"You wish to become a travel companion", the creature mused in its deep voice. "I don't see why not, little cricket."
The two beings stared at each other for a few seconds. Then a few seconds more. At last, Ziriothrax couldn't take the silence and spoke up.
"How exactly are we going to travel off this godforsaken rock of a planet then?"
The creature stared back at him with two black eyes, not a single hint of an intelligent thought behind them. A line of drool exited the corner of its mouth and sizzled as it fell onto the sand below.
"I have no idea"
Ziriothrax gaped before exclaiming incredulously.
"Why would you even agree to it then?!"
"My mother always did raise me to be polite". The creature furrowed its brow. "Or did she? I can't remember because there are no memories in my head".
Ziriothrax threw up his hands in exasperation, grumbling to himself.
"I'm stuck on a dusty rock with a nincompoop. This is as bad as that time I got squashed by a dropship about 15 minutes ago".
He closed his eyes and seemed to enter into silent meditation. Jeffbob, noticing this, attempted the same although the loud snoring noises indicated a different form of consciousness was reached. Namely, sleep.
Unknown to the both of them, the anti-saniton levels around them had only gone up, and were still increasing exponentially with every subsequent second. Barring any miraculous interference, it wouldn't be long before the streams of causality themselves would align to ensure the least possible event would occur.
Of course, Ziriothrax, Devourer of a Billion Souls, thought he had an inkling of Jeffbob's unique effect on probabilities, but he had failed to take into account several matters.
Firstly, Jeffbob had only eaten a single cabbage in an unknown unit of time. Cabbage starved, his very biology was in maximum fight-or-crashout-against-reality mode. Secondly, he himself and his long, illustrious history had its own weight against the fabric of fate. Combined, there was only going to be a single outcome.
Chaos.
***
Now while these two are in a brief moment of respite, let us move the story towards a different place. Hovering against the backdrop of the starry void was an alien behemoth. Its thick skin gave off faint psionic interference as it was buffeted by the cosmic winds of the yellow sun it orbited. Its oval body tapered to seven sets of tentacles on one end, wafting lightly as if the behemoth were swimming lazily in a lagoon.
Abruptly, a flash of light that outshone even the bright star filled the void before retreating. The creature had been sliced cleanly in two across its 'waist'. Its tentacles, not having gotten the memo of its foregone demise, were still waving frantically. But, as the psionic interference of its skin hiccupped and faded away, the two halves drifted apart.
If you happened to be curious, the tentacled half would manage to escape this solar system and travel coreward before being slingshot by the supermassive blackhole into the endless expanse between galaxies. Along its way, it would be responsible for 179,938 wars as a result of being taken as an ill omen, 109,982 new religions starting, and, curiously, eternal peace on one single occasion.
The other half was latched onto by an unseen force and towed away to a seemingly empty sector of space where a small vessel undid its cloaking and revealed itself. It was dwarfed by even the half of the corpse it towed, but its golden metal exuded a sense of majesty that was not suppressed at all. There was a name etched on the side, but the glyphs did not bypass all languages and customs to embed themselves into the minds of whoever read it. How disappointing.
Instead, it just looked like gibberish. From the gibberish-named ship to the carcass of the behemoth shot a pink laser that had the curious effect of shrinking the target down until if looked as though it could fit into the palm of ones hand if ones hand was several metres wide.
Your hands not several metres wide? You pitiful worm of a creature. The more I know about you, the more hate I feel for this cruel world.
Anyways, the cargo doors soon opened and the now miniature carcass floated into the interior, vanishing from the history of the universe forever. Inside, there was a strange creature huddled over a blinking control capsule with the carcass floating in the centre of a small hangar.
"The shrunken top 48% of a Cosmic Glooper-Pooper was the last ingredient I needed."
A flash of mania lit up his eyes. Literally. They shone with the actual colour of mania - which was a kind of slime green, in case you were curious.
"How many years have I been on this quest, soon it will all be over." He glanced at a hologram in the corner, no doubt of some dead relative/ motivating figure, as a single tear streaked down his grey, knobbly skin. "I do this for you", he whispered.
Not really. The massive eye floating in the void behind him suggested more...heinous motivating intentions. Such as being partially corrupted by a resident of the Darkest Trench. Not a nice experience, let me tell you that. Third worst headache ever and second worst constipation.
The eye was bloodshot and moved frantically in every direction as though searching for something. Looking at it for too long was not advised for the sane of mind, as it would induce dizziness, nausea, vomiting, spontaneous veneration of Glarthulor the Fear Eater and, eventually, sluggification. The mottled grey skin of the creature suggested that it had long since reached the final phase, no doubt holding on through the will granted to him by his quest for vengeance or whatnot.
As it was, he shaped his hand into a point and stabbed into his eyeball, ripping it clean from the socket with barely a flinch. He held it in front of him, tearing it free from its optic nerve with a wrench, and threw it at the shrunken top 48% of the carcass of a Cosmic Glooper-Pooper. It collided with the larger object, but instead of bouncing off, it was absorbed as though both objects had become liquid.
For a few nerve racking seconds, nothing happened. Then a bright light began shining from within the floating object, causing the grey skinned guy to squint his three remaining eyes. The hovering carcass seemed to turn into pure light before morphing and taking the shape of something far more familiar.
As the light died down, a rotary phone appeared in mid air, dropping onto the metal floor with a clang. There was an eye at the centre of its dial whose movements mirrored that of the huge one behind the cultist.
To be honest, Glarthulor the Fear Eater was doing way too much with all this 'eye' business. It had gotten to the point where several of its buddies had organised an intervention after he had decided to stage a ritual to turn an entire universe worth of the colour green into eyes. They had tried to explain to Glarthulor that just because you make a lot of it doesn't immediately make it scary.
Well, there's a reason he's still Glarthulor the Fear Eater, and not Cthalchidor the Fear Creator like his much more successful and famous younger brother. Perhaps he really should take a page from his book as his mother always told him.
Either way, the rotary phone had an eye on it, though the cultist was so desensitised to eyes that he didn't even notice them at this point. He approached cautiously before taking out a scrap of paper with a few symbols scrawled on it, and turning the dial.
Once he was done, he picked up the phone with shaking hands and brought it to his ear.
****
Back on the red planet, Ziriothrax was three nanoseconds away from reaching the answer to the multiverse, creation and everything in it before an obnoxiously loud telephone call broke him from his meditation.
He opened his bloodshot eyes and glared murderously at the offending creature with all the bloodlust of a billion souls. Unfortunately, this did little because he was just a lil cricket.
"Excuse me, that's mine", Jeffbob spoke politely.
Ziriothrax ground his nonexistent insect teeth and forced out a reply.
"Pick it up then."
Jeffbob reached into his pocket (how?) and took out an old flip-phone (how? he's literally got hoofs?) and flipped it open to answer.
But what happened next...
.....will be revealed in the next chapter.