Our last chapter has arrived! On a minor note, I noticed a math error with in-universe episode broadcast and time travel, and have fixed that accordingly. Here are my final responses to reviews before wrapping things up.
SideshowJazz1: It was definitely intended to be sweet. Not sure what to say about being strict, but I can imagine Courtney's parents having high expectations. She did once say "Momma didn't raise no sucker!" during a confessional from the TDA episode "2008: A Space Owen", and never really spoke about her family after that in canon. The rest was left to imagination and I just improvised with it. With our CIT indeed being a legal adult, her mother and father can't really nag her so much anymore. I did touch on them a bit in Chapters 2 and 6, though last chapter of course went into much more detail. They're definitely supportive and she will most certainly reflect here on how her life changed when reliving All-Stars.
acosta perez jose ramiro: Her welcome back was far better this time for sure.
That British Guy: Perhaps you'll have more to say for the last chapter.
Gage the Hedgehog: We're now at the story's end, and it's nice to have the contestants get back to where they live.
Phenomenal Ultra Instinct: It has been quite a ride indeed! I'm glad you enjoyed the return home.
Ladies and gentlemen, I now give you the story's conclusion.
Without any doubt, I can safely say that reliving All-Stars and doing things differently has overall improved my life. However, if there's anything good that came out of my first run-through, then it's how re-watching episodes featuring myself afterwards gave me a way to learn from my mistakes. I was horrified at how mean I could sometimes get when viewing those, and I did change myself for the better once I truly realized how often I was in the wrong. Losing Scott as a boyfriend and Gwen as a friend were among my biggest regrets. Good thing neither of those things happened again in this timeline.
The day after I got home from season 5, I picked out a nice Montreal apartment which is about a 20-minute drive from the ginger's farm and moved in a week later. It also is conveniently within walking distance of both train and bus stops if I ever need public transportation. We've met up with each other at least once a week over the past six months since I moved there. Going on dates with him has been a delight. He remains a gentleman with me whether we're in a restaurant, movie theater, museum, one of our places, or anywhere else. I'm quite glad we're still a couple. We've only had occasional arguments or disagreements since All-Stars ended, none of which had any major affect on our relationship.
Scott and I have had the chance to meet one another's families. Thankfully my parents and brothers have no issues with him. Mr. and Mrs. Gordon happen to be fine farmers, and his sister Albertha is easy to get along with. They fortunately don't have any problems with me either. My boyfriend just turned 18 a week ago, and I took him out for his first legal beer to celebrate becoming an adult. He thought that tasted kind of bitter, but still enjoyed drinking it. I had similar thoughts with my first alcoholic drink on my own 18th birthday.
As for other contestants, the ginger is still friends with our gaming nut Sam Shriver. He and the gamer sometimes play Halo or Call of Duty games together on Xbox Live. I've joined them several times, and believe it or not, I somehow kicked their asses the first time we played Halo together. Now I have a better sense of how Penny from The Big Bang Theory felt in that early episode where she ends up being a natural when joining Raj, Sheldon, and Leonard for their weekly Halo night when Howard was absent. Dakota happened to join in a couple times as well for Call of Duty and is pretty good at it.
By the way, I once got the chance to meet Ms. Milton when she and Sam went on a double date with Scott and me. Most of her pre-mutation physical appearance has been restored. The only noticeable differences are a spike on each shoulder, she's a bit taller than before (I'm guessing by 2 or 3 inches), and her hair is much shorter (roughly chin-length as opposed to going down the back). Dakota dyes it blonde these days (or at least the hair tips) when the green that grows in somehow just won't go away.
I hear her surgeons are struggling to find ways to get the natural blonde hair to grow back and that scheduling appointments hasn't been easy when they're oftentimes booked with other patients. Regardless, they still have done a very impressive job overall trying to restore her prior looks, and she was pleasant to interact with when we met. It also took multiple operations to get her to this point because of how advanced the goal was and how much she had mutated. Dakota and Sam are certainly lucky to have one another, and I wish them well. Right now, she's primarily hoping to get the shoulder spikes removed whenever the next surgery takes place, which is also something hospitals for some reason haven't yet found a way to safely remove.
Two other people I happened to meet up with one day were Mike and Zoey when they were visiting Montreal and we exchanged contact information to keep in touch. They're still happily together to this day. Psychiatry also really helped Mr. Albright feel better mentally after all his alternate personalities got wiped. She was quite forgiving when he apologized for not thinking to caution anybody about Mal before the evil persona resurfaced, reasoning her boyfriend couldn't have known it would be an issue before the beach shovel hit when he previously thought that demon was long gone. I share her thoughts on the matter.
A new thing I learned from our meeting was that the first three seasons of Total Drama ended up airing two episodes each week, not just one as I thought. Ms. Fulton had watched them all as they aired and apparently nobody on camera knew this right away, not even Chris or Chef. Seasons four through six still just showed one episode per week, though. It's hard to say for certain, but maybe high ratings for the original season changed the network's mind on how often to broadcast those. In any case, I still have no idea whether a seventh season of Total Drama will come. If it does, then I probably won't compete since I've sent in applications for multiple colleges and I do hope to get in ASAP so I can subsequently go to law school and someday become a lawyer. I already took home half a million bucks from the show anyway and am quite happy I could get any cash out of it.
In the meantime, I've been working part-time hours as a barista at a coffee shop. It's about a five-minute walk to and from there. No, this isn't permanent, just something to help pay the bills and start making my own earning. It pays me more money than my work as a grocery store cashier. Not going back to retail if I can avoid it. The free coffee I get here is also quite nice.
Why am I not doing anything for my parents' law firm now? Because it's too far away to feasibly commute to and from every day, plus they've always had a rule on only hiring people with law degrees and insisted it wouldn't be fair to just hire my brothers or me without such qualifications just because we're family when they wouldn't do the same for any other people. While I really wish I could work there sooner, I also understand their point. Being the youngest of their three children, I of course will be the last to join, but at least I have an idea of what to expect. Here's hoping I get accepted into something good soon so I can work further towards that.
While working on some college applications, I re-watched the Pahkitew episodes with Scott as they were broadcast. What he doesn't know is that I wanted to see whether any differences would be made from the first time I viewed them following my changes to All-Stars. The answer was no. Literally everything was the same from Beardo getting the first boot to the Shawn vs. Sky finale. I should've guessed when no past contestants were seen or heard from that season at all and the closest things to even mentioning them took place in its first episode where Chris discussed the island sinking and Ella said in a confessional that she loved watching season three and memorized its songs.
My boyfriend was probably most disturbed by how Scarlett went berserk and tried to kill the other players during the final six. Can't blame him for feeling irked when she was indeed a psycho who should be in jail for that. I heard she got banned from the show after getting cut from the contest that day, which is fully deserved and wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. No way would I ever want to compete with someone like her! Letting that maniac return would basically be asking for trouble.
Conversely, something he found funny was how Max tried to be evil without much success. That wannabe villain just wishes he was as evil as the show's actual antagonists of each season (Heather, me, Alejandro, Scott, Mal, and Sugar in that order) when serving as baddie, or perhaps as evil as Scarlett when she attempted to murder the cast. The ginger felt somewhat embarrassed to be from a farm after seeing how ridiculously easily Rodney would fall in love with different girls just from simple interactions. Scott once complained "That idiot and his delusions could easily give a poor impression of other farm guys like me!", though I quickly assured him otherwise when he has little else in common with the love-obsessed farm boy.
Oh, I almost forgot something else; Gwen sometimes visits Montreal. Her arms took about two months to fully heal after both got broken from that big fall in the cave. We've also met up from time to time near her London, Ontario home. The goth isn't interested in competing on Total Drama again, though has no issues meeting up with castmates such as my boyfriend and myself, and she has lately gotten back in touch with Leshawna. Not sure why the two didn't interact much after getting eliminated in season three when they were close friends during seasons one and two.
In any case, one really great thing about my time-travel is that I'm sure not one of my competitors had the slightest suspicion that I had already once lived through All-Stars. Good thing nobody figured out my big secret. I specifically made sure not to leave any hints about it. Not even brilliant detectives like Sherlock Holmes or Adrian Monk could've figured out I went back in time unless maybe they had some aura-reading ability like Dawn has or could read minds. She on the other hand inevitably would've figured it out and exposed me if competing in season five.
Because of this time-travel and changing up my actions, I'm now someone with friends and a loving relationship instead of a largely lonely person who most (or all) of my castmates despise for the stupid elimination chart. It also helped me get to the finals. In the original timeline, my relatives were probably the only people who didn't hold any grudges against me after All-Stars ended, though Mom and Dad did reprimand my actions as very wrong. I don't blame them for doing so even if it added to my guilt. At some point after they told me during that conversation to think long and hard about what I did, I started re-watching seasons I had competed on to refresh some fuzzy memories, which of course made me really examine my own behavior.
In a way, I feel grateful for what my parents said because I otherwise might not have viewed recordings of myself or subsequently wished to go back in time for a chance to do things over. I'm also glad that I re-watched those episodes and could truly learn from my mistakes. Such gratitude certainly cannot be given aloud for obvious reasons, though. Oh well. This time around, they're very proud of me becoming a finalist and taking home some cash even if I didn't win the season. I do hope to please them further with my academics once I get into college. They've never been super strict, though do have high expectations of my brothers and me. Right now, I'm back on the night I made the wish that sent me to the beginning of All-Stars. It feels good to have returned to the present. With a far brighter future this time around, I'm quite eager to see what follows. Here's hoping for the best.
THE END! Our CIT has finished her crusade AND returned to the present. It's been really fun writing this fic, and I do hope you've all enjoyed it. I feel quite accomplished for completing it and am very grateful for all of the praise and suggestions I got from reviews. In particular, I'd like to thank Phenomenal Ultra Instinct, ShadowJcreed, and GlitchWarrior for how often they gave input for my story here as well as PurpleBandit3000 for inspiring its premise with his "Total Drama Redemption" fanfic. Seriously, go read that brilliant piece and then its sequel "Noah's Tour of the World", especially if you haven't already. Speaking of sequels, I AM NOT making one for this story as it's purely supposed to be a standalone fic, so please don't ask for one. It'll never happen. On another note, I give credit to SideshowJazz1 for the idea on Dakota's post-surgery physical appearance used in this chapter. The operation details were something I came up with for additional nuance.
Chapter posted: May 19, 2019.