Overall: Okay now it makes sense. Also this is a pretty hilarious setup so far.
I hope we never see the time machine. Following this kind of setup it seems like we’re going in for another “story within a story” structure this time. But there’s a possibility/suspicion being expressed by some of the characters that whatever the Time Traveler says is likely just some elaborate trick, and honestly, I kind of hope the story keeps it ambiguous on that front. I could see it going either way, but ambiguity is one of my favorite literary tropes (though I hate it in social situations). That said, the biggest question on my mind has to do with the unusual choice of character naming here.
So let me see if I can make a list of the characters so far: Narrator, Blank (don’t know much about Blank), The Editor and the Journalist (both kinda showboaters and seem like they’ve taken the yellow journalism thing whole hog), the Psychologist (a skeptic), Fillby (speaks a bit tersely), The Doctor (/shrug/), The Medical Man (seems pretty much like the calm one here), and the Time Traveler.
What is this assortment of people? What brings them together? They seem to be casually acquainted with one another, but it seems odd that they’ve apparently all met several times and the narrator doesn’t know many of their names, not even the name of their host (though I think that one’s intentional).
As to what happens, the Time Traveler invites his… associates(?) over for dinner the week after the demonstration in chapter 1. He himself arrives rather late to the meal and as he walks in he is covered in dust and cuts. The others poke fun at him, asking if he was time traveling, to which he bluntly responds that he was, now hand me the mutton thanks. After a bit more prodding and eating, the Time Traveler explains that earlier this afternoon he started traveling through time, stayed 8 days in another time, and then came back during dinner. I had totally forgotten that time travel means that the amount of time spent in any one period becomes flexible. Somehow I had thought that this would hold to my usual visualization of time travel stories in which if you go into the future and stay there for 8 days, you’ll come back and 8 days will have passed. I wonder if he’s going far enough into the future/past to avoid running into other versions of himself.
Seating his guests down, the Time Traveler gets ready to recount his traveling experience. I’m looking forward to it.
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