The Suwabe Family, and a Treatise on The Incorrigible Troublemaking of Multiversal Constants
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

SHIZUKA SUWABE
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Where do you begin with an anomalous spacetime refraction? If were were discussing a single thread of
time, the correct answer might be "from the start." And if you were rather focused on a physical object,
you might instead say "from the bottom." But this thing is a little trickier. To make my best attempt
at untangling it all, how about we begin at the center?

Once, long ago, someday to be, or perhaps sooner or later, there will was be a girl named Shizuka.
She will have red hair, as she shall in the future and did prior to this. The skin shall at any given
point remain pale and freckled. And until they are not, or never were, blue eyes shall remain a constant.
She is in other ways not unlike your average girl, with average interests. Likely concerned with mundane
things, whatever passes for mundane in this paradoxical existence of future-past-present. What's
important is that she is the one at the center. Time, space, gravity, they all extend in directions
as a given, be they ones we can comprehend or otherwise. But their starting point is, almost certainly,
not supposed to be a girl.

This Shizuka, which we will call Shizuka Prime for simplicity's sake, is unique. Unique in that for all
the myriad forms of creation, the uncountable threads of time laced across cosmos, she is the least
unique thing to ever exist. Though this humble cataloguer couldn't guess at what creation-cracking event
might have spurred this circumstance, it is certain that Shizuka did something of colossal consequence.
Some kind of order-upending action of such magnitude we can no longer envision what the nature of things
might have been prior. In the course of this calamity, "Shizuka" - not herself, but the idea of her -
became a point of refraction for reality.

If we were to view time as a bundle of threads running parallel to one another, we could follow those
threads backward in time. And no matter which thread you chose to follow, they would all return to
the selfsame place: a knot. Every thread, no matter how far apart they may otherwise drift, comes to
and departs from this knot somewhere along its length. As you might surmise, this knot is Shizuka Prime.
The Refraction, as you might otherwise refer to it, casts its colors upon each thread in the form of
images of this original individual. Each timeline possesses its own Shizuka. Some details may change,
of course. Her name is perhaps different. Her family, her lifestyle, the people surrounding her, they
are all subject to the whims of causality; but Shizuka shall always be Shizuka.

In this timeline which we have come to view together, Shizuka is a student at /kkg/ High School. She
has a mother, a sister, a girlfriend, a passion, and a looming disaster which we will of course all come
to in time. But these are fluid things. If we were to, say, hop a thread over, we might find that she's
a businesswoman who never met her girlfriend, and married her college professor. Maybe we dare a hop
further, and she is a professional basketball player who never had time to fall in love, and never even
had a sister. Further and further we stray, as the fluid details stir about. Maybe if we drift far enough
we could meet Shizuka Kazan, the Olympus Godknight Hephaeston, Magical Girl and Mistress of Forging Flame.
A far cry from where we started, but the constant is firm. Shizuka is still Shizuka.

I have pondered many and more reasons why and how this came to be, and what pins her to the cosmic fabric
so tightly. I have asked myself "What could constitute her that binds her so strongly to existence?"
And after many years, I can firmly tell you that I have not even the slightest clue. All I can tell you
is this: in every thread I've touched, every refracted image of the original I have seen, one seemingly
superfluous detail remains fixed: the earring she wears is exactly the same.