Dave floated aimlessly through the cosmos, a look of utter bewilderment plastered across his formerly omnipotent face. He had spent the last few celestial hours trying to snap his fingers and conjure up everything from a plate of divine nachos to a small planet shaped like his head. Nothing. Nada. Zilch.
"Right," Dave muttered to himself, running a hand through his suddenly very tangible and surprisingly frizzy hair. "Time for a bit of soul-searching. Or god-searching. Whatever."
He decided to make a list of his remaining abilities. After all, surely losing omnipotence didn't mean he was completely useless, right? Wrong. As it turned out, the list was depressingly short:
1. Floating in space
2. Breathing in space (though he wasn't entirely sure why he needed to breathe now)
3. Looking fabulous in his cosmic robes (a small consolation)
4. Making snarky comments to no one in particular
"Well, that's just brilliant," Dave grumbled, crossing his arms like a petulant child. "Eons of ultimate power, and now I'm essentially a sassy space balloon."
As he wallowed in his cosmic pity party, Dave's mind wandered back to the cause of his predicament. That pesky human, Zorg, and his annoyingly paradoxical thought. How dare a mere mortal overthrow the natural order with a single neuron firing! It was outrageous, it was unfair, it was... actually quite impressive, come to think of it.
"Perhaps," Dave mused, stroking his chin thoughtfully, "I've been going about this all wrong. Instead of moping around like a rejected nebula, maybe I should pay this Zorg a visit. After all, if he could take away my powers with a thought, maybe he could give them back!"
With renewed purpose, Dave set his sights on Earth. There was just one tiny problem: how exactly does a depowered deity get from one end of the universe to a specific mud hut on a small blue planet? Uber certainly didn't cover that route.
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"Oh, for the love of... me," Dave sighed, realizing the magnitude of his predicament. He began to paddle through space, using his arms in a poor imitation of a breaststroke. At this rate, he calculated, he'd reach Earth in about... never.
Just as despair began to set in again, Dave spotted something in the distance. A glimmer of hope in the vast emptiness of space. As it drew closer, his eyes widened in disbelief.
It was a bus. A honest-to-goodness, bright yellow, cosmic bus with "UNIVERSAL TRANSIT" emblazoned on the side in twinkling star letters.
The bus pulled up alongside Dave, its doors hissing open. The driver, a being that looked suspiciously like a sentient cloud of sparkly space dust, gave him a nod. "End of the line, mate. All aboard for the Milky Way."
Dave blinked, wondering if he had finally lost his marbles along with his omnipotence. But hey, gift horse, mouth, and all that. He clambered aboard, fishing in his robe pockets for loose change and praying to... well, himself, he supposed... that they accepted cosmic credit.
As the bus lurched into motion, hurtling through the cosmos at speeds that would make light itself jealous, Dave couldn't help but chuckle at the absurdity of it all. From all-powerful deity to cosmic commuter in less than a day. If nothing else, it was going to make one hell of a story at the next Gods Anonymous meeting.
Little did Dave know, his journey was only just beginning. And somewhere on Earth, Zorg was about to have a very strange visitor drop in for tea... quite literally.