Hahaha, there's Anja being awesome again. What a bombshell, too.

Katerina "Time travel. Which is impossible, by the way" Donlan. Always being surprised

Gotta love Anja (is that how her name is spelled? Ah, whatever, I'm dyslexic) she's the best!!

Anja being unsurprised is somewhat unsurprising.

aHAHAHA

Oh, I cannot wait to see how literally everybody has been constantly time traveling this whole, er, time.

This would have been a great time for a spit-take, but noooo, somebody couldn't be bothered drawing glasses of iced tea in a few hands...

"you throw yourself at the future and miss"

Grandfather > bootstrap

All the new lines on Anja's face make me wonder how she'd look with a nose hook in.

oh yeah i do that all the time

I thought she was taking that a little too well

Oh ok thanks very simple 😊

Unexpected!

There are too many gimmick posters in here.

Not difficult. Now you’re telling me, mom!

You don’t say! 🤔

LOL! I LOLLED for real. "we're not cross Katerina, just a little disappointed. After all we've sacrificed to place you here, we hoped you would push yourself a little. There's that opioid crisis, quantum computers... global w...." "Maybe your friends here are holding you back?"

Remember, innocent until proven guilty, as long as you're the right race and gender.

This of course means that Jones could simply be a robot... FROM THE FUTURE!!!! Man the warranty on her must be amazing.

"Yes, it started one day when I was trying to hang a clock in the toilet!" *Back to the Future* theme starts playing in the background.

Uh... what?

Of course it’s not very difficult! All you need is a DeLorean with a flux capacitor and some plutonium or a slightly used TARDIS or a wormhole threaded through a solar flare at the right moment or a starship at high warp around a star/black hole or . . .

So, the past can be changed. That's good. How much has ALREADY been changed?

Wat?

Didn't see that coming

Just gotta go the long way.....

"... impossible, huh? Nobody ever told me and it's really a child's play ..."

First!

Well, time travel going forward in time isn't very difficult, provided you travel at a steady pace and don't try to jump around...

Kat is literally speaking for all of us 😮 Anja again with insightful but disturbing revelations. Could this be the source of "suddenly we've been making cookies for hours" in "Microsat 5"? 🍪 Lol duh it's easy, the Star Trek guys do it by accident like every few weeks. 💫

So good...

If the river is endlessly pushing you forward, simply step out of the river.

yeah, we travel forward _all the time_ at a constant 1 rate

Huh!

That is good to know! May I borrow the time machine so I can finish all my work by Friday?

WaitWHAT?!? Way to drop THAT Bombshell, Mom!

And so, another cycle closes, where Kat's mom teaches Kat how time travel works so Kat can build a time-travelling robot that leads Kat's mom-to-be to the workshop which Kat eventually uses to build said robot...

...Explain please.

Shocking!

Oh wow. First Tony Stark, now Kat's mom. Kinda makes you think it could be all a sign that we might get the real thing soon...

Of course not. I time travel nearly every night.

Anja is so chill. I love this woman.

I think that last panel is all of us.

Hahahahaha yes Anja!

"Time travel isn't difficult" ... now THIS, I gotta hear!

Hahaha! I wonder which direction Anya expected Kat's work to go then...

So much angst for nothing? Is talk to parent the ultimate solution for every problem? Find out on the next page!

I knew it! Time and space are linked, and Anja can already teleport things (computer-aided, though it runs off her own etheric ability), so I figured she'd be able to make sense of it.

It may really not be that difficult, but some of these paradoxes would leave one person unborn and another dead.

yea, my mom told me that too

Well, that was unexpected. :)

Not very difficult you know!

anticlimactic motherly response :D

Well, yes, you see, all you have to do is bribe the eldritch entity that just so happens to live in a nearby forest. If the bribe is accepted you go to your desired temporal coordinates. Should the bribe be denied, your destination is as random as said eldritch entity.

Oh, good

Oh, ok then.

tom please

THIS IS BAD NEWS FOR REALITY

Do tell!

WELL IN THAT CASE

Oh that statement could lead to all kinds of nonsense.

Sure, time travel is easy, we do it everyday at the rate of 1 second per second. ...oh, backwards through time, that's a bit harder.

Excuse me?

Also... Feel patronised much there, Kat??

It is actually a hobby for children! No harm will ever come from it.

Easy peasy! You just need to break a few laws of physics and causality!

Timetravel is easy. As long as you keep it at a steady 60 minutes per hour.

This is why you always talk to mom. Mom knows.

In hindsight I probably should have expected this. After all, reality bending stuff happens on the regular in Gunnerkrigg Court.

what?Why?WHEN?!

Oh! Well that's okay, then!

Oh yeah it's easy! I travel through time all the time. You could say it's my default state of being!

Supportive mom is supportive. I wonder how dad would feel 🤣

I mean everyone travels forward automatically anyway so all you need to learn is the temporal version of the moonwalk and there you go!

Yep. It's quite simple really. It's just a jump to the l... oh, wait, that's something else, never mind!

"It's simple, Katerina. My hair used to be red, and your father used to be a centurion."

Time travel is super easy. Barely even an inconvenience.

It's nothing special, really.

... there is a "but" coming, isn't it?

Uh... wha?

Oh great, she's the Doctor.

I miss Renard

WHAT THE SWUR

She's got a point. I've been travelling forward in time since I was born.

Well, I wasn't expecting that.

... huh. Yeah, this was not the reaction I was expecting

I love this comic! I have read from the beginning! I can't help think that maybe you are jumping the shark... and I can't wait!!!

You're telling me we spent almost an entire chapter listening to Kat worrying about how to make time travel possible, only for Ma Donlan to turn around and go "Oh its actually quite simple!" ?

Tom!

Kat is her own mother.

For whatever reason I find Anja very creepy on this page.

Neither is driving a car. Inventing a car, though, that's a different thing...

I don't know what kind of response I expected but it was definitely not "time travel isn't hard"

:D

timey-wimey = easy-peasy!

"Time travel is where babies come from, don't you know anything?"

Oh. Well if time travel isn't so hard, maybe this isn't such a huge drama after all. Whew what a relief! ...???

is not really very difficult.

What.

Man! That lady is truly something special.

Time travel is easy! It's just a jump to the left, then a step to the right ...

Surprise back at ya!

True dat. I'm doing it right now.

Yeah, Right ... Easy for You to say ...

Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?

I think sometimes I forget that Kat's mom is also a super genius too

This is sort of random, but Kat and Tony parallel each other really interestingly here. Both are largely scientific-driven, and were tormented by the thought of losing people they love (Surma and Annie.) They both went to drastic lengths to save them. But Tony refused to reach out to his friends or family for help. Even though a simple talk with his daughter could've revealed all she knew about psychopomps (and that his quest to get Surma back would probably fail.) Kat was also stressing out big time and trying to figure things out on her own. But she does heed Annie's advice and seek out help. The most substantial difference between Tony and Kat is that Kat is actually going to succeed in her endeavor to rescue the person she loves. (Oh, and probably ascend to Robot Goddesshood, judging by the look of things.)

Triple Mind-blow, the girls are stunned. That moment when your Parents get to show of.

Mom: We thought you'd just do Robots, not Time Travel. :3

So smooth.

Well now

Uh... ok.

"You only need to give the time arbiter a phone call, after all. She is charming, here is the number."

To be fair she did only put a few months into it.

Armchair philosopher? LOL

uh what

Mom's all "Eh, nbd."

Well, duh. Of course it isn't. I just do it as a hobby. One day per day, into the future...

If you thought she’d be surprised... SURPRISE! SHE ISN’T. Biggest plot twist: the person we would most expect to freak out at the big, crazy reveal... just doesn’t. Kat’s Mum is just too cool for school.

Nothing is difficult if you have a magic computer.

Hold up.

Pshhh- time travel. no biggie. I forget that Kat's mom is also etherial-sensitive, like Annie.

"Uh... wha?" So say we all...

Oh, okay then. That settles that.

"Well!" You're saying she hasn't seen 80s/90s time travel films and did essays on them?

I really want to know what her accent sound like...

Wha?

Kat: Time travel is literally impossible Mrs Donlan: The bee, of course, flies anyway, because it does not care what humans think is impossible (and also because humans were working off of the rigid physics of a bird's or airplane's wing and the concept of lift, and weren't yet accounting for the elasticity of an insect wing, using a partial spin motion, which alters the surface area necessary considerably)

And there it is.

Nah, it's really easy. We're all traveling forward in time right now! Traveling back is a nuisance, though.

ANJA BEST MOM!

Hello there! After a few weeks of binge-reading 15 years of comic archives, I finally caught up to the current page. I just wanted to say that this is SO IMPRESSIVE and SO AMAZING and I'm definitely going to keep reading. Also, this is the first and only explanation for a time paradox I've seen that actually makes sense, assuming Kat's explanation is accurate: she was so upset about losing Annie that she BROKE TIME to start the loop. (I mean, breaking time doesn't make all that much sense, but I'm sure she could find a way to do it.) But depending on what Anja says about time travel, this whole theory might go out the window. *Shrug*

anthony is gonna lose his shit when he hears about this

If time travel isn't all that difficult, then Jones can take the Annies back for a look at the dinosaurs (Chapter 40). Or is it that time *travel* is easy, but navigating *back* to your original start point is impossible.

I wonder if Tom has secretly already mastered time travel?

Uh...wha?

When Kat goes Anja is already there it seems XD XD

I am somewhat expecting Anja to give some sort of Cloudcuckoolander view on time travel. Simple, likable, inspiring, but totally unscientific.

Best possible mom development.

Wha indeed.

And this is why you ask your parents for help!

.... Kat's mom may not be panicking *in front of the girls,* but she's playing this a little too cool. Methinks there will be an Adult Conference behind closed doors. The Donlans with Tony, Eglamore, and Jones, maybe? o_O

she said the "T" words!!

Bruh, WHAT!?

I can't tell if Anja is trolling them or not... Also, I'm really curious what Anja's work was, when she had that lab. I know she and Donald built that computer, but it seemed like Anja had some regrets/sadness when she gave Kat the key. Did we hear about that and I missed it? Was it related to the older robots?

The delicate art of temporal manipulation

And here we've all been worked up over nothing. Turns out it was no big deal after all.

And to the surprise of nobody, she is not that surprised! Oh but also time travel has been done before.