He gives Ray a list of souls to collect. The list is ordered, but not timestamped, the deaths are essentially just spaced at such intervals that Ray has enough time to deal with each one before moving on to the next. Being a grim reaper gives him the power to bilocate when not on-panel, but he often doesn't entirely know where to go, and kills a great deal of innocent bystanders by accidentally touching them while asking for directions. He also frequently misreads the list and shows up at the wrong person's address, or kills people in the wrong order. Death doesn't seem to care about Ray's mistakes, as long as he doesn't actually skip anyone entirely. We never actually see someone's soul. Ray will show up, the character will realize they're going to die, and we'll cut to a different plot thread. With Ray having jumped off a building, Liquorice has no one to yell at, and forms the Jesus Clone Extermination Squad to avenge her daughter's botched resurrection. ¯¯¯ Jesus Clone Extermination Squad ¯¯¯ Matthew and The Dunce seem to be capable of breaking all sorts of laws of the comic strip. The artist tries to select and delete them, but this only causes a glitchy error message to appear. The King tries to go back in time to before they were created, but this doesn't work either, and he ends up in the infinity room instead. The artist, who assumes the King was successful, draws a time machine and sets the destination to "the strip when the King went". He also ends up in the infinity room. ---------- The Infinity Room ---------- <<< ----- The Fix ----- >>> The cartoonist goes through a bad breakup and decides all the characters are asexual, have no conception of gender or sex, and reproduce by binary fission. This retcon is not mentioned to the reader. This is where things start to get confusing. When travelling between planets, or coming back to a planet from a spaceship (usually one that was just blown up), Ray will frequently find himself thousands of years in the past or future, because he doesn't grasp the nature of reference frames, despite having had them explained to him in painstaking detail by the inhabitants of multiple futures. Not being able to tell the difference between being in the wrong place, the wrong time, or the wrong timeline, he uses a complex system of superstitions about the killing of differently colored prehistoric butterflies to correct the changes he thinks he has made to history. By trial and error he eventually finds a timeline that looks like the original one, but there are always a variety of differences. Due to the way the spacetime of the strip proper is embedded in the spacetime "outside the strip", somewhere in the world within each alternate timeline is a region which has the king's wireless network extending into it, which has been there since the strip when the router was turned on. Because Ray only alters time within the fiction of the strip proper, the real world internet always contains the "actual" (blue strip) version of Poorly Thought Out Comics (which during this period skips constantly between alternate timelines). Many of the worlds discover the internet connection, read the strip as it updates, and consequently recognize and eventually even learn to look out for the moment of their timeline's creation, and try to catch Ray before he causes their timeline's destruction. (This doesn't entirely make sense, because even merely browsing the internet requires a two-way connection, so if the alternate timelines had access to the real world internet before they were introduced, they should've been interacting with the real world, and thus each other, all along. Additionally, the fact that the wireless network extends into timelines prior to their introduction implies that the giant paper-covered boxy object that the strip proper manifests as in the spacetime outside must contain multiple unintroduced timelines simultainiously with the current one, in such a way that they all occupy the same space, and experience time relative to the real world at roughly the same rate. This is considerably different than the way unintroduced things were previously established to work. These inconsistancies are eventually brought up by The Recognizer, way later on.) Catching ray is not trivial, because although Ray is an idiot, his erratic bilocations make it impossible to know his position for more than a few minutes, and other than unhelpful liminal beings like Ray, no one within the strip can travel at superluminal speeds. Ray is eventually caught by Project Pipewheel, in the final timeline. ----- Final Timeline ----- Mr. Fishpaste's daughter, who in this timeline is the mysterious transfer student at Pig Ports instead of Victoria, uses her family's pirated real-world internet connection for her assignments. She doesn't grasp the fact that copying is considered cheating, and her papers are heavily plagiarized. When she does a three-page report on reproduction, the teacher gives it an F, and assumes she wrote a deliberately absurd report to nettle him. She protests that it's all true, and that she copied it directly from wikipedia. The teacher calls her father and painstakingly tries to explain what plagiarism is, and how wikipedia is not to be trusted. Mr. Fishpaste, somewhat missing the point, angrily insists that his daughter is not a liar, that sex is real, and that the internet has countless pictures and even videos of it. He complains about the crazy teacher to the headmaster, who arranges for the three of them to meet informally and resolve the misunderstanding. Mr. Fishpaste misunderstands this as well, and shows up wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase full of bizarre rule 34 drawings and pirated hentai movies, which he enters into the (nonexistant) evidence record as individual "exhibits", assigning them each a letter, or when he runs out of letters, names of 80s bands. The headmaster and teacher are flabberghasted. The headmaster tells Mr. Fishpaste that the teacher will be suspended pending a psychiatric evaluation, which satisfies him. After he leaves, the headmaster tries to trace the source of the porn, but can find no record anywhere of anything like it. The websites, artists, production studios and so on simply don't exist. Being the head of a school for the paranormal, he concludes (almost correctly) that Mr. Fishpaste has somehow unknowingly acquired a connection to an alternate universe's internet. > Whit The headmaster calls Viceroy Whittaker, an alternate version of Alger, saying he thinks the fishpaste connection is of potentially vast strategic importance. Whit is pessimistic, but he knows a great deal about Mr. Fishpaste and his family and can't remember why, and this troubles him. He has them brought in, and sends a team of covert military operatives and civilian wizards and scientists from Pig Ports to secure their house and investigate their internet connection. This operation is codenamed Pipewheel. Meeting the Fishpastes proves unilluminating, and since it seems impossible to disuade them from the notion that they've been summoned to the castle to collect some sort of prize, he awards them a "free luxury staycation" and confines them to their suite to prevent information leaks. The Nemians are winning, and although it quickly becomes clear that the world on the other end of the fishpaste connection is technologically backward and can offer no military aid, Whit holds out hope that the link can be widened enough to allow for a planetary evacuation. Project Pipewheel discovers that in the alternate universe, Nemi is merely a character in an obscure crudely-edited comic strip. Soon after, they discover Bob the Angry Flower exists as a comic strip character as well. Then they find Poorly Thought Out Comics, and gradually the truth sinks in that it's not merely about their world, it IS their world. Evacuation is thus impossible. Whit tries contacting the cartoonist, via email, instant message, skype, and finally simply shouting at the heavens. She does not respond. The comic rarely provides actionable intelligence, because from the perspective of the final timeline, it's set 50 years in the past, and the events it concerns are now irrelevent. However, Whit finds that merely knowing the world is fictional illuminates many situations. A set of highly classified Operation Pipewheel documents (later known widely as the Pipewheel Dossier) is circulated to select staff, and the tide of the war begins to turn. As the real strip continues to update, significant differences emerge between their world and the world depicted in the comic. Eventually, as Ray starts to visit timelines in the same situation as their own, they realize why. Project Pipewheel creates a two-stage plan to catch Ray. Stage 1 is to superficially remodel their world to look like Ray's (somewhat inaccurate) memory of his own, so that when he arrives, he will stay, thinking he has fixed the timeline. Stage 2 is for the Viceroy to order the execution of a member of Ray's family, or rather, of a member of their alternate version of Ray's family. Pipewheel is confident that the relative's name will be on Ray's list, and that he will come for their soul, because, they reason, it would be narratively uninteresting if he did not. When he shows up, he will be captured in a quintuply-redundant matrix of force fields, pentagrams, null-time projectors, icy manipulators, and bear traps. It is necessary, they say, that Ray's relative be executed even if Ray is captured before the time the execution is scheduled, because based on past strips, although Ray's list does not always contain people's names in the order they actually die, the people on the list do always die at around that time. So, they reason, he can't be summoned by a mock-execution, and since it would be a paradox to have an execution that would only have been carried out if he didn't appear, attempting to make the execution conditional on his actions may put the world in jeopardy. Whit approves Stage 1 of the plan. He asks Pipewheel for an alternative to Stage 2. They can't come up with anything viable. He tells them to keep thinking, but when the comic starts showing their timeline, he orders the location and detention of all Ray's descendants just to be safe. The final timeline version of Ray was different in many ways, but one thing he had in common was a habit of accidentally killing everyone he knew. His only surviving relatives are Red the clone-hunter; Twizzler, Faith, and Charity. Red and her squad are light-years away, but as Project Pipewheel is headquartered in Mr. Fishpaste's house, the other three are literally next door. They are taken to the castle and detained in a suite of rooms. They're also told they've won a "free luxury staycation", because Whit's not very creative. The comic shows Ray appearing in their timeline, and Pipewheel asks Whit which one of the three detainees to execute. He tells them to pick randomly, and this leads to the eeny-meany-miney-mo sequence that in the red strip takes place in the mysterious hallway. This is interrupted by Ray walking in from off-panel with his list, saying "Charity Zinn... Hey, we have the same last name!" and killing Faith, before being set-upon by the various wards and stasis beams and bear traps. Whit convinces Project Pipewheel that it's not necessary to kill everyone else on Ray's list, and Twizzler and Charity are sent home, after having their memories rewound to before they were summoned to the castle. This memory gap, combined with the unexplained disappearance of her daughter, causes Twizzler to go insane, and she splits into Sizzler and Sizzler, who run off, leaving Charity alone. ---------- "Escape" From The Infinity Room ---------- The Blue King and the Artist give up on fixing the time rules, realizing that they can avoid dealing with the problem indefinitely through the use of a fairy simple kludge. They return to the strip proper, along with a pre-wall version of Alger, who the King summoned to help find a loophole in the rules (unsuccessfully). The King freezes TV-headed Amelia Bedelia in time. The King wants to do a Jack and the Beanstalk parody. The artist demands they do another Pig Ports story, because, exactly as he said would happen, virtually none of the crazy architecture he drew for Pig Ports got used. The king and artist get into a fight. The King and the Artist go visit Whit, who's in a secret summit meeting with the prime minister of the bees, trying to negotiate a ceasefire. The artist ends up doing the next story on his own while the king sulks. With Victoria having turned into Matthew, Temperence dead, Katerimiko not existing in this timeline, and Mr. Fishpaste's daughter in indefinite detention, the only established child character of any consequence is Charity, who's too young to be in high school. The artist retcons Pig Ports into the elementary school Guinea Pig Ports. He sends Charity the equivalent of an owl with an acceptance letter, and inserts himself into the story as lawrence the yard teacher (unlike the King, he doesn't shapeshift, he just has a fake mustache and a broom). ¯¯¯ Guinea Pig Ports ¯¯¯ Blue King: Oh look, she's late for the first day of school. Kawaii! Shouldn't she have a piece of toast in her mouth? Artist: If you're not going to help, go play video games or something. Artist: Hello there. I'm Lawrence the yard teacher. What seems to be the trouble? Charity: I can't find my classroom. Artist: Maybe I can help. Do you know your teacher's name? Charity: Mrs. Fralb. Artist: You're in luck. I happen to know that Mrs. Fralb's class is in sub-basement 911, at the very top of the school. Charity: I'm confused. Artist: Guinea Pig Ports was accidentally built upside-down, sideways, and inside-out. Artist: Also, the last 42 floors are tied in a knot. [pause] Artist: The builder said he was very sorry. Charity: [squinting] It seems like someone would've noticed at least one of those things before they got very far into the construction process— Artist: Bell's going to ring any minute! If you don't hurry, you'll be late! Charity: [squinting] It doesn't look safe. Artist: It's fine, trust me! Charity: How do you KNOW it's fine? Artist: I have a PHD in engineering! Charity: Why are you working as a yard teacher if you have an engineering degree? Artist: Bad job market. You better get to class before the bell rings! Charity quickly becomes friends with a girl named Ava Rice. Ava is actually the Blue King, who has snuck into the artist's storyline in order to wreck it. He subtly manipulates charity into investigating various things that don't make sense or haven't been drawn, forcing the artist to come up with increasingly eccentric means of railroading and increasingly haphazard excuses for the holes in his story. Mrs. Fralb: Ava. Ava: [eating x-stream blu] Mmphm. Here. Mrs. Fralb: Please keep your snacks in your desk until snacktime, Ava. Mrs. Fralb: Weren't you in my FOURTH grade class last year? Jinx: I accidentally turned myself into a first grader. Mrs. Fralb: I see. Mrs. Fralb: By the way, if those of you without eyes would like to sit closer to the board, there are empty seats up front. Mrs. Fralb: Asterisk. Equation: Here. And it's pronounced [CENSORED]. Mrs. Fralb: Inappropriate language will not be tolerated! I'm writing your name on the board. [long pause, Mrs. Fralb appears to be frozen] Equation: It's not an inappropriate word, it's just an inappropriate letter. Mrs. Fralb: I guess that's not as bad. Still, I can't call you something inappropriate. What's your last name? Equation: *sigh* Mrs. Fralb: Very well then. I'll call you *sigh* Mrs. Fralb: Let's start again. Mrs. Fralb: Ava. Mrs. Fralb: *sigh* Equation: Here. Marshmallow: [simultainiously] Here. Mrs. Fralb: Hmm. Do you have a MIDDLE name? Equation: I have four. Dopenparen[low]thes[high]is, *siiiigh* Equation: *siigh* Equation: and *siiiiigh* Mrs. Fralb: Any nicknames? Equation: Most people call me 'Commateliazarqaoghamspacemarksemicolon'. [pause] Mrs. Fralb: Commateliazark-...kchwaogh-... Equation: But some people call me 'Sinewaveleftparenthesisinternalfieldseparatorfooooooooouuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrr'. Mrs. Fralb: Say your full name again, please. Equation: [CENSORED] dopenparen[low]thes[high]is *siiiigh* Equation: *siigh* Equation: *siiiiigh* Equation: *sigh* Equation: *siiigh* Equation: *siiiiiigh* [pause] Mrs. Fralb: Where did those extra sighs come from? Equation: One is a title, like "esquire". The last one was just me sighing. Hickory etc: I'm five students. Blue King: [V/O] MUCH LATER Mrs. Fralb: —which means one of you should be here, but isn't. Are there any of you who shouldn't be here but are? ???: Me! Artist: Hey! Knock it off! Blue King: [V/O] What? I'm helping. Artist: Help somewhere else. Blue King: [V/O] Fine. Don't come crying to me when you paint yourself into a corner. Mrs. Fralb: Who are you? I don't remember calling your name. Iceland: Lýðveldið Ísland! Eventually Charity and Ava escape from the school, and then from the strip proper, into the strange void of the main strip, which has nothing in it except the strip proper, a few smaller subcomics, the king's house, and some unused props and settings the artist has drawn. Eventually charity finds the artist in the garden, watering plants, still as lawrence the yard teacher, and he reveals his true nature and apologizes to charity for letting her story go off the rails, and tells her more or less the whole truth. Artist: Ordinarily you wouldn't even be able to CONCEIVE of a space beyond the wall. You had help from a member of the administrative cast. Charity: The administrative caste? Artist: In fact, the culprit is someone in this very garden. Artist: J'accuse! [sprays Ava with the hose] Ava: Blah! [the green paint washes off, revealing ava is blue except her dress and hairclip] Artist: Changing the color of your voice with X-Stream Blu was clever, I have to admit. Blue King: Thanks. I had the idea at the paint store. Artist: I assume the real Ava Rice is tied up in a closet somewhere? Blue King: No, I just told her to skip school. And stole her clothes. ___ Guinea Pig Ports ___ [ Charity dreams about being abducted by Mazz. The dream terrifies her so much that she she splits into hundreds of characters in order to destroy the memory of it. These events are not shown in the comic, and only established later, during the recursion. ] ----- Jack and the beanstalk / Tower of babel arc begins ----- The king institutes a no-resurrection policy, to prevent the creation of any more of whatever Matthew and The Dunce are, and narrates the new improved time travel rules alger's written up, including a major fix to the speed of light rules. He creates cosmo as part of these new rules. > Cosmo ¯¯¯ M.A.C.H.I.N.I.S.T.! ¯¯¯ ___ M.A.C.H.I.N.I.S.T.! ___ ----- Crossover with Sandwich Time begins ----- ----- Library of babel ----- race vs. intelligence argument ===== Strip 1299: Recursion Begins =============================================================== red strip (--- cursory skimming of the red strip ---) maximum yuks copying to the the improv group, the blue strip feels "more real", because of the fifth wall Blue King gets copied into the red strip as Squiggles eyeball seizes power talking to eyeball red pauses blue red unpauses blue talking to eyeball again green strip (alger) - green strip (whit) - framing device simply fades out, leaving a collection of unrelated one-shot strips green strip proper red strip is introduced in green strip, much to the king's dismay. he fires the creature in charge of warning him about recursion, for taking what he said too literally talking to blue guy about green strip recursion pausing red strip Artist: The problem is, even in a world where time travel is impossible, it's not inconcievable. You can still write stories about it, and that's all this is, a story. Blue King: I could MAKE time travel inconcievable... Artist: We'd break symmetry with the other two strips, wouldn't we? Definitely the red strip... Blue King: Wait, if it's just stories, does that mean time travel ISN'T a paradox? Writing about time travel is just like saying "this sentence is false", right? Artist: It's not the paradoxes that are the issue, it's th— Blue King: How can PARADOXES not be an ISSUE? Artist: Paradoxes happen all the time! Blue King: Like what! Artist: Like every time you narrate a change to your own narration powers! It's awfully ironic you're getting pissy about this, considering you're basically a Mr. Men character named Mr. Paradox. (--- reading green and red strips ---) recursive simulation of the yellow strip (--- reading green and red strips ---) fast-forwarding green to the point red is paused at, conference-calling red to green, unpausing red holoconference well-thought-out comics Blue King: Are you CRAZY?! Artist: No, think about it! If Matthew and The Dunce travel backwards through time, all we have to do is copy them INTO our strip, and we'll never have to see them again! Blue King: Do you think we did all this correctly? I kind of feel like we missed a double negative somewhere and broke symmetry. Artist: Who cares? It's not like it's remotely plausible their strip is the real one. Blue King: Famous last words. (--- reading green and red strips ---) call from the noble hierarchy, red pauses blue again king finds out about charity's dream, wants to do a recursion with it Artist: It's not even a comic, it's a fucking dream! Blue King: Everything is a comic! It's comics all the way down! king gets artist (as lawrence) to convince charity to go back to mazz, then fixes strip focus on her bed and sets tempo to "no skip", disguises himself as charity and seamlessly switches places with her, splits into himself and mazz upon waking Artist: What's wrong with you? You're listing like you're on a damn boat. Blue King: On awakening, mazz and I were the same person for a moment. Her mind is literally infinite. Blue King: [digging his finger into his ear] I'm still sort of getting echoes of... thoughts... that aren't mine. Up from the dark tunnels of eternity. Artist: Want some Tylenol? Blue King: [distantly] Crow egg. Artist: Don't tell me to shut up. Artist: So, is the number of these clusters finite or infinite? Mazz: Finite. But larger than any finite number which could be described precisely in a book. Artist: Larger than could be DESCRIBED? Do you mean "larger than could be written", maybe? Mazz: Larger than could be precisely described with words. Artist: Would— hold on. [the artist draws a math dictionary, and leafs through it] Artist: Would you consider "[definition of the busy beaver function for a turing machine with two states]" to be a precise description? Mazz: What is a turing machine? Artist: "[definition of a turing machine]" Mazz: Then yes. Albeit a roundabout way of saying "six". Artist: Did you work that out in your head just now? Mazz: There's no work involved, merely figuring. [they continue walking] Artist: What if the machine had four states instead of two? What would the number be? Mazz: A hundred and seven. Artist: Five states? Mazz: Forty-seven million, one hundred seventy-six thousand, eight hundred and seventy. Artist: Seven states? Mazz: That number is too long for your ears. Your world would turn to dust before I had recited its first three names. --- Mazz: —the memory of the Blue King's mind... Mazz: It's like a piece of grit which is so small that there is no way to sense it save unintentionally to bite down upon it. Artist: Want some Tylenol? Mazz: [distantly] Be silent. Artist: Hey, we did a bullshit dream-recursion-loop thing with the "world" of this evil eternal fairy-queen, and I'm trying to prove to the king that her mind isn't infinite. It's being surprisingly difficult, despite how patient she is. Blue Guy: Whether or not something is infinite is unverifiable by a finite process. Artist: Right, I'm remembering now that you're one of those pedantic smart characters who's only helpful if you ask exactly the right question. Blue Guy: Technically, you didn't ask a question. [artist switches to the yellow strip, via whatever crossover method they've established] Artist: Hey, we did a bullshit dream-recursion-loop thing with this evil eternal fairy-queen, and I'm— The Recognizer: Mazz is here? The Operator: Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. The Recognizer: [disappearing] We have to leave now. Goodbye. [the last of the operator and recognizer disappear] [a sign appears saying END OF STRIP] Artist: Ffff. ============= UNSORTED EVENTS ============