Welcome to Ghostliness & Nerfherders Presents: Paper Girls, Issue #9! In the previous installment, KJ is still missing! The two Erins scope out the mall looking for clues! Mac, Tiff, and Not-Erin all converge at the mall, but Not-Erin plans to whisk the two of them away 68,000 years in the future where they will be “safe”.

In the mall, the two Erins discover a field hockey stick jutting out of an alternate dimension near the ceiling of the concourse. Old Erin discovers some writing carved into the stick and pulls it out for Young Erin to read.

It says “DON’T TRUST OTHER ERIN!!!”

Open for interpretation, obviously! I wanna keep reading. Someone shut me up right now so I can continue on!

Paper Girls, Issue #9 [September, 2016]
Written by: Brian K. Vaughan

“The here and now is neither here nor now“

So here we are! Now! “You must be very confused, but I have answers to all your questions,” proclaims Not-Erin, still helping Tiff out of the maggot spooge. The giant maggot must have been in her backpack full of rations, and, like the tardigrades and god knows what else, got resized all wrong while she… “chuted through her folding”. Sounds like you have to be over eighteen for that.

Not-Erin uses her special time-travel genie powers to warp the maggot spooge out of existence. At least out of this existence. I’m sure the maggot is still spoogin’ Tiff at another point in time in this ONE timeline, as Not-Erin has confirmed. Just one. You can bounce around it all willy-nilly though. You just can’t, you know, flash sideways.

“So, you’re another time-traveler? Then…why do you look exactly like our friend?” asks Tiff. Oh hey, remember when Not-Erin said she has the answer to all of your questions? Well, she doesn’t want to answer this one. Not yet. “Right, the original Erin Tieng. Please tell me you know where to find her.”

Um, up your butt, bitch! That’s where!

Bill Cosby loves the New Coke! Don’t tell me you’ve got a beef with Bill Cosby?? In 2016??!?!

Newsflash! There are two Erins running amok in the Great Cleveland Area!

What, you didn’t know that? Looks like the unflappable doth been flapped, as they say! Not-Erin looks nervous. Here we go, buddy. Now it’s your turn to be in a fucked situation, Sport.

Back at the mall, Young Erin just discovered that she’s not supposed to trust “other” Erin… OR, MAYBE, Old Erin will soon discover that she’s not supposed to trust “other” Erin… a real sticky wicket is about to unfold here in either case!

Old Erin climbs down from the fountain ready and eager to learn what her scrappy counterpart has just discovered on the field hockey stick.

“Well, I don’t know if KJ really wrote it…” Young Erin looks sheepishly down at the stick and begins her uncanny Jeff Goldblum impression, “…but um, it says… ah…”

WELL DON’T LEAVE ME HANGIN’, SON! Let me get closer! These old-ass eyes have SEEN better days, heh heh heh!

Young Erin flips the stick over before Old Erin is able to read the words. The other side says this: “GET TO THE 4TH FOLDING NOW”. Hey, whew, that looks like an important diversion! Good call, Mr. Stick. “What do you think it means?” Young Erin asks her wise, albeit shaky and coffee-fueled older self.

The 40-Year Old Virgin pulls out her Apple doohickey and says that it just told her the ass where the stick was extracted from was the First Folding, the very same First Folding the device told her about back at home. So that means they found it! Maybe they gotta find two other foldings before they can stumble upon the Fourth Folding. Kinda like collecting crystals or gems or dungeon medallions! Hey, this sounds kinda fun!

Nah, scratch that, the Apple Brain Worm is giving Old Erin directions to the Fourth Folding as they speak at that very moment, in that very dingy mall. It’s pointing them to downtown Cleveland…and about 1000 ft above the ground. Taller than Terminal Tower. And Terminal Tower towers pretty terminally at 771ft. Young Erin already knows that, somehow.

So how are they gonna get up there, you ask? I already predict that someone’s going to hijack one of those futuristic pterodactyls! But right now, who knows? “Flying is Missy’s gimmick,” Old Erin mutters saltily.

Wow, Erin’s younger sister is a pilot! Gnarly shit!

Oh, Dad? Dad’s in hell. Where he belongs.

Old Erin doesn’t get a chance to answer. There’s a bear-sized tardigrade sneaking up behind Young Erin’s back! Eek! Eek and gross.

Young Erin hits it with the hockey stick, but it gets stuck in its…face sphincter. He chews it up into splinters. “Aww, he’s just a little guy!” coos a voice coming from the stairs. Old Erin and Young Erin turn to look…

And here we have it! A confluence of the three Erins! Not-Erin descends the stairs with Mac and Tiff in tow. “Stand aside ladies. This is about to get…” she notices the two ladies she’s going to save are indeed her and her, “…messy? God. Is that how I’m gonna look when I’m old?”

This distraction buys the tardigrade time to swipe his creepy tardigrade paw at Not-Erin, knocking her ass down the rest of the stairs. It looks like curtains for Not-Erin. Curtains, see? But Tiff leaps onto the water bear and rides it like a bull, just like this issue’s cover art!

“Tiff, what are you doing?!” shouts Mac.
“I have no idea!” shouts Tiff. She has no idea.

Tiff is keeping the beast at bay, though, and she urges the rest of them to get out while she has the flolloping tardigrade occupied.

Fuck that, though! Young Erin takes the hockey stick and stabs through the top of the beast’s head. Now, a quick Wikipedia article perusal on tardigrades will tell you that these things are literally damn near indestructible. They can survive in volcanoes, they can survive in Antarctica, they can survive deep in the ocean, and they can survive in the vacuum of space. So impalement by hockey stick is fuckin’ nothing. Still, the thing wails and rolls up in a quivering little ball.

I was made in a cup. Like soup. $130,000 cup of soup.

Young Erin, Young Patient Level-Headed Erin, Young Erin Who Doesn’t Like Cussing, looks at her similarly-aged doppelganger and asks her, and I quote, “What…what the fuck are you?”

“Get away from her, Erin,” yells Xanax Nancy over here, “she’s obviously some evil Mirror Universe version of us!”

No, there are no alternate universes. There are no alternate Earths. She’s DEFINITELY not an alien, how could you even be so dumb? No no no, she’s a CLONE. Like, a CLONE, you know? As in *fzzzz* *whrrrr* *spppllorrt* *zzzzzizizz* *POP* there’s your new clone!

And who cloned her? Her “creators”. Sort of like mom and dad without the penis inside the vagina part. Good ol’ Naldo and Uncle Heck, those do-gooders aren’t the “creators”, but they helped!

Even Mac has to hand it to these two who died to save Young Erin’s bullet-riddled life.

Young Erin, though, is skeeved out a little bit. “A clone? Why would anyone want another one of me?” she asks. If I had a nickel for every time I myself was grateful I didn’t have a creepy twin.

The answer is simple. November 1, 1988, was a very special morning. You paper delivery girls found “her family’s ship” and the rest is history. Or future. The rest is history in reverse.

Does she mean that thing that happened where the ship overloaded and sent them to the future? Mac wonders if that’s what gave her the Dreaded Cancer, but no, it did something else too. It “encrypted their DNA”, sort of. And this magical DNA encryption renders the “Old-Timers” unable to find them. And anyone who shares their genetic makeup, for that matter. Not-Erin. Old Erin. You get the gist. Do I need to spell it out for you?

The key was in one of those robot bugs that swarmed over Young Erin’s gunshot wound. When Naldo and Heck’s ship crash-landed back home with their dead corpses and whatnot, one was discovered brimming with Young Erin’s blood. Not-Erin owes her, and all the rest of the paper girls, her life. And she intends to repay that favor by helping them all to safety.

Which, as you might recall, is somewhere in the vicinity of Year 70,000. The 701st century, baby.

Aren’t you listening? Magical DNA encryption! Hockey sticks! Keep up.

Old Erin is understandably skeptical. You don’t get to age 40 living in the same town and working at the same newspaper without… … …well, at any rate, she doesn’t trust this kid as far she can throw her. And she’d probably be able to throw her pretty far if she wasn’t all squishy and flabby. Her sentiment, not mine. I think she looks tops!

So why should you listen to Not-Erin right now? Because there’s giant versions of normally tiny creatures roaming around, and that’s gonna attract attention (DNA encryption or no DNA encryption). And since we don’t have time to get that shit on the blockchain permanently, they all need to do something about it before these old-timers catch wind of something fishy going on in 2016 and pop in unwanted. They’re the Kramer to our Jerry’s apartment.

OLD ERIN’S GETTIN’ UPSET! “You keep saying ‘old-timers’ like that crap means anything. Who are these senior citizens you’re so afraid of?”

“Like most people over thirty, they’re monsters,” Not-Erin says grimly. Darn tootin’! That’s what the “don’t trust anyone over 30” said until they all turned 30 and were not to be trusted! You can trust me on that, I’m 34.

Young Erin gets douche chills and peeks over at the still-crotchety old lady with a look of mild apology.

What’s going on in downtown Cleveland right now? GOOD QUESTION, TOM, LET’S FIND OUT. A woman is flying a helicopter over the urban skyscape. The sky crackles with violet-tinged electricity. A bridge is destroyed. Some collapsed buildings emit plumes of smoke. Looks like Detroit. Eh, Cleveland’s not much better, who am I kidding?

Her boss, or, like, some guy, radios her to get out of there. “Missy, get back to the hospital, right now. We just watched the 19 Action News Chopper get…get swallowed by something.”

Missy, Erin’s sister, helicopter pilot extraordinaire, is like “what”. She requests more information as she flies into a large cloud of hot pink light. “VUR VUR VUR VUR VUR VUR VUR VUR”. That’s the hum! You remember the hum, right? When crazy time shit starts happening? Crazy time shit is happening.

“Please do not worry, all shall be done and forgotten,” says a new voice over the radio. Missy is like “what”.

The voice repeats the part about the done and the forgotten. In front and above Missy’s helicopter, a huuuuuuuuge whale of a flying craft emerges from a space-time rift in the sky. We’re talking like an ornately old-fashioned cruise ship the size of Providence, Rhode Island connected to three big blimps. We’re talking some crazy cyberpunk shit.

You best not be yankin’ our chains right now, bitch.

Back to the group where 3/5ths of them are Erins, the cloney Erin takes them all to the front of an old Radio Shack where the Fifth Folding is about to pop into existence! What about the Fourth Folding?! For that matter, where’s Two and Three? Did we skip levels? Did someone blow the Warp Whistle?

Young Erin motions desperately for her old self to put a fucking sock in it. Mac asks what she’s talking about. Old Erin spills the beans about the field hockey stick they found. “WHAT?! You got a message from KJ and you didn’t tell us?” cries Tiff with petulant indignation!

“We don’t know she wrote it,” Young Erin defends herself against the onslaught of Tiff’s fiery Arkanoid-addicted rage, “I…I didn’t know what to believe.”

Not-Erin agrees. It was probably a trap. Sorry, Tiff. The Fourth Folding is no good, kid. It’s less than jake. It would take you right into your enemies’ hands! No, no, no, the Fourth Folding ain’t the place to be. The Fifth Folding is where it’s at. It’s, like, ONE better! Plus, it takes you to the sanctuary. The future. 68,000 fucking years from now. So let’s hop to it!

“I don’t know where your companion KJ really ended up, but if you don’t come with me, I promise you’ll never live long enough to find out,” says Not-Erin with the solemnity of a bowling ball to the face. Does anyone realize how serious this is? There are hockey sticks sticking out of time-space continuum portals next to KAY-BEE TOYS, you ninnies.

“So now you’re threatening these children?” challenges Old Erin, itching for a Xanax-fueled fight.
“It was a warning. And these girls are not children,” replies Not-Erin, adding more exciting WTF layers with every new sentence that comes out of her mouth.

Tiff is starting to come around on this cockamamie business. After all, the future is where Young Erin got her bullet wound chewed up by robot bugs back to full health, right? Perhaps someone somewhere can even wipe out Mac’s cancer? Hell yeah, now Mac’s on board. Fucking cancer can kiss her Gen X ass.

You had me at “hello”.

Off they go, leaving Old Erin behind and completely beside herself. “This is insane! I’m not letting you girls leave here with some patently sinister stranger!”

This is where it comes out. With Mac and Tiff convinced, and Young Erin sheepishly following suit based on that menacing hockey stick advice, nobody is on Old Erin’s side anymore. “Even Erin thinks you’re a crazy person,” says Tiff coldly. Young Erin has tears streaming down her face. Old Erin has tears streaming down her face. As they say, you’re your own worst enemy.

“Erin Tieng, if we have learned one thing over the last twenty-eight years, it’s that most people are way better liars than us. Please, please be smart about–”

Boom. Violet light. Fifth Folding. They’ve got 87 seconds to pass through the barrier. Shake a leg.

On the other side of the open portal, you can see creepy pod communities built upon strange tree-like structures growing out of the ocean. Flying mechanical robot centipede things. It doesn’t look very sanctuary-esque to me.

Final Thoughts

Yeesh. How about we all just go back to Radio Shack and loot some walkie-talkies? All these Foldings seem like bad news. How about an Orange Julius? Eh? Eh?

Fine, go through the dang portal.