Dr. Qantas Braunstein fights some cavemen with symbols on their chests that you’d find on a TV remote control. They club her in the head and steal her helmet and phaser.

KJ and Mac are stuck downstream and then KJ gets her period.

Now you’re caught up.

---

Paper Girls, Issue #13 [April, 2017]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

Wild Child’s baby goos and gahs while Erin holds and fawns over him. “Is having a baby the most awesome thing in the world?” she asks Tiff, but mostly she asks herself. And that’s fine, because Tiff doesn’t look like she thinks it’s awesome at all.

“It is painful and terrifying,” Wild Child confirms with pointedness. “Now stop talking and keep your eyes open.”

The three of them traipse across along the river. Wild Child has her bow at the ready. Tiff holds KJ’s Hockey Stick. Erin holds a baby.

“If you’re lucky, we’ll recover your friends’ corpses before nightfall.”

Nice bedside manner! What is this, the Stone Age? Be nice!

Erin calls her Wari, which I haven’t seen yet, but now I’ll appropriate it! Erin looks hurt that Wari assumes their friends are dead. Tiff vouches for Mac and KJ’s ability to withstand anything! They yelled at garbagemen a few weeks ago! They’re tough cookies!

Doesn’t matter. Cookies can crumble, sister.

Wari mentions some sort of beast or entity with a name that cannot be translated to English. “Must be too crazy for her collar to handle,” Erin explains after Tiff sneers. “Everything this girl says is crazy, Erin,” Tiff rebuts. “So why are we following her like–”

Her train of thought is CUT OFF when Wari tells them to cork it and stop moving. There’s one of those strange violet time rips floating in the air! Ahhhh, it’s been a while since we’ve seen one. It looks just as I remember them!

“That’s a magic shithole dead ahead,” Wari says, pointing an arrow right at it from point blank range. And she’s almost literally with it. It’s some other time and/or place’s toilet, just dumping it into the year 11,706 BCE. Just like everyone else. Makes her sick. BUT…

“Sometimes, precious things accidentally fall down the hole… but if I can retrieve this lost treasure, the [dream] women will give my son a long life.”

Yeah, ok lady. That’s nutty.

“Tiffany,” Erin whispers, “it’s one of those ‘foldings’. Like, the portal thing that dropped us here?”
“You don’t expect me to squeeze my ass through that one, do you?” Tiff sneers again.

Erin has a feeling. An inkling. She knows where this folding is going to lead to. She hands Wari’s baby to Tiff and starts preparing.

“What is this?” Wari asks incredulously. “If you want to find your people, we need to keep moving.”

Ha! This is part of the plan! This will help Mac and KJ. This will help them all get home.

But first…

It appears that KJ has recovered from her sudden blossoming of womanhood, and Mac has likewise (somewhat) recovered, so the two set off to continue their riverbed excursions.

“Come on, I think it landed over here,” Mac ushers KJ over a fallen tree. KJ is not having a good time with her missing shoes and her socks soaked with several different liquid substances. It doesn’t take long before Mac finds what she’s looking for.

It’s another one of dem time machine capsule dealies. It’s hanging from the trees. “Hello?!” Mac shouts up into the air, which is something I wouldn’t have the balls to do. This chick’s got balls. “Anybody in there?”

KJ’s balls are even bigger and has no interest in getting her answers from hootin’ and hollerin’. She likes to get those brass knuckles on and break some fucking teeth to get her answers. By that I mean, she climbs the tree and heads for the capsule. Even Mac is wary, and Mac is the tough guy tough girl guy! KJ got her period after all, she’s basically an invalid now. She needs her wheelchair and her medicine. Mac doesn’t get it. She’ll die of cancer before she gets Period One. End of sentence! Period!

“So, do you feel any different?” asks a very curious Mac.
“We’re stranded in prehistoric times. Of course I feel different,” KJ snaps back as she continues her tree climb. Mac is only asking because her misogynist older brother says women lose their minds while they’re on their periods. Just a lot of crazy snarling and punching holes in walls and biting big chunks out of jugular veins. Huffing and puffing and frothing at the mouth.

KJ is floored that Mac can be so goddamned fucking stupid. Was she home during sex education? Did her alcoholic step-mother rave and rant about Jesus instead of teaching her how the penis enters the vagina (I think?). Come on!

Actually, it’s kind of true. Mac’s dad didn’t let her take sex ed. The most education she ever got was from a male gym teacher who said it was unladylike to talk about their bodies. ANYWAY, what’s in the time machine? Heh heh heh hee hee. Um.

Nothing. Nobody. “Looks like there was at least one passenger,” KJ reports, inspecting an empty chair, “but he’s gonzo.”

Oh, Gonzo! I love that guy! Do you think they had the Muppet Show during the Pleistocene era?

KJ does find some boots, but she is distracted when she notices a sparkly, twinkly, pixie dust-y emanation from across the forest.

Mac wants to know what the hell KJ is talking about, but all KJ can do is point in awe and demand they both go see what all the hubbub is across the way! Maybe the faeries can grant wishes! Like a portal back to the 20th century! Or a pogo stick!

“I thought the plan was to wait here for Tiff and Erin,” Mac says with hesitation and KJ puts on the newly found boots.
“What if they’re the people who, like, released those things? To try and signal us?” KJ demands, and there’s no arguing with her anymore. “Just trust me, we have to go there right now!”

“My brother was right about everything,” a concerned Mac whispers to herself.

EXCITEMENT AWAITS!

Final Thoughts

Just kidding! I must’ve used that joke 50 times already!

Final Thoughts

OK, I’m an idiot.

Dr. Qanta Braunstein hangs upside-down from a tree with a rope tied to her ankles. The cavemen what done it. The three sleep in a cozy little triangle on the ground while Qanta slowly regains some of that precious, precious consciousness. In the center of the three is one of those violet foldings I’ve been hearing so much about lately!

“oh. oh, God” Qanta mumbles. She activates her Captain’s Log and attempts to record an unencrypted message. It won’t let her. She asks it nicely (read: meanly) to override and she starts recording. “To whom it may concern, this is Dr. Qanta Braunstein, and in the year 2055, I will attempt to pierce the fourth dimension and–”

BORING! BOOOORRING!

Oh wait. No it isn’t. It’s actually quite interesting! But she says a lot of stuff and I’m not gonna write it all out. This attempt to pierce the fourth dimension should never be attempted, as it turns out. So somebody please stop her.

The problem was, and it was a BIG problem, that the indigenous people were around the area when Dr. Quantum landed. That wasn’t supposed to happen! They were all supposed to be at Stone Age Burger King at the time so that she could slink around unnoticed. But nooOOOooOoooOOO. And not only that, but these cavemen already had some future shit with them, and that ain’t good.

Qanta stops talking once one of the cave-type men wakes up and shouts some nonsense at her. “ERCHATA! Erchata nu rooni.”

I think that might mean “I wanna play some Xbox.”

Now, Qanta understands the whole “whatever happened, happened” aspect of time travel. She pleads for someone, anyone who can hear her message, to stop her. BUT, of course, since she’s already here in the past then no one stopped her!

Caveman #1 gets up in her face.

Caveman #2 wakes up and approaches. Qanta begs them not to hurt her, but they’re not interested right now in the likes of her. They both grunt at each other about the shimmering folding right in front of them. The one wearing her space helmet picks up a little disc, which immediately starts translating his grunts into English.

“Where…is…our…son?”

Yeah, duh, these three not-wise men impregnated our Wild Child. Well, one of them did, obviously. OR PERHAPS ALL THREE?! The past was crazy and biblical!

Son is crying loudly. Loud enough to hear across the whole dang forest, so I don’t know what the problem is.

“The longer we stay in this place, the more likely we are to encounter the three men or the untranslatable.” Wild Child says, bow and arrow still trained on the folding floating in front of them. Like she’s expecting Gary Busey to pop out at any second and start gnawing at their legs.

Erin is writing a message on KJ’s hockey stick. “Wari, the people on the other side of that shithole aren’t magic… they’re just us.”

The portal leads to an abandoned mall in 2016. We all know what she writes on the hockey stick, and it obviously only makes sense to write that because that’s what she saw written on the hockey stick in the first place! There need to be more of these mind-bending time travel loops going forward. I get off on that stuff!

“So, this means you wrote that stuff on KJ’s field hockey stick all along?” Tiff asks, staying nice and caught up with the situation. And while Erin isn’t entirely sure, the fact of the matter is that their future/past selves will never get to the Fourth Folding if someone doesn’t tell them to not trust Erin! And who better than Erin to tell the Erins not to trust Erin?

Yeah. You got it.

Again, let’s see if Mac and KJ are all right. Doesn’t that sound like a goddamned cunting plan? Let’s do that before we start wagging sticks through portals. And Erin, ever the level-head, notices the portal slowly closing and doesn’t want to miss her chance.

Junior is crying. Tiff thinks he’s hungry. Erin says he’s gassy. Erin’s right. Tiff is impressed and wonders if Erin is depressed that her future doesn’t involve a baby or, like, a life. She isn’t. This wasn’t worth writing about, I suppose. Tiff doesn’t really want kids either. Wari thinks they’re both nuts! Have some kids! Your lineage is important! Someday she’ll have to let go of that bow and arrow, and maybe she’ll pass it on to her kid in about 20 years and he can start aiming at the portal instead until his kid is old enough to aim at the portal. And so on.

Hmmm… let’s see if Mac and KJ are any closer to figuring out the time capsule / faerie dust situation.

Sounds like a no to me! KJ admits that she stuffed a handkerchief up there, and Mac tells her that she’s even weirder than Erin. And she’s pretty weird. She wants to wave hockey sticks through violet holes in the air.

They eventually show up to the area of the forest from which the pixie dust was floating in the air. The dust is coming out of those flowers that look like cones. I don’t know what they’re called! Do I look like a Flower Man to you? Yes? Yes.

The flowers are connected to a strange upside-down pyramid hovering within a foot off the ground. I shit you not. It doesn’t do justice describing it. Buy the comic book!

KJ is positively entranced by the weird floating thingamabob, She’s drawn closer and attempts to touch the flower stem attached to the pyramidy goodness, and then her eyeball pupils turn into triangles! She starts seeing visions of the future! A bloody Qanta telling her to leave! Tiff screaming “NOOO!” in a heavy gust of wind. Erin looking unconscious while that old man with the t-shirts aims a gun at something! Mac looking sad and finishing a thought with “…then I guess we do.”

Then, in the vision, they kiss. Who didn’t see that one coming? They appear to be far into the future when the making out happens!

KJ snaps out of it. She looks dazed and or confused!

“What is that thing?” Mac asks.

“I don’t know,” KJ answers with vague numbness, “but whatever you do… don’t fucking touch it.”

Final Thoughts

Hoo boy! Just when you thought you were getting a thread of the story wrapped up, it splits into many more threads! I wish I was a twelve-year-old lesbian kissing girls. Sounds fun.

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