Author: oddnoc

The War of the Time Pools

No one would have believed in the early years of the twenty-first century that Westview was being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than Les’s and yet as mortal as his own; that as pizza mongers busied themselves about their various concerns they were scrutinised and studied, perhaps almost as narrowly as a man with a microscope might scrutinise the transient creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water.

Yet across the gulf of the internet, minds that are to Les’s mind as his is to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded today’s strip with beady eyes, and slowly and surely picked at nits.

Here ends my snark stint,
So off will I slink.
Coming up next:
Billy the Skink!

In which it turns out to be about Les

Oh, the plot turned out to be about how it affects Les? Huh.

The artwork today isn’t bad, and the facial expressions have been mercifully smirkless of late. We see Young Les as he discovers Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe on the in memoriam table. He thumbs through the volume, a look of wonder and bemusement on his teenage features. And then—

Hey, wait a minute! Les never wrote this book; he read it. It is no heartbreaking work of staggering genius. No! It’s a temporal loop, a quantum fluctuation that has existed since the Big Bang itself, a flaw in the matrix, an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato. Or something.

Still, it doesn’t explain how this innocent boy became an insufferable pedant. It’ll take more than quantum time paradoxes to explain that.