10. Far Across the Distance
Previously on 2.17 Seconds into Never, the world is disintegrating as Meg Atomic has been removed from the timeline by Merlin in the form of a bear! Meanwhile, Meg herself is outside the Pearly Gates of Heaven, discussing the situation with her new friend Constance the angel…
“Well-” said Constance.
“Wait a minute!” an angry voice shouted. A nearby cloud turned a sickly brown color and belched open. From its now-vomitous depths emerged a shadowed form with angry red eyes. “That’s cheating! She broke it, so it’s mine, okay? The world’s mine!”
“Oh, you,” Constance sighed. “I thought you were getting stabbed in the spleen by what’s his name, Asmodeus down there. What happened, Asmo get bored?”
“No,” the shadow said petulantly. “What happened was your friend here broke the timeline, broke the world, went all post-post apocalyptic End of Days and so whaddya know here I am again. Ain’t it fun?”
“Thrilling,” Constance said, though she didn’t look happy about this new development at all. “Meg, meet Ben. He’s a loathsome squid.”
“Am not,” the shadow said. '“I’m the Antichrist!”
“Failed Antichrist!” Constance snapped. “On two worlds!”
“Wanna go for three?” Ben leered.
“He’s my ex,” Constance said in an aside to Meg, as if that explained everything.
Meg decided this was a good time to hit him with a graviton power blast; normally she wouldn’t strike first against a seemingly unarmed person, but this guy was the Antichrist, she was kinda dead, and all rules seemed out the window by now. She fired with everything she had; fortunately, kinda dead was just enough alive that her powers still worked. A shockwave of atomic power sent the once and future Antichrist skipping away across the white clouds, then careening hard off the Pearly Gates and soaring away into the infinite sky.
“Well, there he goes,” Meg said.
“He’ll be back,” Constance said unhappily. “Also, I hate to say it, but he had a point.”
“What?” Meg said in surprise.
“Look, if the world’s ending, then apocalyptic things start kicking off, okay? He’s a loathsome squid and I hate his guts with a righteous fury but he wasn’t entirely wrong on that. Which sucks because you know the one time, before he became, well, that, we actually did have a halfway decent thing going but now-”
“Hey,” Meg cut in, “How do we stop the world from ending?”
Constance thought a minute. “Oh, boy, this is going to be complicated. Okay, only one thing to do, really: you gotta go back.”
“Back to-”
“To when you started this whole time jumpy thing, ya goldfish! Sorry, that’s the problem with being an angel, I’m limited on language and I only get one swear a year and I already used it so I have to get creative. Anyway. Ready? Cool. Here we go!”
She snapped her fingers. There was an almighty bang.
Meg climbed out of her old beater out of a car and cautiously approached the door. She knocked carefully. When it opened, her friend Liz Flask didn’t exactly greet her with a burst of warm enthusiasm. “Oh, it’s you. Look, I got a guy coming for an estimate on a new fridge, so make it fast, okay?”
“New fridge?” Meg said. “What’re you getting?”
'“Depends on-” Liz began. She didn’t finish because suddenly out of nowhere in the yard appeared a woman in glowing bright clothes and a green halo accompanied by…
“You’re me!” Meg said.
“You’re me!” the other Meg said. “What- oh, wait, wait, I understand- okay, listen, I am you, but I’m also you from a future time and I’m trying to save the world and your friends and so what you absolutely cannot do is use your probability powers to work out what would’ve happened if you had not met Keith and gone on a date with him etcetera etcetera etcetera. All right? Do not think about that!”
“Okay,” the first Meg said cautiously. “I won’t. But why-”
“In order, you nearly get eaten by a Tyrannosaur, you kill King Arthur, Merlin becomes a bear, you fight the bear, the bear wins, the bear kinda kills you, the world gets destroyed. I’m a little unclear on that part because I was kinda dead,” the other Meg said.
“It’s a technical term,” Constance put in. “I’m Constance, I’m an angel, I’m with W.I.N.G.”
“What the hell?” said Liz Flask, who had no idea what was going on.
“Wait a sec,” the other Meg said suddenly. “Where’s the others? Gaseous Girl, the Wombat, the Green Moth, Ron Raven? What about them?”
“Who?” Liz said.
Constance raised her eyes to heaven. “I’m going to need another swear for this one,” she said imploringly.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the North Atlantic…
“Wha-” the Wombat said as he jerked awake. He had an odd feeling, very close to nausea. He looked around, very quickly realizing that he was on some sort of ship, near a railing, and it was at night. It was awfully cold, too. The Green Moth, Ron Raven, and Gaseous Girl were just waking up beside him.
“Hey, guys,” the Wombat said. “Good news and bad news, I guess. Good news is either the world didn’t end or it did and we survived somehow.”
“Hurrah,” Ron said weakly.
“The bad news…” the Wombat had just looked up. High above him at the top of the ship loomed four mighty yellow-orange funnels with black tops, and above them rose a cloudless star-filled sky.
“Oh no,” said Gaseous Girl, who’d seen the movie more times than she would admit.
“What?” said Ron, who’d only seen the back half after the iceberg.
The Green Moth said nothing. She left it to the Wombat to confirm what they all knew by now.
“We’re on the Titanic.”
Now I get where the titles were going!
“....I only get one swear a year and I already used it so I have to get creative.” LOL
If only I could cast such a spell. 🧐
To restrict anyone, at will, to only one swear a year. 🫢
No one would be safe. 😏
And the world would be a much more creative place. 😇