The Smush

"The Smush" refers to the convergence of multiple potentialities into a single reality that was a central theme during Arc 14: Autumn's Blend. During this time, the Shepherd of the Confluence of Potentiality (SCOP) merged potentially hundreds of versions of Isb — and consequently Wildcliff — into a single entity. The intention of this was to force Winsler and Serinepth into finding their replacement, as the results of the Smush couldn't be ignored, and it would provide them with even more options for their replacement.

## The Potentialities

* A "potentiality" refers to a possible outcome to a set of events
* The SCOP has the power to view every single potentiality there is, and decide which ones are allowed to exist
* There are some potentialities that must always happen, some that can never happen, and others that are left to the SCOP's discretion
* From a meta perspective, Luke has confirmed that different potentialities can be the outcomes of different dice rolls

## Shattering

During the Smush, if anyone who was unaware on the Confluence of Potentiality was told something that contradicted their knowledge of reality, it caused them to shatter. In this process, a person breaks apart into hundreds of glass shards, looking into one of these shards shows an image of that person in a different potentiality. The first shown shattering was of Fidan after SWIM said they were friends of Artis. It is also shown that there is some tolerance for the information a person can learn, as when Crowe was told about the golems, he got a headache but did not fall apart. Usually, people unaware of the Confluence were unable to trigger a shattering, however if they did realise something was wrong and shattered, any discrepancies caused by this would be fixed in the next loop.

### Example: The shattering of Fidan

When SWIM first met Fidan outside her room, she shattered upon the mention of Artis' name. The conflict of potentialities arose due to Artis' current state as being stuck in a pebble. Fidan knew Artis as an elf, not a pebble, and so when her knowledge of this contradicted the reality of Artis' condition, it caused her to shatter.

## The Time Loop

At the start of each loop, another potentiality, and therefore more people, would be added to the Smush. The result of this is that by the time SWIM enter the Smush, there are hundreds more students than normal at Wildcliff.

## Changes to the world

The Smush of different potentialities also affected various locations in the Prime Material Plane. According to the Disciple, when the Smush started, the planet of Isb looked as though hundreds of different images of itself were stacked on top of and shifting into each other. The divine planes surrounding the planet stayed mostly the same, however some of them seemed to move into alignment with the planet.

In Wildcliff, the room containing the model of the mountain where SWIM was first pulled into the Smush seemed to age centuries in a second. The Divine Studies tower had completely disappeared from the campus, and several other buildings such as the Infirmary and dormitories had minor changes to layout and composition.

## People in the world

With the exception of SWIM and Veronica, no one on Isb is aware of the Smush. Students and faculty at Wildcliff come from many different potentialities, though thanks to the memory reset the chances of them causing a shatter event are low.

## The Cookie Analogy

The cookie analogy was first used by Luke in Episode 8 of Conversations & Catapults to describe the Smush. The analogy is as follows:

*If I have two chocolate chip cookies, and they are identical in every aspect, except on one I put a mark that says "1". Those are my alternate cookies, I could switch them out, they're the same, but they're different in different ways. The cookies are in different places, if I crumble them, they won't break apart in the same way. But they're all still made from the same dough.*

*Imagine I took a thousand cookies, and smushed them into a cookie ball, and handed it to you. This is not an alternate universe, it's a confluence of potentiality.*

This cookie metaphor describes the alternate potentialities viewed by the SCOP not as fixed alternate universes, but as possible versions of the same reality arising from random probability. During the Smush, the SCOP simply allowed all of these possibilities to exist simultaneously, during which time any possible path taken in universe was represented in different ways, for example a person or place from a particular potentiality. Essentially, the Smush was not a single alternate path, but a world in which every possibility could potentially coexist.