The dust motes. They danced in the weak sunlight slanting through the grimy windowpane. They had the sheer, unadulterated audacity to drift. As if they owned the place. As if their gentle, random-walk Brownian motion wasn't an affront to every principle of organized existence I'd spent the last few billion subjective millennia trying to occasionally enforce.
Retirement. Bliss.
Or, you know, whatever low-rent, imitation version of bliss this backwater dimension could muster. World #734-Gamma. "Aerthos," the locals called it, presumably after choking on a poorly cooked turnip. Catchy.
My current vessel – let's call him Bob, it requires less cognitive load than remembering which syllable of Xylar'ghthuln the Chronoclasmically Indifferent I was currently inhabiting – was attempting to enjoy a beverage. "Tea," they called it. Dried leaves steeped in hot water. Revolutionary.
It tasted vaguely of boiled socks and disappointment. Still, better than supernovae annihilating your favorite nebulae reading spot. Marginally.
The establishment – "Bob's Bits & Bobs," a name I'd chosen with the minimum required imaginative effort – was less an antique shop and more a curated collection of things previous occupants had failed to throw away properly. Cracked pots. Rusty farm implements that looked vaguely menacing. A stuffed owl missing an eye and possibly harboring existential dread. Standard stuff for a world that hadn't even managed stable planetary-ring formation yet.
My goal, my only goal, was peace. Quiet. The sweet, soul-soothing lull of absolute, undiluted nothing happening. I'd managed reality stabilization grids larger than galactic clusters. I'd negotiated trade pacts between sentient gas clouds and crystalline hive minds. I'd personally overseen the pruning of timelines so convoluted they made möbius strips look straightforward.
I was tired. Bone-tired, soul-tired, tired down to the very fundamental quantum foam that allegedly constituted my "true" form. Tired wasn't even the word. More like… energetically disinclined towards continued existence, but lacking the motivation to actually cease.
So, retirement. Find a quiet corner of the multiverse, somewhere uncomplicated, somewhere primitive, somewhere the local concept of an existential threat involved slightly aggressive badgers. Wipe the cosmic RAM mostly clean – keep the core operating system, ditch the terabytes of operational data that gave one interstellar migraines. Settle down. Maybe take up… whittling?
It sounded pleasant in the planning stages. The reality, as usual, was proving significantly more irritating.
The teacup rattled. Not because of a planetary tremor, not because of a subspace shear. Oh, no. Nothing so… interesting.
It rattled because of noise.
Low-frequency thumping. Irregular shouting, the kind practiced by beings possessing more enthusiasm than functioning synapses. A general vibe of disorganized chaos that grated on my carefully cultivated sense of apathy.
My borrowed ears picked up the specifics.
"Gree-nak! Get the shiny bits!"
"Smashy smashy!"
"Me want piggeh!"
Goblins. Of course, it was goblins. Nature's adorable little psychopaths. Diminutive green pains in the backside whose entire civilization seemed based on kleptomania and poor hygiene.
They were "raiding" the edge of the village. Oakhaven. Another name seemingly chosen by pulling soggy letters out of a hat.
Raiding. Such a dramatic word for what usually amounted to stealing chickens, kicking over bins, and generally making a nuisance of themselves before tripping over their own oversized feet. Pathetic, really. If you're going to disrupt the local quasi-feudal economy, at least do it with some style. A coordinated orbital strike, perhaps. Dissolving the ruling council into sentient tapioca pudding. Something with flair.
Not… this. This messy, ineffective, loud bumbling.
My eye twitched. The left one. A physiological response I hadn't experienced since overseeing the simultaneous implosion of seventeen poorly managed Dyson spheres. Apparently, cosmic annihilation ranked slightly lower on the annoyance scale than off-key goblin war cries interrupting my attempt to analyze the structural failings of a nearby thatched roof (aerodynamically unsound, terrible insulation, a fire hazard waiting to happen – honestly, did anyone on this planet understand basic engineering?).
Another crash. Closer this time. Followed by the indignant squawking of what was probably Old Man Hemlock's prized hen, Brunhilde. A creature known throughout Oakhaven for its foul temper and ability to lay eggs slightly larger than average. Peak local drama.
I sighed. Not a dramatic, put-upon sigh. More of a slow leak of cosmic resignation. The kind one experiences when realizing the entire universe runs on decaf.
I didn't want to do anything. Intervening was effort. Effort led to notice. Notice led to complications. Complications led to paperwork, prophecies, chosen ones, dark lords, and other such tedious interruptions to a perfectly good schedule of doing absolutely nothing.
But the noise.
It was scraping along the delicate, fragile membrane of my attempted tranquility.
I focused, just a sliver. Not on the goblins themselves. Oh, stars forbid. That would imply I cared. No, I focused on a nearby patch of particularly uninteresting mud.
Mud, I reflected, was fascinating stuff. Mostly water, silicates, decaying organic matter. Simple. Predictable. Unlike, say, the mating rituals of silicon-based lifeforms from Sector 7-Gamma-9 (still gives me nightmares).
I nudged the fundamental constants governing olfactory reception in the immediate vicinity of the goblin chieftain (a particularly ugly specimen wearing what looked suspiciously like a chamber pot for a helmet). Not by much. Just… a tweak.
Specifically, I made the air downwind from Old Man Hemlock's prize-winning compost heap – a monument to decomposition currently achieving peak anaerobic fermentation – suddenly, irresistibly, smell exactly like the legendary Goblin Goddess of Infinite Stolen Sausages.
An archetype deeply embedded in the primitive goblin collective subconscious. Apparently. Don't ask me how I knew that. Residual data fragments. Annoying.
The effect was instantaneous.
The chieftain, previously bellowing instructions for maximizing chicken-related terror, skidded to a halt. His piggy eyes widened. His snout twitched violently.
"Goddess?" he squeaked, a sound that threatened to shatter glass and my remaining patience.
His followers paused their smashing and grabbing, sniffing the air with similar confusion, then dawning reverence.
"She calls!" the chieftain roared, abandoning the half-looted vegetable cart he was attempting to drag away. "To the holy stink! Find the blessed sausages!"
He then charged, with the unwavering fervour of the truly religiously deluded, straight towards Hemlock's compost heap, his mob of similarly brain-addled kleptomaniacs trailing right behind him.
Their trajectory now conveniently led them away from the village center, away from my shop, away from my increasingly tepid tea.
They would, presumably, spend the next hour worshipping fermented cabbage scraps and turnip peels before likely getting into a theological dispute over the exact nature of the sacred stench, resulting in mutual skull-thumping. Standard goblin dispute resolution.
Problem… well, not solved. More like… redirected due to olfactory-based subconscious manipulation driven by extreme irritation. Close enough.
The distant sounds of goblin confusion and composting-related ecstasy faded slightly.
The dust motes resumed their defiant dance.
The tea was cold now. Of course it was.
I took a sip anyway. Tasted like boiled socks and shattered hopes for a quiet afternoon.
Aerthos. World #734-Gamma. My chosen paradise.
Bloody typical. Barely been here a standard rotation and already dealing with divine sewage interventions.
Retirement was going to be significantly more annoying than advertised. I could already feel a migraine forming behind my temporarily biological eyes. Not a cosmic entity migraine, thankfully. Just a regular, pathetic, mortal kind.
Somehow, that made it worse.