Protector of the Universe: Another Story

This story doesn't follow the same theme as the previous ones do, I just think it's fun. Not to be taken seriously. C'mon, for a guy raised on Dragonball Z and all that, I can't be expected to have a character like this and not have him do something neat every so often.
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I'm bored.

This is not a state in which I often find myself, these days.

I've been sitting at my house for the last six days, mostly staying in bed, not doing much more than watching television and browsing the Internet. Why, one might ask? Why aren't I gallivanting around and having adventures, or going from hot spot to hot spot and aiding those in need? The long and the short of it is, I can't. At least, not well.

For the very first time since I got this power, I now know what it means to exert myself. I pushed myself to the breaking point recently (the story is a bit too outrageous, too rotten-science-fiction-novel for me to share with a serious expression), and as a result I am now here. I've had a bursting headache for about a week. Any time I try to use even the most minor manifestation, it feels like I'm being stabbed in the eye socket with an ice pick. I can do regular stuff, driving, typing, etc, without increasing my pain, but no warping reality for me. It isn't worth the pain.

No, I can't use my power to get rid of the pain. I tried it. Doing that brings me more pain, and trying to get rid of that starts an infinite bloody recursive loop that ends up with me rolling on the floor and weeping.

I have long tried to reduce my reliance on my power to accomplish regular tasks, but now I see just how dependent I really was. I mean, having to go out and buy food is irritation itself, getting to the store and back, waiting for the bus, etc.

Yeah, the bus. Apparently, when I over-exerted myself, this caused most of the things I had conjured into existence to wink back out again, for some reason. When I got home, I was chagrined to realize that my car was one of those things. (Yes, I limit myself to driving around, but I'm not going to limit myself to driving around in the beater I had previously. I made myself a fine custom car. Reap what I sow, I suppose.) So I have to take the bus. Which, as has previously been stated, sucks. I did it twice, then said "screw this" and have been living mostly off of pizza and Chinese food ordered in. I'll fix my metabolism when I start feeling better.

I have slowly been getting better. I estimate that, oh, about another week before I'm back on my feet again. But during that time, I've been reduced to sitting around my house doing nothing in particular. I did get my paladin to level 40 in World of WarCraft, so that's something, I guess. It seems a little silly in the grand scheme of things, but I find most things do.

Ashley somehow heard that I was laid up and stopped by yesterday with a bowl of chicken soup and a bottle of aspirin. Looking at the box, I saw that she had scribbled out "Extra-Strength" and written in "Cosmic-Strength". Oh, her. What a sense of humor. It would be funnier if I didn't constantly hate everything because of the pain. Still, a nice gesture. I'll repay her somehow when I can use my power without passing out.

Right now I'm watching anime. Some damn thing. It has some complex Japanese name which roughly translates to "Fist of the Everlasting Power Destruction Torrent of Absolute Energy Domination." This is why I like the Japanese, because their repressive culture produces quality entertainment like this. A bit of a high price for them, I'll admit, but things work over there far better than here in America, and whatever gives me my spiky-haired muscle-bound louts punching the daylights out of each other.

Hah, now. This episode features the villain claiming that as a result of absorbing some energy field...of a god...I think, that he now is "all-knowing" and thus can counter the hero's every move. This is of course accompanied by a lot of shouting and grunting and pained facial expressions, as befits yet another DBZ knockoff, but it reminds me of the time I tried omniscience.

It really, really is not worth it. I mean, I am not even kidding here. I tried to give myself omniscience once, reasoning that it would make things easier on me in terms of knowing where to go and how best to apply my abilities. So I set up a few safeguards, held my breath, and plugged myself in to infinite knowledge.

Ooooookay. Forget knowing the hero's every move. Forget knowing all the information in every library, forget knowing lottery numbers a week from now, forget knowing every soldier's name in the Battle of Antietam, forget all of that. That's dross. That's meaningless. True omniscience? Think about exactly what the word means: "knowing everything." Everything.

Every spin of every electron in every atom in every piece of matter everywhere. I read somewhere that the number of protons in the universe was something like 1.2 x 10^80. Just to give you a better handle on that, that's 120,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 protons. There are more or less a similar amount of electrons, and a slightly smaller amout of neutrons. Imagine knowing the position of each of those particles, everywhere, updated in real-time with a refresh rate of infinity. And then add in all the stuff about every thought in every conscious mind everywhere, all the information about every cell of living matter, the rate and state of decay of every subatomic particle, then you add in the piddling little stuff like the trajectory of every meteor and the World Series scores and that.

It completely annihilated my mind. Safeguards though I had taken, the human mind is simply not built to process that kind of information. I was floating in space at the time (I often do, it clears the mind), and for a while I just...drifted. Mindless. Fortunately, one of those safeguards was that no matter what, five minutes I would revert to the way I had been. I did. And that was the end of my experimentation with being all-knowing.

The show ended on a cliffhanger. They always do. Commercials began for some kind of fruit juice, I think, though you'd hardly be able to tell because almost the entire thing was just a bunch of girls playing volleyball on the beach, with a few glimpses of the juice bottle scattered about haphazardly. Those commercials annoy me.

Aagh. I tried to call the remote into my hand, and was rewarded with a blinding stab of agony. Seeing stars, I limped over and got it manually.

I can't wait for this to be over. Seriously. This bites.



The thought occurs that the story of how I pushed myself too far might actually be of some interest. It is extremely ridiculous, though, so...yeah.

This enormous alien fleet, about nine galaxies worth of massive warships, popped into existence about halfway across reality from where we are, armed for extermination. I have a system set up wherein if anything happens that massively affects the cosmic consonance, I know about it, so the instant I knew I zapped myself over to where they were.

I hopped onto their flagship. They were not happy about this, as far as I could tell, because - I swear - these things looked like giant Hostess Twinkies with five spindly blue arms on one side. Just like, down to the cream filling leaking out the top and everything. It kind of threw me off my stride.

Giving myself the knowledge of how their language worked, I told them in no uncertain terms that they were to back off and not harm even a single world or star. They responded with some blather about how their universe, I think they called it the "Quasi-Real Field of Existence" or some such, had been preparing for war against ours for eons past and this was their fleet and blah blah blah, basically we stubbed their toe an age ago and they'd been smarting over it ever since, so they decided to come on in and wipe out all life.

I wasn't about to let this happen, obviously. So with a gesture, I disabled all their guns and defused all their bombs. They were really not happy about this, but now they knew what they were dealing with. I further told them that if a single one of them made any attack on anything here, I'd send the lot of them packing. This did not go over well.

Here's where I made my mistake. I was a bit arrogant (not unjustified, but still) and thought they'd just whimper and turn tail. Turns out, they had an emergency backup plan in case they weren't going to win by conquering everything. The boss Twinkie hit a switch, and all of the ships detonated simultaneously in an explosion for which the term "massive" is a legendary understatement.

Instead of taking the more reasonable route, leaping back in time and dealing with it another way, I brashly thought I could contain the blast myself. Biiiig mistake. I didn't know what kind of energy I was dealing with. It was about a third the intensity of the Big Bang.

A blast about a third in size of the fucking Big Bang.

It rapidly became obvious that I couldn't contain it for long, given the bursting capillaries in my brain and the fact that energy flares were leaking out everywhere around my containment. I desperately sought for a solution - the sum total of matter and energy in the universe had just increased by, oh, a whole lot, and it was my job to take care of business.

The last-second solution I did come up with, I believe, was elegant and well-formed. I funneled the energy all across existence into the heart of every star, re-energizing them and pushing back the inevitable heat death of the universe about twenty billion years or so. Great. But doing so nearly ripped my conscious mind to pieces. I was barely conscious enough to bring myself home, and passed out as soon as I landed back on Earth. Whereupon I woke up, limped to my house, and, well...yeah.

Told you it was ridiculous.