And Today, You (novel)

And Today, You was a novella written by James Wylder and published on 17 October 2023 on the the occasion of Arcbeatle Press's 10th anniversary. It acted as a crossover between the main three print franchises whose licenses were held by Arcbeatle by that point: Cwej: The Series, 10,000 Dawns and WARSONG.

In addition to elements associated with Cwej: The Series, it featured several characters and species from other Doctor Who media. Most notably, the plot hinged on the return of Sixth Doctor companion Grant Markham (elaborating on the events of his last appearance in the short story Repercussions...) and on an attempted metafictional reboot of Professor X. Other individually-licensed DWU elements included in the narrative to greater and lesser degrees were Coloth, the Quoth, the Selachians, the Caradans, the Yssgaroth, and finally Faction Paradox's Auteur, Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn and Dionus.

In addition to this, it featured elements from The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids and several non-10,000 Dawns novels by James Wylder.

Publisher's summary
In Space, No One Can Hear You Dream…

Sang Mi is having strange dreams of a man who has been forcefully forgotten. When two strangers named Chris Cwej and Lady Aesculapius come snooping around the same mystery, the trio find themselves caught up in an adventure none of them saw coming. Their deepest fears will be pulled to the surface, and a dangerous new foe called the Letharchy will test all of them to their limits.

Bringing together characters from Cwej: The Series, 10,000 Dawns, and Decipher's WARSONG, "And Today, You" celebrates Arcbeatle Press' 10th Anniversary with a journey you won't soon forget!

Summary
to be written

Prologue: The Patient
In a sterile mental-ward-like environment, a girl referred to only as the Patient listens in from her bed to a conversation between her grief-stricken mother and an authority figure; it seems that she had a traumatic response to seeing a bit of blood in a movie, suggesting that she is as yet very far from mental recovery. Though anxious at these news that she will remain confined here for some time yet, she finds distraction in the sight of a bronze statue of a deer outside her window, which reminds her of a quote from an old short story, and makes up her mind to open one of the books on her shelf; she finds that "the pages are filled with dreams".

Chapter 1: Beautiful Dire Dreams
On the planet Gongen (a colonised Mars) in the future of a parallel world, against a backdrop of rising tension between the local government and old Earth, Academy 27 student Jhe Sang Mi, otherwise known as Kalingka or Kalingkata, gets up on an ordinary morning. Before she leaves off to school, she mentions to her mother that she and her twin brother Eun intend to hang out with some friends after school. The older woman is initially suspicious, but lets the matter rest when Mi denies her suspicion that "friends" here means her daughter's unsavoury acquaintance Saki Suzuki. She warns Mi that the parents of Academy 27 students have been notified that the Self-Defense Force will hold a militaristic propaganda meeting for the students partway through class, and that attendance is not strictly mandatory; though hardly enlivened by the news, Mi declines the chance to stay home, as she wants to meet up with her friends regardless.

As the students file into the gymnasium to hear the presentation, she finds a few of her friends, but also Saki, who abruptly grabs her arm and drags her into the bathroom for a more private talk. There, as it becomes clear that the two have indeed been meeting up frequently to partake of illicit substances Saki has been "testing", Saki informs Kalingka that she intends to hold another trial tonight, ahead of schedule — handing an anonymous hotel keyfob and room number to Kalingka. They are interrupted by a teacher before Kalingka can get a clear answer from Saki about why she moved the trial ahead. At the assembly, Mr Mori introduces the guest speaker, Kano Tamja, accompanied by his daughter Kano Masako. Tamja soon begins to ramble about his high deeds as the girls discuss their certainty that they'll soon begin actually drafting the students for war, except for those like Saki who have contingency plans to leverage their money and connections to avoid conscription. Indeed, after Kano Tamja's speech is finished, both Kanos move on to officially observing Kendo matches between the most gifted students, then having brief bouts with some of them.

Things go off-script when Kano demands to spar against one of the "worst" students after having seen the "best"; because she arrived late, he selects Sang Mi. Recognising her as a Jhe, he hurls abuse at her and she goads him into an earnest fight in turn, with the swordfight that ensues being a genuinely brutal duel rather than a staged, rules-abiding bout of Kendo. Though she initially fares poorly in the duel, bruising several ribs, her willpower is restored by her brother's cheering from the crowd, and she ends up turning the tables back on Kano by using his own strength to break his ostentatious katana in half, winning the duel. After quickly exiting the arena (with Mori reprimanding Kano for his recklessness) and seeing a nurse who applies medpacks to her wounds, ensuring she will heal overnight, she is warmly congratulated by her brother as Jae Hyun and Cao Li Xiu. However, she leaves them to go make her date with Saki.

Chapter 2: Yesterday, I Saw a Deer
Sang Mi and Saki have met up at the hotel room. Before they consume the mysterious experimental drug procured by Saki which she and Sang Mi have been testing out, Sang Mi unpromptedly asks Saki a surprisingly deep and personal question: "Did you ever think about being replaced?". Saki is unfazed, answering that she obviously has. They swallow the peculiar Delirium Pills acquired by Saki, and as what Saki describes as "the Time-Space phenomenon" takes hold, drift off to a trance-like sleep where they experience strange dreams.

As usual, Sang Mi's dream becomes in a familiar memory: she sees herself, in mourning clothes, at her grandmother's funeral. It doesn't last long, however, before the world blurs around her and she finds herself transported to a place she's never seen before, a kitchen-like chrome room full of high-tech appliances where some kind of plasma-gunfight is in progress. She bumps into a strange, muscular blond man who's baffled at her sudden appearance but wants to help her. Introducing himself as Chris Cwej, he flippantly explains the situation as "you know how it is, the Selachians catch you in the wrong place on Hytheriax VII, things just go funny". Chris's day gets stranger still when Lady Aesculapius suddenly appears, flanked by a white-haired woman. After playfully scolding Chris for having missed her funeral, and introducing her companion as her girlfriend Blanche Combine, Aesc agrees to parlay with the attacking Selachians and soon clears up the misunderstanding.

However, by the time the shooting stops, Chris is surprised to find that Sang Mi has vanished. Indeed, Sang Mi has been transported to yet another location — an ominously empty spaceship with unfamiliar technology, where she meets an equally ominous, unfamiliar man who describes the place as a "dead end". Finally, she awakes back in the hotel room on 24th century Gongen, where she crankily informs Saki that she didn't have any good dreams.

Three days later, the Jhe twins are surprised to get an alert one morning that all the buses to school have been cancelled and the start of the academic day has been delayed by two hours. In the Academy 27 group chat, Li Xiu expresses her intention to take advantage of the delay to go check out a new café which has recently opened, allegedly run by a woman with "no past" who "talks like an alien". Impishly intrigued, Kalingkata decides to come along. On their way, the Jhe twins hail a cab, which turns out to be driven by an undercover Chris, although Sang Mi doesn't immediately recognise him. He explains that the government decided to send out manually-driven taxis rather than rely on the autocar network, for fear that the mysterious abnormal electric storm outside the Dome which caused the bus network to go down might also come to affect the autocar network.

As they reach the city of Takumi, Sang Mi and Sang Eun get a phone alert informing them that school has been cancelled altogether. They ask Cwej to pull over so they can figure out where they want to go instead. This gives Chris some time to reflect on his situation — having been sent by the Superiors on a mission "far outside his jurisdiction", to this Mars in a parallel universe with a very different history than he's familiar with, for no obvious reason. He has not come to any particular conclusion by the time the twins settle on asking him to drive them to the mysterious new café, Virgina's Cosmic Bakes. There, going in to order a coffee himself, Cwej instantly recognises the mysterious barista as Lady Aesc, also undercover and investigating the mysterious time-space phenomenon. Knowing a little bit more about it than Chris, she explains that mysterious signals have been affecting people's dreams, although this is only a side-effect and not the main event. While the kids catch up, they agree to pool resources for their investigation, and head to the Takumi Broadcasting Centre, where the signal seems to be strongest, leaving Virginia and Jason Jackson in charge of the shop in their absence.

They belatedly realise that Sang Mi overheard them talking, and the girl insists on coming along on the adventure lest she blow their covers. They agree (reluctantly in Chris's case), only for Sang Mi to make it clear, as they leave, that she has apparenty not grasped the full multiversal truth, and instead believes that Aesc and Cwej are undercover documentary filmmakers. The two travellers, however, still suspect that she knows more than she's letting on (though Chris has yet to recognise her from their earlier encounter on Hytheriax).

Chapter 3: Blinking in the Eye of the Storm
At the Broadcasting Centre, Chris Cwej, Lady Aesculapius, Blanche Combine and Jhe Sang Mi use faked credentials (which depict them as envoys of Shocho itself, the AI running Gongen) to gain entry into a conference room where several important people are already discussing the crisis, including the city's leader Director Jojoan, Deuputy Director Naita, Kano Masako, and Cao Li Xiu's mother, who holds no official government job but is the leader of a local religious sect and thus commands a lot of influence. With access to the prime signal, they are able to decode it; it reveals itself to be a distress signal reading:

Aesc is unfamiliar with him, but Chris seems to recognise the name, noting that he never thought he'd hear it again. Confirming that Cwej and Aesc are not filmmakers, Sang Mi tells them she has an idea of how to learn more, and contacts Saki to get her to bring more Delirium Pills. When she gets there, Blanche and Aesc, thanks to Blanche's emergency Internet research, are able to recognise them as "a drug developed by the Earther Corporation XeLabs", originally intended as a sleeping aid. Sang Mi takes a dose, and just as she's drifting off to sleep, Cwej and Aesc, discussing coincidences, simultaneously come to the realisation that Sang Mi is the girl they met on Hytheriax VII.

Thanks to intense mental focus on Grant Markaham, Sang Mi is able to directly find herself back at the strange space station, which Grant calls Point of Know Return, describing it as "a place where people are sent to be forgotten. Sometimes out of malice. Sometimes out of pity. Sometimes because it’s easier". He confesses that he doesn't remember how or why he came to be at the Point, but suspects he may have exiled himself there voluntarily in the hope that it would help soothe the pain of his separation from a friend, only for him to gradually lose the will to leave. After Sang Mi wakes up and relates all of this to the dimension-travellers, Cwej comes to suspect that Grant has been taken into the custody of a group whose existence he has long theorised about but has no firsthand evidence of: a group subcontracted by his Superiors when they need someone discreetly removed from space-time and forgotten.

After some brainstorming, Chris and Aesc further decide that the easiest way to counteract this group's actions would be to make the world at large remember Grant. They come up with the idea of filming and broadcasting a TV series about his adventures with the old "acquaintance", and getting Auteur to script it, which would restore Grant to reality unless the Superiors interfere. Aesc is initially confused, believing Auteur to currently be dead, but Cwej informs her that at some point in the future, Auteur will come back to life and then wander the multiverse; he suggests that a dimension-traveller like Aesc could easily bend the laws of time "discreetly" by collecting him from that point in his timeline. She agrees, though she also has concerns about Auteur's notorious insanity.

Chapter 4: Pre-Production
Sang Mi takes a nap during the following trip; when she comes to, Lady Aesculapius has successfully collected Auteur, who has begun giddily scribbling up a script, but she and Cwej are locked in an argument with Graelyn Scythes and Archimedes Von Ahnerabe. Graelyn, Auteur's adoptive daughter, is protective of him, and feels that indulging him by getting him to write a metafictionally-potent script is simply taking advantage of his mental illness and indulging it. However, before the argument can get very far, Auteur announces that he's already finished the script for a new series about "the Mysterious Professor X".

A portal (resembling an unobtrusive black door) is also opened between the Broadcasting Centre in the Warsong and the Base of Operations in the Totality, "sustained by a complex architecture of living time machines". Unwilling to tell her where it really leads, the travellers tell Sang Mi that it's simply a building in Hongtu, a nearby Gongen city, which she doesn't believe for one moment, especially after they step through to meet a prospective "executive producer", the imperious Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn. The Superior tells Cwej that after discussing the matter with others of his kind, they have agreed to authorise Cwej's Professor X project, provided that he also takes the opportunity to look into the memory-erasing subcontractors, and unobtrusively report back to the Superiors on how they've been running things;

Chapter 5: Auteur Theory
As shooting begins to get underway, Sang Mi is told by Cwej and Aesc about the fact that Professor X, at least as it exists in Chris's own universe, was based on real events, though with some liberties taken, with Grant and Chris's mutual friend being the template for Professor X himself. With neither Chris nor Aesc wanting to play the Professor despite some similarities, Sang Mi herself ends up being drafted to portray the Professor, specifically their sixth incarnation, which necessitates that she try on an eccentric outfit (though Chris believes the real man's coat was "even worse") and start wielding a "futuristic multitool"; Sang Mi doesn't understand the appeal of this plot point, as in her own world and era soundwave multitools are commonplace.

Chapter 6: Filming
After falling asleep again as they travel in Lady Aesculapius's Factory of Crystal to gather a cast from across the Totality, the 10,000 Dawns and beyond, Sang Mi wakes up to find the cast already assembled and decides to introduce herself to the others, meeting Coloth, Dionus, Ax Rossum and Larles. Oblivious to the alien nature of some of them because she believes them to already be in costume, she is slightly confused at them all feebly claiming to be from Hongtu until Graelyn sweeps in and alleges that they're from a drama school where Auteur is a teacher. She also meets the camerawoman, Zoey Hartnell, a time-traveller dressed in an outfit from Colonial America.

Before long, shooting begins on Grant, the prospective first episode, which opens with Grant (as played by Cwej) discovering a mysterious line in some computer code, discussing it with a colleague played by none other than Kano Masako. Just as the characters are realising what the computer code does, an overbearing superhero called Dynamite Thor bursts into the room, explaining that he is set on "liberating" the city using some Mecha-Nephilim. A later scene finds "Grant" and his coworker tied up inside one of the giant robots, only for Professor X to make her crowd-pleasing entrance and rescue them using the soundwave multitool, later explaining that the mayheam across New Tokyo is rooted in something being in the process of turning fiction into reality. The culprit turns out ot be none other than Professor Meistras, as played by an unenthusiastic Larles, and Grant agrees to start travelling with the Professor.

Next is the second episode, provisionally titled Return of Iconic Villain. At the climax, Grant and the Professor meet the evil creator of a race of malevolent cyborgs, as played by a hesitant Coloth. The third episode, Tales from the Green Glow features Meistras again as she attempts to infiltrate the Green Glow Café to take control of the Green Glow, the power of stories itself, as embodied in a show hosted by Hamish Forester at the café. At the climax, Larles's Meistras is mortally wounded while trying to reach for the Green Glow, and regenerates into a new incarnation played by the rather more competent Kirstine Cwej, to general relief.

Next is Kidnapped to the Space Spa in Space, which opens with an amnesiac "Grant" waking up at a spa populated with a variety of aliens. Aside from a plot point involving a "hot space dragon boyfriend" (played by a non-sentient prop), the story features Grant needing to remember himself, urged to do so by the Professor. Things proceed onwards to Episode 8, Cryptological, where the Professor and Grant investigate a village whose children are being abducted by a cryptid known as the Wolf of Heaven. When the creature reveals itself, the Professor is skeptical and uses her multitool to reveal its true identity, which she apparently finds much more believable: Bigfoot in disguise. Pliny the Elder and Diane Fossey are also involved, and the story can weirdly enough be read as "an allegory about tax-dodging", although Auteur denies that this is intentional.

Eventually, Lady Aesc, getting tired even with the time-slowing effect they set up over the Broadcasting Center, is relieved to reach the thirteenth and final episode, The Fate of Grant Markham, only to find that the script for the first scene is blank, simply wishing the crew "good luck" with the "mystery opening". She rushes to confront Auteur, only to find that Sang Mi has disappeared; in fact, she has found herself in what she believes to be a new set, a set of metallic sleeping quarters stained with blood where she meets a child version of Grant, whom she notices doesn't look much like a child version of Cwej, without realising that she's facing the real one. When she emerges back on set, Aesc and the rest of the crew refrain from correcting her misunderstanding, but as soon as she's out of earshot, berate Auteur for an explanation.

An unrepentant Auteur insists that the "grand ritual" to bring Grant back is proceeding as planned, and suggests that they use the time-travelling capabilities of the Foce to start broadcasting the series (doing so in the Warsong, the Totality and the 10,000 Dawns simultaneously) even as they finish shooting The Fate of Grant Markham. The climactic scene features time and space rupturing, and the Professor deciding to sacrifice herself to save the universe; just as Sang Mi has finished acting out that beat, a genuine space-time anomaly appears as a metal capsule falls down from the anomalous storm outside, and a swarm of mysterious faceless robots invade the Broadcasting Center, capturing everyone. Just before he's captured, a laughing Auteur explains that he never said his ritual would summon Grant back to reality; instead it's opened a portal into the Point of Know Return and causing everyone to be taken there, where they will have a chance to rescue him if they play their cards right.

Chapter 7: The Day Before I Saw a Rabbit
Jhe Sang Mi wakes up as "the Patient" aboard the Point of Know Return. After watching a deer outside her window, she receives a visit from a nurse, who informs her that she is Patient 331 and helps her to realise that she doesn't remember her name, nor how she came here. The nurse says she must be "getting better" but refuses to explain what she's supposedly recovering from, before bringing her attention to a set of clothes and asking her to put them on. After she has done so, she looks out the window again and finds that the deer has gone. Walking out, the Patient sees that the patients have all been assigned various menial tasks, helping with the upkeep of a beautiful domed tourist resort maintained at the heart of the ship. The robot nurse cheerfully explains that "helping others" to "learn to help yourself" is allegedly part of the "treatment plan".

The nurse leaves "331" in the care of none other than Blanche Combine, also a patient, but apparently one with some seniority and who has been allowed to retain greater independence. Blanche makes it clear that as far as she knows none of the patients have any actual conditions aside from their clearly-artificial loss of memories, and they're simply being exploited as a free labour force. After spending most of the day fulfilling strenuous cleaning duties, the two run into none other than Grant Markham, whom "331" recognises despite no longer remembering why she was so eager to find him. He, in turn, recognises her and remembers seeing her before, though he's not sure where. Over the course of the day, she also witnesses the strange, seemingly psychic, reinvigorating "treatment" provided to the paying customers of the resort, though the nurses refuse to explain its nature.

After the day is done, "331" politely declines Blanche's invitation to eat together, intent on finding Grant again — having been informed that he works with "the other techies" on maintenance of the machinery at the heart of the ship. After making her way through narrow corridors full of exposed, whirring machinery, she finds a circular room where a more individualised, multi-armed variant of the staff robots, who identifies himself as Finagler, is being inconvenienced by a rambunctuous white rabbit. It quiets down as soon as it spots the Patient, however, and jumps onto her shoulder; though clarifying to Finagler that she's never seen the creature before, she agrees to take responsibility for it, and dubs it Uisa. She asks after Grant, who takes her to his workshop. Though she casually helps him solve a problem with his current work in progress (a grav-stabilizer which was missing its particle shaft whereas he'd been fixating on the regulator capsule), he is disappointed to realise that her earlier amnesia wasn't an act, and the "rescue attempt" has failed.

He explains that the Point of Know Return is actually a prison ship of the Letharchy, run by the Letharch Whilom; the Letharchy are a group whom greater powers hire to make people disappear from time and space, and have decided to further increase their bottom line by running a slave-labour-based wellness spa on the ship. Not all prisoners' memories are adjusted, at least not as severely as the Patient's, for which reason Grant thinks it's worth it to try and get hers back in the hope that it'll be enough to restart the escape plan somehow. Having witnessed her technical ability, he informs her that he's been putting off repairing a power generator in the Memory Storage Area for just such an occasion, and will arrange with Finagler to have her transferred to the tech sector and then sent there for that purpose. However, even with Grant doing his best to disable the firewalls remotely at the critical moment via a well-timed system reboot, she'll still have to deal with the security, which he describes as simply "nightmares".

They agree to put this plan into motion tomorrow, and the Patient returns to her room with much to think about, casting one last look at the bronze deer outside the window before she drifts off to sleep.

Chapter 8: Memory Storage
The following day, as planned, "Patient 331" is called to the Repair Shop, heading there with Uisa. Finagler sends her along, though he's openly suspicious of her motives for agreeing so readily to the extra workload. After she meets up with Grant Markham and helps him start the rebooting cycle, she heads into the Memory Storage Area, only to find herself trapped into a nightmare where her late grandmother appears to her only to belittle and insult her, followed by another one where all her friends likewise renounce and demean her, declaring that she is better off forgotten and erased. Another, hitherto-unexplained recurring element of the nightmare is a strange woman begging Sang Mi to "call her caseworker".

Though she is overwhelmed, Grant follows her in and ends up pulling her back from the brink of suicidality, allowing her to exit again with no more than a slightly-burnt hand (though she has yet to remember her name). When she returns, Finagler more explicitly informs her that he knew what she was up to but will not tell on her, revealing that he himself used to be a human patient and tried the very same thing unsuccessfully: once their bodies start to fail, the Letharchy keeps Patients profitable by cybernetically converting them into the robotic staff-members. Explaining that he will do his best to help Sang Mi and Grant escape, Finagler hands her a smuggled sword.

Chapter 9: A Very Important Guest
Two days after the Patient's escapade in the Memory Storage Area, an alarm rings across the ship, with Blanche Combine recognising it as one signalling a "problem patient" causing mayhem. The new arrival turns out to be a barely-coherent silhouette, glitching in blue and purple, and leaving glowing blue footprints and scratch-lines wherever it goes, not unlike Uisa the mysterious rabbit has been observed to do at times. Blanche and Letharch Whilom itself thrust the task of approaching the enraged being to the Patient; she is able to get through to it, asking it if it needs "the treatment", and leads it to the amphitheatre where such problematic cases are typically handled.

Finding something familiar in the figure, she realises she needs to sing 'it' a nostalgic song to calm it down, only to realise that she still doesn't remember any; Blanche is able to talk the panicking Whilom into restoring some of her old memories, allowing her to recite, and then lead the massing crowd into, her younger self's inadvertently comical adaption of Meet Me in St. Louis to match Takumi, successfully calming down the glitching colossus, who begins to solidify into a man, whose hand she takes. The blue colossus turns out to be not an old classmate from Gongen, none other than Chris Cwej, in whom the tune of Meet Me in St. Louis coincidentally stirred a memory of a mission to the actual St. Louis World's Fair with Larles. In the same moment he remembers himself, he acknowledges her as "Sang Mi", restoring her own memories as well.

Naturally, a battle erups between the loyal Letharchs and the pair as soon as Whilom realises Cwej is here to break Sang Mi out. Though fighting very efficiently, they're no match for the Letharchs' sheer numbers, and end up taking a seemingly suicidal exit into the laundry disposal chute. However, before they reach the bottom where they'd be boiled alive, Sang Mi is able to use the sword given to her by Finagler to cut an opening sideways and out of the chute, allowing her and Cwej to escape and eventually make their way up to the grassy pleasure dome, where Sang Mi finally takes a breath and then demands some kind of an explanation from Cwej.

Chapter 10: What the Hell Just Happened
In a flashback to what happened immediately after the Letharchy's attack on the Takumi Broadcasting Centre, Whilom transports Chris Cwej to an abstract space to have a discussion, explaining that they are essentially on the same side — as the Letharchy often work for the Superiors — and that their minor incursion into a universe beyond their jurisdiction is of no consequence, as the Warsong does not have any powerful beings guarding it on the level of the Superiors or Firmament. Chris cannot accept the callous dismissal of the Warsong's inhabitants as "not mattering", however, and also feels that his memory is being tampered with; he remembers Littlejohn asking him to look into the activities of a certain contrator of the Superiors and realise that contractor is the Letharchy. Disappointed that his attempt at memory-wipe aided diplomacy failed, Whilom resolves to erase Chris from space-time, assuring him that even his Superiors will eventually forget him the natural way even if the Letharchy cannot actually affect their memories.

Whilom then has a similar interview with Lady Aesculapius, which begins as a memory of one of her lessons with Meistras, only for Aesc to immediately see through the charade. As his people have no prior business relationship with the Firmament, unlike the Superiors, he is more reluctant to antagonise her, and gives her a tour of the Point of Know Return. However, she is increasingly appalled as she realises the scale and mercantile immortality of the Letharchy's operations, with the last straw being when she spots Coloth among the mind-wiped Patients. With diplomacy clearly failing, Whilom activates his backup plan, forcibly transferring Aesc's consciousness into the body of an ordinary rabbit (as he's aware that any attempt to destroy her would simply result in her being reborn in a new clone body within her Factory of Crystal). Aesc, however, easily escapes from her cage in her new body, quickly finding Grant and later being found by Sang Mi and rechristened "Uisa".

Back in the present, Cwej finishes his lightly-edited summary of the above events to Sang Mi (he left out the part about Uisa really being Aesc to save her the embarrassment), ending on the note that he had continued to exist as a disembodied consciousness even after the Letharchy "erased" him, able to keep tabs on the Letharchy's own files and thereby his friends' fates, even as he had lost his own sense of self.

Chapter 11: Remember the Good Times
Sitting on the grassy plain under the dome, Chris Cwej and Jhe Sang Mi discuss where they stand. Chris is having second thoughts about summoning Grant Markham back into reality, not out of a lack of empathy, but quite the opposite: because he himself wonders if it might not have been better for him to simply cease to exist when he got left behind by his and Grant's mutual friend. Feeling bad for roping Sang Mi into the adventure, he veiledly asks her if she would like him to simply return her to her life with her memories of the entire mad escapade erased.

Sang Mi heads off the train of thought, however, and reveals to him that she has dealt with depression since she was a child, on a medical level such that even now, she has a minor biochemical implant to regulate her emotions. Though she had natural dispositions, she finally relates the context for the woman pleading to see her caseworker, explaining that as a child, she ended up saving the life of a strange woman who had attempted suicide, keeping her alive until the emergency services could get to her; much to Sang Mi's dismay, they did not stop to make sure the "literal child" was dealing healthily with the traumatic event, departing without even taking her name.

She subsequently makes it clear that the events of the prologue were not set on the Point of Know Return, but rather were an event from her extended mental health crisis some time after the traumatic event, which her stay in the Point strangely echoed (down to the deer statue outside her window — near which, back in the Gongen-bound version of the event, she once saw a mysterious man). The paperback books she picked up on the day of the Prologue were in fact works of fiction within her universe, some of which featured Grant as a fictional character; she'd recognised the name all along but didn't know what to make of his apparently being a real person, worrying about her own sanity. However, with a little help from the cheered-up Cwej, she moves past these existential worries, and they agree to regroup and try again to defeat the Letharchy and rescue Grant.

Chapter 12: And Today, You
For all of its existence, the clockwork-like precision of the laundry rotations of the Point of Know Return has stood as a symbol for its stability and efficiency. Thus, the beginning of the end for the Letharchy's racket is fittingly heralded by Letharch Memento's realisation that some effects are missing, stolen back by Cwej and Sang Mi alongside one of the drones from the Takumi Broadcasting Centre. When Memento reports it to Whilom, he hubristically writes it off as irrelevant before attending to the day's VIP guests, only for their pleasant morning on the observation dome to be interrupted by a video broadcast from Sang Mi, once more posing as Professor X. Trading on her heroic image (many of the guests prove to be fans of the series, elated at the thought that the Professor really exists), she announces that ruin is coming to the Point and advises any innocent bystanders to return to their rooms immediately.

When the irate Whilom locates Sang Mi and tries to seek his army of Letharchs on her, she puts into motion the next stage of the plan, seemingly using her soundwave multitool to reverse the polarity of the ship's laundry systems (though this is actually for show as the actual hacking was done by Grant and Finagler). As the systems accelerate and reverse, the Letharchs find themselves buried under their literal dirty laundry, causing several bits of structural damage to the ship itself in the chaos. Taking advantage of the distraction, Chris returns to the Memory Storage Area and smashes all the containers open using the sword previously given to Sang Mi by Finagler. In one great rush, the patients, including the interdimensional filming crew who had all been kidnapped (including Coloth, Graelyn Scythes, Ax Rossum, Dionus, Blanche and even Auteur), all remember themselves. The failure of the memory-storing technology also reverts Aesc back into her own body while the bunny body's original mind, which had been trapped in Aesc's captive body, is returned to the rabbit body — "happy to hop again", with Lady Aesc subsequently taking custody of the rabbit and promising to "get her home".

As it becomes clear that the entire operation has failed, Whilom begins to impotently rage and threatens to self-destruct the Point, but Sang Mi reminds him of his humanity by pointing out an amusing realisation which has been nagging at her from the start of her stay on the ship — its theming seems to have been created as a homage to the film Spirited Away. This stirs a memory within Whilom, and, to his existential despair, he realises he was never one of the founding Letharchs: the original airship was self-running, and he and the other "staff" were just more brainwashed erased people, who gradually forgot so much of their original lives that they believed themselves to be an officer class left in charge by the true Letharchy.

In the clean-up, Cwej fudges the paperwork to avoid having to erase Sang Mi's memory of the adventure altogether, merely letting her believe that it was all a dream (though he feels bad about even that) — something he does with Littlejohn's knowledge and approval. However, Aesc and Cwej overheard Sang Mi's final conversation with Grant, where he made it clear he was still "hung up" on having been abandoned by his old friend. To try and get him some closure, Aesc comes up with "one last bad idea for the road" and, using some manner of shapeshifting and disguising her Factory of Crystal as the TASID's model, poses as that old friend to pay Grant one last visit and give him some closure by taking him on one last trip, to the infamously beautiful planet of Gendar, one of the universe's great tourist traps. After dropping him off, Aesc and Cwej wonder they did the right thing with this "white lie", but Aesc remains fairly certain that she did, noting that she snuck ahead in his timeline and saw that with this weight off his shoulders, things do actually improve for Grant going forward. She herself, however, is left feeling slightly miffed at the idea that she really is that closer to the "other" space-time traveller after all, angsting about her own status as some kind of imitation until it's Cwej's turn to reassure her.

Chapter 13: The Dandelion Boy
Back on Gongen, Sang Mi wakes up. She initially dismisses everything that happened as a Delirium Pill dream as expected — only to come to suspect that it was all real after all when her brother admiringly teases her about her overnight status as some kind of superstar from starring in the Professor X reboot, which very much still exists.

That "superstardom" turns out to be something of an exaggeration, however; the series, rationalised as some kind of bizarre bureaucratic obligation the city had to fund and shanghai an Academy 27 into to fulfill some accidental clause in a contract somewhere, is far from massively popular, being recognised by most as the shoddy, inconsistent mess one would expect of something produced in a week with a first-time actor in the lead role. Indeed, Sang Mi's friend Li Xiu, who always wanted to work in film, easily forgives her for not having shared her "exciting opportunity" earlier because she assumes that Sang Mi realised how terrible the series was shaping up to be, and didn't want her actually-professionally-hopeful friend's career tarnished by such a debut.

She is surprised to find Chris coming back for one last rule-breaking visit. Having mulled over his own experiences with tampered memories, he confirms that the entire interdimensional adventure really happened. In turn, Sang Mi makes one last confession of her own: she has remembered perfectly well, all along, that the man she saw outside her window so long ago during her mental-health recovery was Cwej. Though she is unsure whether they'll meet again, she assures him that they'll always be friends, as, counting that house-call which Cwej has yet to make in his own subjective timeline, Cwej has "already come back for her twice — more than most people". Relating their situation to the Dandelion Girl story, they part on the quote memorably repeated throughout the time-travel tale by the titular girl "because sometimes we can remember people who don't remember us". ""And I promise I won't forget you either. A deer, a rabbit." "And today, you." "And today, you.""

Characters

 * Lady Aesculapius/Uisa
 * Archimedes Von Ahnerabe
 * Auteur
 * Bashrat
 * Blanche Combine
 * Cao Li Xiu/PinkPrincess2424
 * Cao Li Xiu's mother
 * Coloth
 * Countess
 * Chris Cwej
 * Dionus
 * Diplomacy Bot
 * Finagler
 * Galaxy Violet
 * Zoey Hartnell
 * Mrs Ichinose
 * JackBox
 * Jason Jackson
 * Jae Hyun/JaeHyun
 * Jhe Min Jun
 * Jhe Sang Eun
 * Jhe Sang Mi/Kalingka/Kalingkata
 * Male Kalingkata
 * Jhe Sang Mi's grandmother (nightmare)
 * Jhe Sang Mi's mother
 * Director Jojan
 * Kano Tamja
 * Kano Masako
 * Larles
 * Grant Markham
 * Memento
 * Midi (nightmare)
 * Mr Mori
 * Deputy Director Naita Hideo
 * Starcatcher Ax Rossum
 * Saki Suzuki
 * Graelyn Scythes
 * Virginia Stens-6
 * Talinata
 * Dynamite Thor
 * Tsetseg
 * High Councillor Vaquar
 * Whilom
 * Yanna

Mentioned only

 * Robert Boyle
 * Nathan P. Butler
 * Mother Camilla
 * Countess's daughter
 * Chris Cwej's old friend, the inspiration behind Professor X, whom Aesc claims not to be a rip-off of
 * Amelia Earhart
 * Diane Fossey
 * Ernest Hemingway
 * Hei Ran
 * Higen Shijen
 * The Hongtu Ripper
 * Kwang Sun
 * Paul McCartney
 * "Knock-off amnesiac botanist lady"
 * Hayao Miazaki
 * Pliny the Elder
 * Serren
 * Anakin Skywalker
 * The Vicinity

Worldbuilding

 * Having seen a rabbit and a deer in sequence by chance, the Patient is reminded of a line in "a short story she'd read a long time ago", featuring a time-travelling girl meeting an older man on a hill.
 * In the Warsong, Gongen's moon Phobos has been occupied by Earth forces as a display of force.
 * Kano Tamja is an Olympic gold medalist and war-hero, known for having "defeated the Pirate King Serren", "ended the Lybid kidnapping standoff", "caught the Hongtu Ripper" and, less straightforwardly benevolently no matter how the reigning Gongen regime wishes to present it, "helped put down the reform movement back in 2356". His defeat of King Serren was the subject of two holodramas; Sang Mi has seen both and believes the 2379 one to have been the better of the two. Both movies lengthened the duel with Serren, which, in real life, was cut short when Serren slipped on some spilled fuel and broke his skull on the floor.
 * Jhe Sang Mi describes herself as "Hei-Ran and Kwang Sun's daughter". Kano Tamja was familiar with Sang Mi's grandmother on the Jhe side of the family, describing her as an idiot.
 * Cao Li Xiu is surprised when Kalingka explains that she's going to meet up with Saki again, stating: "Again? JackBox isn't even here yet!".
 * The non-self-driving car driven by Cwej reminds the Jhe twins of "the cars of the well-to-do of Takumi". Chris himself, with his impressive physique, reminds them of "a GravBall player".
 * When thinking that the cab driver has mistaken her and Sang Eun for richer kids than they actually are, Sang Mi reminds him that "this is Cheonsa Dome, not the Main Dome".
 * When learning that school is cancelled and resenting that they didn't learn that earlier and stay home, Sang Mi notes that she and Sang Eun could have been playing a video game called Sellis Strike 2 and that they could even "have gotten the grognak achievement — finally!".
 * When discussing whether a problem in the Warsong should really be any of the 10,000 Dawns or the Totality's business, Blanche Combine reflects that "if it's serious business, the Council of Frogs will take care of it".
 * JackBox is a cyborg, from a subculture known as "Mavericks"; they have their own colonies, and don't go to school with unaugmented humans.
 * Aesc refers to the 1950s as "the Buddy Holly era".
 * Before he reveals that he's talking about Auteur, Aesc briefly believes Cwej is suggesting going back in time to kidnap Alfred Hitchcock.
 * Sang Mi is five foot six, has O+ as her blood type, and her favourite food is lemon chicken.
 * A "defected Yssgaroth" once described Chris's blood as "tasty".
 * In her present incarnation, Aesc is five foot eight, her blood type is AB, and her favourite food is "chocolate cupcakes with salted caramel frosting and sprinkles", although she's embarrassed about it and she sometimes pretends it's somethine else.
 * The 24th-century humanity of the Warsong believe time travel to be impossible. They have a version of the Professor X TV series, wholly identical to the one in the Totality, but it is not based on any real events.
 * The Warsong is stated to have no local species equivalent to the Superiors or Firmament archetype: "no Gods or Lords or Auditors, no Grey Men keeping reality under lock and key. Around here, it seemed, the Laws of Physics took care of themselves".
 * Grant Markham's own city of New Tokyo has an equivalent in the Warsong, Tokyoplex, but it goes not exist anymore by 2387. Aesc also relates to "Space Tokyo", yet another city which she is familiar. Aesc also mentions New Neo Neuvo East West Tokyo 2.
 * Sang Mi has watched all of a recent revival run of Professor X, up to The Year of the Professor, but has never checked out "the classics", featuring such incarnations as the sixth or seventh Professors.
 * Before adjusting her story to, yet again, being from the city of Hongtu, Virgina Stens-6 lets slip that she's from the Great Assimilation, claiming that "Stens-6" is an unremarkable last name there.
 * The extras at the space spa include Gendar, Diashna, Halshai, Caradans, and even the Quoth (specifically Ambassador Galaxy Violet).
 * Aesc describes Auteur as a "disheveled Proust wannabe".
 * Auteur implies that he has "rather more than two hearts" in "various areas of his chest".
 * Aesc previously encountered another version of Kalingkata, native to one of the 10,000 Dawns. This version was male and had a different civilian name despite also using the Kalingkata nickname/username.
 * Grant Markham relates how a number of groups have started investigating the Letharchy's activity, including "SIGNET, OOPS, a bunch of other acronyms" and "a few people" who even "came poking around about some other missing folks like Mother Camilla and Amelia Earhart", although in those two cases they came away disappointed.
 * When Sang Mi declares that she "likes to fix stuff", Blanche Combine jokingly calls her Anakin Skywalker.
 * After Grant quips "let's rock and roll", Sang Mi calls him Paul McCartney. She confesses that she tried to think of a cleverer "Beatles pun".
 * When Cwej complains that her Gongen sword doesn't work the way a "monomolecular edge" should theoretically work, Sang Mi quips "Take it up with Robert Boyle!".
 * At one point during the climactic escape sequence, Sang Mi's sword buries itself in the ground "like Excalibur".
 * Aesc notes that she would have preferred to be transformed into a fennec fox than a rabbit.
 * Among possible destinations in time and space, Lady Aesc suggests Paris, 1921 to meet Ernest Hemingway, then Space Wyoming, before finally taking him on a brief jaunt to Gendar.
 * When blearily thinking that she's been asked a pop-quiz question in class to make sure she was paying attention, Sang Mi parrots that "the Great Journey was written by Higen Shijen".

Continuity

 * The planet Hytheriax VII was previously mentioned in.
 * The Selachians originated in . They had previously been referenced in an Arcbeatle Press publication in.
 * Chris Cwej is currently travelling with Larles in the La Kraw el Sol, Larles and Kwol's ship as introduced in PROSE:.
 * Aesc chides Chris Cwej for not having attended her funeral, which occurred in PROSE:.
 * Aesc is again seen wielding a not-actually-quantum whisk as in PROSE:.
 * When thinking on how Aesc has gotten a "whole new body" because "her people put their minds into blank clones upon death", Cwej reflects that this is something he "could relate to, in a way". PROSE: and PROSE:  established Chris to have been made a regen-inf soldier during the War in Heaven, meaning that he regenerated on several occasions, even though his current form is identical to his original body.
 * Chris reminds Aesc that he's from the 30th century back in his own universe. He was originally introduced in PROSE:, set in 2975, and PROSE: would later establish that he was born in 2954.
 * Without ever naming this individual, characters repeatedly discuss a "mutual friend" of Grant Markham and Chris Cwej's, who shared some similarities with Lady Aesculapius and on whom Professor X was somehow based. This is evidently the Doctor. Cwej acted as a companion for the Seventh Doctor in the Virgin New Adventures novel starting wit the aforementioned PROSE:, while Grant was a companion of the Sixth Doctor in PROSE: and PROSE: . Grant was subsequently shown to have been erased from time in the short story PROSE: , existing on a mysterious airship on an unending journey within the Time Vortex; this story establishes the airship to have been run by the Letharchy as the predecessor to the Point of Know Return, with Whilom recalling that his organisation "originally operated a vehicle that transported the candidates on an unending journey", but "ran out of space", especially as they "had grander goals".
 * Chris recalls how his Superiors "adjusted" his own memories for a while, a major plot point in PROSE:.
 * Lady Aesculapius believes Auteur to currently be dead, following the events of the First Auction in Heaven as seen in PROSE: . Chris, however, informs her that at some point in his relative future, Auteur will have come back to life and wander "beyond the Totality". Auteur was shown to be back to life but stranded outside the Third Universe in PROSE: and PROSE:.
 * Professor X, an in-universe analogue of the Doctor Who franchise, was introduced in PROSE: and referenced on several subsequent occasions, together with the TARDIS equivalent, the TASID.
 * During her visit to Sergeant-Instructor Littlejohn's office on the Base of Operations, Sang Mi nearly knocks over a pedestal holding a golden gauntlet. This is evidently the central macguffin of PROSE:, of which Littlejohn took custody at the end of that novel.
 * Littlejohn insists on being addressed by his title of Sergeant-Instructor; when asked why, he states that "you never really leave the army" without elaborating. When he was introduced in PROSE:, and during his appearances in PROSE: and PROSE: , he was a member of the House Military; as an entry in Cwej: The Series, this story takes place later from the Superiors' perspective, during V-Time, an era when the Superiors ostensibly believe the War in Heaven to be over.
 * The real Professor Meistras appeared in PROSE:.
 * Various elements of the Professor X revival written by Auteur evoke real Doctor Who episodes. The opening episode's plot is adapted from Grant's actual debut PROSE:, but is titled after the companion's first name, Grant, thus evoking the first episode of the 2005 Doctor Who revival, TV: . The Professor's dilemma in Return of Iconic Villain clearly matches the climax of TV: , with Coloth's "creator" character being a parody of Davros. The idea of Cryptological being a veiled allegory about taxes echoes a common reading of Robert Holmes's TV:.
 * Kirstine Cwej previously appeared in PROSE:.
 * Ambassador Galaxy Violet was previously seen in PROSE: . The Quoth as a whole originated in PROSE:.
 * One of the places where the rebooted Professor X series is broadcast is the village of Cheldon Bonniface. It originated in PROSE:, reappearing in several other Virign New Adventures. In particular, Chris remembers having once been to "a wedding" there; this is Bernice Summerfield and Jason Kane's wedding from PROSE:.
 * It is revealed in a brief flashback that the Point of Know Return was designed by Yanna of Gendar, who was not told about the ship's true purpose. Yanna previously appeared in PROSE: as an inter-dimensional engineer who reluctantly created various "messed-up" weapons for the Superiors during the War.
 * When the Patients' memories are returned to them, Coloth remembers his coming-of-age ceremony from PROSE:.
 * At that same point, Dionus remembers "a sunrise over Gulliver's Rest", referencing the home he'd built there in AUDIO: . However, he "conveniently" does not recover his memories of the events of AUDIO:, i.e. "an encounter with a knock-off amnesiac botanist". A fourth-wall gag, Nari's description as a "knock-off" references the implication that her true identity was the Rani; in in-universe term, it seems to imply that she was a hatchling of the real Rani, a concept introduced as a factor within the War in Heaven in PROSE:.
 * Meanwhile, it is said that it's "not clear" if the memories Auteur had lost, and subsequently recovers, had "ever really happened"; this references the speculation in PROSE: that Auteur's backstory as a Mapper is a fabrication which he Observer Effected into a level of retroactive reality.
 * During Aesc and Grant's visit to Gendar, a mountain-sized "mighty statue of a woman with her arm raised to the sky" is seen overlooking the cities. This is the Statue of the Goddess, a statue of Auteur's twelfth incarnation which was a major plot point in PROSE:.
 * Aesc states that Gendar is traditionally the seventh most interesting place in the universe, but briefly made number one "last year" because "a bunch of the universe had stopped existing", referencing the Flux, shown in TV: to have destroyed a majority of galaxies in the universe. Although not described in great detail, it is suggested that Lady Aesc's disguise as a regenerated form of Grant's old friend was specifically a "pound-store imitation" of the then-recently-debuted Fourteenth Doctor: the "friend" is described as having a long billowing coat and short hair, matching his appearance as introduced in TV:, and Aesc and adopts some David Tennant-esque mannerisms and vocal tics as part of her performance (including "Something in French, let's go!" as a stand-in for "Allons-y!").