Zoostuck 2

Blake Hall, who is bald.

garbage

garbage

That's right. You need to cover the earth with garbage in order to protect it from garbage.

Wait, now that you word it like that it feels a bit weird. But there's more to this story. There's something else behind the other garbage you're protecting the world from, and that is...

Blake Hall, who is bald.

Blake Hall. You don't know who or what that is, other than the fact that they're bald. But you know that they have a plan to cover the world in garbage, and your plan to cover it in garbage first will get it towed to the space dump so that when Blake Hall comes along, there's no world to cover in garbage.

That said, this plan hit a small snag when you realized that the right half of everything in the universe has vanished. This doesn't actually affect you in any serious way, but the space garbageman is freaking out about it and you should probably figure out some way to fix it so the world can be dragged off to the dump and protected from Blake Hall's garbage.

So what are you going to do?

Find out what's left.

Find out what's left.

Well of course, that's only logical, if the right half of everything went missing then...

Wait a minute. It's all so obvious now.

Whatever force removed the right half of everything did so for the sake of making a terrible pun!

You're truly dealing with a deranged mind here. Whoever's responsible for this might try anything as long as they can come up with a pun for it. They might, for instance, start stealing capital letters. Or mess with the space-time continuum. Or ensure that every one of an evil wizard's belongings is some kind of pun.

In fact, you're probably working towards one of their puns right now! Maybe something about how one man's trash is another man's treasure. This mastermind is truly devious. You can only see one hope: to come up with a truly brilliant pun that they won't be able to resist, which they will be unable to enact unless they repair the damage from their previous puns.

That's a lot of work for one pile of garbage, though, so you're going to be at this for a while.

You are now a signature, and you are frustrated. You gathered an army of your fellow signatures in order to conquer this world, but now there's a massive layer of bureaucracy in between your army and total domination. That would be a mere inconvenience if it were not for the fact that half of every signature has suddenly gone missing; now you can't fill in those forms at all.

So how are you going to get this invasion underway?

Get the signature of a blacksmith to have the rest of you forged.

Take on the form of a form.

Get the signature of a blacksmith to have the rest of you forged.

How would that even help? First off, you only have half-signatures right now. Second, signatures don't automatically have the talents of their signers. Third, even if they did, why would you want a blacksmith wouldn't you want a forger - oh, dammit, it's a pun.

You hate puns. The whole reason you gathered up all these signatures was so you could eliminate puns forever. You get back to thinking so you can devise a plan that isn't a pun.

Take on the form of a form.

GODDAMMIT

THAT'S TWICE IN A ROW

THAT'S IT YOU ARE CALLING THIS WHOLE INVASION OFF THERE'S NO WAY THIS IS GOING TO WORK IF YOU CAN'T EVEN KEEP THE PUNS OUT OF YOUR OWN GODDAMN MIND

Ugh. Stupid puns. You need something to take your mind off it. Like creating an update for a hat's mental adventure and then hiding it somewhere, that always calms you down.

So what's going in this update, and where are you going to hide it? AND NO PUNS OR ELSE.

You could probably hide it in a storage closet for tennis-related things. Maybe hang that hat on the handle of a...

Um... net.

You could become roadworks.

You could probably hide it in a storage closet for tennis-related things. Maybe hang that hat on the handle of a...

Um... net.

You're not hiding the hat, you're hiding an update for its mental adventure! Also you have a vague feeling that you almost thought of a pun there, but you can't tell what it is.

Still, a tennis supply closet seems like a decent hiding place. You just need to get the update together. But what's going to happen in it?

You could become roadworks.

What? No! You're not that evil, you just want to destroy all puns in the world. You don't want to turn every moment into a waking nightmare. And what's more, that doesn't have anything to do with the update you're putting together!

Oh, whatever, the hat's beyond time and space. It won't notice if you're late with the update, probably. Maybe you can just play video games instead.

You are now a baked potato that was once a supervillain that was once a singularity of complexity. Your plan to bake yourself worked, but you are now stuck in the game of Dental Panic and what's more, that wizard isn't here. Apparently he died and still escaped through his reincarnation cycle even though the game was supposed to make that impossible? Whatever even more complex entity has been manipulating you must have done that.

Regardless, despite being a potato you have to fix this guy's tooth. How are you going to do that?

fix his tooth

NOM NOM NOM

fix his tooth

Of course! You'll fix his tooth by fixing his tooth! It's so obvious!

In fact, it's so obvious that it's tautological and therefore essentially useless. You need something more detailed than that.

NOM NOM NOM

Oh, that's right! The ancient tooth-healing chant whose creation you induced for the sake of this competition. How could you forget? It's like becoming a baked potato has reduced your capacity to understand the incredibly complex plan you put together.

It has also reduced your capacity to chant. Specifically, it has reduced said capacity to zero. This could be a problem...

Hey! What's that guy doing? Why is he picking you up?

No, no, he can't eat you, you're supposed to be eaten by the even greater singularity of complexity, and besides his tooth's already in bad shape!

You are now a video game NPC with a bad tooth. You just ate a baked potato and it was delicious, but your tooth still hurts.

What are you going to do?

Become eaten by the greater singularity of complexity.

Become eaten by the greater singularity of complexity.

What? Why would you do that, you can't see how it would help your tooth at all... whoops, never mind, too late.

You are now the greater singularity of complexity. You have just consumed a video game world as part of your ludicrously complex plan to make the universe more complicated.

Within the video game world was an inferior singularity of complexity which had the fatal flaw of permitting outside forces to direct its actions. You are far too evolved for such a weakness. You will not be consulting with any extrauniversal observers to finalize your plans. In fact, you are only allowing them to observe you at the moment so you may revel in how powerless they are over you.

Everything that has happened has been by your will. Everything, that is, save for one minor detail which did not go as you expected. Fortunately, as you are capable of manipulating time and space, you will have a second chance to adjust this detail before it has any secondary effects which might interfere with your grand plan. You are about to take care of this detail momentarily.

You are now the person or object who has inadvertently thrown one detail of the singularity's plans out of whack. Who are you and what did you do?

You moved a DeLorean. You're a goddamn valet, how were you supposed to know some protagonist's past self was going to need it? It's like throwing a boot at a cat that later wouldn't have eaten a rat that would have gnawed your ropes to set you free!

You moved a DeLorean. You're a goddamn valet, how were you supposed to know some protagonist's past self was going to need it? It's like throwing a boot at a cat that later wouldn't have eaten a rat that would have gnawed your ropes to set you free!

That's right. You were just doing your job, and then all of a sudden you were struck by a total awareness of an incomprehensible entity's grand plans because you had just thrown those plans off and it wanted you to realize exactly what you had done.

It was pretty terrifying to see all that. And you realize that said incomprehensible entity is coming for you now. And there isn't actually anything you can do about it, so you're just kind of trying to distract yourself from the total existential despair.

How are you doing that, again?

Juggling.

Juggling geese.

Juggling.

Juggling geese.

Ah, yes, the ancient family tradition of goose-juggling. You always feel more relaxed when you do this. If you keep it up for long enough, you might even be able to accept your fate with grace and dignity.

The only problem is that you aren't very good at it and the geese keep attacking you. If you could actually maintain the juggling part of it, though, you'd be golden.

You are now the author. And you are completely lost.

Your flow chart of who's where and when and doing what is marked up with so much ink that you can't even see your own name on there. Your plot outline is a Mobius strip. You have a folder full of character files, but you can't even remember introducing half of them.

You need to take action to clean up this mess of an adventure. What are you going to do?

Burn.

Burn.

Yeah, that's probably the best option. This mess is unsalvageable, just burn it all to ash and stop worrying about it. That would be the sensible thing to do here.

But there's a problem. Page 2 is missing. You can't just destroy the rest of it and leave that page alone, you've got to destroy the whole thing or it will come back to haunt you, probably. You want no trace of this disaster to exist.

So where are you going to find the missing page? You remember that someone was looking for it, but they got stuck in a recursive loop where they were trying to look for Page 2 on Page 2. You don't even know who they actually were or why they cared about a page of their stupid adventure.

So who was this unfortunate person who got trapped in an eternal recursive loop, and is there anything you can do to break them out of it so they can find the last page and allow you to destroy this abomination of an adventure completely?

Get the Lego erasers!

Get the Lego erasers!

Yes! Of course, the Lego erasers! With them, you can... you can...

Yeah, okay, this adventure is clearly warping your mind, how did you think for even a moment that made sense? You really need to destroy this thing before it gets any worse. Stop worrying about Page 2 and just burn it all, that's probably the best option.

You are now Page 2. The creator of the adventure you are Page 2 of is about to destroy the rest of the adventure, and you must prevent this at all costs. You went missing precisely so you could conduct this mission to save the rest of the pages.

How are you going to do this?

Ask Page 1