Hello from the Outside

SLIPSTREAM SUMMARY

As Slipstream begins, Veronica is unable to forgive Logan for the ways in which he’s hurt her over the years. She breaks up with him when she finds out he slept with Madison in Aspen. That night, in her dad’s apartment, she drinks Nyquil to get to sleep and falls back into her own past, where she wears red satin to Sophomore Homecoming; she expresses her true self instead of pretending to be a pink princess, setting her future and relationships on a different path.

The story moves back and forth between this new-and-maybe-improved past and alternate present realities, which she creates each time she fixes a past wrong. These efforts to erase trauma strengthen her relationship with Logan, but they have other unintended consequences. For example, she rescues Lilly from Aaron, but Duncan murders him minutes later with a glass ashtray. Duncan’s subsequent incarceration turns Lilly against Veronica, and leads to V once again becoming an outcast.

Veronica bounces incorporeally between several post-Aspen realities created by her time travel choices; she possesses the body of the resident Veronica, which neither V enjoys. These timelines include Ideal Reality, where Logan becomes his best self after much of his trauma is negated; Hearst Reality, where a more bitter Logan has broken up with V and joined the Navy; Prison Reality, where Veronica is framed for Felix Toomb’s murder and goes to jail; Boat Reality, where a graduation cruise on the Kane family yacht ends in disaster; and Almost Real Reality, which is just like the canon timeline, except for the red satin homecoming visit that changed V’s future.

Over the course of the story, Veronica learns that while some events can change, some are fated. For example, certain deaths may be prevented, but Logan and Veronica always end up entwined. She also learns she has the ability to navigate the multiverse (which she calls the Slipstream) if she tries. She begins to realize that retconning her trauma has left her stranded in a world to which she can’t relate, and she starts fighting to get back to her own life, body, and choices, as well as canon Logan.

Halfway through the story, she meets Victor Lester, Logan’s supposed grandfather, who’s incarcerated in the mental asylum with Duncan. She engineers his escape, and he helps with all her Slipstream struggles, including the birth of her daughter, Leilani, who results from an unplanned college pregnancy. Eventually, Victor rescues her from Cassidy, who plans to throw her off the Coronado Bridge; he then reveals himself to be canon Logan, from a future in which physical time travel has been invented, where he and Veronica have been a couple for fifty years. He’s come back in time (along with future Veronica, who is now a doctor) to help V till she exits the Slipstream, in order to protect their own happy ending.

After a confrontation in Aspen with Ideal Logan, who has become entangled in a Madison-like situation with Carrie Bishop, Veronica comes full circle. She returns to her dad’s apartment, where she drinks Nyquil to go to sleep. As she drifts off, she realizes she no longer blames her Logan for traumatic events of the past, since he recognized his mistakes, apologized, and tried his best to make amends.

She briefly visits each reality that has figured in the story, where she witnesses the native Logan and Veronica achieving a happy ending. Then she wakes up in her own timeline, where she listens to Logan’s voicemail, drives to the Neptune Grand, and makes a speech, forgiving him. They happily reunite. Then there is a flash-forward epilogue, set 10 years later, which takes place at their wedding. Logan has just retired from the Navy, Veronica is pregnant with their son Tony, and they have a tween daughter, Leilani, who’s the result of an unplanned college pregnancy.

SHORT STORY 1

A short story between the two fics (posted as chapter 7 of my LoVe AU Fics collection) features Logan and Veronica at Disneyland with an early-twenties Leilani and a ten-year-old Tony. Leilani has just broken up with an important boyfriend for unspecified reasons, and she’s returned from a stint in the Peace Corps. Tony is an aspiring actor, much to Logan’s chagrin, but he uses his performing talents to get them a better spot in line.

REDUX SUMMARY AS OF CHAPTER 14

Redux begins with 30-year-old canon Logan taking the first flight in a Navy test pilot program, which is run by the genius Walter Schnect; this turns out to be a secret time travel experiment. Over the course of several chapters, he tries multiple times to stop his mother from jumping off the Coronado Bridge, and rescues his 12-year-old self from being shoved into an empty swimming pool by Aaron. He tells his young doppel he’s Charlie Stone.

Logan lives in Coronado, near a Naval base, along with his fiancée, Veronica (who’s going to medical school after suffering a miscarriage, and who won’t marry him till he loses his death wish), as well as his 9-year-old daughter Leilani. He has given up his dream of being an astronaut in order to take this secret assignment, so he won’t have to deploy while his family is in crisis. However, the program proves more dangerous than expected, and other pilots involved begin dying.

This narrative alternates every second chapter with that of 70-year-old Logan, who lives in an oceanfront compound called Arizona Bay, due to a climate disaster that sank southern California. He and Veronica are retired, but they’re called back for one last caper when contacted by a company called Atreon; this startup has reinvented time-travel, which was shut down after the disastrous ‘Coronado Experiment’, and they want to hire Logan as their spokesperson.

He is offered a one-shot time-travel trip as an enticement, which Veronica insists they accept. She tags along and hijacks the trip so they can escape into the multiverse--she wants Logan to perform all the actions of Victor Lester, so he can protect her younger self during Slipstream travels and ensure their happy ending. However, Veronica isn’t upfront about the challenges involved, and they find the task more complicated than it first appeared.

Every third chapter is narrated by either Leilani (who everyone calls Peanut) or Tony (who calls himself by his middle name, Dominic). Leilani is about fifty and divorced, with two young adult children; she remains nostalgic about the boy she broke up with in the short story, Bobby Enbom, who is now married to Walter Schnect’s daughter. (The Schnects also live in Arizona Bay, although there has been a breach between them and the Echolls’ community. They control and maintain the only remaining non-Atreon time-travel device, which is called The Thing in the Barn.)

Tony is in his late thirties and engaged to a powerhouse lawyer, who of course Veronica hates. He’s the Vice President in charge of sales of a green tech company which he founded, and which is currently being run into the ground by its shareholders. He and Leilani have a fraught relationship; she is assertive and dyslexic and had a difficult childhood, while he is handsome and charming and grew up after the Coronado Experiment ended.

When their parents go missing following a visit to Atreon, Leilani and Dom enlist the help of Mac and Wallace, fellow Arizona Bay residents, in order to rescue them. Leilani convinces Bobby Enbom to let her use the Thing in the Barn, and she tracks down Alonso Stanton, the bodyguard Logan and Veronica ditched when escaping into the multiverse, to serve as a pilot.

Meanwhile, Tony visits Atreon to plant a bug for Mac, and is offered the chance to travel back in time and rescue his parents himself. He accepts on the spur of the moment, but finds himself stranded in a different location than planned, where an unknown person begins to shoot at him.

SHORT STORY TWO