.

“Whatever. The year is 1973. Jenny Everton is in her first year of college, as is her best friend Laura Phoebe Drake. Jenny has a sister. An adopted sister — but then, Jenny’s adopted too. Our parents couldn’t have children, you see. So they adopted two girls from the orphanage, two girls who’d always been inseparable. I’d like nothing more than to tell you the girl’s name, but we don’t always get what we want in life.”

As she spoke, old polaroids materialised to match her explanations, hovering alongside the map.

A striking-looking twelve-year-old girl with long blonde hair, dressed all in white, smiling on a bright summer’s day.

The blonde girl at a beach with a slightly shorter, squatter girl, a girl with short hair and dark brown skin, incongruously wearing a scarf to complement her dark green swimsuit.

A girl with red, frizzy hair, proudly holding up a toy robot for the camera.

The same girl, an older teenager now, with a pair of glasses perched on her nose, holding hands with a young Jenny as they graduate from high school.

“Jenny didn’t have many friends,” Nowhere continued, “but she and Laura did get along, which wasn’t surprising, since Laura didn’t have many friends either. As for Jenny’s sister… well, she must have had friends, mustn’t she. But never mind her. One fine day, Jenny, I suppose, decided dressing like some kind of northern hobo wasn’t weird enough. So she decided to start snogging her girl best friend.”

“Hey.”

“Oh, you know I’m well past caring,” Nowhere defended herself. “I’m just telling the story as it was lived. Telling your sister’s side of the story, warts and all. I think you owe me that.”

The other Jenny bowed her head sadly, unable to think of a reply.

Nowhere put away the map and levitated up another sheet of paper, an old blueprint

“Now, apparently, when they kissed, it triggered some gizmo Laura had built to detect fluctuations in the fabric of reality.”

“It wasn’t a ‘gizmo’,” Laura said angrily. “It was a gizmotronic proton equalizer.”

“Oh. Silly me,” Nowhere said, deadpan. “I wonder how I ever got those two mixed up.” She took her eyes off Laura, addressing her entire audience once again. “Now why did the gizmo get triggered, you ask? Good question.”

She clicked her fingers again, dismissing the schematics and replacing them with pictures of various sizes, all depicting women with scarves and goggles alongside women in purple with frizzy red hair. In some they were holding hands, or even getting married; in others they were locked in battle. There were photographs old and new, paintings, sketches, newspaper clippings — each only hovered for a few seconds before vanishing back whence it came, but with every picture that disappeared Nowhere summoned another to replace it.

“It turned out Jenny — my Jenny — was one extension of a complex multi-dimensional event, a pattern artificially seeded into every reality of the Omniverse by some unknown force. Infinite numbers of women calling themselves Jenny Everywhere, with scarves and goggles and bad hair, making nuisances of themselves where they weren’t needed. And in all their lives, there was a Laura Drake. Not all the same by any means; and not tied directly to one another the way the Jennies were tied to each other. One of many living props in the endlessly repeated Jenny Everywhere success story. For example…”

Her eerie eyes focused on Jimmy Anytime.

“…I suppose you’ve realised by now that there are many other versions of you across the Multiverse, even if you cannot sense them. I’d met other Jennies’ Jimmy Anytimes long before I created you. You’re just a natural extrusion of the interdimensional cancer that is Jenny. There was an opening in our continuity for a Jimmy Anytime, and I decided to fill it for my own purposes. There’s nothing special about you. How does that make you feel? Hm?”

Jimmy did look a little shaken, but he had walked into the Castle with rather a lot of brash heroic bravado, if not with a lot else, and he wasn’t about to let that go unused. So, he shrugged, as much as he could in his chains.

“Eh,” he replied. “I’m already a clone. Comes with the territory. I’m just happy to get to choose who I am going to be.”

Nowhere just rolled her eyes. “Whatever. This isn’t about you. You were just a simile. Where was I?” She stared at the pictures she’d summoned. “Oh yes.”

With a wave of her hand she dismissed them and brought up something new. Another blueprint, for a device simpler and slicker than the proton equalizer. Unlike the complicated detecting apparatus that made up the equalizer system, this was clearly designed with human use in mind: it was… a chair. Well, it looked like a dentist’s chair, or a hairdresser’s. But there was a helmet-like component affixed to the back of the chair, shaped like the upper half of an egg, covered with small tubes and wires.

“Laura and Jenny, they were starting to understand what Jenny was. Just a bit. Jenny was having dreams, visions. Oh, and shifting fits. But they wanted to know more. Laura especially — but both of them, at the time. Based on the principles of the proton equalizer, they began to work on this. The Dimensional Consciousness Maximizer.” She enunciated the name, syllable by syllable, in a tone of voice which clearly communicated that every fiber of her being longed to take the D.C.M. apart. “A device to give anyone who sat in it a mental link to 999 of their closest counterparts in the Multiverse. Which, for Jenny, meant patching her once and for all into that telepathic network that all her infinite parallel selves share…”

She paused and gave a practiced chuckle.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I’m quite forgetting about Jenny’s sister. What was she up to during those months of feverish dimensional work? Ah, well, you know, just the usual. Living her life. Falling in love with a local boy. Practicing her piano-playing. But who cares about her, right? It was all happening at 88 Curie Avenue, of course. Laura’s laboratory in the mouldering old Drake mansion. They built the machine — Jenny went first. And somewhere in her epiphany she realised — she noticed the thing about all her sisters having a Laura, right. So Laura got into the D.C.M. next. For her it was just a temporary thing, over as soon as she got up from the chair, but she couldn’t get enough of it. So much knowledge to leech off her parallel selves. It was blowing her mind. So…”

Nowhere’s eyes glinted as she focused on Jenny Everywhere.

“Well, sis, want to take over? You know this one, don’t you.”

Jenny stayed silent, biting her lip and trying to avoid Nowhere’s glare.

“No, really. I insist,” Nowhere said as she punched her in the gut — not hard enough to injure her, especially through the chains, but hard enough to make her point.

Jenny coughed, and, shrinking guiltily under the curious stares of Jimmy, Jenny-O, Thymon, and even Sophie, who was listening with bated breath from her cage, she admitted:

“Well… I felt it wasn’t good for Laura, the way she was just plugging herself into the machine over and over. ’cause, me, sure, I could handle being connected to all my other selves all the time, but, uh… all my other selves are kinda mostly decent people, is the thing. Whereas some of the people Laura was hooking herself to…” She shuddered at the memory. “Well, anyway, she wouldn’t listen to me.”

“I was advancing human understanding of —” Laura began protesting.

“You wouldn’t listen,” Jenny repeated more loudly, cutting her of. “So I did the only thing I could think of. I tried to… to redirect Laura’s curiosity. I told her, alright, we’ve learned enough about what your other selves are like, time to see what everyone else in our life is like in other universes, right? She liked that idea. We made a whole list, a whole schedule. And right at the top of the list of names was, uhm.” Unable to point, she looked meaningfully at Jenny Nowhere. “Her.”

“Me,” Nowhere agreed. “Her big sister. She convinced me, easily, to sit down in that chair and put on the helmet. And then she —” She pointed at Laura. “— pulled the lever, and… well. One moment I was me, sitting in a particular chair in a particular house in a particular world. The next moment I was… Nowhere.”

“I didn’t know!” Jenny protested, on the edge of tears. “How could I know? I’d seen other me-s have sisters. Julie. Jordan. I thought… I thought your counterparts would be —”

“I told you!” Nowhere shouted back. “The moment you’d hooked me to that machine, when I first felt the… the miasma of all the Nowheres of all the worlds closing in on me. I told you how it felt, I begged you to switch it off. And you…”

“I’m… listen, I…” Jenny hesitated.

For just a moment, she clammed up. But then she felt Thymon and Sophie’s eyes on her. Not judging, just yet, but wondering.

“Look, when she… when you…” She didn’t quite know who she was talking to, anymore. “It felt like this for me too, the first time, you know? Just for a moment. For a moment I thought I’d lose myself completely to all the other Jennies. I did. But then I grounded myself. I saw the Infinite. And from then on, it was wonderful. And I thought… I thought it would be like that for you too. I thought…”

“Liar. That’s just it. You didn’t think. You assumed.”

“Sister, I didn’t know —”

“Cut the sister crap,” she interrupted. “Why don’t you use my name? Hm?”

“…You know I can’t do that.”

Nowhere noticed the expected puzzled looks from her audience.

“Of course not. They took my name from me, you see,” she explained, falsely calm. “My entire identity. Everything that I was… erased. I was just one more part of Jenny Nowhere, filling a body that had once belonged to a particular girl. But I wasn’t really there anymore. I wasn’t really any place at all.”

“Wait, what?” Jimmy queried. “You may have forgotten, but surely you had ID, records —”

“All gone,” the blonde woman said in a hollow voice. “The power of Jenny Nowhere is a terrible thing. I’m a walking abomination, you must understand. An absence made flesh.” She looked into a distance that none others could see. “As for ‘Jenny Nowhere’… Even that name wasn’t my choice. Though I can see the logic. My story isn’t unique. Many of us Nowheres began thus. Sisters, friends… even lovers.”

Images danced before the six prisoners. Countless girls and women, all full of life and personality, with little in common, save that many appeared on the pictures with what the prisoners recognised as versions of Jenny Everywhere.

“And then good old Jenny becomes strange new Jenny, Jenny Everywhere, the Shifter of a Thousand Faces. And one by one we lose ourselves to become her necessary reflection. Jenny takes our names away. Not on purpose, of course, never on purpose. But she does.” Nowhere allowed herself a thin smile. “It’s only fair that we take hers for ourselves, don’t you think?”

Falling silent, she allowed her conclusion to sink in, dismissing the final slate of pictures with a brisk flick of a wrist.

No one dared speak, at first — not that Thymon or Jenny Over-There could have done so even if they’d wanted to.

Nowhere watched all their reactions with rapt attention; the sadness in Thymon’s eyes, the frightened confusion in Sophie’s, the lingering shock in Jimmy’s; the guilt, too, and the wounded pride, weighing on Jenny and Laura.

Before one of them could say something of their own, Nowhere stepped in again:

“And don’t you forgive her yet,” she said. “I’ve done this before, I know how it goes. Everywhere’s friends forgive her, always. No matter what. She’s too wonderful not to forgive, right?” She was speeding up, her voice rising. “Oh, of course it’s sad what happened to mean old Nowhere, very sad, but Jenny didn’t mean it, did she, and anyway, it was inevitable, there has to be a Nowhere, and isn’t Everywhere such a boon to creation? Isn’t it worth the Nowheres to have more Everywheres, always more, til reality is full to bursting? Food for thought, isn’t it!?”

She turned her head back and forth, looking all her prisoners in the eye, one by one, as she spoke, shaking with fury:

“Well?! You’re all thinking it, aren’t you. You don’t care, any of you. Not really. You never did. I’m just… Oh, that one; not the Jenny, her sister. Just the big sister. The pretty one, the normal one. She’s not fun and she’s not creative and… and… and I’m not even nice and I don’t have a good sense of humour, and she’s white and straight and boring. So, so, whatever, right? So! So!…”

And she stalked towards Jenny in great predatory strides, shouting:

“So I still didn’t deserve what you did to her, you — !!!”

(At this point, Nowhere called her sister by a word which Jenny Everywhere and Thymon would really have rather kept away from Sophie’s ears until she was older, had it been up to them.)

“But I don’t think that’s ever really sunk in, even after so many battles,” Nowhere continued, in a more level voice. “So I’m going to make you see. I’m going to make you feel it.”

She made a gesture over her head and the chain holding up Sophie’s cage slowly started to extend, lowering the cage.

Jenny blanched.

“Nowhere. Nowhere, whatever you’re doing, stop it.”

“And waste all my hard work? Look what I made, just for your daughter. Call it a baby-shower present.”

With a dramatic flourish of her hand, an evil-looking, metallic chair appeared right under Sophie.

Laura’s eyes widened. It looked unmistakably like her D.C.M., resized to accommodate a girl of Sophie Everytime’s size, with a few cosmetic alterations to bring it in line with Nowhere’s generally sterile sense of aesthetics.

“You… you plagiarist!”

“Oh, hardly, Doctor,” said Nowhere. “I’ve improved upon your work enormously. Meet the Identity Dispersal System. Your device could only connect one person to their nine hundred and ninety-nine closest counterparts. Mine can connect the user to anyone else‘s network of counterparts.”

“What? Nowhere!” Jenny shouted urgently. “Nowhere, you can’t!”

“I can and I will,” said Nowhere, just as Sophie’s cage landed with a thunk on the seat of the wicked machine. She clapped her hands, sending a wave of staticky shifter energy to engulf chair, girl and cage; the metal bars of the cage melted away, but, before Sophie could escape, the metal reconfigured itself into tight straps binding her to the I.D.S..

“MumMy—” Sophie began, but a gag appeared before she could use her Words to free herself.

“You didn’t spare Jenny Nowhere a second thought when she was your sister. But we’ll see how you feel when she’s your daughter.”

“What? Nowhere, this is madness!” Laura protested. “And that’s coming from me! The girl’s not even been born yet. If you erase her identity, Jenny and Thymon won’t be able to name her once she’s born properly. You’ll create a time paradox!”

“Quite right,” Nowhere nodded. “Hooked right into the Nowhere gestalt. Who knows, maybe it’ll be big enough to set me free. To set us all free. Hey, a girl can dream. But even if not… well, I’ll still have gotten revenge on my sister. On all of you. That’s something.”

“Nowhere. Sister. Please,” Jenny pleaded, straining more than ever against the metal coils ensnaring her body. “Please, don’t do this. I’ll do anything you want. Take me. Kill me, exile me to one of the hell-dimensions, I swear I won’t try to escape, anything. Just… just you promise not to harm her. Please.”

“Very tempting, but… no, I don’t think so.”

“No. No… hang on,” Jimmy began in a somewhat harried voice, apparently trying to reassure Jenny. “I do know something about Time, whatever Thymon says. Let me think this through. The Sophie we’ve seen, she’s just a potential future, right now. Nowhere can do what she likes with her… I mean, it’s not good, we should stop her. But it’s only one version of her. She’ll still be born as herself nine months from now, okay? Or — or however long it is half-human half-Embodiments stay in the womb, I don’t know. And if you just make sure she never gets sent back to now, she’ll split off, become her own Sophie. Nowhere can’t do anything to her.”

“Tsk tsk,” Nowhere mocked him. “You don’t understand, do you. This is the first Sophie Everytime. She’s never existed before. Not in this epoch of the Omniverse, anyway. If my sister and I truly are eternal, I suppose she must have come and gone long, long ago, like everything else. Farther than even the oldest of us can remember. But for here and now, for this era of our infinite lives, this is where she begins. One Jenny, one night with Thymon, one baby. One baby then millions, infinities. The concept of her is taking root in the hypercontinuum even now. It’ll spread. Retcon itself into a myriad worlds. Tomorrow there’ll have been millions of Sophies around, for millions of years. But it’s all still cooking.” She began flicking switches on the side of the I.D.S. “And I’m going to spoil the broth.”

“Wh — b — she’s done nothing to you!”

“Actually, she’s been pestering me all afternoon, all the time I was watching you blundering through the Island,” Nowhere replied flatly. “But that’s irrelevant. Your sister never did anything to you, either.”

She took a deep breath, steadying herself.

“Alright. Enough monologuing for today, I think.” She put her hand on what seemed to be the master-switch and looked straight into Sophie’s mysterious blue eyes. “Bye bye, kid. Get ready to see things my way.”

Jenny, Jimmy and Laura screamed — Jenny-O and Sophie cried into their gags — even the prism containing Thymon seemed to shake harder than before — but, heedless, Nowhere threw the switch.

Shifter energy streamed like water from the headpiece of the I.D.S., engulfing Sophie’s entire body, and streaming lower still, reaching the ground where it reshaped itself into shifting arcs of electric-looking energy, linking all the prisms laid on the floor of the Hall by Nowhere in a great glowing spider-web. Outside, white lightning flashed. One of the bolts of energy reached the prism containing Thymon, which exploded, freeing the Time-Demon and sending mote-sized shards of crystal flying across the room.

All this lasted for just a second — then the lights-show disappeared.

Sophie’s body, still strapped into the chair, had gone inert. Nowhere, too, had collapsed in a heap on the ground, her right arm still grasping the switch.

“jEnNy!”

Thymon hurried to her side and, with the dexterity of an expert first-class mail-sorter, released her from her bonds.

“Sophie?” Jenny called weakly, even before Thymon was done untying her. “Sophie!”

“i’Ll WaKe HeR uP,” Thymon said. “yOu FrEe ThE oThErS.”

Jenny seemed torn, her eyes still on her daughter’s unmoving form.

“nOw!” he pressed her. “BeFoRe YoUr SiStEr HeRe WaKeS uP!”

She snapped to attention and quickly got to work on Laura, laying her palms on the chains and replacing them, one by one, with harmless strings of daisies.

Thymon glided to Sophie’s side, looming over the I.D.S.. As gently as he could, he extended his reinnervating tentacle and pinged her with it in the centre of her forehead.

Two empty eyes opened — eyes with black sclerae and white pupils. The eyes of Jenny Nowhere.

“oH, nO.” He quickly undid her gag. “sOpHiE. sPeAk To Me!”

The child’s face twisted itself up into a very familiar sneer.

“Heh. Heh. I’m afraid the number you dialed is no longer in service,” said Jenny Nowhere in Sophie’s voice — Sophie’s voice, but too flat, too even, too adult.

“What?!” shouted Jenny Everywhere, looking up from her work releasing Jenny Over-There.

But as her eyes landed on Not-Sophie, she saw the villainous grin vanishing, replaced by annoyance and confusion.

“Wait. ‘Sophie‘? You just said ‘Sophie’. I remember ‘Sophie‘. How is that possible?”

She hopped to her feet, the I.D.S.’s metal straps vanishing at her behest, and examined herself up and down.

“I don’t understand. It worked. I’m Jenny Nowhere, I’m in her body. Not a trace of who she was remains. How…”

“Yuck. Gross,” said a voice.

It was a voice she should have known well, but Jenny Nowhere took a moment to place it. She’d never heard it from the outside, least of all through Sophie Everytime’s ears.

She very, very slowly turned around to find that her other body, her proper body, had gotten to her feet. She was now staring down at the blue-haired girl, hands balled up in fists on her hips.

“What? When did you wake up?” Nowhere asked. “I didn’t feel it. I should have done! What’s going on?”

“Oh, go on, catch up,” said Jenny Everywhere, a victorious grin returning to her face. “You were always smarter than you gave yourself credit for. You can figure it out.”

Nowhere whipped back and stared at ‘herself’ some more. Her cape would definitely need ironing after all this was over. Oh dear, did she really look this tired? And her eyes…

Her eyes were impossibly blue.

“Oh no. Oh hell.”

“Auntie Nowhere?” said Sophie Everytime, irritably running a hand through long, tangled blond hair that didn’t belong to her. “I still don’t like you at all.”

It was at this point that Laura burst out laughing.

Thymon hurried to his daughter, hugging her in his many tentacles.

“oH, mY wOnDeRfUl GiRl,” he exclaimed, cyan tears of joy and relief pearling on the edge of his great black eye. “A pOsSeSsIoN aT yOuR aGe. I’m… I’m So PrOuD oF yOu.”

“What the — let go of that!” shouted Jenny Nowhere, running to them and pulling fruitlessly at Sophie’s cape to try and tear her away from her father. “That’s my body you’re squeezing!”

Sophie stuck out her tongue at her.

“I’m not givin’ it back ’til you gimme mine back,” she said defiantly.

Nowhere let out a roar of frustration, which, even with the echoey quality of Sophie’s voice, sounded quite silly coming from her child lungs, coming out as more of a high-pitched squeak.

“Yaargh! This can’t be happening! You should have been erased! Overwhelmed by the mental powers of a thousand Jenny Nowheres! How are you alive, you ridiculous whelp?!”

“My daughter? Erased? Oh, please,” Jenny explained, as she took her turn hugging Sophie. “You may have lost yourself to the gestalt, and I’ll always be sorry for you. But you were a glob of teenage self-doubt in a hoodie long before you sat in that chair. And, I mean, look at you now. You’re a walking identity crisis. A measly thousand of you, up against one whole Sophie? Hardly a fair fight.”

“’Specially today,” Sophie herself chimed in, grinning. “Everybody I’ve met today loved me so much, had so much faith in me. Except you, I guess.” She blinked. “No, not even that. You might not like me, but you didn’t half talk me up in your speech. I mean, unique in all the universes, the first of me, ever! That’s cool! Am I the only one who thinks it’s cool?”

“It’s very cool,” Jimmy confirmed with a friendly grin.

“But I… I was gonna… ” Jenny Nowhere sniffled. Then sobbed. Then bawled. “Oh… ow…h…”

She let herself drop to the floor, her tiny body curling up in fetal position, crying wordlessly.

Sophie looked curiously down at her own, crying form.

She looked at Laura and her parents.

“It’s the immature brain chemistry, right?”

Her mother nodded uncertainly.

“Right, thought so,” the girl-in-a-woman’s-body nodded. “Does feel a bit weird up in here. More… still. Not sure I like it. Mh.”

She knelt down by her miniaturized Aunt’s side (a little shakily — she wasn’t used to those legs) and cradled her in her arms.

“Hey. Hey. It’s okay,” she said gently. “It’s okay. I’m sorry I said mean things about ya.”

Nowhere slowly stopped crying as Sophie gently rocked her. She sniffed, still on the verge of starting to tear up again.

“Tell you what. If I tell you a secret, will ya let us switch back? I promise it’s a real good one.”

“A-alright,” Nowhere said weakly.

“Okay. Listen carefully now,” said Sophie, and she whispered — something — in Nowhere’s ear.

Her strange, hollow eyes widened, and — was it a trick of the light, or was there, just for a moment, a flash of colour there? The ghost of an iris?

Nowhere didn’t breathe for several seconds.

Then she sighed slowly. A new tear was rolling down her cheek, but this time, she wasn’t letting herself spiral back into childish grief.

“…Okay,” she said. “Th… thank you. We… we can switch back now.”

Sophie blinked.

“Er… how exactly do we…?…”

With no further warning, there was a flash of shifter energy. Sophie and Nowhere both shut their eyes from the light — and when they opened them again, the blonde woman’s were black, and the little girl’s were blue.

Jenny Nowhere, back in the correct body, carefully lowered Sophie Everytime to the ground, as one might a wild animal.

“Tha̷̪̽nk̷͍̂ ÿ̷͓́oṷ̴͘,” Sophie said politely, before clasping a hand over her mouth as she realised her Words were back.

…Sorry, she signed at once, sheepish.

But given what she’d expressed, it didn’t look like the small release of cosmic power had done her Aunt any harm. Quite the opposite — she looked more peaceful and better-rested than she had all day.

Which, granted, given that she was Jenny Nowhere, still looked fairly cranky.

“…Don’t worry about it,” she muttered darkly. “Blrgh. Alright. You win this one, Everywhere. What a surprise. See you whenever, I guess.”

She walked off dejectedly. An arched gateway of shimmering shifter energy appeared in her path; she walked through, and it closed behind her.

Sophie ran to hug her mother.

“What did you tell her?” Jenny asked after a minute.

Her name, Sophie replied.

Jenny’s eyes widened.

“What? But how did you…”

I went back in time to find it out, she explained with a fey smile. Back in, uh… wait, no sign for that. “mEta-Time,” she said out loud before switching to signs again. Which was tricky, but you and Daddy told me it was important.

“Ah. I’ll make a note of it.” Jenny bit her lip. “What… what is it? I don’t remember it either. I can make guesses, but I don’t remember. Nobody did.”

Sophie hesitated. I don’t think you knew in the future, she explained. I think maybe it should be up to her to tell you if she wants. She’s mean, but… she’s allowed to have secrets. She has so little that really belongs to her.

Jenny kissed Sophie’s forehead. “Fair enough. Absolutely fair enough.”

“dId I hEaR tHaT rIgHt?” Thymon asked. “YoU — sHiFtEd ThRoUgH mEtA-tImE. aT yOuR aGe? ThAt’S aStOuNdIng!”

Yeah. Well… She smiled shyly — Cousin Tiny did help me.

Thymon cocked his ‘head’.

“cOuSiN tInY?”

You know. The new—the other ‘you’.

“oH,” Thymon nodded, a hint of wonder in his voice. “oH, i SeE.”

“I don’t,” Jenny cut in. “What’s she talking about? We’ll really need to finish that meet-and-greet tour. I barely spoke to any of your side of the family. There’ll be time enough now, I suppose.”

“aH. hM. wElL, aS i BeLiEvE mY sIbLiNg oF tHoUgHt InTimAtEd, ThE bAlAnCe Of ThE iNTeRdImEnSiOnAl pSeUdO-cOsMoS dEmAndS tHe ExIsTeNcE oF a LoRd ThYmOn To KeEp TiMe In ThE hOwLiNg VoId In PlACe. OnE oF tHrEe AlL-pOwErFuL eMbOdImEnTs. AlWaYs. In CaSe OnE oR mOrE oF uS eVeR bEcOmE uNaBlE, oR… uNwIlLiNg, To FulFilL oUr PuRpOsE, tHe LaDy SpAtIuM aLwAyS gIvEs… I sUpPoSe YoU mIghT sAy ‘BiRtH’… tO tHrEe UnSpEciAliSed ShApEcHiLdReN, eAcH wItH tHe CaPaCiTy To SpEciAlIsE iNtO aN eMbOdImEnT oF tImE, sPaCe, oR tHoUgHt. NoW tHaT i HaVe DeSeRtEd My DuTiEs, OnE oF mY sIsTeR’s BrOoD hAs BeGuN tO tRaNsMuTe HiMsElF iNtO a… WeLl, A ‘tInY tHyMoN’. aNd bY tHe SoUnD oF tHiNgS, iN a FeW yEaRs’ TiMe, He WiLl HaVe TaKeN mY mAnTlE iN fUlL.”

“So you weren’t the first Lord Thymon?” Laura asked curiously.

He waved a tentacle evasively. “iT iS hArD tO sAy,” he explained. “i Am AlL tHe ThYmOnS oF eOnS pAsT. i ReMeMbEr ThEiR lIvEs. As He CoMeS iNtO hIs PoWeR, mY nEpHeW wIlL bEgIn To ReMeMbEr mInE. iN a FeW mIlLiOn YeArS tHe SePaRaTiOn bEtWeEn mYsElF aNd HiM wIlL hOlD lItTlE mEaNiNg FoR hIm.”

“Oh. Will… he… remember — everything?” Jenny asked blushing.

“Ah — No, My DeAr,” he reassured her. “OnLy My CeNtUrIeS iN oFfIcE, i ThInK. tHe LiFe I lIvE nOw — My HoMe In ThE cUpId HoMeWoRlD, mY wOrK, mY — eNtAnGlEmEnTs — AlL tHaT iS jUsT mInE.” He put a tentacle on her hand. “aNd YoUrS, nOw.”

“Ah. Er, good. Good.” She squeezed the tentacle. “But… I mean, once he… replaces you, for good, what happens to you? Your powers? Do you —”

“HuSh NoW,” he interrupted her, gently, but a little too quickly. “tImE eNoUgH tO wOrRy AbOuT tHaT lAtEr, Mh? We HaVe A dAuGhTeR tO gEt HoME.”

“Also, us,” said Jenny Over-There, who’d picked up Pristine’s Crystal Ball and was peering curiously into it. “I dunno about Jimmy here, but I’m going to need a ride. I can’t actually shift.”

“Me too,” Laura added. “I didn’t have a Shift-Gun on me when Nowhere nabbed me.”

“Ah. Er. Easier said than done,” Jenny said. “My powers are still blocked. Why is that, anyway? What is this place? Darn, should have asked my sister before she left.”

Oh, I know the answer, Sophie intervened.

“Really?”

I saw it when I was connected to the Jenny Nowheres, she signed. This entire island, it’s… well, it is a Jenny Nowhere.

“…It’s what now?”

This place. Nowhere Island, in the 9768761143th Universe. It’s an incarnation of Jenny Nowhere. It’s not completely sentient, but it’s sort of… aware. It’s part of the mental network, anyway.

“Huh. That’s a first even for me,” Jenny said, thoughtful.

“WeLl YoU hAvE bEeN dAtInG a CeLeStIaL bOdY,” Thymon pointed out.

“Fair point. So… what do we do?”

“If it’s Nowhere’s aura cancelling out all you shifters’ powers,” Laura reasoned out loud, “we should be good if we just leave the island. I say we go back to the beach, make a boat, and row out to sea until we’re out of range.”

“Yikes. How long will that take?” Jenny Over-There asked.

Thymon and Sophie shared a mischievous look.

“wItH uS oN tHe CaSe? Oh, HaRdLy AnY tImE At AlL.”

*********

There wasn’t really any day or night in the Cupid Homeworld. It had been the plan, early on, but the instructions the Creator had left on how to operate the Clockwork Sun and the Clockwork Moon had been unclear at best, mistakes were made, and the Department of Celestial Bodies had been looking for the Moon for thirty-two years now.

Nevertheless, time did exist, just about; there were work-days, and a “night”’s worth of rest in-between each of them. Keeping track of them was why most Cupids kept a clock in their homes and places of work, redundant as it may seem. Thymon had followed the custom, and a great, slightly crooked grandfather clock stood in the dining room of his house.

When Lord Thymon, Jenny Everywhere and Sophie Everytime reappeared in the said dining room, having finished dropping off their friends where they belonged, they happened to be facing the clock. Its judgment was clear.

“oH, dEaR,” said Thymon. “wE’rE iN sYnC.”

“What d’you mean?”

“i MeAn ThAt We HaVe BeEn GoNe, FrOm ThIs WoRlD’s PeRsPeCtIvE, fOr JuSt As LoNg As OuR aDvEnTuReS lAsTeD fRoM oUrS.”

“Oh,” said Jenny. “Yeah, I guess we have. What’s your point?”

“wHaT’s My — BuT — bUt I’vE mIsSeD mY dAy’S wOrK aT tHe PoSt OfFiCe!” Thymon cried out, very distressed. “wHy DiD yOu Do It LiKe ThAt?!”

“Oh fudge, I’m sorry,” Jenny confessed. “It’s just how I do things, usually. I’m a regular shifter, not a time-shifter. I mean, at the end of the day it’s all dimensions, can shift to specific time periods in the worlds I visit, if I really have to, but it takes a bit of work.”

“hArRuMpH,” said Thymon.

Before he could complain further, however, he felt a small hand tugging at one of his tentacles. He looked down at Sophie.

“wHaT iS iT?”

Daddy, I know you don’t like moving through time under your own power —

“wElL, iT’s NoT sO mUcH tHaT i DoN’t LiKe It, YoU kNoW,” he explained, “bUt It TeNdS tO cReAte UnNeCeSsaRy DiStReSs. YoU kNoW, rEsIdUaL rIFtS iN tHE fAbRiC oF rEaLiTy, ApOcAlYpTiC vIsIoNs In ThE lOcAl PoPuLaTiOn, ThAt SoRt Of ThInG.”

Yeah, I understand, Sophie signed. But I could shift you back to this morning. I’m good at being… delicate.

“oOoH,” Thymon said admiringly. “yEs, ThAt WoUlD bE vErY nIcE, tHaNk YoU!”

Okay, she signed quickly before spreading her arms and hugging her father.

“S𝔢e̸̅ yo̶̩͝ų̵̍̿ 𝔰𝔬ȯ̸̪̈́̏̒͠n, 𝔇𝔞𝔡,” she said, very tenderly.

Slowly at first, then building up, like a gust of wind, rings of light-blue light appeared around Thymon’s body, circling him, swarming and swirling until a column of bluish energy engulfed his entire form. Then he was gone.

Sophie took a step back, relaxing her arms from their position of a hugging a form that was no longer here. She glanced at the clock again.

He should be coming home from work soon, she told her mother. I’d best be going home quickly.

“Yeah, you’re probably right,” Jenny allowed, feeling a twinge of sadness. “Nine months, huh. I’m going to miss you.”

Sophie ran to her, Jenny crouching to meet her hug, lifting her up just as their bodies met.

Jenny clung tightly to her daughter, spinning her round. She turned and turned, squeezing her eyes shut as she twirled. Slowly she felt the weight lighten.

She thought she hard a voice, almost human: whisper: “Bye, Mummy”. But maybe it was just her imagination. When she opened her eyes, she was alone in Thymon’s dining room.

She stood there a moment, her head still tilted down.

“What a day,” she sighed, a strange mix of sadness and content relief.

She noticed, absently at first, that her outfit still looked rather the worse for wear after the day’s exertions. In particular —

“Huh. I’d better find some new shoes,” she decided, her mind readying herself for a new adventure, one which would, hopefully, involve fewer life-altering family revelations. “Who do I know who sells shoes?” She thought for a moment and snapped her fingers, grinning. “Oh yeah! That wily old leprechaun I met in Dimension 77. Wonder what he’s been up to.”

In a second, rainbow light engulfed her, and she was gone.

---

THE END

---

Written by Aristide Twain.

---

The character of Jenny Everywhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Everywhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.

The character of Jenny Nowhere is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Nowhere, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.

The character of Jimmy Anytime is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Anytime, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.

The character of Jenny Over-There is available for use by anyone, with only one condition. This paragraph must be included in any publication involving Jenny Over-There, in order that others may use this property as they wish. All rights reversed.

The characters of Laura Drake and Pixie Pristine were created by Jeanne Morningstar and Carter-Ethan Rankin respectively, and are available for use by anyone with no citation needed. That being said, crediting them is polite.

The character of Sophie Everytime, created by Aristide Twain, is hereby made available for use by anyone. All rights reversed.

---