Keith and I had decided we were going to try to go together into what would be my eighth life and his second. But deciding on another world to make was harder than we thought.

In shooting down one of Keith’s ideas, I explained, “It can’t be too much like this world, or my first world. When I projected myself into an earlier version of my first body, I got stuck in a world where the timeline was fixed. Although I could make minor changes, including drawing a different way out of that world, I couldn’t do things that changed the timeline within that world in meaningful ways. I was simply unable to make such decisions. And at the same time, I can’t define the world too strictly. When I went into Cindy, she had been featured in thousands of comic strips that defined exactly what behavior she was capable of, and also what she was not capable of. The Watson family I drew in my first world was like many other cartoon and comic-strip families in that they never age. The seasons pass, but a year later they haven’t aged.”

“So Cindy was stuck in a year-long time loop.”

“Essentially right.”

“I can see how that would suck, especially after you’ve been through it a few times.”

I added, “The worst part was that I was literally unable to break out of it. The comic strip had defined Cindy’s behavior so thoroughly that I was literally unable to will my body to do anything she wouldn’t do. There weren’t even bathrooms, nor the bodily functions needing them, because I’d never mentioned them in the comic strip. If I hadn’t been able to draw my way into a different world while Cindy was in an art class, I might have been trapped there eternally.”

“I understand why you are worried about that. But The Watsons you draw now isn’t like that. I’ve read all your work. Characters age. You have mentioned bathrooms. Could you go back into this version of your comic?”

“I could, but I don’t want to. It would be better than the first time, but just thinking about that phase of my life scares me.”

“So tell me again how you made this world different.”

“I defined myself as the cartoonist who draws The Watsons, and you as my house-husband, but there wasn’t a lot of detail in there about our lives specifically. Instead, I focused on the kinds of things that people do in general. The kinds of foods we eat, the way we go to school, the jobs we do, the way we date, get married, have sex, and have kids, not always in that order. All depicted using different people, in different places, at different times in their lives. I tried to avoid drawing anything twice unless it was just one of those things literally everybody does, or it was needed to show different aspects of the thing.”

I quickly drew a series of rough sketches of people eating to illustrate my next point.

“There was lots of eating, but I tried to avoid the same food being eaten twice anywhere over the entire set of drawings. Similarly, there were lots of drawings of people sleeping, going to bed, waking up, washing themselves, and plenty of birth and death scenes, each one different. Not quite everybody gets married, so I made sure to show some people purposefully deciding never to get married and instead growing old single, but I also drew several marriages, and lots of scenes featuring couples who might be interpreted as being married. There are people from other cultures, other races, other societies, though there are a lot of societies I don’t know, so I drew samples and best guesses, ways of showing that those people are different without being too specific. I probably changed some of those societies dramatically, but I don’t know enough of how they were in my first life to be able to tell.”

“Are there any areas where you know it didn’t work?”

“I drew people as being more flexible and less subject to pain than is realistic, and this led to athletes being able to perform better than they did in my original world, but it was only a matter of degree. Perhaps partly related to this, but also because I always drew mothers giving birth as being happy before, during, and afterward, childbirth isn’t painful here at all and instead is intensely pleasurable.”

“Birth is painful on your original world?”

“Yes, it is sometimes said to be the most pain a woman will experience in her entire life. Of course, it varies from one birth to another. And you don’t even know because the change is wrapped so thoroughly into the fabric of this world that pain during childbirth is simply not a thing here.”

“So you can modify specific characteristics of the world.”

“Or leave them out entirely, like the first two attempts I made at becoming female. The first was just a single scene like what Cindy had drawn of my first life. But, apparently because I had drawn it as an intentional change from my original world, unlike Cindy’s drawing, I ended up in a universe that just consisted of that one room, and drawing was basically all I could do. So I realized I needed to draw the whole world, but to make it more bearable and as a test of how it would work, I drew an intermediate version with our whole house, the first version of you, and some basics of human behavior. The universe still only consisted of that house, but I was able to live mostly like a human being while drawing the thousands of pages needed to illustrate the whole world.”

“So you could draw the whole world again, but with us as other people, in the future so you’re not living the past again.”

“It would be a lot of work, and it’s not interesting enough to me to devote the effort. In the intermediate world I was only doing that, and not any other job. I had breaks to eat, sleep, and be with that world’s version of you, but for 10 to 12 hours a day, I drew. If we are doing it on the side here, we would never finish. I would have to retire from drawing The Watsons, and work hard for a year on drawing the world. We would have to really have some interesting positions in the world to make it worthwhile. I wouldn’t do it to just make us be some random people.”

“Hmm. That’s tough. If we don’t just draw another variant Earth, how are we going to imagine something so detailed?”

We shot down a lot of other ideas, in little sessions like this once a week for months, before Keith finally suggested, “What if we don’t try to make a detailed world?”

“What, intentionally put ourselves into one of those limited worlds, like the one where I couldn’t even pee, and couldn’t go anywhere outside the equivalent of this room?”

“Well, not that limited. It should be a whole world, but one that is less well defined. In the same way you left our behavior undefined by showing only a little of it, you could leave the world’s behavior undefined by showing only a little of it.”

“But then we might end up on a barbarous kill-or-be-killed world or some other horrible place!”

“I suppose. Maybe the limits, the laws and enforcers of the laws, are what we show.”

“Could get too boring. The laws might end up so strict we have to live like Cindy within little rigid guidelines, except instead of not having free will, we’ll just have enforcers everywhere who dictate our actions.”

And it went on like this the rest of that night. The next session I figured it out.

“Suppose we’re gods.”

“Oooh. How’s that work?”

“We start on a featureless world, but the comics show that we can literally do anything. We can change our bodies, we can make other people, destroy ones who misbehave, we can create plants and animals and buildings and maybe whole new planets. We’re invulnerable, undying, and our only limit is that we can’t change each other.”

“Right. We should show that limit to imply one exists, and the lack of limits in other areas will help show those limits don’t exist.”

“Yes! You’re getting it!”

So our subsequent sessions were both building a checklist of things to show, and coming up with ways to show each one. We didn’t always agree, but hashed out our differences, and several times I redid a drawing because once I got it done I didn’t think it portrayed what I wanted adequately. I installed a second drafting table beside mine so that Keith could help. He was a terrible penciller, but once I had drawn the basic shapes he was an adequate colorist. And they all needed to be colored, of course. We didn’t want to end up in a black-and-white outlined world!

One of the things we decided on pretty early, since we had the ability to change our shape, was that we would each wear a symbol on our foreheads, based on our initials. Because Keith came from the family that was Barbara’s in my original world, our surname was Stewart, not Browning. In Keith’s symbol the legs on the right side of the K poked through the centers of the loops at the top and bottom of the S. For mine, the B was backward, and the S was twined around the vertical post.

These symbols helped identify us even when we were shapeshifted in the drawings, and we were probably going to be stuck with them in the other world, but that was fine. We’d always be able to identify each other that way.

And we kept doing this once a week, sometimes working on ideas Keith had come up with during the week, while I kept on drawing The Watsons the rest of the time. If this didn’t work somehow, either because we couldn’t go into the world together, or it was so bad we wanted to come back here by drawing ourselves the way we are today, this life will still be available. It was slow, but since we’d decided on a plan that didn’t need a massive amount of art, but a moderate amount of carefully thought-out choices, we got through it in about a year.

The last drawing was an oversized one, the one we were going to hopefully fall into together, which showed the two of us in forms resembling idealized versions of the forms we have now, naked, and with the symbols. The musclebound comic-book heroes were far from my normal style, but they were also what every aspiring cartoonist learned to draw before developing his or her own style, so of course I could draw them. And I let Keith draw parts of it, too.

We spent two daily sessions of eight hours each putting together the final drawing, and it still wasn’t done. But it was close, so after dinner the second night we worked at it until it was done, which was perfect in one important way. As we got tired, we would eventually fall asleep and hopefully fall into the drawing. When it looked done, I got up and arranged all the other related drawings around us while Keith continued to add little details, and then I rejoined him, continuing to add more of my own tiny details to the drawing so that we could stay up late together working on it until we fell asleep.

The Eighth World

I am not sure if I stirred first or Keith did, but we were partially on top of each other and woke together.

“It seems like this worked,” I commented. “We have these bodybuilder bodies and we’re lying here on the featureless plain.”

“Let’s see if our powers came with us,” Keith said.

He slowly drew up his hand and a short distance away, a shape rose up out of the ground and formed a small house.

“That’s good. But why do we actually need a house?”

“I don’t know. To put all the other stuff we make inside, to protect it from the sun, rain, and wild animals, when we create those things.”

He laughed and I laughed with him.

Keith continued, “I think it just felt right. But come look. I made it with the furnishings and everything.”

I was curious which furnishings, since some of the things we were used to on Earth, like television, wouldn’t work in an isolated world with no broadcasters or electric power supply. So I followed him in. It turned out he’d made some tables, chairs, shelves, closets, and a bed. Of course a bed, I thought to myself. We’re pretty certain to want to try sex with these bodies! There was no kitchen nor bathroom, as it should be, since we’d designed the bodies without the need to eat, drink, or eliminate wastes. There was a near-perfect reproduction of my drawing studio as it was on pseudo-Earth the night before, including the drawings which got us here.

So we tried out the bed. And when we were done, Keith next tried out the body transformation ability, forming his body into a copy of mine, except of course for the forehead logo. I obliged, making myself a copy of the body he had moments earlier, and we did it the other way. Next I ran outside and transformed into a tigress, and let him chase me down as a tiger. And we repeated this with many other forms. Would we ever get tired of it? We’d never get physically tired, since the bodies were designed not to need rest or sleep.

We went through countless changes, including a bit where I created a lake and we spent a while as various aquatic creatures. We didn’t make anything to keep track of time, nor were there any day-night cycles here, but I think this went on for a few days. We ended up as two giraffes, which had sex in just as awkward a way as you would imagine. At this point Keith was unable to think of any animals we hadn’t used yet, and just changed back into the superhero-looking version of himself that he arrived here as. He moved our house from where it was, completely out of sight across the horizon due to some of our chases having gone on for miles, to where we were now. He went inside, and I transformed into super-Barbara and followed him.

“That was fun,” I told Keith.

“But now what?” he asked.

“We could play God.”

“You mean fill this world with all the plants and animals and stuff from Earth?”

“It doesn’t have to be those. We can make up our own.”

“Sounds fun!”

So we headed back outside, taking turns trying to outdo each other in making the most fantastic plants and animals imaginable. Since we didn’t limit ourselves to Earth-things, this went on for a lot longer. In fact, since time had no meaning for us anymore, I might well say it went on forever.