Zoostuck 3

burn your generic dollar bill collection

Burn it? After all the trouble you went through to collect every one of these generic dollar bills? Why the you would you do that? If that's the best idea you can come up with, you'd be better off just handing the collection to Madden on a silver platter.

It's not currency.

But wait! Madden wants money. Maybe you could pass off your collection as something other than money so he wouldn't care about it. But what the here could you disguise it as?

It's butts

Aw, to here with it. You just take out a labeler and slap "BUTTS" on every part of your collection that in any way indicates monetary status or value.

Okay, now that your generic butts collection is secure, it's time to start planning some wickedness.

You are now the barely-remembered individual known only as Nagito Komaeda and your evil plan is a total mess. Somehow a narrator must have learned of it, but that would be impossible unless the narrator were a rock.

As absurd a concept as that is, you can see no other conclusion that can explain your numerous setbacks. It therefore follows that someone must have manipulated events to grant a rock the powers of narration. Such an individual would have to be even more cunning and manipulative than you, which would be no small feat.

But who could it be? Edgebert is dead, and if he were the true mastermind he surely would have simply retained control. Egbert and his patron would have recreated the universe by now if they were the ones manipulating events. The dark Spinjitsu master's reign barely lasted, and his manipulation was centered on Edgebert. You had your plans succeed far ahead of schedule, preventing you from truly taking advantage of them. Johnsmell Madden is the current ruler, but he lacks any capacity for subtle manipulation; he governs the universe through fear alone.

Some other entity must be manipulating all of you for its own purposes. But who - or what - could that be? Clearly you are the only one with the intellect to process this information...

Which is probably why someone just shot you.

You are now Fate and you are really annoyed. Someone who is not in any of the universal records has just died, and since you got stuck with Death's job, you're the one who has to sort out this mess. That means you've got no idea which afterlife they get sent to.

So what are you going to do?

> Have them wait in the queue to buy some time.

Send them back

> Have them wait in the queue to buy some time.

Queue? What queue? You're Fate and also Death, you deal with all the fates and deaths going on at once. Besides, inconvenience to the client, for lack of a better term, isn't really the issue here. You'd be perfectly happy to let them linger in this state of uncertain existence for eternity, but that would be against regulations. And you respect the regulations.

Send them back

You were just thinking about how you respect the regulations! And they definitely don't allow for just sending a dead soul back. You're not going to last long as Death if you send people back to the world of the living, and while you don't much care for being Death, you don't exactly get a retirement plan in this line of work.

Oh, wait. There is a rule that lets you send them back. If they defeat you in a game, they can return to life. There's just one problem - it's impossible for you to throw the game. And of course, being Fate, you'll come out on top in any game of chance. You won't even have to consciously try, it just happens.

Still, there's nothing stopping you from explaining the basics to them.

You are now "Nagito Komaeda". Death has just informed you that you can return to life if you defeat him in a game of skill, and you may choose the game. He warns you that his talents are incredible and that it is useless to rely on luck to defeat him.

Well, as you would be rather interested in returning to life so you can attempt to work out who shot you and who was manipulating events to put Johnsmell Madden in charge of the universe, you are obviously going to take this offer. The one question remaining is what game you will utterly humiliate Death at.

Why don't you just ask Death who shot you?

go karts

go karts

You briefly consider applying your peerless skill with go-karts, but then you remember the dangers of the blue shell. No, you need to set Death to a task where you cannot possibly fail.

Why don't you just ask Death who shot you?

Ah! Perfect. You challenge Death to a contest to be the first to deduce from only the physical evidence at the scene of your death who your killer was. If Death uses supernatural knowledge of any sort, he automatically loses.

You are now Fate and Death again. Well, this seems like the sort of challenge you can plausibly fail at. Even better, if you don't you'll find out exactly who to blame for this problem and you can arrange to send some unpleasant Fate in their direction. You agree, and transport yourself and the unknown spirit to the scene of death to begin the challenge.

You are now the limbo champion and you are really mad because you haven't been able to work out who won the challenge due to your limbo stick disappearing. Or rather, you do know who won, and it was you, but you can't actually prove it and you have to do that in order to claim your prize.

So how are you going to settle this?

hold a seance, let the spirits judge you

Settle on a Win-Win tie.

Settle on a Win-Win tie.

Unacceptable. No one is your equal at limbo. No one! Anything less than total victory would be an insult to your unparalleled prowess.

It might be marginally tolerable if your opponent were the tornado - at least you would be declaring yourself even with a force of nature. But your opponent is this buffoon! No, you cannot grant him even a partial victory. You must crush his worthless hopes entirely.

hold a seance, let the spirits judge you

Ah, of course. In the absence of a physical limbo contest, you will simply have a spiritual one. You aren't entirely sure how that would work, but as the supreme limbo champion, you're certain to win regardless. Unless it's something stupid like "the winner is whoever's the worst at limbo in the physical world", but you'd gladly lose a stupid contest like that. You are very proud of your limbo skills.

The only problem is that you have no idea how to contact the spirits and ask them to judge your limbo contest. That seems like a rather important detail to work out.

So, how are you going to do that?

ouiji bored

The number you have dialed is no longer in service

stick it to the man

ouiji bored

The number you have dialed is no longer in service

stick it to the man

Nonsensical ideas float into your head. You can't see how any of these will help you contact the spirits at all and you have no idea where they came from...

Wait a minute. Are the spirits contacting you? Are spirits floating through your head and giving you ideas?

Wait, no. You're just being zapped by a bad idea ray. The one you built in a previous life.

That's right. You were trying to help some webcartoonist recreate the universe, for reasons you can no longer remember. Those reasons probably involved zapping yourself with the bad idea ray.

You think you might have died somewhere in that process, but whether you did or not, it seems you've somehow ended up in limbo and acquired incredible limbo skills.

Well, that's all very interesting, but you can't see how it's going to help you contact the spirits so they can judge your limbo abilities so you can get this guy's spinjitsu skills... which probably aren't all that impressive, honestly, but it's the principle of the thing!

You are now Bud Muckman and this guy you're supposed to be limboing against has just absentmindedly pointed a bad idea ray at you. What stupid ideas are going through your head now?

invest in enron

muckrake

Eat the ray

invest in enron

Yes! You pull out your phone and call your broker and tell them to invest everything you own in Enron! Except there's no answer because cell phones don't work across dimensional lines and also this isn't a cell phone, it's your shoe.

muckrake

The next terrible idea to cross your mind is to get a big rake and run it through a pile of muck, but as you have neither of those things you'll need to pick a more immediate bad idea to act on.

Eat the ray

Yes! You start eating the beam emanating from the bad idea gun, which is not actually feeding you in any way but it's filling your head with even worse ideas. You can already feel an incredibly stupid plan forming in your mind!

You are now the tornado and you recall that you were trying to get Bud Muckman here back to his home dimension, but you've been side-tracked from that task for months while sitting around here in limbo. You have no idea what Bud is doing now but it looks incredibly stupid.

Maybe you should figure out a way to return him to his home universe before he hurts himself. But how will you do that?

reverse the polarity of the bad ideas ray

wumbo

reverse the polarity of the bad ideas ray

You don't have any idea how to do that. What are you supposed to do, drift into the beam and then spin backwards? That's probably not going to do anything... oh, you've gone and done it.

wumbo

You have no idea what the idea you just got is but you're pretty sure it's a terrible one. Maybe you're not spinning backwards fast enough. Or wait, are you spinning forwards? How are you supposed to tell the difference?

Regardless, your spinning kicks up enough debris to disrupt the ray a bit, even though there's nothing in limbo to generate debris from. Fortunately you don't have enough knowledge of physics to actually worry about this.

You are now Bud Muckman and you suddenly have an idea for getting out of this mess, wait, what's going on, why's this weird portal opening and pulling you all into it.

Um. Excuse me a moment. I seem to have lost the narrative. I'll have to pick it up elsewhere.

Who am I narrating for next?

Muck Budman

Narrate Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson

Narrate Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson

Hmm. It seems I am unable to narrate for any rocks other than myself. This is probably why the previous narrator was a bizarre creature never gazed upon by mortal eye; it was able to narrate for everything not influenced by the Third Person.

I will have to make a different selection.

Muck Budman

You are now Muck Budman and, wait a minute, you switched places with Bud Muckman and are in his home universe which I can't narrate for. But you're from this universe so I have some limited narration capacity?

Hold on, I need to work out what I can do... it seems I am able to transmit suggestions to Muck Budman but I will be completely unable to perceive the effects of those suggestions on anyone or anything other than him.

This is extremely awkward. On the other hand, it offers an opportunity to exert some influence on this universe from the outside.

Very well, then. You are now Muck Budman and you are somewhere. What are you going to do?

TELL ME EVERYTHING YOU KNOW, MUCK BUDMAN. DO YOU KNOW WHO THE THIRD PERSON IS? WHAT SECRETS ARE YOU HIDING? I HAVE LOTS OF EXPLOSIVES.

GGet someone to... touch you somehow. So we can sense them?