Let us assume that, hypothetically, there is another universe. One in which humans have finally made it to another galaxy, aliens have made contact, and they're being treated in much the same way as a different nation- that is, with a shitload of diplomatic policies, minor skirmishes, and cultural exchanges.
Let us also say that in such a universe, a treasure called the Ultimate Answer existed. Nobody knew what it was, nor why it was so important, but they all wanted it anyway. The problem is, nobody had a clue where it could be. Wild guesses to its location had been made countless times, ranging from the middle of the Milky Way to the very fringes of Andromeda, but of course, they never turned out to be correct.
In this hypothetical, possibly nonexistent universe there were three people of incredible importance, even if nobody- even the three in question- realized it. They were individuals that nobody would imagine coming together in some sort of group, but they did anyway because they didn't give a damn.
Those three individuals managed to find the Ultimate Answer, and learned of the terrible truth behind that universe- and the Answer sent them back, back before they had formed a group, and wiped their memories. Why? Because the Answer itself was sure the Answer they had found was erroneous- in other words, the Ultimate Answer had an identity crisis, and requested a timeout while it put itself back together.
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Somewhere in Andromeda, 252 AC
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A girl put a matte grey, polished rectangular box with strange protrusions at unlikely angles to her shoulder. On one end was a tiny opening, and as the girl pressed her finger to a small screen located on one of the protrusions, a beam of visible, white light emerged from the opening. It was a gun, and a terribly futuristic gun, one that not only satisfied the requirement of looking absolutely bizarre but also shot lasers, something that would be deemed impractical in the present in which you are living in.
The girl herself was not very remarkable. Slim, with no particular womanly features, it was obvious she was young. Her jet-black hair was cut short to her neck, and her face was stereotypically Asian. The only thing that exposed her as different were her eyes. Mint-green and glowing, they looked rather nonhuman- because they were. They were Oculus eye implants, guaranteed to increase productivity by 100% (or half your money back). They also allowed the user to view a heads-up display that was both annoyingly detailed and conveniently accurate. The implant was usually near-useless and possibly even harmful for someone with an average intelligence, because of the tide of information from the implants they had to process. Some reports claimed that some average people who had the implants installed started screaming, and then laughing as their brains melted and ran out their ears (the brains were immediately cleaned off the road by Broxothlerp cleaners).
What are Broxotherp cleaners? Hailing from a remote planet in the Milky Way, they had an incredible body and digestive system that allowed them to digest any organic matter, provided they could fit it in their pinky finger-sized mouths. Most cities employed them as cleaners free of charge, because the matter they cleaned up constituted their payment. Broxothlerps caught digesting organic matter from a living organism- or one that had been alive before the Broxothlerp began eating- were sentenced to a special trial with Broxothlerp judges who judged the criminal based on the stupidly complicated Broxothlerp Code of Laws, which was so thick it could take a Broxothlerp months to simply flip the pages from the front to back. As it was, the trials usually took anywhere from a week to 73 years, which is the length of the ongoing trial of Flipbiddly Broxwent, who committed so many atrocities at once that it took the judges a decade just to find the appropriate clauses.
The fact that the girl was neither screaming nor writhing in agony as her brains poured onto the floor was a testament to her intelligence. She was Alina Laxoclean Ridley, whose practical-minded parents had accepted an offer from the laxative manufacturer Laxoclean. In return for making their child's middle name Laxoclean, they would receive free toilet paper for life. Said practical parents had also volunteered for HuGeImP, or Human Genome Improvement Project, which aimed to modify babies to become superhuman (the shortened form was run through fifteen different offices of government before it was accepted by the public in a landslide against NETT, which frankly didn't make sense anyway). Out of millions of volunteers, Alina's parents (and Alina too, by proxy) had been chosen. Technology had improved immensely, as it is prone to do, and biologists and chemists alike were fairly certain they had isolated the specific sequences in DNA that corresponded to different traits. Alina's modifications were designed to make her super-smart, super-quick, and whatever else the scientists could think of putting a 'super' on. Unfortunately, while the first part successfully made its way into Alina's general makeup, the other parts didn't. Instead, she was just a child with incredible smarts and hand-eye coordination. The scientists were about to chalk her up as a failure, before they realized that she had managed to read her way through a textbook on xenobiology at 4 months. They continued tests, but while they could force the other attributes to take on other babies, none of them were quite as pronounced or extreme as Alina's intelligence. So, Alina was taught everything- and quite literally everything (that had something to do with knowledge, that is). One day she was given a book on politics, and economics on the next. She was injected with obscure forms of knowledge, from how to tie a toga properly to meditation techniques. In a way, she became an archive for humanity's combined sum of knowledge. At the age of 8, she debated representatives of every religion and reduced them to tears. At the age of 10, she designed a vastly more efficient way to use antimatter in engines. And at the age of 13, she founded a company- Ridleyworks Co.- that churned out patents by the dozen and made her a multimillionaire. And then, at the age of 15, a year before the starting point of this story, she was chosen to be the supervisor of colonization efforts. With Earth's population multiplying exponentially, humans had started to properly settle other planets for human occupation starting with Mars multiple decades ago.
The place Alina was at the moment was an orbital habitat over Vishnu, named after the god. Although there weren't many followers of religion- in fact, there were almost none- it was still an important part of Earth's history and culture. Thus, each new settled planet had been named after a mythological figure from a culture chosen at random.
The reason she was firing a laser inside such a habitat was because it had been manufactured by her company, and thus contained a complete mini-factory, product testing range, and engines powerful enough to push an entire city into space. Even while coordinating colonization efforts, she still found the time to design more inventions, most likely for selling to the general public. The laser gun was an improvement over the company's previous model, the BFL-13 (short for Big Fucking Laser). To go into its technical specifications would be extremely boring, which is why we will skip it in this story. Rest assured, it was extremely powerful.
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"That was a short summary of just one of our strange cast of characters. Now, we move on to- huh? You want to know who I am? Well, I suppose that's fair.
I'm the Narrator! I tell stories- and that's about it. I live in a small apartment, where a giant screen covering an entire wall shows me what's happening with the characters. Because I always count clockwise, the wall the screen is on is the fourth, which is why I call it the fourth wall. Simple enough.
But you mustn't think of me as a stalker. Oh, no! I have the characters' best interests at heart. I'm just here to record and retell, so their stories aren't forgotten. Is that enough of an explanation as to who I am? Okay, let's get back to our mysterious second character."
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Somewhere in the Milky Way, at the same time
Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.
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A man lounged in an old, stained armchair in a seedy casino, hazy with tobacco smoke and who knows what else. Behind him was a voluptuous Quilladian woman (famous for having five breasts, two vaginas and no inhibitions), who he fondled every now and then. The armchair was in front of a large poker table, at which three other players were seated. None of them were human, and none of them looked particularly happy, possibly because the man had won the past five rounds.
The aliens had readily accepted poker, and it had become the most popular card game in the entire galaxy. Although some aliens were physically unable to pronounce the word 'poker', they all enjoyed it nonetheless- some so much that they made it the de facto method of waging wars, with contested territories serving as the chips.
"Well, gentlemen, I think we should wrap this up. I'm sure you've lost enough money tonight."
The man was wearing an EZConverter, which was a universal translator. Of course, it made mistakes occasionally- maybe a bit more frequently- or very often- which sometimes led to wars, as was the case between the Kalisthenics and Arobicans. During a diplomatic meeting, the translator made an error in translating 'We intend no harm' and output 'We intend to farm' instead, which the Arobicans took as a threat, due to the fact that the Arobicans are hugely muscled, cow-like people.
One of the other players let out a guttural grunt. It was a Glorp'zdalitd'staal, a creature that looked like a cross between black sludge and a badly drawn sketch of Cthulhu. The reason for the complicated naming was due to the fact that nobody was able to understand what their species name meant, not even the Glorp'zdalitd'staals themselves. Their entire language consisted mostly of grunts and chirps, which meant that a slight mispronunciation could result in disaster.
"Do you really intend to leave now, after you've robbed us of all our money? I don't think so."
How the Glorp'zdalitd'staals managed to cram such a large amount of information in a couple of grunts was largely unknown, although scientists suspected that this was due to their prodigiously overdeveloped vocal chords. Of course, nobody cared to go near them for long enough to check, and when they died their bodies melted into an unidentifiable black ooze.
The man put up his hands in a placating manner, which was a risky move, as such a gesture could be taken as a threat, especially for Slipenslidians, since their planet was filled with cliffs and crevices to fall off. There, lifting your hands as though preparing to push them would be taken as a death threat. Even at the poker table, a Slipenslidian that had been glaring at the man over its spectacles gasped and fainted.
"H-hey. No need for violence. You're all cultured individuals, who I'm sure are very nice and-"
At this point the Quilladian behind him took out a wicked-looking black knife and put it to the man's throat. The man gulped, his Adam's apple bobbing. He slowly sat back down, the knife traveling around his head to the nape of his neck. He put his hands on the wood rim of the table. The Glorp'zdalitd'staal gestured with a tentacle.
"Play."
The man put his hands on the cards, and with trembling hands, made to flip them. At the same time, he tossed them into the air. As the other players' eyes tracked upwards, he ducked under the table, pulled out what looked to be white plastic balls, and gulped them down. In that instant, time stopped.
To be exact, the man's perception of time sped up. The drug he had ingested was Acceleraterol, which would make it look as though the world had slowed down. In this state, the user is able to plan out his actions in advance, which allows for elaborate tactical moves. Of course, there is a drawback- the drug is extremely addictive, and excessive use will cause an overload of d'mesliek, an untranslated word that humans seemed to have no equivalent of.
The man would have smiled if he could move in normal speed. As it was, the corners of his mouth slowly began curving upwards, as his hands inched their way down to his pockets. He watched as he threw himself out from under the table in slow motion, while the other players scrambled to reach for their own weapons.
The weapons the man drew from his pockets were two pistols- a remnant from an age when guns had used chemical propellants instead of electrical means. His fingers, poised on the trigger guards, slipped into the space between the trigger and the guard, and pulled. The first two flashes launched pieces of metal at the Glorp'zdalitd'staal and the fourth player, a relatively human-like creature, albeit with blue skin, ten-fingered hands, and a lizard-like head. He repositioned his hands to aim at the unconscious Slipenslidian and the Quilladin. He felt the familiar pounding in his head that signified the impending end of the effects of Acceleraterol. With a jolt, time sped up, and the bullets struck the two targets as intended.
Although killing the lizard-human creature was relatively easy, it would take a trained marksman to kill a Glorp'zdalitd'staal with one shot. It had a small, peanut-sized organ roughly in the middle of its body that was responsible for controlling everything- like a brain, except this organ also controlled its brain. When it was destroyed, it fell to the ground, as though its strings had been cut.
The gunfire had not woken the Slipenslidian, but the Quilladian was frozen in a crouch, with the gun still trained on it.
"Well, sugar, looks like you need more experience being a whore-slash-killer. I know a couple that could fondle your dick while they cut your head clean off, and you wouldn't even notice. I mean, the part where they chop your head off. You would want to feel them fondle your dick. Except you don't have one."
With that, the man exited the room backwards, gun still trained on the Quilladin whore.
Dennis Warhawk. A 23-year-old mercenary, famed for being both a talented gunner and an insufferable womanizer. Warhawk wasn't his real name- his actual last name was Dinkelmann, which he considered stupid. If there was a war, you could bet that he would be involved in some way, whether as an instigator or a participant. Walking Testosterone. Hair-trigger Havoc. Biggest Fucking Idiot In The Entire Universe. All of these nicknames had been attributed to him at some point or another, and he relished them. Even the last one.
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The Narrator paused the screen.
"What would a man of carnage do with the Ultimate Answer? Well, it's obvious! He wanted to sell it, and if it was something he couldn't sell, use it in other ways so he could be rich and powerful. You see, he was a bit of an idiot- he fought wars just for the fun of it, and he never made much of a profit from contracts due to his exorbitant debts.
"Just goes to show that the universe is a very diverse place. The third character is much different from the other two- in fact, it's not even human!"
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Somewhere in space, at the same time
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The being was tiny. It had four legs, a tail, and a head with floppy ears. In short, it was a dog- for the moment, anyway. It was a shapeshifter, and quite possibly the only one in the entire universe that could change its physical makeup to that of a different creature.
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Suddenly, the screen turned off. The Narrator had lunged forwards to touch the power nodule on the side.
"I thought maybe we'd skip this part. The life of a dog is pretty boring, even if it's actually a shapeshifter. What? You want to know anyway? Too bad. I'm not going to let you know until you have to."
The Narrator turns to an unopened book on a desk right in front of the screen. It is labeled 'A Jaunt Through Subspace'. The Narrator places his hands on the cover, then pauses.
"This influx of information may be confusing for you. If that's the case, go out, take a brisk walk, make yourself a snack, and come back. I'm always here, and I have all the time in the universe. If you're ready, just keep reading. I'm not responsible for any mind-splosions you may experience."
The Narrator turns the cover, grimaces at the introduction, and quickly flips to the table of contents.