The Unravel
The Unravel was the widely-accepted name for a catastrophe which impacted many universes, with aftershocks particularly damaging the Third Universe. The Unravel caused the lives of different individuals to be unwritten as well as revising the meta-history of the universe. (PROSE: A World of Pure Unimagination [+]Loading...{"page":"3-4","name":"\"AWoPU\"","1":"A World of Pure Unimagination (short story)"})
Nature
The Unravel was a phenomenon happening "everywhere", (PROSE: {{esquivalience}} [+]Loading...["Esquivalience (novel)","'\"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000010-QINU`\"'"]) impacting the whole of the Omniverse. (PROSE: A World of Pure Unimagination [+]Loading...["A World of Pure Unimagination (short story)"], {{esquivalience}} [+]Loading...["Esquivalience (novel)","'\"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000015-QINU`\"'"]) Miltontheus believed that it "wanted" something in particular, and was manipulating probability to rewrite all of history until it "got" it. As such, it took advantage of the unexpected consequences of other individuals' attempts to rewrite reality, causing them to go slightly awry in a compounding accumulation of small changes slowly building up to its desired outcomes. Miltontheus thought of it as "twisted knots of coincidence… ropes of reality tugging together", (PROSE: {{esquivalience}} [+]Loading...["Esquivalience (novel)","'\"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000018-QINU`\"'"]) evoking the Goblins' vocabulary of rope and language of luck. (TV: The Church on Ruby Road [+]Loading...["The Church on Ruby Road (TV story)"])
History
Issue 276 of The Druimport Entwister, a newspaper published in the 1960s but catering to time travellers from throughout time and space, contained many traces of the Unravel's alterations to history. (PROSE: The Druimport Entwister No. 276 [+]Loading...["The Druimport Entwister No. 276 (short story)"]) The name of the composer Maurice Ravel (PROSE: Time and Relative [+]Loading...["Time and Relative (novel)"]) was rendered as "Maurice Unravel" in his obituary, which noted that he had died on 28 December 1937 "after a brief time spent in 1987 thanks to an enthusiastic temporal tourist". Another obituary in the same issue was rendered in ciphered gibberish; the clue given to decode it was "RAVEL". Another article, concerned with the space-time anomalies within London, noted rumours that the "temporal sensitivity" exhibited by The Warwick Arms in Kensington "ever since its opening in 1828" were caused by "that fabled concept that is the Unravel"; however, the article's author, S. E. Dickinson, was sceptical. The same article mentioned a London spatial anomaly with a Dutch name. Other items in the newspaper included a report on the ongoing literary success of T. S. Lee's The Travels As Our Souls Unravel, and a cryptic warning to "beware ______". (PROSE: The Druimport Entwister No. 276 [+]Loading...["The Druimport Entwister No. 276 (short story)"])
The Unravel affected the Multiplicity, an inter-universal scholarly organisation which had departments who recorded and policed all known languages, after Miltontheus, the Head Dictionary Contributor of the Dead & Dying Languages department, hubristically tried to add a "trap word", "esquivalience", to The Book of Dutch. Due to the Multiplicity's nature, this caused the word to actually be added to the language in the real world, retroactively spreading to other languages such as English. The supposed definition — "to shirk one’s official duties deliberately" — also made its way into various individuals' behaviour. Other consequences and hints of the Unravel observed around the Multiplicity included the creation of a special disposal chute belonging to the Meta-Temporal Support department, Assistant Dictionary Contributor Gower reading T. S. Lee's The Travels As Our Souls Unravel, and — some speculated — the sheer fact of the word "unravel" itself being a contranym relative to the word "ravel". It was also observed within The Book of English (18th to 25th Century) that the order of the letters of the alphabet had been altered from "T, V, U, W", (PROSE: {{esquivalience}} [+]Loading...["Esquivalience (novel)","'\"`UNIQ--nowiki-0000002A-QINU`\"'"]) as Sarah Jane Smith had once recited backwards while under mental attack from the Mandragora Helix, (TV: The Masque of Mandragora [+]Loading...["The Masque of Mandragora (TV story)"]) to the "T, U, V, W" that most other accounts documented. (PROSE: Doctor Who and the Masque of Mandragora [+]Loading...["Doctor Who and the Masque of Mandragora (novelisation)"], etc.)
The influence of the word "esquivalience" spread to the lives of 21st century humans Cory Maythers and Shawn Doltmann, who wound up meeting and falling deeply in love simply because Shawn engaged in "esquivalience" himself to attend a movie screening where he first bumped into Cory. More worrying, however, was its influence on Miltontheus himself, who, without realising his mistake, shirked his duty to interview a new applicant to the position of Caretaker, passing them onto the unqualified Assistant Dictionary Contributor, Gower, while muttering something about him needing to "unravel the true meaning of work". Gower hired a mysterious young individual known only as ______, who went on to accidentally erase the Belgian Dutch language from existence — along with all its speakers — when they mistakenly placed The Book of Belgian Dutch in the special disposal chute. Becoming aware of the Unravel as he studied these and other mysterious goings-on, Miltontheus then realised that ______ had actually got themself hired to gain access to the Inner Reference Room and modify The Book of the Head Dictionary Contributor of the D&DL Department to assassinate Miltontheus and take his place as head of the Department. Miltontheus waited for ______ in the Room, and tried to talk them down from making any further edits to reality, warning them about the Unravel. However, they didn't listen, and murdered Miltontheus through his book.
As they did so, a 1960s song whose lyrics seemed to relate to the Unravel played the distance: The Twist at the End, by Aubrey Waites, David Agnew, and one other who wished to stay anonymous. (PROSE: {{esquivalience}} [+]Loading...["Esquivalience (novel)","'\"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000036-QINU`\"'"]) After their battle against Maestro in 1963 London, the Fifteenth Doctor and Ruby Sunday, in a musically-altered state of reality, ended up dancing and singing to a slightly different song of similar authorship, called simply Twist at the End. The adventure also involved Maestro's supernatural music-based abilities, and the Beatles; (TV: The Devil's Chord [+]Loading...["The Devil's Chord (TV story)"]) the fate of Paul McCartney's guitar was stated in one of the books in the Multiplicity, at which ______ had previously glanced, to relate somehow to "purported musical magicks". (PROSE: {{esquivalience}} [+]Loading...["Esquivalience (novel)","'\"`UNIQ--nowiki-0000003B-QINU`\"'"])
Jenny Everywhere, aware of the fiasco that was the Unravel, shifted into the Third Universe to help mitigate the damage, despite her trepidations given the universe's reputation among multiversal hitchhikers.
She possessed the body of Achron Everywhere, her Third Universe counterpart, and travelled to a snowy planet and met a pair of stranded Pinguis — Bibendum and Puff Tremayne — whose lives had been unwritten by the Unravel. Upon their introductions, Jenny had sensed in her bones that even their names were meta-historical revisions. After gifting the duo a device that enabled them to leave the planet, Jenny herself shifted out of the universe, reflecting on her suspicion that even her native counterpart had been altered by the Unravel. (PROSE: A World of Pure Unimagination [+]Loading...{"page":"3-4","name":"\"AWoPU\"","1":"A World of Pure Unimagination (short story)"})
Legacy
While in the Plume Coteries' Library, Maritsa, a "great student" of Applied Theology, recalled the Unravel when she and Callum encountered someone who they thought might potentially be the Monochrome Auteur.
She recalled the knowledge on how the Unravel, the "old gods" and the enemies of the Sun Builders, and contrastingly the Sun Builders themselves, weren’t part of a universal binary of chaos and order, but rather they didn't fit into a coherent binary at all; just like how Auteur had no true sense of code or rules, other than the "rules of narrative" which became more binding to him the more he drew upon them. (PROSE: "Scene 16" [+]Part of The Book of the Snowstorm, Loading...{"name":"\"TBotS\"","page":"522-524","namedep":"Scene 16","1":"The Book of the Snowstorm (short story)"})
In most places affected by the Noodle Incident, the fabric of reality had already been knitted and unpicked many times ― and if the rumours were true, it had been "unravelled" too. (PROSE: Taste the Noodles of Dracula [+]Loading...["Taste the Noodles of Dracula (short story)"])
Behind the scenes
- Jamie H. Cowan was credited on the copyright page of The Book of the Snowstorm and A World of Pure Unimagination [+]Loading...["A World of Pure Unimagination (short story)"] for ownership of the Unravel, with the latter also thanking Thomas Stewart.
- In the "Thanks" section of {{esquivalience}} [+]Loading...["Esquivalience (novel)","'\"`UNIQ--nowiki-00000045-QINU`\"'"], Cowan thanked Chris McCafferty "for helping set loose all the ticking thoughts in [his] head that led to the Unravel", stating that the idea had first been conceptualised "all the way back in 2018".
External links
- The Unravel at the Jenny Everywhere Wiki
