Inspired by the 12/6/12 update. (Let nobody henceforth mistake you for a guy who isn’t trying as hard as he can to travel like a cold blooded motherfucker.)
How does Lord English travel through the Furthest Ring with apparent ease? There isn’t much difference between traveling in time and traveling in space in the Ring:
but being a Hero of Time alone isn’t enough to get you where you want to go.
Besides, Caliborn doesn’t seem to be an exceptional Hero of Time, at least not by the usual criteria or when compared to the other Time players in the cast.
And there isn’t much reason to believe his basic personality and general worldview are going to change too drastically by the time he’s dropping in on dream bubbles to Fuck Shit Up.
Caliborn has his own way of doing things, of solving problems: it’s not an elegant way, and maybe it’s not an efficient one, but it gets things done to his own satisfaction.
And when he finds something that works, it doesn’t matter how he found it. He makes it his own.
I’m pretty sure I know now how Lord English managed to travel through the Furthest Ring, during [S] Caliborn: Enter, in what looked very much like a straight line. All I had to do was consider how Caliborn would approach the problem.
I think Lord English travels through the Ring by making a very large number of very small movements in time(/space). Just as Caliborn’s method of drawing a circle would produce an apparently smooth line if the angles he used were too small for our eyes to detect, Lord English makes his tiny movements through the neither-time-nor-space of the Ring so quickly and so seamlessly that he appears to be moving in a straight and steady line. Caliborn’s circle drawing isn’t made of a single smooth line, though - it’s made of many sharp angles which add up and cancel out to produce a circular shape. Lord English’s Furthest Ring travel would work the same way: many infinitesimally small movements in many directions which nevertheless add up and cancel out to produce steady progress towards his goal. It’s pure Caliborn: he doesn’t really understand it, but he gets it done anyway.
