After the debacle with the Schrodinger's Stone, Dave was beginning to think that mortality wasn't all it was cracked up to be. His feet hurt, his back ached, and he was pretty sure he'd developed an allergy to Zorg's endless supply of cheese sandwiches.

"Alright, Zorg," Dave sighed, massaging his temples, "what's the next impossible task on this ridiculous quest?"

Zorg, who was busy constructing what looked like a contraption made of rubber bands, paperclips, and an old pocket watch, grinned mischievously. "Oh, it's a doozy! We need to create a paradox so mind-bending that it makes the universe hiccup!"

Dave raised an eyebrow. "And how, pray tell, are we going to do that?"

"Time travel, of course!" Zorg exclaimed, holding up his makeshift device. "Behold, the Temporal Taffy Puller!"

Dave stared at the contraption, then at Zorg, then back at the contraption. "That's a bunch of office supplies stuck to a watch."

"Exactly!" Zorg nodded enthusiastically. "It's so improbable that it just might work!"

Before Dave could protest, Zorg grabbed his arm and pressed a button on the watch. There was a sound like a cat being put through a wringer, a flash of light that smelled vaguely of burnt toast, and suddenly they were... well, somewhere else.

"Welcome," Zorg announced grandly, "to five minutes ago!"

Dave looked around. They were indeed standing in the same spot, but Zorg was still tinkering with the Temporal Taffy Puller, and a slightly confused-looking Dave was watching him.

"Oh no," Dave groaned, "we're going to create a paradox by meeting our past selves, aren't we?"

Zorg nodded gleefully. "Even better! We're going to convince our past selves not to time travel!"

As they approached their oblivious past selves, Dave couldn't help but wonder if the universe had a customer service department. He'd like to file a complaint about the current management.

"Excuse me, handsome fellows," Zorg called out to their past selves, "I'm afraid we have some bad news. You absolutely must not use that time machine!"

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Past-Zorg looked up, his eyes widening in recognition. "Ooh, future us! How exciting! Why shouldn't we use the time machine?"

"Because," Dave interjected, hoping to inject some sanity into the situation, "if you don't use the time machine, we won't exist to come back and tell you not to use the time machine."

Past-Dave's brow furrowed. "But if you don't exist to come back and tell us, we'll use the time machine, which means you will exist to come back and tell us, which means we won't use it, which means..."

As both sets of Daves and Zorgs tried to untangle the logical knot they'd created, reality began to ripple around them. The sky flickered like a faulty lightbulb, and the ground beneath their feet started to feel less like solid earth and more like a waterbed filled with Jell-O.

"I think," Zorg said, his voice distorting as if speaking through a fan, "we might have overdone it a bit."

Suddenly, with a sound like the universe's largest rubber band snapping, everything went white. When the light faded, Dave found himself standing alone in what appeared to be a cosmic waiting room. The walls were an indescribable color, and the magazines on the table seemed to be written in a language that hurt his eyes when he tried to read it.

A disembodied voice crackled through hidden speakers: "Attention. The universe is currently experiencing technical difficulties. Please remain calm. A representative of Existence Customer Service will be with you shortly. Your reality is important to us."

Dave slumped into a chair that may or may not have been there a moment ago. "Well," he muttered to himself, "I wanted to file a complaint. Be careful what you wish for, I suppose."

As he settled in for what promised to be an eternity of waiting (literally), Dave couldn't help but chuckle. He'd created the universe in six days, but it had taken him less than a week as a mortal to break it entirely.

Somewhere, in the vast nothingness of the paused cosmos, he could have sworn he heard the faint sound of divine laughter. It seemed the joke was on him after all.