Part 1, if you missed it. And Part 2. And Part 3. And Part 4. And Part 5. And Part 6. And Part 7. And Part 8. And Part 9. And Part 10.
Before we get to the end of Stumpy’s adventure, thank you for hanging with me and Stumpy and her cast of characters for this journey. And a special thank you to Prof. Kyle, who, as a true teacher, threw out a prompt far too tempting to resist, far too intriguing to let pass. And, of course, thank you to our dear Sticky for sharing his Stumpy, who generously took on our Stumpy as her namesake.
And now…The Conclusion of “Stumpy the Time Traveling Penguin!”
“Well?” said Stumpy. “Well? Well what?”
“We still have a little bit of a…situation,” Edgar said, his voice tinny and indistinct.
“What kind of a situation? And shouldn’t I be out of here?”
“That kind of a situation,” said Edgar. “How much do you know about the multiverse?”
“I think you know the answer to that,” Terry said mildly, mouth still full of an eighth of an acre of underbrush.
“Let me put it this way,” Edgar’s tone was careful, “you fixed ONE timeline. ONE timeline has gone back to the way it should be.”
“Right.” Stumpy’s eyes narrowed as she waited for the “but.”
Stumpy could hear Edgar take a huge breath in, disembodied as he was, and then the words all came out in a rush.
“The human race is saved, yay, good for them, and Aunty Ida will be eating well tonight, so, nice work, but the thing is the timeline you’re currently in doesn’t, um, actually, well, um, officially exist.”
Stumpy looked up at Terry.
“I told you it was weird,” Terry said, still chewing, debris scattering.
Looking around her, at the enormous, odd creatures, at the sky with its mix of languid clouds and sun, at the tiny scratches and scrabbles under huge leaves and almost-flowers, Stumpy felt her brain rebel. “This isn’t real?”
“Oh, it’s real,” Aunty Ida’s voice cut in through Edgar’s measured silence. “It simply doesn’t exist.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Yes, I’d expect so,” said Aunty Ida. “Let me rip off the adhesive bandage.” Her voice muffled slightly, as though she put a hand over a microphone, “that’s a good one, Dot, write that one down.” And then she was back.
“You’re in what we call a ‘stub’ universe, Stumpy. A branch that ends.”
“Ends?” The tips of her wings fluttered, and she hopped from foot to foot. “Ends?”
The same little creature Stumpy stopped from picking up her blood ran by her again, and she had to resist the urge to peck at it. Not that it would feel it, anyway.
“Yes, I’m afraid that you can’t return to your original timeline from the timeline you’re in. Which leads to quite a debacle with your existence.”
“With my existence? Do you mean I’m going to disappear anyway, even though you said if I did this I wasn’t going to disappear? Is everything going to disappear?”
There was a silence longer than any Stumpy had ever felt, longer than the cold, long nights and days sitting with the egg within an egg that was only an egg at the time, left to watch it while the ones who stuck her with it went with the rest of the raft to exotic locals. Longer than the time it took to travel millions of years, forward and back. Longer than the space between heartbeats.
“Wasn’t I clear?” said Ida. “If you were going to disappear, that would have happened already. Multiverse, Stumpy. Multi. Multiple timelines, all existing simultaneously.”
Stumpy let out the breath she didn’t realize she was holding. “Then what?”
“I’m afraid you can’t get back to your original timeline. Not from here.”
“It’s not the worst thing to happen when you mess up a timeline,” said Terry. “Hey Stella, Stumpy got stubbed! I win the pool!”
Terry trundled off, the ground rumbling behind.
Stumpy flopped down, her legs in front of her. “So that means…”
“I’ll let you keep the egg.”
“Thanks?”
“I thought you’d be a little happier than that.” The egg rolled back and forth, and then wobbled end to end to a stop, and if an egg could harrumph, it would have.
“Happier?”
“Yes, you can still travel to the places the egg took you. Where you are now, you can go see Oliver–“
“Hi!” said Oliver, also seemingly from nowhere.
“Yes, yes, Dot, I’m getting there. And Dot wants me to tell you that she got you an all-you-can-eat two-for-one for krillamari in Chitroutgo.”
“Chitroutgo?”
“Yes, obviously you can go there as well, please do try to keep up. We got you a little apartment there, it’s not much, but it’s right over a fish restaurant. Mostly because they’re all fish restaurants.”
Stumpy tried to process. “Chitroutgo? I can go there?”
“You can live there,” said Ida, “as I said, you have a little place. And, of course, you can come here, to my Institution, if you like–“
“No thank you.”
“I’m sure you’ll enjoy coming back now that things are back to–“
“No thank you.”
“The one thing,” said Ida as the egg began to glow orange and yellow, shimmying its ends as it readied to roll, “Is how you got your wings on this egg to begin with. No matter, though, what’s done is undone, sort of, and redone and undone again or something like that. Safe travels, Stumpy.”
And just like that, as the egg’s light grew brighter, fStumpy was Chitroutgo bound.
* * *
EPILOGUE
The raft of penguins marched back to their colony, laughing, showing off the souvenirs they brought back from their travels. Buoyant, happy, and gone for weeks, they were pleased to return home.
“Hey Ralph,” said Otto, “do you think Stumpy’s still sitting on that joke egg? Where did you get it, again?”
“Aunty someone’s novelties or something like that. Best online purchase ever, and you know Stumpy alone would think it was the real thing. I wonder if it really did light up. I’m sorry we didn’t get to see her face!”
“Yeah, I’d bet she’s still there, sitting on it anyway. Such a sucker.”
Otto snorted. “Probably. That’s the thing with Stumpy, you could always get her to do anything.” They waddled onward toward her usual indentation, surprised to find it empty. No egg, no Stumpy.
Otto took left, Ralph right, but still, no Stumpy. Not in the burrows, not at the water, neither she nor the egg were anywhere to be found. They went from the hill to the cave and back again.
Not far from where Stumpy usually was, a seagull rested on a ridge of snow and ice.
“Hey, Edgar,” said Ralph, “have you seen Stumpy?”
Edgar smiled the smile of a seagull. “You could say that I have,” he said. “You could say that I have.
A Bit to Read 
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