Every second, in a random place in a random universe, a portal leading to a random location in the realm of Ahunna opens. The size and duration of these portals are hardly ever the same, going from lasting barely a millionth of a second and small enough a tardigrade would find it a tight squeeze, to lasting millennia and being big enough to swallow planets whole.
Rarely (circa every couple thousand years or so), a single portal simultaneously opens in multiple dimensions, causing, due to the portal’s own unique energy, multiple things—if they happen to be within reach of the portal, and the portal big enough to take them—from multiple dimensions to mix at an atomic level, often creating something grotesque and just plain wrong.
Except, of course, for those very, very, very few times where a quintillion and one things go perfectly right and something beautiful is born.
*****
Universe #883456-II (Skallaa’s Society for Inter-Dimensional Matters [SSIDM] Designation)
Dr. Franken “Victor” Stein’s Main Laboratory, Transadavia
Lightning crackled and thunder boomed over The Strange Doctor’s—as the townsfolk of Transadavia called Dr. Franken Stein; surgeon, biochemist, inventor and mad genius—laboratory up on the hill, but this was nothing new.
In fact, it was actually quite old, as that laboratory had been up there since long before the current oldest person in town was born, and had always been powered by the electricity from The Strange Doctor’s artificially generated thunderstorms. Why the man did not just connect to the dam like a normal person no one knew.
The townsfolk had complained at first, naturally, but then an agreement had been reached; The Doctor would provide them free healthcare, and in return, they would learn to live with the constant thunderstorms and the bone chilling screams that sometimes rolled down from up the hill in the dead hours of the night. And since The Doctor could (and had) reattach a severed head with nary a scar, the townsfolk liked to think that they got the better end of the bargain.
They were starting to reconsider that now though.
Another flash of blackish-purple lightning lanced across the night sky as an oppressive wave of energy that oddly made a person get a faint taste of bananas in the back of their throat blanketed the entire countryside, and Dr. Franken “Victor” Stein, who for all the world currently looked like a particularly unstable eleven year old—an unfortunate outcome of his most recent de-aging procedure, which due to a typographical error, ended up winding his biological clock all the way back to eight instead of eighteen—let out his signature laugh, “mwahahahahaha™,” his prepubescent voice making it sound all the more maniacal in a way that was really starting to grow on him.
Victor was standing in a cavernous chamber several stories high, filled with all the usual doohickeys and thingamabobs one would expect to see in a mad genius’ science lab. The roof of the room was open to the sky observatory-style, allowing the old-young doctor to visually observe the effects the energy being emitted by the meteorite he’d oh-so intelligently tagged ‘space rock’ was having on his artificial thunderstorm. And it was amazing.
“Igor,” he screamed. “Pull the switch.”
“Sir?” Igor, Victor’s serva research assistant of the last three hundred years, called. “Can I just say again that I think that this is a really bad idea?”
“Yes, you can,” Victor called back. “Now pull the switch.”
A vein bulged on the woman’s temple. “Victor,” she said, angry now and not bothering to hide it, “we have absolutely no idea what this energy will do. At the very least let’s—”
“Damn it, Igor, you have one job. Just pull the bloody switch.”
Igor sighed, resigned. Her anger never lasted long, which was good, because if it did she would have died of an ulcer or something by now. “Fine,” she muttered. “But when this comes back to bite us and we’re being run out of another town with pitchforks and torches by the townsfolk, just remember that I warned you.” She pulled the switch.
Now, a little exposition on just what exactly is going on here. About a week ago, there was a perfectly ordinary meteor shower, which, the only reason why it interested anybody was that it was a meteor shower.
Fast forward five days later, and Igor was down in the market doing some shopping when she came across a gaggle of kids (get this) licking a rock. Fortunately (or unfortunately, Igor still wasn’t sure about that one), Igor was never the kind of woman who would just ignore something like that (she lived with Victor after all), so a few questions later and she’d learnt that:
1. The rock tasted like ripe bananas.
2. The children had found it out in a field away from town in a patch of burnt ground.
3. She was not above blackmailing/threatening children to get what she wanted. And
4. She was definitely not parent material.
She’d taken the rock back to Victor, who had quickly run a barrage of tests on it, which determined that the rock was not of Earth, and, more importantly, emitted a kind of energy signature that he had never encountered before. So naturally, like any respectable mad genius would do, Victor had placed the fist-sized rock on a suitable surface in his lab and fired an ungodly amount of gamma radiation at it, just to see if anything (quote) interesting (unquote) would happen. And since blackish-purple lightning and the ever-thickening taste of bananas was not, in fact, “interesting” enough for him, he was asking (read: telling) Igor to pull the switch.
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The switch that controlled the yeta emitter. Which would release yeta radiation at the space rock.
If you don’t know what yeta radiation is, then it mustn’t exist in your reality. Thank whatever deity you worship for that miracle.
So, where were we? Right. Igor pulled the switch.
Do you know it is technically possible for a person to roll a pair of dice a thousand times and get snake eyes Every. Single. Time? Hard to believe, but statistically speaking, it’s possible.
These are the kinds of odds that Victor and Igor made in that moment when a portal to Ahunna, roughly three feet in diameter, opened right in front of the space rock, sucking it in as well as four seconds worth of yeta radiation and saving the two idiots from... actually I don’t even know what it saved them from and I don’t want to know.
Igor turned off the yeta emitter, the world strangely silent even though the thunderstorm was still going strong, the lightning’s colouration now back to normal.
“What just happened?” Igor asked.
Victor, being a man of science, walked over and poked the metal tray the space rock had sat on until a few seconds ago with a finger. He looked at Igor, mumbled an “I don’t know” with a careless shrug, then walked off, back to whatever he was doing before she brought him the rock.
Igor sighed. She really needed to consider alternative career options.
*****
Meanwhile...
Universe #648dlrowiakesi (SSIDM Designation)
Castle of The Demon King, Valley of Lamentations, Lallelfa
If someone had told Hiroshi a year ago that there would come a day when he found himself facing a fifteen foot tall, very powerful, and very pissed-off Demon King with nothing but a bow and wearing light armour, he would have laughed in their face and told them to lay off the anime.
However, one unfortunate encounter with truck-kun and five minutes with a blue-haired, air-headed goddess can really change a young man’s outlook, because here he was. And the last thing he wanted to do was laugh.
Activating [Summon Arrow], [Snipe], [Rapid Fire], [Penetrating Shot], [Exploding Shot], and [Duplicate Shot], all of which had been maxed out over the year he’d spent here in Lallelfa, Hiroshi fired twelve arrows within a second, each of which duplicated into ten arrows, all of which somehow—due to BS system magic—struck the same spot on The Demon King (Hiroshi actually just realised he didn’t even know this guy’s real name. Oh well) and exploded with the power of 120 frag grenades, doing some damage but mostly serving to piss The Demon King off even more. And a pissed-off Demon King had a nasty habit of—yep, there it came, a ginormous fireball.
Before Hiroshi could react, Aika [Teleport]ed in front of him and [Absorb]ed the spell, then [Redirect]ed it back at the Demon King, three times as strong. The big guy screamed in more rage and pain, while Hiroshi just gave thanks that unlike in anime, he at least didn’t have to go through this ordeal alone. Or worse, with vapid harem girls, he shuddered. He still got nightmares about that.
“Keep attacking him, guys. He’s getting weaker,” Kenji, their “leader” screamed in encouragement, Holy Armour glowing as he dashed back in to trade blows with the Demon King.
“Shouldn’t he running out of mana by now?” Hiroshi asked as the two other Summoned Heroes, Himari and Kanako, moved in to support their only strictly close range fighter.
These were the Summoned heroes of Lallelfa, three girls and two boys who, once upon a time, were all average Japanese high-schoolers, until truck-kun and that idiot goddess decided they all needed more excitement in their lives.
“Who? Kenji? Nah, that guy runs on concentrated youth,” Aika said.
It was an old joke between them, which started because of Kenji’s bushy brows and very Might Guy attitude, so it wasn’t exactly fresh material, but Hiroshi laughed all the same. Laughing was easy with Aika.
They stood silently, trying to get in whatever R&R they could before they were needed again, and Hiroshi was busy watching his desperately low mana bar slowly crawl up when Aika spoke.
“Maybe we could go for dinner,” she said and Hiroshi’s focus snapped to her. “When this is all over. If you want to, of course, I mean since we’re friends and...” she tapered off.
“Are you... asking me on a... date?”
Aika looked nervous, the young woman who had soloed a frigging steam dragon looked nervous. “Yeah, I guess I am.”
Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit! Holy shit! Aika was asking him on a date! A date! An actual date!
Hiroshi started to reply “y—” when a wave of oppressive energy stole the breath from his lungs and make his muscles lock up.
He and Aika could barely turn to see the Demon King, looking the worse for wear, with his armour in shambles and two of his six horns broken, cut and burnt and bruised but still standing and... laughing. While that red gem in his forehead that Hiroshi had assumed was some kind of fashion statement was glowing.
That couldn’t be good.
“I commend you,” the Demon King said in his deep, gravelly voice. “You are the first enemies that have ever required me to use this.” A clawed finger pointed at the gem on his forehead and Hiroshi wished he could move so he could put an arrow in the damn thing. “Your rewards will be quick deaths.”
The gem glowed brighter and that oppressive aura intensified, completely halting even Kenji’s movements.
This was it, Hiroshi realised. He was about to die. There would be no date with Aika, no first kiss, no possibility of more. The heroes of Lallelfa would end here.
He stared at Aika, their eyes—the only parts of them still capable of motion—meeting, and he saw his thoughts mirrored in them.
The glow intensified. This was it.
At least he had this moment with her.
Demon King (yes that is his actual legal name) watched the heroes standing powerless before him and he smiled cruelly. He had often wondered if spending the resources on creating the Power Stone was worth it, especially when over the years it had looked like no one would ever be strong enough to threaten him, but now, he realised just how wise a course of action it had been. Now he could wipe out the heroes of Lallelfa, rebuild his army, and take over the world without any worthwhile opposition.
Finally, he thought as the stone released a conical beam of energy which was sure to take out these pesky flies, things were going his way.
They weren’t.
Not two feet away from his head, the portal to Ahunna opened, lasting just long enough to swallow the beam of energy before disappearing. And since the portals to Ahunna were invisible, to all observers present the Demon King’s ultimate weapon was a cone of energy that ended two feet away from his forehead.
The ensuing silence was awkward to say the least.
“That’s your super weapon?” Himari asked, sounding almost affronted. “Guys, let’s murder this bastard.”
Suffice to say, Demon King’s last day was not a pleasant one.
*****
Simultaneously...
Universe #616 (SSIDM Designation)
Newton, Michigan
Myles Tyberius (his mother liked Star Trek and thought the name was more spacey with a y) Rend was standing on the rooftop of his apartment building watching the city before him, when an invisible portal opened directly underneath him and swallowed him whole.
He was never heard from again.