Christmas Calendar Conundrum Cracked! (short story)

Christmas Calendar Conundrum Cracked! was a 2024 short story, published on the website for The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids as the first in the 2024 Copper-Colored Cupids Calendar (so published on the first of December). Written by Aristide Twain, Lupan Evezan, and Thien Valdram, the story was issue 2135 of a fictional newspaper called the 'Cupid Courier'. Illustrations within the newspaper were by Aristide Twain.

Summary

Horoscopes! Poetry! Dinosaurs!

All of these and more may be found in this very special December issue of the “Cupid Courier” (the Cupid Homeworld’s one and only newspaper), which will also reveal, at long last, the truth about the 2023 Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids Advent Calendar that never was.

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Plot

CHRISTMAS CALENDAR CONUNDRUM CRACKED!

The headline story, 'CHRISTMAS CALENDAR CONUNDRUM CRACKED!', explained the mystery behind the missing 2023 Copper-Colored Cupids Calendar, and it's relation to The Book of the Snowstorm. Jenny Everywhere of the 925th Universe explained that the weight of the knowledge from the 2023 Calendar stories opened a crack through which the stories leaked into other universes, and then "people took credit for it, made it out to be fiction. That does tend to happen. Or maybe the local dimensional antibodies created authors to patch the gap in coherence after most of the Rifts healed over." This article was written by Journalist-649.

NOSTRADAMUS’S BACKWARDS HOROSCOPES

The next section of the issue of this paper was was a set of horoscopes by the Cupid Homeworld's "backwards prophet", Nostradamus-066, which predicted things that had already happened based on star sign.

TIRION & ROSANNA: WHERE ARE THEY NOW?

This article by Freelancer-672 described what happened to Rosanna Marlow and Tirion following their adventure together as recorded in 'The Dinosaur in the Snow', one of the short stories of real events recorded in 'The Book of the Snowstorm'. Once the book became known to the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, some copies were sourced and distributed, with 'The Dinosaur in the Snow' garnering much interest. The article explains that Ms. Marlow went on to become a paleobiologist and a science fiction writer, while Tirion's actions were much more difficult to track.

POETRY CORNER

Critic-833 provides a back-and-forth set of seven poems, each one a response to the last. The back-and-forth is between Versifier-693, who wrote the first poem, 'An Ode to Clouds', and Bard-237, who wrote such poems as 'A Response to an Ode to Clouds'. Critic-833 notes that the final poem, 'An Ode to Clouds, Part II', won the Copper-Colored Composition Award for Excellent Poetic Achievement by the Department of Poetry. This poem will be included in an upcoming anthology of Versifier-693's best works, and Bard-237's next response is "exepcted to be a hotly-anticipated event for the Cupid Theater".