#dr. python

There are a lot of weird places in the world. There are talking jungles and upside down plains where the rain falls upwards. There are psychedelic tundras and digital rain forests and that one island that’s completely cut off from civilization where all the seagulls constantly sing songs about cool guys not looking at explosions and throwing things on the ground and being way too excited about boats. But some of the weirdest places in our universe are the places that sometimes aren’t even in our universe!

Transdimensional cities are locales that phase in and out of any given dimension. One second they’ll be there and the next they’re shimmering out of existence (ok they still exist but now they’re in a pocket dimension that can’t be reached by anybody). If you’ve even seen one you know how trippy of an experience that can be. The word “mirage” actually comes from the name of one of these cities that fritzes in and out of the Sahara Desert every so often, confusing travelers. The supernatural properties of the vast majority of transdimensional cities are magic-based. Some monks decided they’d get more meditation done if they didn’t have to deal with the rest of the world except for for one week every fifteen years. Or some rogue mage folded an entire city into a pocket dimension in order to practice his evil magic in private, and on dozens of unwilling participants. Recently scientists have made a few forays into trying to replicate the abilities of these cities with varying results. At best they’ve been able to warp individual buildings like smoothie stores or Halloween themed restaurants (Boo Burger was sorely in need of this transdimensional upgrade, now instead of offending people all year long, they can just blip out of this dimension whenever it isn’t October) but entire cities have proven to be a bit more tricky. If you would like your city to be considered for an experiment in dimension shifting enter our sweepstakes here! 

As far as you need to be concerned with these cities, remember, cities that only enter this plane of existence very briefly every so often might be very appealing to a variety of types of people. Supervillains, for example, might appreciate the downtime from being on the run or having their evil schemes foiled by a kid with a magic backpack that can fit more rocket launchers in it than should be physically possible. (Here’s to you Ricky Rockets, keep doling out your hilariously disproportionate brand of child vigilante justice!) In days past, superheroes were forced to assume that every transdimensional was home to dozens of supervillains who were hiding out. Plus, due to the transient nature of transdimensional cities, they had to assume that the city could blink out of this reality at a moment’s notice. This resulted in superheroes storming transdimensional cities and beating up as many people as possible and throwing them in prison while there was still time. That caused everybody a lot of headaches (both literal and metaphorical). It turns out that it is erroneous to assume that most people in any given transdimensional city are supervillains. Lucky for you the citizens of the various cities have worked out a better system!

These days transdimensional cities have pretty heterogeneous populations. It took a couple of years of bussing people between cities but now everything is pretty well organized. There are cities specific for every kind of person who might want to hop out of reality for a while. We’ve got monks who want seclusion. Supervillains who need to keep out of the public eye. Deadbeat dads, people with overdue library books, people who’ve unintentionally killed people, people who don’t want to be spoiled on shows they’ve only just started binge-watching, procrastinators. If you don’t want to be a part of society all the time you can bet that there’s a transdimensional city somewhere out there for you! So now all you need to do is figure out where the supervillain-filled ones are going to pop up next so you can be there to rain justice down on their bald, horned, helmeted, and on-fire heads!

Determining where and when a transdimensional city will next appear can be a tricky thing. Most cities will appear in the same place every time, and most of those are on a set cycle, so all that needs to be done there is a good old-fashioned, potentially decades long, stake-out. Grab a buddy, some donuts, and a big ol’ book of Mad Libs and settle in for a good long wait. But sometimes the cities don’t show up in the same place (more on that later) or it disappears and reappears at infrequent intervals. In which case you’d be wise to keep a few tracking devices on you and throwing one into every city that randomly pops up in your path. Short of that, I’m sure you can get some brains together (from the brain store) and devise some sort of mathematical algorithm to calculate the exact where and when for any given transdimensional city. Unfortunately you’ll have to do your own work for this one. We here at Howtohero steadfastly refuse to do any math. As a rule.

When transdimensional cities’ locations are randomized, or if they always appear in the same place but it’s been a while since the last time this city appeared and since then some foolish people built a lame stationary city in its spot, things go sideways real fast. That’s how you have situations where cities become superimposed on other cities or stuff starts getting spliced together. Gross. Luckily, using some regular off-the-rack-store-bought magicks these problems can be easily avoided! Sort of! And as we all know, sort of avoiding a problem is the best way to deal with a problem! See, using magic you can actually cause it so that when a city magically vops into a location that already contains something (a city, a town, a village, a cat) the thing that was there before actually switches places with the transdimensional city. Turning the transdimensional city into a regular one and vice versa. (I bet you guys didn’t expect to learn the secret origins of Surprise Cat! the cat that appears when you least expect it in this post but there you have it!) Sure, now there’s a regular city warping in and out of our dimension and that’s not really what those people signed up for but all transdimensional cities were normal cities at some point! (Except for Nexusville, which was built from a one-of-a-kind transdimensional brick over a period of three hundred years by different construction workers and engineers who happened to come across the partially completed city during that time.) 

If you’re a guy who is from a transdimensional city and is deciding to use your first trip to this dimension to fight our criminals, then first of all, welcome to the neighborhood. Second of all, where do you get off punk! These are our criminals! You come in here all high and mighty and judgemental from your crime-free teleporting city (remember all the transdimensional criminals live in their own, separate city) of ninjas and think you can fight our crime? Get over yourself! Also, be warned, lots of times people like you tend to lose track of the time. I guess time flows differently in between dimensions. But you might find that when you get tired of beating up our muggers in our alleys that your city might be gone. Now, it important that you don’t misunderstand what’s happened. Your city has simply transported itself beyond the vail of what we can perceive in this dimension (as cities are wont to do). It hasn’t been destroyed. It hasn’t been stolen. Just wait ten to fifteen years and it’ll be back. No harm no foul. What you need to do now, is not go on a roaring rampage of revenge where you punch everybody in sight. Also don’t blame us for your city going away. We didn’t do that. Have you read the rest of this post? We clearly have like zero to two ideas about what’s going on with these cities. Don’t punch anybody. If you really feel like you have to punch somebody you can punch some more of our criminals but your city and all your loved ones aren’t gone forever. Write that down.

The universe is quite vast. Science records it as being hella vast (trust us on this one, we’ve seen charts). But, as it transpires, one hella vast universe is but a single cog in the vast tapestry of existence. (Wait, what, tapestries aren’t made of cogs. That’s a piss poor metaphor. Hey that rhymed!) You see, our universe (and your universe, perhaps you and I live in different ones) are part of a larger, vaster, multiverse. That means that there are a possibly infinite number of universes and each of them is unique with its own characteristics and rules (except for the ones that are just copies of other ones of course). 

It would be impossible for us to cover and discuss every single possible alternate Earth or universe that you might encounter, so we’re not even going to try (but if you came her looking for vacation recommendations, might I suggest going to Universe 3.789 Epsilon Qwerty {the name of this universe will obviously vary depending on how your universe chooses to name other universes} everything in that universe is ice cream and it is delicious. Just make sure you don’t eat anybody. And if you do accidentally eat someone don’t mention my name). What we will do however, is lay out some situations in which you might encounter another universe and give you the usual tips and tricks for dealing with them.

Many alternate dimensions will have an alternate version of you and everyone else around you. Some universes have doppelgangers of everyone from a different universe, which can be very disorienting for interdimensional travelers since many of these doppelgangers just resemble their alternate universe counterparts physically, while their personalities and personal histories can be completely different (for example there are several universes where I write an educational blog for supervillains and some where I write a blog on creative ways to stack and store cans of soup and some where I am Power Jones, the man with one million powers, defender of the galaxy, lover of tree nuts). Other universes however only feature doppelgangers of major individuals. Which can be very humbling. Imagine if you travelled to another dimension (suppose you had a three-day weekend or something) and discovered that versions of all your super-buddies existed there but there was no version of you. That would be terrible. Like the universe really doesn’t think you’re important at all. You saved your world from the menace of an evil disembodied mustache (named Megalexhar Fizzleton XVII for those of you keeping track of these characters) yet apparently that’s not enough to score you an alternate dimension counterpart. Rough. 

The first thing you should do when you travel to another universe is determine what the deal with your doppelganger is. Do you have one? Are they well liked? Is their life better than yours? Are they a superhero too? Are they a villain? Is their costume cooler than yours? And so on and so forth. Once you get a read on how your doppelganger is viewed you can decide whether or not you want to temporarily steal their identity, seek them out and become multiversial pals, permanently steal their identity, or disguise yourself as someone else. What you decide to do about your doppelganger might be dependent on why you traveled to another dimension in the first place. If you’re going just because you recently discovered the existence of the multiverse and so obviously you’re gonna want to check that out, then you might try to disguise yourself so you can observe the alternate dimension without alerting anybody to your presence of existence. If you’re going because you’re in pursuit of a hostile supervillain (say the Rambunctious-Red-Light-Runner steps up his game and becomes the Rambunctious-Reality-Light-Runner) then you’re going to want to get in touch with that universe’s super-community somehow whether that includes your doppelganger or not. If you’re going in a scientific capacity, to study other dimensions or the alternate physics other dimensions may possess, or as an anthropologist, to study the cultures of other universes, then you might want to make your presence known so you can gain access to certain people and things that you might want to study. 

I would recommend making friends from as many alternate universes as possible. For one, it’s always good to have more super-allies. For two, you can finally create an all-you a cappela group like you’ve always dreamed. For threes, if your nemesis captures all your friends in an effort to draw you out so they can kill you, you can just call in some pals from other universes that they didn’t even know about! For four (!!!!!), sometimes bad guys want to go above and beyond the normal call of evil and try to either take over or destroy the entire multiverse, uch, so extra. When this happens the heroes of the multiverse need to band together to kick some evil butt. It’s awesome. And it’ll be a lot more awesome if you’ve already got some friends from other universes that you can contact to get the ball rolling on this multiversial alliance. For your reading pleasure, and to prove that we are not bound by things that we say, even within the same post, here is a list of some common alternate dimensions that you’ll no doubt encounter during your travels through the multiverse.

The one where everyone’s allegiances are switched: Evil Hatmans, good Democratically Elected President Murder Kills (don’t be fooled by the name, he’s a huge softy), competent Professor Paleontologists. Maybe other things will be opposites too. Cold is hot and hot is also hot because the universe doesn’t want you thinking that you know it’s next move.  Topsy-turvy universes can be quite disorienting to the untrained dimensional traveler, proceed with caution.

The Golden Age: The adventures that were so feel good happy and idealistic that we had to shunt them into an alternate universe where everyone fights for truth and justice and everyone’s always smiling. A good place to spend a vacation.

The one that is a post-apocalyptic wasteland: Humanity has been wiped out. Except for the humans who haven’t been wiped out. But they all hate each other. And they’re plotting to wipe each other out. Because some things never change. Watch this space.

The one where all your friends are cute animals: Ultiman is a caribou, Dr. Python is a wombat (don’t ask why he’s not a python, he doesn’t have a good answer and he gets all frustrated). They’re roommates. Hilarity ensues. And it’s even funnier because they’re animals!

The one with thinly veiled copies of characters from a rival corporation: We have no rivals so we can’t give any practical examples of this. 

The period pieces: These universes have never left a certain time period. There are Wild West Universes, Russian Revolution Universes, Gangnam Style Craze Universes. If you’re the kind of person who can’t let go of a certain era, there’s a universe out there for you.

The universe where a monkey typed out the complete works of Shakespeare: If there an infinite number of universes that means there are an infinite number of monkeys and that means there are an infinite number of universes where a monkey somehow conned his way into getting access to a typewriter and that means that there are an infinite number of monkeys who have typed out the complete works of Shakespeare. (Also an infinite number of monkeys who have typed out the complete works of this blog {also an infinite number of monkeys who have typed out the complete works of this blog except these monkeys are so clever that every single word feeds into some larger, brilliant pun. I aspire to one day find the key to being that talented.})

The one where everyone is a talking animal except they don’t resemble any of your friends: These talking animals are completely original characters like Bunderclap, the thunder bunny and the Hurtle, the turtle with a temper.

The universe where someone or something kills everyone: Well gosh that sounds pretty frikkin’ dark. Don’t go there. Gosh, everybody gets killed? Worst alternate universe ever.

The one that is the future: Maybe it’s your real future, maybe it’s just a possible future. I recommend hopping into a few of these types of universes. Find the future that’s right for you.

The one that’s exactly like yours: Or at least it was until this one thing happened. Now everything’s different! Even if those things shouldn’t have been affected by the thing that originally changed by any stretch of the imagination.