The Powerpuff Girls: PSHAW!
or
Powerpuff School Hijinks And Wackiness
A Powerpuff Girls fanfiction by Andrew J. Talon and The Ero-Sennin
DISCLAIMER: This is a non-profit fan based work of prose. The Powerpuff Girls are the property of Cartoon Network. No copyright infringement is intended, please support the official release.
The Narrator's Voice is in Italics! Just so you know! And no, I'm not out to steal any princesses. Geez, you can only make so many actor's allusions at a time you know!
This chapter written by Captain Sarcasm!
"The City of Townsville… as we know it today!" said Dexter, pointing at a large and fantastically detailed hologram of the aforementioned metropolis. It had taken him quite a long time to fully model and render it accurately enough for his purposes, although he couldn't say quite how long because he tended to ignore the passage of time for more interesting things. He was only a little bit upset when Deedee e-mailed him the very next day to show him the version of the city she had made in two hours on Cities: Skylines. But that's beside the point at this moment, and greatly extending this already overlong dialogue tag. Dexter waved his hand in the air and the city was replaced by an alternate version. Desolate, bombed out and swallowed by the endless desert. A city that had both been and never been. "…and this is how it appeared in your future, according to my latest invention, the Memo-reader!"
"I had thought you had asked me here to tell you about 'what it was like in anime times,'" said Jack, gazing cautiously around the pristine white lab. "Are you trying to unlock the secrets of the future?"
"And see what has been invented before I invent it?" Dexter shook his head, staring at Jack over his thick glasses. "Come on, grandpa. Do you think I would cheat myself like that?"
Jack grinned, and bowed slightly to Dexter.
"Forgive me," he said. "This old man sometimes can't keep up with the new world. Please, continue."
"Gladly!" said Dexter, and waved his hand again, shifting from a view of Townsville to a view of the earth. "If what you remember is true, it would seem that our universe is not the original incarnation of reality." The earth split into two copies of the same planet, one green, blue, white and full of life, the other brown, red, black and pitted with death. "The future you saw, the one ruled by the hand of the master of evil, Aku, was the way time was destined to play out. The current world, the one we live in, only came about because you changed the past. The implications of this are rather shocking, and I have been examining the pera pera pera quantum dynamic pera pera Copenhagen pera pera pera pera Back to the Future 2…"
Jack let the young scientist trail off. He knew he didn't have a chance of understanding it, but Dexter did seem to love his lectures. Instead, Jack focused on his breathing, his hand clutching for the sword that should be at his side.
He always felt uneasy in this place. He knew the boy, knew what he meant to his granddaughter, but could never feel truly at peace in his presence. Everything around him had an aura of innocence, but the form, the design of it all, he had seen them before, more than a thousand years hence. Much like Dexter, Jack had had quite some time to comprehend this new world he had lived through, and how distressingly similar it was to the future he had left. At one point in his travels, he had found an ancient statue of "Dextros, the Machinepriest," one who had created great weapons for the glory of Aku. …but it had been toppled, and all that remained were the stone boots. And besides, that was a completely different name.
Dexter seemed to be wrapping up now. Better pay attention.
"…brings us to the question at the heart of this discussion," said Dexter, pointing at a line on a display that looked like the subway map of an ancient city of squid-people. "What happened to the other you?"
Jack blinked twice.
"The other me?" he said, trying to remember all of his adventures, the years he had lived. "I fought a manifestation of my own darkness summoned by the magic of Aku, but I defeated him through-"
"No, no, no!" Dexter pounded on his table. "Not that other you! The you who went to the future!"
"That me is me," said Jack. "I am he. He became me."
"But he came back," said Dexter, pushing his glasses up his nose. "He came back from the future. But where did he go?"
"…right here?" Jack said, running a hand through his hair in confusion. "I came back from the future to defeat Aku and… I remain. Did you not know this?"
"No, Jack, I had no idea that you were a thousand year old immortal OF COURSE I KNEW ZAT!" he was shouting now, his face as red as his hair, and his inexplicable German accent getting thick enough to slice and serve with sauerkraut. "VERE YOU EVEN LIZENING TO A ZINGLE VORD I-"
"Dexter!" Jack said, his arm whipping out faster than Dexter could blink. Two fingers were poised right between his eyes. If he had a knife, it would have gone into Dexter's skull and split his forebrain in half. "I defeated my inner darkness through calm."
"…da… da…" Dexter said, pushing his glasses up. "I'm sorry. Have you ever met my sister? Never mind, it's not important. Let me try to… be more clear."
He waved his hands and most of the lines in the diagram disappeared, leaving only a straight path with a single fork in it.
"This line is time, and here…" Dexter pointed at the point where the fork split off. "…is when you fought Aku, and were flung into the future."
"Where his evil was law."
"What?"
"Hmm? Nothing," Jack dismissed it with a small wave. "It runs through my head sometimes."
"Alright," Dexter continued. "Now, you eventually found a portal back to the past and return to your own time."
"It was my single greatest triumph."
"Indeed, we never get tired of hearing that story over and over," said Dexter, a rare genuine smile on his face. He pointed to the second timeline, branching off from the first. "But when you defeated him, you created a new timeline, without the influence of Aku, the one we all call home."
"That is as I understand it," said Jack. "What seems to confuse you?"
"The facts of it are thus," said Dexter, holding up a finger. "Aku sent you into the future. You needed to travel back into your own time in order to defeat Aku. But you must have done so after your past self was sent away, otherwise you would never have been sent into the future and never have come back to your own time. But that would mean that your original self would have been flung into a future where Aku's evil did not exist, the future of this current world! But without the future of Aku to fight against, you would not be able to get strong enough to defeat Aku in order to create this timeline in the first place. There is no logical way for you to exist, but yet you do! There is no way that you could create this time, this world in which we all live, but yet you did, and here we are, boldly existing in the face of all logic! This is the question I cannot answer. I can't fathom our own existence!"
"Mu."
"…moo?" said Dexter, snapped out of his ranting by sudden confusion. "Like… a cow?"
"Mu, like zen," said Jack. "It means 'a question that should be un-asked,' one for which there is no answer."
"No answer?" asked Dexter. "How can there be no answer? With science, there is always an answer?"
"What does science say about the great turtle who carries our earth on its shell?" he said. "What answer do you have for that?"
"My answer is that what you just said is complete nonsense," said Dexter.
"It is mu."
"I prefer nonsense," said Dexter. "It rolls more nicely off the tongue."
"To each their own," said Jack, and walked up to the display. "You make your mistake here."
Dexter squinted through his thick glasses.
"At… the time you fought Aku?"
"I did not travel back AFTER I fought Aku," Jack said, folding his arms over his chest. "One does night fight a losing battle. I went to before he and I had ever crossed swords. My past and I joined our swords as one, and together we defeated our enemy."
"But…" Dexter sputtered, equations and booleans and if-then statements flashing past his eyes like nightmares at three AM. "No, no, that can't be right. If that were the case there'd be two of you. Or… or the you from your future would fade away."
Jack closed his eyes and smiled.
"That is correct," Jack said. "But although his future did not exist, his atman did, his own self-hood. And a self cannot be created or destroyed, only changed…" he placed a closed fist upon his breast. "Or moved."
"He merged with you?" Dexter said, taking off his glasses. "His… I hate to use such a word, but his soul is inside of you?"
"I am everything that I am, and everything that he was," said Jack, opening his eyes and staring at Dexter with eyes that had seen far more years than their looks belied. "He became me. I am he. That me is me."
Dexter was quiet for a long time. He slipped his glasses back on and turned his back on the samurai, pressing a few keys on his wall-sized bank of computers. Jack was silent and still. In over a thousand years, he had learned how to wait. Eventually, Dexter turned around, straightened the collar of his lab coat and cleared his throat.
"I have reached another conclusion," said Dexter. He slammed his fist down onto the keyboard, and the hologram display shattered like a plate glass window in a riot. "That was even more nonsense than the first nonsense!"
Jack sighed.
"I mean, do you honestly expect me to believe in your mystical babblings about the soul?" Dexter shouted, waving his arms somewhere in Jack's general direction. "That's… even if it were true, how can I build a thought experiment around reincarnation? No, this isn't even reincarnation, it's meincarnation! That's not even a thing! And if we're going to bring religious experiences into this, then maybe… maybe you never even went to the future? All we have is your memories, it could all be in your head! I'll need to do so many more tests, we could examine you for residual chronomic radiation and…"
And Jack was already halfway up the elevator. He knew how much Dexter liked his speeches, and it would be best to just let the young man get it out of his system and hope he figured things out on his own. In any case, it was nearly time for dinner, and Dexter's mother had invited him to stay for the meal. He could hardly refuse her hospitality, or her garlic-seared tuna steaks. Dexter would come down when he was ready.
A nice bit for explaining how Samurai Jack's time travel worked.