Storyboarded by Sofia Alexander, Owen Dennis, Madeline Queripel, & Cole Sanchez
On the afternoon of November 22nd in North Branch, Minnesota, at the start of Thanksgiving break, a teenage girl named Tulip Olsen is discussing her upcoming weekend trip to a video game programming camp in Oshkosh, Wisconsin with her best friend Mikayla. Her excitement is dulled slightly when Mikayla brings up the topic of Tulip's parents being divorced, but is completely extinguished when she gets home and learns that she is no longer able to go; her father mixed up the dates and can't come over to pick her up, and her mother had scheduled extra work shifts under the assumption Tulip would be out-of-town. Tulip bitterly responds by attacking her parents for "messing things up" with their divorce, ignoring both their attempts to talk to her and running away from home to walk to camp on her own shortly after.
After hours of walking, a train passes by that seems to be heading directly to her destination. Tulip steps onboard, only to find herself waking up in the snow, having seemingly slept through the night and hallucinated the train encounter. But after meeting a robot named One-One, whom Tulip initially believes is a toy, she comes across a door and discovers that she has boarded the train: the snowy landscape is actually one of its many cars. Tulip is initially enthused by this turn of events and runs to the next car, the Grid Car, to spend time playing with its defining feature: pressure plates that create colorful cubes. But when she realizes her right hand is now host to a glowing green number 115, she begins to question exactly where she is.
Leaving the train car, Tulip finally takes notice of her surroundings: this isn't the American Midwest, but some barren wasteland in an alternate dimension. After witnessing another passenger from a distant train car seemingly get atomized by a glowing sky vortex, she tries to leave the train, only to encounter a small pack of soul-sucking cockroach dog creatures in the wasteland. Tulip retreats back to the train and barely manages to escape them with One-One's help and by using the wall-building properties of the Grid Car. Deeming the train a place she definitely doesn't want to stay on either, she learns from her new robot friend that her only means of escape likely lies with the train's conductor, located at the engine room. The very remote engine room. The episode closes with Tulip looking out over the train and at the glowing number on her hand, determined to get back to Earth.
Tropes:
- Bizarre Taste in Food: While walking home from the school bus, Tulip is casually eating a raw onion. Mikayla calls this out as weird, and Tulip protests that she has "a refined palate".
- Didn't Think This Through: Tulip decides to walk to camp when her parents screw up their schedules and can't take her themselves. After a long walk, she realizes 300 miles is not a "short hop" like the brochure indicated.
- Exact Words: When Tulip asks where she is (upon seeing someone being vaporized in front of her eyes), Sad-One states "You're in a bad place right now". At first, you would assume the "bad place" is the world where the Infinity Train rides. He never stated it was a physical place.
- The Ghost: Tulip's father never appears in person in the episode. He talks on the phone with her mother and sends Tulip a text, but we only see a picture of him in Tulip's room.
- Innocently Insensitive:
- Mikayla somewhat bluntly brings up the divorce of Tulip's parents, which is obviously quite sore for Tulip. But she's clearly trying to emphasize and isn't trying to make Tulip feel bad by doing so.
- Tulip's mother just tells Tulip that she can't take her, and neither can her father, without realizing that Tulip was hanging onto coding camp as a means of coping with the divorce.
- Jerkass Has a Point: While Tulip's comments towards her mother about the divorce are out of line, she has a right to be annoyed that both of her parents signed a contract that if she improved her grades, she could go to coding camp, and neither of them will honor that. And neither of them even suggest that she could take a plane, the bus or a train to get there.
- Meaningful Background Event: As Tulip wakes up in the snowy forest car, a strange pod can be seen flying off in the background, just behind the trees.
- Mix-and-Match Critters: The Ghoms, the creatures that chase Tulip, look like dogs with a cockroach body on top.
- Parental Issues: Even without taking the scheduling error that kept either of them from taking Tulip to Game Design Camp as they had promised into account, it's clear that Tulip is not taking the divorce well, and that the scheduling conflict is merely the straw that broke the camel's back.
- The Runaway: Tulip decides to try and head to Game Design Camp herself after her parents can't take her.
- Schmuck Bait: Right when Tulip complains about the distance she needs to travel, a train shows up out of nowhere and a sign flips over indicating the same town she needs to get to. She lampshades it as convenient and is knocked out by a burst of light when she tries to board the train, winding up on an entirely different train in some strange realm.
- Stating the Simple Solution:
- Tulip decides to walk all the way to camp since neither of her parents can take her or offer helpful alternatives. She only realizes later that there's no way she can walk three hundred miles in winter and make it on time and tries her luck at the train station.
- She later tries to get off the train to avoid its strange powers. It turns out the desert is filled with Ghoms, that want to eat her life force.
- Vampiric Draining: The Ghoms can drain the life from humans, though it comes right back if they're cut off in the middle of feeding.
- You Wake Up in a Room: When Tulip is zapped by the train, she wakes up in the snow and thinks she hallucinated it, only to realize she's actually in a self-contained environment on an enormous train.
