Cabin on the Coast Question

Dave Tallman · 29 May 2008, 08:47 · from 2008-May.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Thu, 29 May 2008 02:47:21 -0600
Subject: (urth) Cabin on the Coast Question
Message-ID: <483E6D99.5070003 at gmail.com>

Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> Tim was told that Lissy would remember nothing of her abduction, because
> there would be nothing to remember; the abduction would never have happened,
> just as Tim would never have spoken to the cop. Tim lost a complete
> twenty-four hours, from the morning she disappeared to the morning he swam
> out to look for her. Was time turned back forty-eight hours for Lissy, to
> the first morning at the cabin?
>   
For simplicity I'll assume that the clock was turned back to a single 
point in time. As you say, the evidence points to it being the morning 
after they built the driftwood fire on the beach. In the original 
time-line, Lissy woke up first and went out while Tim was still asleep. 
She was looking for her fairy lover (I think Tim failed a test when he 
didn't sleep with her on the beach as she asked). In this new time-line, 
Lissy finds Tim gone and assumes he has gone for a swim, therefore she 
remains in bed.

> If that is so, then there is no reason she should not remember her
> hypothetical fairy lover, because that would have happened a full day before
> her abduction. Will she go down to the water the next morning again to seek
> him? If the King had the power to turn back the clock for Lissy, why not
> turn it back to before his alleged seduction of her and avoid the problem?
> In which case he would have no need to leave a used towel behind.
>   
She probably does remember the King in whatever form he took and 
whatever story he told her the previous morning. She certainly wouldn't 
share that information with "Big Tim." The King only promised that 
things would stand as they were "before we took her." The devious being 
may be hoping to have it all, to get Lissy after Tim leaves in despair.

I'm not sure what you mean about turning the clock back before the 
seduction. In my theory, the King wants Lissy to remember that. I 
suppose he could have used magic to cover his tracks and leave the towel 
dry.  He either didn't bother, or he might have thought it would make 
Lissy fearful if she noticed what he did.

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net