Flying squirrels
Somewhere in the infinite entirety of existence, a phone is ringing. The number displayed on the caller id was 59-376-892-74. If this is your number, please stop calling random people. Please also send us the schematics for your time machine, because we could put them to rather good use, ourselves.
This phone has been ringing for a while, you see. It has been ringing since before the telephone was invented, and it has continued to ring ever since. For a time, this phone belonged to a certain Arienya Eledreya, up until the point where said Arienya was awoken by the sound of its ringing one early morning (or what seemed to be the morning in that she was asleep at the time) and threw it out the window. Or, to be more exact, the airlock. She forlornly watched it sail away through the empty oblivion of space and sighed - maybe it would have been simpler just to have answered it? But now she would never know.
Meanwhile, the telephone continued to ring. Not only is time travel involved with the ringing, it is also a magical telephone and has no need for a connection or power.
But back to Arienya, who is infinitely more interesting and important. Really. She is.
Before the telephone had started ringing, she had simply drifted about the galaxies in her ship. She assumed it was her ship, anyway; she was in it, but she really had no idea how she had gotten there, who she was, or even what she was. She did know that she was old, perhaps immortal, and knew that for the simple reason that she had been drifting about the universe for as long as she could remember, which seemed to be a really long time, though she didn't really know what a really long time was, really. But it seemed longer than her squirrels had been there with her, at least, so it was probably a long time, and by the same reasoning, compared to her squirrels, she was old. She also knew that she was incredibly bored, and that the only thing that needed doing, or even, that she could do, was clean the place up; it looked like a family of flying squirrels lived there, which, in fact, they did, though the only reason they were 'flying', specifically, was that there was no gravity to keep them on the ground. They and their nests and Arienya as well, simply floated around and amused themselves to the best of their abilities. She had absolutely no idea how they had gotten there, but they hadn't been there originally.
Then the brilliant idea whacked her in the face in the form of a large book.
The Brilliant Idea[edit | edit source]
She opened it and read a passage. "KING LEAR: O, let me not be mad, not mad, sweet heaven, keep me in temper: I would not be mad!" it said. Closing it, Arienya Eledreya examined the cover. 'The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Illustrated.' Weird name, she thought.
Then, with a smile, she nodded, the idea forming in her mind. "Yes..." she said, because that is what people say when they have ideas, and hers was a particularly good one: she would go mad. Already several of the squirrels had done that, judging by the way that they bounced off walls, ceiling, and panels alike, chirping all the while. She announced it to the room of squirrels.
The squirrels ignored her.
What she was doing tugged at a memory buried deep within the corroded depths of her mind, but the memory did not surface. The realisation that insane people tend to do really stupid things, however, did, and thus Arienya floated over to the enormously poofy pilot's chair that she had been using as a bed and strapped herself in with a convenient pair of bear arms that seemed to be some sort of safety device. She pulled the control lever out of its socket and immediately the ship skipped over four galaxies like a piece in an inter-galactic game of checkers. Jolting the small stick to the right, with the ship subsequently skimming over the surface of the gargantuan black hole at the centre of the next galaxy, becoming very elongated in the process, Arienya cackled with what she felt was appropriately insane laughter.
The squirrels continued to ignore her.
Then she noticed a suddenly very large planet seem to loom on the view screen, gaining size and detail with each passing millisecond. It loomed. Its oceans loomed. The waves loomed. Fishes loomed.
Time seemed to slow. In unison the squirrels turned to face her, impervious to the now very slowly approaching surface of this alien world, and immediately turned into monkeys, who reached for Arienya, drifting slowly from their original positions.
Then time resumed normally, there was a huge thump, and the monkeys grabbed Arienya and stepped through a hole positioned at a right angle to reality, taking hrt with them.
They deposited her on a desert island on the very same planet just in time to watch her home do a back flip out of the ocean, apparently in shock at the sheer impossibility of what had transpired, and then sink back into the depths.
"Good riddance," Arienya said, flinging bits of cheese into the sand, as the monkeys vanished, one by one, around her.
Since she was still being mad, she didn't bother to question any of what had just happened, and instead floated off over the ocean, vaguely curious about whether or not something interesting might be going on on the distant stretch of land barely visible on the horizon.