Ok, The story as from what I’ve seen (now having read every page of the comic (online) in under a week, I think, and reading all of the comments up to today’s page but not many past today’s page, but not having read anything from WS books) is that you have Lanthis, super old city/civilization, that acquired super awesome tech that made the religions of the time basically obsolete. In a sort of “Death throes” scenario, the religidiots enact a coup so that religion > tech again. Mayahuel [sic?], Jin’s Mother, is one of the more learned. She is also apparently very dangerous in her own right. Where the Calendar machine and various other technologies that are used and evident to present day, how the Lanthian civilization is old, old, maybe another old in here, or two or three, world compared to the new world old civilisations (It’s like having an old old book and a new old book… supposedly parts of the same story, just different sets of chapters, different events, the same supreme leader with totally different personalities, etc.), and how this is all relevant all sort of escape me at the moment. Ok, so, religidiots take over the world as they knew it. Maya plays veg-o-matic with some peoples’ faces, and that’s about all we see. We know Maya killed people. We know she had a hand in building the Calendar Machine and then in the subsequent disruption of its rhythm. We know she spent 80,000 + years in the demon realm, which may seem infinitely longer to her.
Did she deserve it? Was it a punishment that was too harsh, adequate, or not harsh enough? Well, punishment(s ) should fit the crime(s ), right? What is her crime(s )? She killed a bunch of guards, perhaps more than a bunch, and perhaps more than those guards. She fucked up the Calendar Machine. Are those crimes horrible enough as is to require so horrible a punishment as she received, or are they not, as they are, as bad as to require such a punishment? Well, then Intent comes into play, I would think. Is Maya only as guilty as a soldier on the front lines is guilty of homicide, etc.? Kill or be killed. Being FORCED into such a predicament by others. The VIOLENT take-over could have ended in her death, no? Did she CHOOSE to fight such a battle because the religidiots chose to stage a coup? Or, were there other ways… Assuming she has knowledge or predication of future events. Letting those guards live, etc. would lead to horrible scenarios. As an analogy: You/Maya are standing on a bridge. You have a three way switch in your hands. A train, on track 1, is barreling at a school bus full of children. You could switch the track at an upcoming junction to Track 2, that also has a bus broken down on it, but it is bus full of death row inmates, or you can put the train on track 3, which is clear. Assuming Maya had such options, is her crime that she chose track 1 or 2 instead of track 3? What if those children were to grow up and become the ancestors of Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and any other horribly dis-likable character in the story books of history? That is also assuming that Maya HAD such future knowledge, like seeing what was ahead on the train tracks. What if it was foggy and all she could tell were screams of little children in one direction, screams of grown men and women in one direction, but silence from another? What if the motive was simply REVENGE!? She probably KNEW people who were killed in the violent coup and/or was a target, herself. What if she was a total bystander who happened to just be very smart and studied well in school and decided to act as an assassin for the shits, giggles, and because she liked a video game she played once where she acted as an assassin?
With the knowledge presented, could it potentially be any of these scenarios? Well, perhaps we should go buy and read the books for more answers. Or perhaps someone can shut me up by providing further info that narrows down the possible scenarios: 1) Maya is a murdering bitch who deserved what she got if not more so, 2) Maya was doing what she had to, and probably didn’t deserve what she got or she DID deserve what she got or more so despite doing what she felt she had to do, … etc.

As to the timeline question, what is to say there WAS a “time loop” but more of a single timeline, continuing on indefinitely, that had parts of it seem to repeat a couple of times, as perceived by a few people. It’s shown that a concept of a “timeline” continues outside the real world, INCLUDING the demon realm, and other realms, because even if “time” doesn’t happen in the demon realm, the demons perceive a change in time. They cannot simply pop into the real world through any door available in egypt in the time of the pharaohs one second, pop back into DR, and then pop back out in the time of Lanthis. Phix has seen the change in time, with the ability to count how many times the cycle has happened, etc. So, was Jin REALLY “screwing with the timeline” ? I think not. She could predict with high probability what was going to happen if she did nothing or a specific something, so, by changing what she did, she caused different results.
Now, if there IS a timeline, AT ALL, isn’t there a chance that the timeline has a definite beginning, end, middle, flow in between the three points, etc. and that there really ISN’T such a thing as free will, simply an illusion of it? Or, if there is a timeline but the end is not definite, therefore, the middle is also not definite (but it must have had a definite beginning), then that timeline supersedes the seeming ‘timeline’ that ‘loops’ as explained above in that there is one beyond just the “cycle” present in this one world/realm. So, to be honest, either Free Will is an illusion, or there is no free will at all, but it was never taken away due to Jin’s actions because she never could TRULY “mess with the timeline” .

I’m not a total tea nut, but I do like me some Lapsang, and I can appreciate how much better FOP is than basic Orange Pekoe.

Y’ mean there’s more exposition in the BOOKS?!

OK, I been meaning to get the wife interested in Wapsi, and I think, now, that getting the ‘hard-copy’ version into her hands might be the best idea.