Time reset, and then the laundromat scene began all over again.

Budou read fiction, and Kiwi sketched fashion.

The two men grew ever closer, emotionally, while growing further in intelligence and practice until they were beyond the levels of even the most gifted savants at whatever skill they had honed.

When time was irrelevant, and memory was all that persisted, it allowed for many extremely radical things, such as extreme specialization.

Memory must compact and compartmentalize, yes? Yes, that’s true, at least in this fictional universe because the author is far too lazy to actually look up anything about how cognition and memory work in regards to overloading the brain with memories.

Therefore, both our heroes, Budou and Kiwi, were forced to give up certain memories in order to gain further knowledge. Like a Gamecube memory card when you need to free up 59 blocks in order to save Hitman 2 or Animal Crossing or Beyond Good & Evil, you must delete the “save data” (memories) of older “games” (experiences) in order to progress with the “new games” (whatever).

For example, say that you experienced your entire life—and that life was a save file of Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg, the game Sega produced, developed by Sonic Team, in between Sonic Adventure 2 Battle and Sonic Heroes. Many consider the game to be severely underrated and undeservedly forgotten, but the most important thing about Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg is that it requires 2 blocks to create a save file.

Those 2 blocks on their own do not mean much, especially when you have one of those fancy 1019-block Gamecube memory cards that are essentially the maximum you can get. Those 2 blocks start to add up after a while, though. If you have played Billy Hatcher and the Giant Egg ten times, that’s no longer 2 blocks—that’s 20! 20 blocks is over 2% of the total size of that memory card.

Did you know there was a baseball player called Billy Hatcher? He’s actually still alive. Born October 4th, 1960, William Augustus Hatcher graduated from Williams High School in Williams, Arizona, then went on to play baseball for a small community college, also in Arizona. He was drafted by the Chicago Cubs in 1981 in the sixth round of the MLB draft, so he was put in the minor leagues rather than the major leagues, but he was so skilled that he ended up joining the major leagues in 1984. Then he was traded to the Houston Astros. At some point, he got his nickname as Billy Hatcher, becoming something of an American icon in many ways.

He played for the Pittsburgh Pirates, Cincinatti Red, and Boston Red Sox, before eventually retiring and becoming a coach for various teams, including the Red Sox, then the Tampa Bay Rays, and later the Miami Marlins. His daughter Chelsea Hatcher also played soccer at the University of Tennessee, which is a pretty prestiguous thing to achieve considering that the University of Tennessee is one of the bigger SEC schools in the NCAA.

Here, let’s look at a picture, a baseball card, of this interesting Billy Hatcher fellow:

Anyway, if you have too many Billy Hatcher baseball cards, it can be bad for the marketplace, which means that you need to sell some of those cards in order to free up space in your collectible card binder to get more cards. You get what I’m saying?

The whole point of this is to say one important, uncontoversial, unappealing truth: The longer that Kiwi and Budou stayed at the Laundromat, living their infinite looped hour of time, the more of the outside world that their memories deleted automatically, just like a collector who could only afford one binder at a time and had to sell cards to free up space.

The longer they stayed at the laundromat, the more they forgot their ultimate goal of obtaining the Vine Root and preventing Yue Ji from gaining unlimited power.

And they didn’t care.