
And now you know how, even when the full time-travel storyline never happened, Yomiko was still able to engineer the destruction of the time machine.
While the machine exploded in winter of 1997, this Yomiko is from around January 1998. It's currently around May '98 in Shine time.
And to everyone who has ever wished the comic would Hurry Up And Get To The Plot, Already: Yomiko's visit to herself can be found on this timeline, meaning it's been in the cards for two and a half years now. So you see there is a method to my madness, after all!