All Night Laundry
is an Interactive Comic by Jack Fractal on the MSPA Forums. You start with a young woman named Bina. She’s put off her laundry for far too long. Now, due to having to work an extra shift, she has to go to the laundromat at three in the morning.
As the story starts, Bina starts noticing that things around the laundromat seem a bit… off. The lights are off when she gets there, even though it’s open 24/7. There’s also a small T.V. on that nobody seems to be watching. Gregor, the owner of the store seems to know more than he’s letting on and he’s very anxious not to let her near the basement.
Needless to say, things don’t go as she expected.
Partially due to the MSPA forums being broken, All Night Laundry now has its own website and a wiki here.
Tropes in All Night Laundry include:
- A Form You Are Comfortable With: The Big Bad. We're not quite sure what it is exactly, but everyone who looks at it directly thinks it's beautiful. Other views of it... not so much. Also, the portals/cracks in time. Bina sees them as cracked glass or pools of water, Kendra sees them as splintered wood and rotten trees, Amie sees the Doctor Who time vortex.
- Affably Evil: Gregor. When Bina runs into him at the hospital, he acts disturbingly normal and friendly. He jokingly compares himself to a walrus and gives Bina a nickname based on The Chronicles of Narnia, which he read to the Botfly. Also, he seems to genuinely think that all the deaths he caused will be undone and that the Botfly just wants to be friends with Bina.
- Alternate Timeline: At least 13 of them plus a pocket dimension or two separated from the flow of time.
- Animalistic Abomination: The Hound is an unstoppable undead dog, resurrected by an Eldritch Abomination. Its body is made of bone and mud, it's incredibly fast despite having mangled hind legs, and it never makes a sound.
- Apocalypse How (Metaphysical, City) The climactic Paradox Bomb shatters the multiple timelines looping over the city of Montreal. And the earlier chapters of the story as well.
- Arc Words: "What kind of maggot grows in the corpse of a day?" The first time Bina travels to the past, she finds these words written on the door of Josephine's office upon her return. The "corpse of a day" means that an entire day has been erased from existence, and the "maggot" is the Eldritch Abomination that caused it. When the Botfly is finally defeated and the paradox is destroying the time loop Bina is in, she sees that same door and writes these words on it.Twelve: One who lost. I'd always wondered where that question came from.
- Arc Symbol: This story has an Arc Color, a specific shade of luminous green used to mark everything from the protagonist to the Big Bad to time travel itself.
- Art Evolution: Jack Fractal's drawing skills improve throughout the comic.
- Art Shift: Different locations/temporal positions/states of consciousness have different art styles: black-and-white for most normal locations, inverted black-and-white for the void inside time cracks, crayon drawing for Bina's childhood dream, etc.
- Bait-and-Switch: The End of Chapter title cards
- Blessed with Suck: Time travel is not fun. This appears to be the Botfly's MO, granting wishes to everyone who sees it in the suckiest way possible to create Win-Win scenarios for itself
- Body Horror:
- When Bina is infected by the Botfly, it's shown as a wire impaling her arm. She has to remove it.
- The Naughts are reanimated corpses of the victims of Josephine's experiment. Each of them has some body parts duplicated in different and unnerving ways: two heads, five legs, several ribcages, etc. They are also scarily fast and move in very unnatural ways.
- The Hound is a giant undead dog with an exposed skull, broken spine, and mangled legs.
- Canis Major: The Hound. At the beginning it's big, but not impossibly big. It's been bigger in each appearance since, due to damage to Bina's Timeline. In Previous loops it was the size of a regular dog.
- Catch a Falling Star: Bina and Kendra devise a plan involving three time machines to save Elizabeth from falling to her death.
- Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: Gregor is now actively seeking Bina, and with a gun this time.
- Cosmic Retcon: Some panels change when Bina changes something in the past. They only appear after viewing a page created after the change, with the original behind a button so that readers can see both.
- Crossing The Streams: In the emergency of seeing the now-enormous dog about to fall on Kendra and Elizabeth, Bina resorts to shining unlight in its direction to activate the time machine that can catch it mid-fall.
- Deadpan Snarker: Bina. This extends to when she's half dead from hypothermia.Bina: I'm always snarky.
- Deal with the Devil: Gregor Just wanted his dog back.
- Determinator: Bina is an excellent example of realistic consequences to this kind of behavior. The fan made wiki has an entire page devoted to cataloging the injuries.Bina: Fainting isn't real, only ninteenth century girls in corsets faint.Kendra: And twenty-first century time travelers with high fevers they failed to mention.
- The author himself qualifies: The now-completed main story is comprised of 2400+ daily updates, 7 days a week, each with text and at least one drawing. The text alone would put him into Robert Jordan's territory!
- Eldritch Abomination: The Botfly. We're not sure what it is exactly, but it seems to run off being observed...
- Eldritch Location: Two versions of the sugar factory. Bina enters the Botfly Moment version by falling, and exits by throwing a scarf up into the sky and climbing up, it is unnaturally still and dead. The physical version should not be able to exist where it is, was not there a few days prior to the events of the comic, and is made of many overlapping versions of itself. It is also riddled with cracks in time itself.
- Everyone Knows Morse: Played with here. Nobody in a rescue party knows Morse Code including two police officers. The person they just found does though.
- Fantasy Keepsake: Grandma's scarf, from her first significant dream. It behaves magically, too.
- A Glitch in the Matrix: Over the course of events, anomalies from the story accumulate in Bina's dreams, eventually leading to more interesting things.
- Heroic Sacrifice: The Slingshot can get everyone on the life raft out of the collapsing universe, but someone has to stay behind to operate it. Thirteen wanted to do it, but Twelve puts her into the life raft and stays behind herself.
- Humanoid Abomination: The Naughts are reanimated human corpses that move in very unnatural ways. Each of them looks like several mangled bodies stuck together, and if they are physically damaged, the Naughts unfold to create even more random body parts.
- Hypocritical Humor: When Amie calls B4 intense."I'm not intense," says Bina, intensely.
- Infinite Canvas: while most of the images are a standard 800x600 pixels, the End of Chapter pages tend to be long vertical ones as Bina ascends or descends. For Chapter 14, it was horizontal instead, but the website did not handle it well.
- Intrepid Reporter: Bina's late grandma was a reporter for 40 years, and knew how to get out of or avoid dangerous situations when she found them.
- Jackass Genie: The Botfly grants wishes in the worst possible way:
- Josephine wanted to be a famous scientist, but recieved Magic-Powered Pseudoscience that cannot be explained and only worked because the Botfly made it work.
- Gregor wanted his dog to be alive again, but the Botfly stole the dog's soul and gave him a hideous Animalistic Abomination.
- Bina wanted to fix her past mistakes, but she is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop and every time she travels in time, she damages the universe more and more.
- Amie is obsessed with Doctor Who and wants to be the Doctor's companion, but if Bina is the Doctor, her companion is Kendra and Amie is just an extra.
- Leaning on the Fourth Wall: Bina and other characters respond to the reader's prompts, Bina narrates her dreams and talks to the title card of one of her dreams. But no one ever fully acknowledges or breaks the wall.
- Left Hanging: The author has warned that given all the detours introduced by reader suggestions, not every loose end will be tied up. In particular, ANL started out with the author expecting it to be a "little ghost story", and some of the spookiness introduced at the beginning probably will be forever unexplained. Especially since both the locale and the time period got blown up in the climax.
- Literal Metaphor: On their second meeting, Josephine says that she was "just killing time" waiting for Bina. Bina, who already had her share of time travel shenanigans, warily asks if she means it literally.Bina: Err... were you... you know, being serious just now?
Josephine: What?
Bina: About killing time?
Josephine: Ah! No, not now of course. I don't think the dead get to affect the living that directly. [...] While I was alive, of course, that's another story. - Magic-Powered Pseudoscience: Josephine's electricity generator and Bina's time travel. While they adhere to observable rules and seem scientific up to a point, they only work because of the Botfly, not because they are stable forces within the setting normally.
- Pocket Dimension: The Moment, a shared refuge which also assists with the party's time-travel.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Bina is the Red Oni, Kendra is the Blue Oni. To a lesser degree when Amie and Emmie join them.
- Retcon: One change to the continuity that is not in-universe was made when Jack Fractal realized he should not have killed off Bina.
- Running Gag: Bina wanting to make her previous self step on legos. Lots of them.
- Sentient Phlebotinum: All of the powers/gifts the characters have is powered by the Botfly and probably serve its ends one way or another
- Sickly Green Glow: The unlight, the cracks in the fabric of spacetime...
- String Theory: Discussed by Bina as the "crazy wall", but not actually a Room Full of Crazy. The wall in the construction yard office may also count as this.
- The Speechless: Bina for awhile, due to trauma from a retcon seizure.
- Time Is Dangerous: Without some specific equipment to handle the side effects, time travel can be extremely painful and/or deadly. Just thinking about retcons causes headaches at minimum.
- Unusually Uninteresting Name: The Department of Phenomenological Investigation and Research. They are not the X-Files. They are totally the X-Files.
- Walking Disaster Area: Bina. Even when she isn't punching holes through time and bringing down buildings bad things seem drawn to her location. (In fact, the monsters can detect her powers.)
- Wrong Genre Savvy: Amie believes she is in an episode of Doctor Who and repeatedly tries to act accordingly with... mixed results.
