“Gosh,” said Orwell Bookend to the person sitting next to him—the math teacher from the Mrs. Joyful School. “Does this mean there won’t be a lecture after all? I had such a good question.”

All eyes were on Jupiter Peacock. What was he going to say? What was he going to do? The audience fell silent.

And then there was an almost imperceptible popping sound.

A bit like a cork coming out of a tiny ceramic bottle.

Quantum physics teaches us that at any moment in time, there are countless versions of reality that are possible depending on the choices we make. For example, as Hieronymus Moon squeezed out of his bottle for the first time in three thousand years, ready to appear on the stage of the Grand Lecture Theater in the Old Town University with the one aim of denouncing the latest translator of his great work, he could have been greeted by quite a different scene.

The scene that could have greeted him had one hundred cats caught up in a net hanging from the ceiling. It had Lexy Bottle manacled and drugged and dressed all in white with a knife at her throat. It had poor Maximilian bound and gagged and held hostage so that Effie would do whatever the Diberi wanted. In this once possible version of reality, Raven had never met Neptune and had never had her very useful chat with the Luminiferous Ether, and by this point—8:05 p.m.—the Bermuda Triangle had already consumed most of the audience.

In this alternative version of the present—the one that would have occurred had Lexy not been so brave, and had Effie not been in the Flow, and had Maximilian not been secretly attending the University of the Underworld quite so regularly, and had Raven not found her familiar, and had Wolf not learned to unbind people—Hazel Bottle had not made her speech, and JP was standing resplendent in his academic gown, ready to tell this audience precisely how they were all about to die.

But that version of reality had not happened.

In fact, the scene was quite different. As the old red velvet curtains were drawn apart, an entirely different show was about to begin.

First, the audience saw the spirit of Hieronymus Moon floating up toward the ceiling where, like a perfectly timed special effect, a thunderbolt just happened to strike the roof of the Old Town University in such a way that a little hole appeared for Hieronymus Moon to float through. He looked like an illustration from a book about ancient times, but with a big, peaceful smile. He was free, at long last. Free from having to live inside a bottle in the possession of that complete idiot. As he approached the hole in the ceiling, his spirit form turned and addressed the audience.