Trudi hadn’t seen Bob Worth and Pandora Montague, since they had told her that they were moving to Australia to live near Pandora’s daughter, who was planning to have grandchildren. That had been four years ago. She thought back to the night she had conclusively eaten Murray Jensen for the last time, after lining her stomach with a strawberry pavlova in the preceding minutes. That had been fifteen years ago. She had replayed their final gobbling adventure in her mind many times, along with her memories of all the times that she had eaten him in other timelines. On this particular day, thirty-nine year old Trudi was concentrating on Murray’s desperate last minute suggestion that, after several decades, she might consider time travelling back to regain her youth, thereby reversing her otherwise final consumption of Murray in the process. She had made it very clear to him that, even if she ever returned to the past, she would not go back further than the morning after her final consumption of Murray. She still felt a strong sense of satisfaction at having helped him to come to terms with the fact that he was about to be eaten by her, with no possibility of reversing his fate at any point down the track.

As far as Murray’s motivations were concerned, she still had no intention of changing her decision. She would never return to the time when he was 14 and she was 24 for the purpose of giving him a chance to go on uneaten.

She had no awareness of the chronal immunity she had acquired from repeatedly eating Murray (after his initial trip through the period affected by the Ring of Reversal and Colleen Balfour’s shrinking devices). So she was both blissfully unaware that time travelling through a certain period of time had a side of effect of shrinking, and equally unaware that the problem didn’t affect her.

Through all the timelines she’d lived, she had retained the memory of the warnings Murray had given her about the portal, as well as the memory of the timeline in which Murray had persuaded her to take a short journey through the portal, in an attempt to get her to see his point of view about being eaten by her. No matter how many times she made journeys back in time, she would always be safe from both unwittingly walking into the giant widow’s clutches and from being shrunken by time travelling.

Since she had now lived through this timeline’s period of her being aged 37 to 39, forewarned about the portal, she had never even taken the forest walk that had led to her discovery of it. It would no longer have been possible to have met 27 year old Murray on the forest path at her own age of 37, because her 24 year old self had eaten his 14 year old self early in this latest timeline, a timeline which she had allowed to continue for 15 more years.