At The Tone, The Time Will Be. . .

One thing I've been wondering about with the conclusion of Dial H is how long the Dial Bunch spent trying to reach the Exchange once they left DC-Earth.

Until they reached the world of Meta-Castle and were given a J-Dial, they were reliant on all the winding, backwoods routes the Dial Fixer used, and didn't have any clear idea of where they were going. They just tried following his back trail and hoped it would lead them to where he started from.

It was long enough for Roxie to learn more about fixing dials from Bansa, for Nelson to learn more about using them from Yabba. It took them longer than it did Fixer and the Centipede, and they took a fair amount of time themselves, judging by the Fixer's story of how Centipede finally convinced him they should work together. And then they both had enough time to convince O they should all work together, and he should make a special dial for the Centipede.

But time is kind of screwy anyway in this book. I mentioned this in the review of the last issue, but the theft of Bumper Carla's powers (as highlighted in #0) is suggested as one of the incidents that spurred the other realities into war against the Exchange. But the fact her powers were stolen, rather than copied, suggests it was the result of using of the defective, junk dials that was blown across space and time (along with O) near the end of the war. It landed in Laodice's time and altered reality around it, disguising itself as a sundial (just as Nelson's first dial disguised itself as a phone booth).

Another thing. Bansa sought out Open Window Man to apologize for the death of his ally, Boy Chimney, caused because Bansa's H-Dial always steals powers. They went on to form the Dial Bunch and pursue the Fixer. This would seem like something that happened some time ago. Yet Nelson's first hero dialed was Boy Chimney. We know time moves at different paces in the different realities (the Squid mentioned falling through a reality that was very tiny, where the lives of the inhabitants played out in instants from his perspective), so that could be the case here. It can't have been more than a few months, maybe a year between Nelson finding the dial, and the Dial Bunch finding him and Roxie. But could it have been years for the Dial Bunch?

It's that Villains Month issue that's got all this rattling around in my head. The E-Dial. My guess is still it's the Centipede's custom dial, blown across realities when Roxie crossed the Exchange's wires to defeat O. And it just so happened to land on DC-Earth. We know Nelson dialed the Flash's powers the same day he and Roxie left with the Dial Bunch. And he didn't dial away Barry's powers from the past or future. When Nelson had the powers, then Barry didn't. In theory, we'd know how long it's been since then on DC-Earth when Villains Month/Forever Evil kicks off. My guess, considering how slowly stories move these days - is that we're talking a matter of weeks, at best. Which wouldn't seem to jibe with the lengthy trip the Bunch took through all those realities. So it could be a matter of time moving more slowly on DC-Earth than everywhere else, or the explosion Roxie triggered was like a second Time Bomb, a repeat of O's first defeat, and it blew things backwards through time (and possibly forwards? Could the Centipede's helmet show up randomly some time in the future?).

Time moving at different rates seems likely, but the Dial Bunch didn't react as if it was the case in any of the worlds they reached. And if time passes faster in all the other realities, wouldn't the memories the populace had of the dial-wielding thieves have faded, become legends and myths largely dismissed by the locals? Because for everyone they met, the memories of the Exchange were plenty fresh in their minds.