Name: Qhoroali Versus Qhoroali
Story: The Fulcrum
Colors: Fresh Thyme #5: Time Loop
Styles and Supplies: Vaudeville, Life Drawing, Diptych, Stain ("A person is never happy except at the price of some ignorance."), Charcoal
Word Count: 1583
Rating: T
Warnings: None
Characters: Liselye, Qhoroali, Cyaru
In-Universe Date: Summer of 1904
Summary: Qhoroali has a conversation with herself.
Notes: Heavily inspired by that one Homestuck pesterlog where Karkat spends ten minutes arguing with his future self, and then his past self from ten minutes ago logs on and he has the whole argument again from the other perspective. Unfortunately, Homestuck seems to not be available online anymore, so I can't link to it.


Liselye strode through the Fair, looking around for where the rest of her friends had gotten to. The stage magician had been quite good, the sleight of hand suitably impressive, and she wanted to tell them about it.

She spun around lazily in a circle. If she remembered the layout right, this should be approximately where the clockwork merchant was… she did a second circuit, and finally caught sight of Rou’s ridiculous outfit. Hopefully it was actually the Rou she’d come to the Fair with today, and not the one the she’d come to this Fair with three, or five, or seven years ago. Honestly, that was also ridiculous.

As she approached, she called out, “your birthday, 1911.” You always to check.

“That’s me,” Rou agreed. She had a small bag with her that she was poking around in instead of looking at where she was going. “Look at this—”

“Not now, you’re going to run into someone. Did you ever see the magician any of the times you came here?”

“Maybe once?” Rou put the bag into one of her humongous pockets. Liselye swore that she must have somehow used her academic knowledge of extra dimensions to make them bigger than the inside of her trousers. “Why?”

“You didn’t think it was grand?” Liselye cast a glance at her friend. “I think you could be a great stage magician. You could travel back in time enough times until there were three or four copies of you, and then make it seem like you were teleporting around the stage. And it would be real magic, just not the kind that it seemed to be.”

“It’s not magic. The principles are completely scientific. Anyway, if I did that, I’d have to put up with the two or three different versions of me for weeks, several times in a row, and that would be awful, and depending on the timelines, the clones might wind up as our permanent companions. Honestly, I’m pretty lucky that that hasn’t happened already, at this point.”

“Oh, I love talking to my clones. I make a few extras sometimes, when doing the liberations, they really help with logistics.”

“Really?” Rou seemed genuinely horrified.

“No. That was a joke, silly.” Rou lightly whacked her arm with the back of her hand and Liselye laughed. “Why spend multiple weeks at it, though? You’d only need the clones around for the day of the performance. You’re always so exact with it, I bet you could do it.”

Rou laughed quietly and smiled a soft, genuine smile at the ground in front of her feet. “It’s always such an ego trip to hear about the miracles you think I’m capable of performing. To go back exactly one day… several times in a row… you can pinpoint a specific day and even a specific time from a little ways away, based on the shapes of the timelines — they are all unique, like fingerprints. But from so close, it’s impossible. The best I could do would be three weeks, I think. Who do you think I am, Sapfita Herself?”

“If you were Sapfita, I think we’d both have to reconsider our whole lives’ trajectories.”

Rou smiled at that, and cocked her head suddenly, focusing on something in the distance. “I think that might be future me, over there.”

Liselye looked, and indeed, it did seem to be another Rou, wearing a different set of clothing, standing next to a Cyaru who definitely wasn’t wearing what he’d put on this morning. This was no good at all. “No,” she said. “Absolutely not.”

“I have to go talk to her.”

“You do not have to do any such thing.”

“I have to. She will know things I don’t know yet, and I want to know them. I need to know them.”

“If she is really from the future and knows things you don’t know,” Liselye tried to reason, “then that means that you will also know those things eventually if you just wait patiently for the future to happen, right?”

“No, you know that’s not how this works. There isn’t a single timeline. If I just wait and do nothing, I’ll only wind up in a timeline where I don’t know anything. I’m going to talk to her.” Rou grabbed Liselye’s hand and pulled her over to the alternate Rou and Cyaru, and Liselye was momentarily surprised by the force of it.

The other Rou looked up at them with cautious optimism as they approached, and Liselye could see it; they both desperately wanted the other to be Future Rou Who Would Reveal All of the Universe’s Secrets, and both were almost certainly going to be disappointed.

“I saw you earlier,” began the other Rou. “You came here with that red-headed woman. Who is she? I think I’ve seen her before, somewhere, maybe another time I came to this Fair, I’m not sure. Did you recruit her?”

Liselye’s Rou, the one from 1911, squeezed her eyes shut in an expression like pain. “This is NoraCheanya, you’re going to have to be more specific than ‘red-headed woman’.”

“She was wearing an old-fashioned skirt,” said the other Rou, doggedly. “You know, like—” She moved her hands around her legs to express the full volume of the skirt Setsiana had insisted on wearing. “I just want to know who she is, where you found her. She’s pretty.”

“Oh no,” said Rou from the present. “I remember this conversation now. This was the one I had last year. Oh God, why did I say that?” Some look of horrified realization had appeared on her face, but Liselye couldn’t see a reason for it.

“Why did I say what?” asked the other Rou.

“Oh, never mind. You’ll find out all about her in another four months. Or maybe not, I guess. Look, we have to go.” This time Rou pulled Liselye away from the other two and back into the crowd of the Fair.

“A disaster,” Rou was saying. “What compelled me to say that?”

“I don’t know what you mean.” Liselye had found the whole encounter rather funny, but Rou seemed legitimately upset, so she schooled her face.

“That she was pretty.”

“Oh, what’s the matter with that? She’s not wrong, not really.”

Rou let go of Liselye’s hand and waved her own around for emphasis. “I’m not— I don’t just kidnap pretty people because they’re pretty. That’s not why I went and got her.”

“Relax, silly. I know you wouldn’t be interested in her that way. Your past self probably just thought you’d met her and recruited her the usual way, she didn’t know you’d decided to kidnap her.” She paused a minute, considering her friend. “Why did you kidnap her anyway? Was there actually some reason, other than her supposedly telling you to?”

As expected, this pushed Rou onto a different mental track, and she was happy to talk. “I’ve been stuck in a rut for a long while now, and I’m sure Setsiana is the answer. She’s got to be. Do you know, she’s actually the Setsiana who wrote those papers I had you hunt down years back? She’s the one who wrote those — in another timeline maybe, but still. There’s got to be something in her head that she never wrote about — maybe it was too strange-sounding, too heretical, too radical to get officially published, but she’ll happily tell me all about it once she properly settles in. Whatever it is, it has to be the key to what I’m missing. I’m sure of it.”

Despite her words, Rou already seemed less excited about Setsiana than she had been four and a half weeks ago when she’d been talking about kidnapping her. Liselye estimated she would give up on the idea in another month, or maybe six or at most seven weeks. It was just a matter of waiting her out. “It’s about time for the Governor’s address,” she said, casually. “Do you want to go meet up with the others?”

Rou nodded her assent and they went off in search of Cyaru and Setsiana.

---

The Qhoroali from 1910 stared after future Qhoroali and Liselye as they disappeared back into the crowd. Why did her future self always treat her this way? They were on the same side, they had the same goals, they were in fact the very same person. Why did she always refuse to help her? It wasn’t fair.

“I think you should stop trying to talk to your future selves,” said Cyaru, beside her. “I don’t think it’s good for your mental health.”

“She knows things that are useful to me,” Qhoroali said. “She knows they are useful to me. And she is me. So why does she keep them to herself? Why is she always like this?”

“Possibly it is this attitude you always have towards your other selves that is causing the problem,” said Cyaru, quite reasonably. “If you start being charitable towards yourself now, then by the time you are future you, she will be charitable to you as well.”

“But she isn’t, so obviously that doesn’t happen.”

Cyaru sighed. “I thought you guys didn’t believe in predestination.”

“Well, no. But I can’t change how all of my future selves are. I can only pick which one of them I get to be. And they all seem to be like this.”

“That just sounds like predestination with extra steps.” Cyaru shook his head. “Do you want to go look for Lise?”