The two Heroes of Light had challenged the same Jack Noir, the one straddling The Scratch and about twenty hours of his own time, to a circumstantially simultaneous pair of duels. Circumstantial simultaneity is a concept more complex than its temporal analogue, and is valuable for examining the properties of paradox space. It is the agent responsible for the major cosmic event which pre-extinction Alternians came to refer to as The Great Undoing. The same concept rules the innumerable lesser events by which this critical moment shall be catalyzed, including the break, my employer's arrival, the detonation of a very powerful bomb, and my own death. It is an abstraction weaving together the fortunes of otherwise perfectly disparate chronologies, such as those bound to a pair of distinct sessions. It's not fully comprehensible to a mortal mind, and the length I will go to explain it to you will not extend beyond this sentence.