Christmas Calendar Conundrum Cracked! (short story)
Christmas Calendar Conundrum Cracked! was the first 2024 Copper-Colored Cupids Calendar short story published on the Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids website on 1 December 2024. 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 also by Twain.[1]
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 its relation to The Book of the Snowstorm. Jenny Everywhere of the 38167th 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 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 palaeobiologist 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 "expected to be a hotly-anticipated event for the Cupid Theater".
Characters
- Jenny Everywhere
- Journalist-649
- Nostradamus-066
- Rosanna Marlow
- Tirion
- Freelancer-672
- Versifier-693
- Bard-237
- Critic-833
Worldbuilding
- The 2023 Calendar's disappearance, attributed to an internal filing error, may have been caused by either a Chronon Flea infestation or Crocodilian interference.
Notes
- Rosanna Marlow is described as a "premiere" researcher rather than a premier one. As one of the writers of this story, Aristide Twain, is French, there could have been confusion with the French word "première", from which both words are derived.
Continuity
- Rosanna Marlow and Tirion first appeared in PROSE: The Dinosaur in the Snow [+]Loading...["The Dinosaur in the Snow (short story)"].
- Chronon Fleas, from The Crew of the Copper-Colored Cupids, were first mentioned in the DWU in PROSE: Out of the Box [+]Loading...["Out of the Box (short story)"], where Box discovers that they have eaten through a document on "the dangers Chronon Fleas presented for archives".
