#229-231 - Conclusion

[Alikat]

They did NOT all live happily ever after, because they all had alternates who died horribly with the screaming and the mangling and the torn flesh and the HELLO NICE LADY, IN THE DRESS!

[strange_person]

I made you the thought-form of a cake.

Single. Best. Ending. Line. Ever. Please can a thought-form cake be an emoticon?

Yes Please!

I briefly considered cropping an image of the titular cat from Cheshire Crossing (the fourth one's up, by the way) and reforging it into a "Can I Haz Thought-Form?" memetic image.

[Mitsukara]

I don't understand this ending.

My interpretation of it was this:

After learning what they had in the previous pages, Heliotrope was rushing off to fulfill her "final destiny" to fix Kltikitkactl at the cost of herself. Fuschia was having none of that, so she (not realizing that it wasn't neccesary) deleted most of her memories (leaving her with only the bare bones of herself) to make room for Heliotrope so she could transfer the personality rather than leaving her to die as the omnipitor did it's stuff.

The result of this was trippy and didn't work so well, leaving both of them halfway in control of the body falling, but they both survived, and upon thinking things through and talking to each other realized that all the damage could be fixed. The body would survive such a fall and be fixed, and since they can pretty much go wherever they want and do whatever they want, retrieving Fuschia's memories would be trivial.

And then, it dawns on them, retrieving a whole lot more would be trivial, too; with time travel and the capabilities they have, they can pretty much save anyone, anywhere, from dying by transfering them into new bodies, which is trivial work for the epic Minyan civilization and their empty cosmos 'o raw materials.

So that's exactly what they do. They don't just save their family- Aoi and Hannya- but apparently everyone, in Pastel, and as I'm trying to figure out, possibly other cosmos. It takes a lot of effort and a lot of time, but that's meaningless when (A) you have time travel, and (B) you have an epic civilization at your command that can do all the grunt work of such an epic project themselves if you tell them to (and we're to think Fuschia did; it's only fair, and productive, and those guys are nothing if not productive).

All these people, resurrected- or rather, mentally/emotionally/personally salvaged moments before their death- much in the same way Fuschia herself was- adjust to their new environment at their own pace. They're probably confused as hell, but assuming they aren't given uber-powers up front, nothing really bad comes of it, and they learn to adjust to a completely new sort of existence- a literal, tangible sort of heaven, no dying required. They're probably assisted in the explaination and the comforting as needed by our heroes, who in turn probably build up kind of a group of helpers who get the idea, and so on. Special personal efforts are made, too, and we're led to imagine- admittedly more by the forum posts than what the comic showed, but it does make sense once one thinks of it- that Heliotrope would go to special efforts to help Chartreuse be happy and have the kind of life she always wanted and never had a chance at. I also rather imagine that in cases like that, say, she was copied before the purity beam thing. That must've been an interesting scene; I imagine it kinda like this:

Chartreuse: "I'MMA GET YOU WITH FIREBA- WHAT THE FARG...?!?!"
Heliotrope: *grin*

Anyhow, time goes on and on, immortality and invulnerability become household terms, and a truly epic civilization of revived humanojellese and minyan now occupy trysylmaistan and the rosy Ktlikitkactl. So do the Kltikitkat I would imagine. It's all pretty rosy. Everyone does their own thing, suffering and need are no more, and it's everything you could want out of an afterlife without ever having legitimately completely died. Our gang has shenanigans of their choice; Meiun explores the cosmos freely (wonder if he ever checked back in on Torocyclundis?), K'chk enjoys his rosey and lively home and not being hungry in the least, Aoi tries to learn and explore things- and perhaps acquires a taste for games?- Heliotrope and Fuschia are happy whatever they're doing, as long as they're together, which they are... Hannya and Aoi obviously spend their days together... and I imagine Chartreuse spends her time between enjoying a posh-beyond-comprehension existence, and studying science. But who knows? They probably do all kinds of stuff. Whatever they feel like.

Time flies when you're having fun, but who cares if you've got no limit of the stuff? Easy to lose perspective of the thing, though, and not know how long it's been since ____. Especially when every single person has been transplanted between cosmos, where time isn't necessarily relative and continuous, and quadruply so if you're so steeped in time travel and whatnot that you just lose track.

It's also possible that various people started learning how to ascend- highly probable considering the non-material shape the Heliotrope gang has become. On request, they put on the old (probably very old, but freaky and way new to us- though, I say Aoi's pretty cute that way ) material body.. avatar... type things, with the faces and the floaty hands and the idea-hair and Aoi's glasses and pinnochio nose.

And, well, you see the rest.

If Heliotrope were an anime, you could make an AMV with Belinda Carlisle's "Heaven is a Place on Earth", but that would stop making sense at the Earth part prob'ly.

Now, realizing the reprecussions of that, a very easy question to come to mind: "Why did any of this matter?"
Two big reasons. (A), if it hadn't all worked out right, this wouldn't have happened
and (B), the journey-mattering-just-as-much-as-the-destination thing.

The same goes for TSH. Especially since we just know that somehow, something they do ties into Cursor's existence; Cursor looks like Kaywai, not just any old bowless Kay, and part of Kaye's head was sitting around the room for ages. Some shit goes down there, definitely. But what? I have no clue. And the journey of TSH is what it's all about anyhow.

That's how I see it, and I like it. It's far out, but not only a happy ending, but a 100% completely perfect ending. Best possible outcome. All the clues and tools that something like this could happen were there, but it takes the right perspective and optimism to even guess at it, which no one really seemed to do.

The details, though, are very fuzzy, and the explanation so brief that it leaves some patching together to figure it all out. I got the basic gist on first read, which was the important part and the emotional response therein, but the details of how that functions are really hard to sort out afterwards What about splays? What about other cosmos than pastel? There's lots of puzzling bits to it. But a complete scientific dissection wouldn't have made a good emotional story moment: I think when you first read it, you're just meant to realize generally what has happened, and say holy shit, wow!, and smile at seeing- a different, yet distinctly them-looking- Aoi and Hannya again, having a nice sweet little birthday party with Fuschia and Heliotrope.

I felt it was awesome, but I can also see how it's easy for it to make no friggin' sense when you first try to take it in, too.

Like I said before: weird, yet awesome.

Unicorn Jelly's ending was meant to leave you asking questions, wondering what-ifs, seeing the story and taking the story your own way. Just as UJ always was.

To be taken either as it's own thing with an assumed history of UJ, or as a continuation, Pastel Defender Heliotrope's ending gives us a possible answer. A fantastic one. An incredible, far-out idea. Heliotrope was always about experimenting with far-out ideas- it was an idea story. Always was.

What will To Save Her give us?...

It's a character story, all about the characters growing and who they are, fleshing out sides of alternates of people we only got to see a few sides of in UJ, the neglected mains, like Kaywai and Pho and Texto. The ending, I would suppose, will be very thick with character. How so, I haven't the foggiest.

[Tangent]

Hmm. I dunno, Jennifer. The ending feels jumbled. I'll have to let it sit a few days and return to it and see if it makes more sense... probably reread the entire last chapter.

Good luck on the next project. Take care =^-^=

[Tychomonger]

I find it strange that CURSchia would so willingly shed her physical form after having fought so hard for a body. Out of all of them, I would expect her to have the most physically oriented avatar, but she is just hair, face, and hands. I wonder at what point she decided to abandon the fruit of her life's goal?

[Jennifer Diane Reitz]

I don't understand this ending. There was no definite end to the story, it just jumped a long, long way and then stopped. I had to read it like four times before I understood it at all. I think there was way too much left open and unexplained between 229 and 230. The ending of Unicorn Jelly was purposely vague and that worked well for it, but it was certainly final, and even that had an epilogue. The happy end of PDH apparently takes place 100,000 years later and is more of a snapshot of another part of the character's lives already in progress... it doesn't seem final. And what the hell did they turn into.

The page before that where Heliotrope/Fuschia is falling and looking kind of mental is more of a sad ending. I wish there had been a couple of simple explanatory pages between that page and the one after it. Some narration or something, rather than leaving 100,000 years and a lot of closure for the characters up to the reader's imagination.

Read this, and learn my childhood inspiration for the ending of Pastel Defender Heliotrope:

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

In this classic short Issac Azimov story, you can find a lot of where I'm coming from.

[draque]

In this classic short Issac Azimov story, you can find a lot of where I'm coming from.

Ok, this is going to sound very weird... but is the guy who is hosting that file Dave in the IT department at Case Western? If so, I worked with that guy and the world is disturbingly small. I just can't remember his last name or I would be able to check from the username (Case is where I went to school).

[Wizard CaT]

What else did I want to say -- oh, WizardCat, if the revived Ktlik want to make trouble, they'll have to consider the risk of fighting between 3 and indefinitely many super-powerful foes.

But the entire Multi-verse was only BARELY able to stop them the first time, and now they have that super power source. I dunno, it doesn't seem like the Ascended Tryst have super powers, even the McBurgers had trouble.

[Dan]

What else did I want to say -- oh, WizardCat, if the revived Ktlik want to make trouble, they'll have to consider the risk of fighting between 3 and indefinitely many super-powerful foes.

But the entire Multi-verse was only BARELY able to stop them the first time, and now they have that super power source. I dunno, it doesn't seem like the Ascended Tryst have super powers, even the McBurgers had trouble.

Er, "have"? According to Heliotrope, the Omnipitor's final form prunes down the cosmos as well as suckling it. The Ktlikitkak don't actually have root access to the device. I don't follow the rest. Tossing endless sentient uber-novas around and sailing the multiverse in your own personal cosmos seem like pretty impressive super powers to me.

[Wizard CaT]

What else did I want to say -- oh, WizardCat, if the revived Ktlik want to make trouble, they'll have to consider the risk of fighting between 3 and indefinitely many super-powerful foes.

But the entire Multi-verse was only BARELY able to stop them the first time, and now they have that super power source. I dunno, it doesn't seem like the Ascended Tryst have super powers, even the McBurgers had trouble.

Er, "have"? According to Heliotrope, the Omnipitor's final form prunes down the cosmos as well as suckling it. The Ktlikitkak don't actually have root access to the device. I don't follow the rest. Tossing endless sentient uber-novas around and sailing the multiverse in your own personal cosmos seem like pretty impressive super powers to me.

The way I took that was the United Multiverse Alliance figured most Omni protrusions would end up killing Kit, thus pruning it, while some might get the second goal of suckling it into place. As for not following the rest, everyone else other then the Kit seemed to fear Kit to the point where they had to come up with these super weapons in the first place. I just don't see why the Kit will now be fun and happy because they have a endless food source.

Food was one reason they went out to conquer. Ideology was the second. Did they suddenly thing hosting fab tea parties is the best way to show their superiority?

[Mitsukara]

Who says there was a lot of ideology to it? I thought it was just about the hunger.

Take away the hunger and make them feel dumb (and keep them under reins), yet not worthless or repressed or anything so as to rebel, and theoretically both those problems go away. If they're treated with enough respect and handled with enough care and wisdom. Or so I'd think.

[Tychomonger]

Read this, and learn my childhood inspiration for the ending of Pastel Defender Heliotrope:

http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm

In this classic short Issac Azimov story, you can find a lot of where I'm coming from.

That story is and always will be my favorite scifi story. It literally brings tears to my eyes. Glimpses of far flung times, threaded throughout with the single Great Question. It reads like a legend, told in a circle of firelight.

This is why I want to see the singularity occur. It can outlast even Man, live on as our child, continuing the great work of seeing and understanding it all.

[Alikat]

Er, "have"? According to Heliotrope, the Omnipitor's final form prunes down the cosmos as well as suckling it. The Ktlikitkak don't actually have root access to the device. I don't follow the rest. Tossing endless sentient uber-novas around and sailing the multiverse in your own personal cosmos seem like pretty impressive super powers to me.

Not exactly. There were many splays to Pastel, and therefore many Omnipitors. There was a one-in-exactly-that-many chance that each Omnipitor could CHOOSE not to perform the "pruning" function, which meant a full-powered Omnipitor Activation destroying an entire splay of Ktlikitkak. The Omnipitor Activation is a wholesale release of Pastelian End-of-the-Universe energy, which effectively pours all of that destructive energy from the end of that splay of Pastel into the target Universe's splay, completely obliterating it. Almost ALL of the Omnipitors chose to destroy Ktlikitkak, only one chose to let Ktlikitkak live by allowing its artificial body to be destroyed. Unfortunately, instead of laying there and feeding K'Chk's splay, this Omnipitor was damaged by the attack that destroyed its host body. By bringing it to Pastel and playing around with it, Dr. Aoi managed to get the damaged Omnipitor to reprogram itself after a fashion, and the more that this new program got limping along, the better the damaged Omnipitor was able to function.

So there was an army of Omnipitors, one for each splay of Pastel, each encased in a square body with four pointy limbs, so many of them that they overwhelmed Ktlikitkak, with perhaps millions of them targeting each splay of Ktlikitkak. Most of them were destroyed by Ktlikitkakl Battle Drones, but enough survived to prune Ktlikitkak down to a single surviving splay, the one in which Heliotrope's damaged Omnipitor lay amongst her many thousands upon thousands of totally-destroyed sister Omnipitors, probably leaking just enough enti-entropic energy to keep K'Chk from starving completely before Meiun and Aoi showed up with breakfast. Aoi brought the Omnipitor home and put it into suitable bodies and left it in front of a vidscreen and it did what it was designed to do if its program was damaged and it reprogrammed itself based upon available data.

[Iustinus]

I briefly considered cropping an image of the titular cat from Cheshire Crossing (the fourth one's up, by the way) and reforging it into a "Can I Haz Thought-Form?" memetic image.

Just reading that comic. It's interesting. But... freaky coincidence, because all this morning I was dreaming about the Knave of Hearts' trail from Through the Looking Glass (or more precisely from my fourth grade play). Not something I often think about, let alone dream about. Hell, not something I EVER think about, let alone dream about, so to stumble on that character today has me humming the Twilight Zone theme.

[Dan]

On pruning: I suspect this is not to scale. But it doesn't seem to show any change in Ktlikitkaktl's speed of growth after Fuschia and Heliotrope's location despite the presumed increase in energy. Nor does it show any more Mouth connections to other cosmoi. Looks like the Omnipitor ring took the place of the "fishing" while either the ring or some person stopped the existing energy drain (still going when Heliotrope flew to the ring).

You'll have to ask Jennifer about Ktlik ideology.

[Wizard CaT]

On pruning: I suspect this is not to scale. But it doesn't seem to show any change in Ktlikitkaktl's speed of growth after Fuschia and Heliotrope's location despite the presumed increase in energy. Nor does it show any more Mouth connections to other cosmoi. Looks like the Omnipitor ring took the place of the "fishing" while either the ring or some person stopped the existing energy drain (still going when Heliotrope flew to the ring).

You'll have to ask Jennifer about Ktlik ideology.

Well yes, it looks like they played nice, and the map supports Jennifer saying they play nice.

But like that page says, they had a religious believe that they should become gods, since there was a lack of god. Why did that change suddenly? I don't really get it. Ah well.

[Monocheres]

But like that page says, they had a religious believe that they should become gods, since there was a lack of god. Why did that change suddenly? I don't really get it.

Um, being taken down a peg? Getting humbled? In fact, having the crap kicked out of you so bad that only one of you survives -- and that only because the crap-kicker decided to let that one live? Boy, if that happened to me, I think that would cure me of any delusions of godhood right quick!

[Wizard CaT]

But like that page says, they had a religious believe that they should become gods, since there was a lack of god. Why did that change suddenly? I don't really get it.

Um, being taken down a peg? Getting humbled? In fact, having the crap kicked out of you so bad that only one of you survives -- and that only because the crap-kicker decided to let that one live? Boy, if that happened to me, I think that would cure me of any delusions of godhood right quick!

Maybe. It doesn't seem to take to humans that often as you'd think.

[draque]

One question that has still not been answered is why the ascended unity helped in the fashion that they did. Clearly they're looking at this from outside a perspective of time as we experience it, so they wouldn't have to worry about a long shot chance and crossing their fingers. They chose to help in a way that allowed for the continued existence of humanity (and Jen has told us that humans are less than entirely popular in the multiverse) and more oddly, the continued existence of Ktlikitkaktl. Unless there was a reason for that, the ascended unity would clearly not have allowed it. The ascended unity simply doesn't strike me as particularly sympathetic to needs other than its own... which given the context of a set of beings infinitely more advanced than ourselves makes pretty good sense to me. But why did they do it? I'm getting the feeling that it's a big reveal that Jen is going to save for another day, which I both love and hate, as I love slow reveals, but waiting so long to find out will be torture. ^^()

[ThingOfThing]

One question that has still not been answered is why the ascended unity helped in the fashion that they did.

Hannya badgered them into it. That's gotta be it.