The opossum reclines under a tree beside the slow moving jungle stream. He snores quietly. A fishing pole reclines next to him, leaning against a tree nearby. Beside the opossum reclines a lunch box, open and disgorging its contents onto the jungle floor.

Turns out opossums like Ho Ho's.

The opossum wears a yellow baseball cap. Across the front is printed the word, "CAT" in big black block letters. Mislabeling of a jungle creature is a Flagrant Violation of union rules, and an animal so grievously mislabeled as an Opossum named Cat is an Actionable Offense.

But nobody in the jungle notices this except the Caribou. And the Caribou says nothing.

Nearby, lurking nearly submerged in the murky lurky waters of the Languid Jungle Pool, the Crocodile smirks to himself. He moves silently, so slowly that no eye can track his motion. His eyes are fixed, his attention is captured, he coils like a spring and waits.

He watches the Ho Ho's very carefully, glancing up occasionally to make sure that the opossum still slumbers.

The crocodile silently stealths up the river bank, his jaws opening gradually as he nears the Ho Ho's. Suddenly the Raven flies overhead, squawking adverbs at the top of his lungs. The crocodile retreats into the water to watch and wait. The opossum stirs and sputters and shudders and snores again.

Not far away, two very different animals face each other. The wombat, wearing no hat at all, thoughtfully rubs his fuzzy nose. The rhinoceros, wearing a spiked helmet, pensively paws the ground.

"So if I understand you correctly," ponders the rhino, "what you're describing is an Alternate Universe, rather than an alternate dimension."

"Absolutely!" exclaims the fuzzy metaphysicist gently, careful not to startle the rhino into doing Anything Drastic. "It's a totally different link in the IPC!"

"The IPC?"

"The Infinite Possibility Chain!"

"Aha!" exclaims the spiky one, also careful to make No Sudden Moves, lest something just awful ensue. "So what you're saying is that every variable, every possibility in the Jungle could be different. In some alternate world, the raven might bellow similes, not adverbs, at us. The languid jungle pool might be a raging river."

"Exactly," replies the wombat, "anything or everything could be different! It's a fascinating theory, but unfortunately, there's never been any way to prove it."

The rhino fails to respond. He is lost in thought.

The wombat wanders over and humphs down beside the opossum, donning his fez. No letters emblazon the front of the fez, no words carelessly misrepresent the species of the bearer of the cap. Soon the marsupials snore in unison, slumbering soundly as the reptile slouches soundlessly toward the Ho Ho's.

Time passes.

The fuzzy befezzed one starts in his sleep, befuddled and bemused by a dream or a thought or a flea or a fly which has crawled up his nose.

The crocodile slinks back into the murk to lurk, the wombat gesticulates, muttering to himself about wormholes and sinkholes and post holes. He reaches into his pouch and catches hold of Something Big.

With great puffing effort, the gray one wrestles with the mysterious object, random stuff pouring out of his pouch as he does.

He reaches into the pouch with another paw. He struggles, he grunts. He reaches deeper and deeper into the pouch...

"Hmmmm. Mighty dark in there," mutters the wombat as his nose delves deeper into the dark, "Deep too..."

Suddenly, like a balloon popping inward, like the perfect oposite of a sneeze, the wombat implodes into his pouch, disappearing, snout, fez, paunch and all, inside his bizarre navel.

OPO.

The crocodile hears the perfect opposite of a "POP" as the wombat disappears into his tummy.

At this point, the normally strange occurrences of the jungle seem insignificant compared to just exactly what the intrepid dimensional traveler goes through now.

Somewhere, in some universe other than our own, there is a place where nothing exists and exactly nothing ever happens. Nothing has ever existed there and nothing has ever happened.

It's a great big place with no stuff at all.

It's a very peaceful place and if there were anybody there to enjoy it, I'm sure they'd feel very serene.

But just as nothing goes on merrily not happening, a strange thing happens.

A sound like the inside of a sneeze wishes across the nothingness and a gray marsupial in a fez plummets into existence, bellowing at the top of his lungs.

YEEEEEEEEEEEEE *gasp* HAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!!!!!!!

That's the sound of a wombat on a wave, surfing the fourth dimension into a whole new universe. And out again, it turns out.

A sound like the outside of a sneeze demands across the vacuous nothingscape and a marsupial on a mission dissolves into a gray blur and is gone.

The wombat barrels through the fourth dimension. A million times a minute, for a million minutes, traveling at the speed of light, the wombat passes through a million million universes.

This one is just like our universe. The wind blows when the trees move and the caribou never says much. The only difference is that everybody always says the word "slalom" all the time.

It's slalomly difficult to carry on a slalomian conversation when one slalomingly modifies ones slalom speech patterns in this slalomesque way.

Our fuzzy, fourth dimensional friend was slalomly glad to get out of there.

The next world the wombat visits is completely unlike our own. Lions work all the time and have absolutely no time for staging life and death struggles with their cubs. Doves rarely give you the time of day, and if they do, they're usually fifteen minutes behind.

"Hmmm", thinks the wombat, "I'm beginning to like my own universe very much indeed."

The baby-sitters are usually crotchety old yaks who actually make you eat your slaloming broccoli. Every channel on the TV is ads and infomercials. Yikes.

Just as soon as the wombat appears, the wombat disappears, turning a Strange Corner and vanishing into the next big thing.

The next big thing is a jungle not like our own. The wombat lands like a safe, humphing down next to an opossum under a tree by a raging jungle river, full of fierce, taco-hungry smelt. The dragonfly flies backward as the quadruped on a quest takes to his paws.

"A lot like your own world, I think", babbles the caribou, "and yet not quite the same. I was discussing this just recently with Whomever Would Listen, and I seem to have come to the conclusion that we live at opposite ends of the 4d wave that seems to have brought you here. Nobody believes me, of course. But here you are."

"Whoa. What a ride", whispers the wombat to himself as he reaches Very Carefully into his pouch and produces a clipboard and a pencil. "I see", he answers. "Tell me about your theories, Caribou. I seem to have fallen, quite by accident, into the very fourth dimensional wave of which you speak."

But the caribou is off on another topic. "Look at that hat!" he says, waving his antlers at the opossum. "Of course he's an opossum! He doesn't need to proclaim it to the world in big bold black block letters, emblazoned on his forehead for all the jungle to see. Why would he wear a hat that says "Opossum"? Do I wear a hat that says "Caribou"?"

Meanwhile the smelt, with their razor sharp teeth, are bubbling on the surface of the raging Jungle River. They propel themselves through the air, aiming for the tacos spilling from the open lunch box of the slumbering marsupial.

"But the portal... the interdimensional rift between your universe and mine..." The wombat follows the muttering caribou for a few paces.

But the caribou will have None of That.

He strides on, muttering, bellowing, shouting invectives, completely ignoring the gray one.

The gray one investigates further. The raven darts overhead, squawking, "like a rock" and "as quick as a wink". The rhinoceros does not wear a spiky helmet, but a toupee.

The wombat scribbles in his notes. "Ravens shout similes" "rhinos wear rugs" and taps the end of his pencil against the tip of his fuzzy snout.

"I seem to have fallen into an alternate universe by way of my pouch. The theories were correct. Wait until I tell the rhinoceros!", exclaims the quadruped, but the rhino in THIS universe has no time to talk and ponder and think it over. He's much too busy.

"Well maybe it's time to get back to my own universe", sez the displaced marsupial, and he once again reaches deep deep DEEP into his pouch.

On the bank of a slow moving jungle stream, a wombat awakes with a "humph" and a "YEEEEE HAAAAAAAAAA!!" and the crocodile slinks back into the water. He gazes groggily around for a minute or two as the raven bellows adverbs from a high tree top.

"Oh, it was all a dream", sez the sleepy one. "The alternate universe, the trip through my tummy, they were just a dream"

"But, BOY what a ride!"

The rest of the jungle goes on about its business in normal familiar fashion and the wombat takes out his dream journal and begins to write.

Nobody notices the opossum's hat, clearly and accurately labeled, "Opossum", except the caribou.

And he says nothing.

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