“It’s not that I don’t believe you. I can tell when someone’s being sincere, and I don’t think you’re deluded or mentally unbalanced or anything like that. What I find so engaging about your story is the plurality of different concepts involved in it, all of which would have been considered as mere science fiction until I just heard your story. Another land, where a giantess lives, is amazing enough. Yet consciousness time travel, and warnings of the future which saved your life by changing that future... To have all that worked into one phenomenal experience is what staggers me the most.”

“It’s still doing quite a number on my mind, I can tell you,” said Trudi, “He called what happened to me the first time around ‘a previous timeline’, and said that by merely doing that mental time travel act, before he even got around to warning me, he’d created a second timeline. Doesn’t it unglue your head to know that we’re living in a second timeline now? ... I mean, it affects everything we do.”

“So where is this knight in shining armour who saved you from a fate you’d already faced in that previous timeline you guys called it? It’s no wonder you can’t get him out of your thoughts. You’ve had the look of an obsessed lady since I first met you at Bob’s dinner party. What could possibly be keeping you and this guy apart?” asked Pandora.

“It was my doing, really. You’ll think I’m terrible,” said Trudi.

“Trust me, I’ll think you’re my friend. I’m in my fourth relationship, with a teenage daughter to my third who has to understand that,” said Pandora.

“From the moment he approached me after he got his mind back to my time, I had one burning desire in my head, probably even in my heart as well, to have him small enough that I could gobble him up. Can you believe that, after he saved my second timeline future self from living out the same result. I almost feel terrible, but I can’t think that way. The desire is so strong, and I can’t deny it,” said Trudi.

“You’re beating yourself up, because you’re trying to take responsibility for feelings beyond your control,” said Pandora.

“He obviously didn’t want to face a fate like that, even if I could have gone ahead and done it with him. He called me on the phone at my old Irish home twice in the weeks leading up to my moving over here to look for new roles. We talked about it. We both tried to find some sort of compromise between his more traditional romantic yearnings and my highly culinary crush on him. In the end, I had to tell him that I couldn’t see any way for us to make it work between us, as we both wanted different things from eachother, and both wanted them so strongly that we would only go on frustrating eachother. I asked him not to call me again, and moved over here, and had my Irish phone disconnected,” said Trudi.