The year was 197X.

From Mooks to Neptunians, Fobbies to Mr. Saturns, people of all shapes and sizes had flocked to Mars to attend the 127^th Annual Milky Way Science Expo. It was the third day of the big event; the Cydonia city hall was packed with the latest inventions from the most brilliant of physicists. The visiting crowd gawked and fawned over them all.

A single white eyestalk peered out of the wings of the stage at the end of the hall. The owner of the eyestalk smirked.

“They probably don’t understand what any of those things do.”

“Dr. Malik!” A tie-wearing Martian looked up from the brochure he gripped. “You’re lucky you even made it here for the start of the expo, it wouldn’t kill you to be a bit more respectful to them, would it?”

Malik looked over his shoulder, then sheepishly giggled. “You’re not wrong, Dionaea.” He spun on his lower tentacles to face the Martian and added, “Besides, once I get my next project out there, people’ll be goin’ ga-ga over me! I won’t have a choice!”

“Dr. Malik!”

Malik laughed again. Dionaea sighed.

“You sure are one kooky old man, I’ll give you that.”

Malik slithered over to Dionaea and gave him a playful smack on the shell, prompting a yelp from the Martian.

“I thought the officials woulda told you about me before the expo started, kid,” Malik smirked.

“They did! And I’m not a kid, I’m going on 30!”

On the stage, an older Martian, around his mid-50’s, tapped the solitary microphone on the podium. The sound echoed through the hall, catching everyone’s attention. The Martian then began a long-winded speech that Malik couldn’t care less for. He never understood the point of them to begin with.

He counted 10 minutes before he heard his name announced. Dionaea gave him a light pat on the back and whispered, “That’s your cue!”

Malik slithered onto the podium, resting his arms on the top. He fiddled with the microphone momentarily before looking out at the gigantic crowd gathered in the hall.

“I’m not one for long, boring speeches, so I’ll make this quick. There’s been a lot of arguing in the field on the likelihood of alternate timelines and what not existing. I’ve decided that when I get back to my lab on Saturn, I’m going to make a machine that will prove that they exist!”

The crowd sprung to life with murmuring amongst each other. In the wings, Dionaea had dropped the brochure he held as his eyes went wide.

“How will it work?” a Fobby standing on a Mook’s head yelled.

“It’ll find a way to get to an alternate timeline however it can, then make a path to it. It’ll be liking making a bridge across a river,” Malik explained. “Expect it’ll be across space-time. And there won’t actually be a bridge.”

Malik began to step off the podium, but paused, then added, “Also, Martians, how are you liking those Instant Hyberpods?”

A chunk of the crowd cheered. With a grin, Malik slithered back to the wings.

As Malik re-entered, Dionaea hissed, “That’s all you’re going to say?!”

“The first thing I said was that I’m not one for long, boring speeches.”

“Alright, fair enough.” Dionaea paused before adding, “B-But a machine that creates paths to alternate timelines?! What makes you so sure that you’ll succeed? What if there aren’t any alternate timelines at all?”

Malik gave Dionaea a stern frown. “People used to think that there was no other life in the solar system, and nowadays we travel to other planets like we did it since the beginning of time. What makes you so sure that this is the only universe?”

Dionaea fell silent as he stared up at Malik with wide eyes. He warily glanced away, then muttered, “You have a point.”

A grin reappeared on Malik’s face again. “Like always!”

That night, Dionaea managed to convince Malik to stay for the final day of the expo. It was good manners, Dionaea said. After that was said and done, Malik returned home to Saturn as soon as dawn arrived. It was difficult to drag himself out of his hyberpod so early, but he didn’t want to get caught in traffic. Plus, he had an Instant Hyberpod at home. He could get the rest of his rest in just a couple of seconds, then make a start on his machine.

Malik had the calculations prepared before he went to the expo. Now all he had to do was to put them into action.

The motherboard was made. Wires were melded to circuits. The frame for the machine was set up. The monitor was set in place. The blinking lights and millions of gears came soon after. The steel was put in place, surrounding it all.

Ten years had gone by. He didn’t even know. He was too wrapped up in himself and his machine. After admiring it from afar for a minute, he slithered inside the machine and, lost in his own pride, pulled the lever that started it up. Lights flickered before stilling their glow, cogs began to turn, electric currents danced through the wires. The monitor in front of him came to life, greeting him with a select screen. There were only two options – “explore” and “shut down” – and he knew exactly which one he wanted.

The monitor then told Malik to put on the special goggles he designed just for it. He did as he was instructed, and was greeted to a view of the endless possibilities that awaited him. The space between the windows he could only assume were alternate timelines was whiter than any white he had seen before, and yet, he could still detect a star-like twinkle around the windows’ edges.

‘I knew it! I knew it! I knew there were alternate timelines out there! Now all that’s left is to get there…’

Even though he could not see them, Malik knew exactly where each component of the machine’s control system was. He pushed a button, then grabbed hold of the wheel. He aligned his line of vision with a nearby timeline, then pressed the button again. He then pulled another lever to the right of him. There was a second of waiting before he felt himself get lighter yet lighter. Before he knew it, he was sucked into the void, then thrown into the alternate timeline.

Reality crashed down on him as heavily as he fell onto a cold steel roof. He began to slide down it, and despite his attempts to climb back up, could not refamiliarize himself with his body in time and fell off. With a grunt, he propped himself up on his arms, then slowly got to his feet.

Nothing looked out of the ordinary at a first glance. Understandable, he thought; he travelled to the nearest timeline. After taking another quick look around, Malik warily slithered away from the house he fell off and began to make a round around the town he had landed in.

He knew this was Satralia – he had been there a couple of times, actually. But he couldn’t help but notice everything was a bit… off. The buildings weren’t quite in the right places. He started to regret not taking a closer look at the timeline before jumping in in the back of his mind, but he ignored it. He was more interested in the slightly odd placements of the buildings.

He slithered up the hill with the Mr. Saturn house nobody knew anything about. Once he was a few meters away from the house, he squinted at it. He knew the placement of it was off, but what was it? After staring for a few more moments, it finally clicked – it was slightly to the left from where he knew it.

The front door of the house creaked open. Malik flinched and froze in place. He saw a bulbous nose peep past the door, and heard the owner of the nose converse with another Mr. Saturn inside. Every limb of Malik’s body began to feel light again, and he quietly let out a breath he didn’t realise he was holding. As the Mr. Saturn at the door finally peered outside to see who was there, Malik was whisked away, back to his lab.

The smooth, cold steel underneath his feet took some readjusting to. The shock and slight discomfort of returning was quickly swept away by ecstasy. It worked! It really worked!

Malik threw off the machine’s goggles and ran to his computer. He loaded up his barebones website, default font and plain black background and all, and hurriedly typed up an announcement: he had done it. He made the machine, and its maiden voyage was a brilliant success.

The news spread like wildfire. Everyone everywhere was talking about it. Everyone everywhere praised him for it. Scientists from all fields congratulated him.

“This is going down in history!” everyone everywhere cheered. Malik had never felt prouder.

Soon, the people asked what it was called. They couldn’t write the history books without the machine’s name, now, could they? Malik hadn’t thought about that at all. So, he did what he did best when it came to such matters – ignore the public and ask a Martian about it. Or, in this case, the Martian came to him.

While Malik sat at his table, a worn pen resting in between his teeth, frowning at the blank scrap piece of paper in front of him, his computer let out a chime. He jumped upon hearing it, falling out of his chair in the process. He scrambled to the computer. On it, a popup reading “incoming call” with Dionaea’s name underneath sat on screen as the chime continued. Malik sighed, then accepted the call. Dionaea then appeared on the computer screen.

“Hello, Dr. Malik! Congratulations on the machine!” Dionaea greeted. He paused before asking, “What are you doing on the floor?”

“I was tryin’ to think of a name for the machine, but no dice,” Malik replied, his eyestalks turning to the table behind him.

“Oh, I see. I was calling about that, too.”

Malik growled. “Of course you were.”

“The press has been hounding me for the name of that machine, which… doesn’t exactly make sense, seeing as I’m also part of the press…?” Dionaea explained. “But anyway, I guess they asked me because I’m the Deputy Prime Minister’s son, and I have accompanied you in the past.”

There was an awkward silence between them before Dionaea asked, “Do you want help with the name?”

Malik rolled his eyes and looked back at the blank piece of paper. “I’ll be fine.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“…How long were you trying to think of a name?”

Malik thought for a moment before he shrugged.

Dionaea frowned. “…When was the last time you ate?”

Malik thought again, for longer this time. “Sometime yesterday, I think.”

“Well go get some food!”

“Fine, fine!”

Malik wandered into his kitchen – an awfully small space – and grabbed a tub of yoghurt out of the fridge. He wandered back into his workspace and held up the tub.

“Got something.”

Dionaea frowned at the tub of yoghurt before sighing and saying, “Better than nothing.”

Malik peeled open the lid of the tub and squeezed the yoghurt into his mouth. Dionaea watched with a somewhat discernible look of disgust on his face. They stared at each other in complete silence for at least 30 seconds.

“…So…! The name! For the machine!” Dionaea finally said. “I was thinking something with ‘alternate’ or ‘reality’… or ‘alternate reality’… in it. What about you?”

“I wanted to put ‘maker’ in there somewhere, just not sure how.”

Dionaea perked up. “Alright, so we’ve got something! Let me just…” He leaned over and grabbed a pad of paper and a pen off to his left. He slid it in front of him, then scribbled down some words.

For the next couple of hours, Malik and Dionaea went back and forth on ideas, before they settled on Reality Pathfinder Generator-maker. Malik proudly declared it himself.

“Hmm. That’s a bit long, though,” Dionaea mused.

“What? It’s nothing. Could be longer,” Malik replied, an eyebrow raised with a smirk.

Dionaea quietly sighed and leaned back in his chair. “I guess you’re right, but it doesn’t really roll off the tongue. Saying it all the time would get annoying quick. We could abbreviate it.”

Malik simply squinted in disapproval.

“RPGm?” Dionaea suggested.

“No.”

Dionaea thought for a moment. “RPG-maker?”

Malik opened his mouth to object, but stopped. He thought about it for a few moments…

“It works,” Malik replied, crossing his arms.

Dionaea sat up, his eyes sparkling with joy. “Then it’s settled! I’ll go tell the press!”

With that, Dionaea hung up. Malik relaxed his limbs and sighed. “Finally.”

He looked over to the newly named RPG-maker that sat nearby. He slithered up to it and put a hand to it.

“Well, it’s just you and me now. We’re going to be game changers.”

The next couple of years were dedicated to upgrading the RPG-maker. If Malik wanted to use its full potential, then it was needed. First, the range of the RPG-maker’s reach was extended. It eventually extended beyond Malik’s comprehension. Next, he added in a function that allowed him to choose which location in any given timeline he could visit. It made things much more efficient. Lastly, the element of time was added. Not only could Malik go to any timeline he wanted, but he could choose what time, down to the precise second, he wanted to go to. The timelines were at his tentacle tips. He could do whatever he felt like.

Malik used the RPG-maker as often as he could. It was his pride and joy, of course! Why wouldn’t he? He visited many timelines, so many of them far different from the one he came from. But blinded by the pride he felt for his creation, he didn’t see just how strange that was.

Not until a fateful visit to another timeline.

To spice things up a little, Malik decided to visit a timeline closer to his own. By now, he was used to the sensation of becoming lighter than any physical object and getting thrown into an alternate reality. He landed inside a small ship, not very far in the future. There was only one window and one hyberpod inside. He scoffed at the sight. He slithered up to the window to find Saturn sitting far away, getting absorbed by some sort of strange static. A trail of sorts flowed from it.

‘What… IS that?’ he thought to himself, squinting at it.

The hyberpod’s lid creaked open, revealing a purple eyestalk. Malik whipped his eyestalks around to look at the hyberpod, and the strangely golden eyed Mook inside.

“…Whaddya doin’…?” the Mook inside the hyberpod wearily mumbled.

“Why should you care?” Malik snarled in response.

“This isn’t…” The Mook yawned. “This isn’t your ship.”

“I know THAT! Now tell me what’s going on! What’s happening to Saturn?!”

The Mook hummed in thought for a moment, before replying, “I dunno.”

Malik growled. His tentacles hovered down to the ship’s control panel. “Fine. I’ll just find out myself!”

He turned the ship around, following the sporadic trail of static amongst the stars. The trail led Malik to a large alien ship. The ship, much like Saturn, was covered in the strange static. Any normal person would have gotten out of the situation. Malik decided to park the ship in the airlock. After the ship was parked, he opened the hatch and deployed the drop ladder.

The purple Mook lifted the hyberpod’s lid a bit more with his head, revealing his other eyes, both of which were golden with a somewhat darker iris and pupil.

“Wait, you’re going onto the ship?” the Mook questioned.

“What’s it to you?” Malik snapped in reply. He then climbed down the ladder and into the ship.

He couldn’t remember what the journey inside was like. He didn’t particularly want to, either. He only remembered the suffocating feeling of the static as it edged closer to him, nipping at his lower tentacles, hissing. And then, when he finally made it to the top floor of the ship, he saw it.

He saw the RPG-maker.

It sat at the opposite end of the room, like a king sitting upon his throne. It sat with its entrance open, and its sides loose and ready to fall off, with static pouring out.

He had seen enough. And his timeline’s RPG-maker seemed to agree. Just as the static began to climb up his frozen body, he felt himself get lighter and lighter. Before he knew it, he was back inside his RPG-maker. For a few minutes, he couldn’t move. He couldn’t speak. All that ran through his mind was the one image of the other RPG-maker in the ship.

His one wouldn’t do the same, would it?

Malik opted out of even using his Instant Hyberpod that night. Instead, he devoted his time to searching the future for proof his RPG-maker wouldn’t turn against him. He didn’t like what he saw.

In just under a month, the RPG-maker – his RPG-maker – would leak out into the world. Its leakage would slowly destroy anything it came into contact with. And it would waste no time in destroying the entire timeline. Every last atom of being, every last second of time, destroyed. How or why it would get to that alien ship was something he couldn’t figure out.

Throughout this end of time, Malik noticed a group – one Mook, two UFOs, and a hooded alien - travelling across the solar system. Whatever they were trying to achieve, it wasn’t happening. The only thing they were doing was irritating the leakage and causing the end to arrive faster. There had been a Starman with them, yes, but he disappeared at a point. Malik concluded he was not a part of the group, and was simply being used by the hooded alien.

He did not know the names of anyone in the group. He gave them his own names instead. The hooded alien, Death. They appeared to be the one leading the others into peril. The others that followed them, the horsemen: the Mook was Pestilence, the light pink UFO was Famine and the magenta UFO was War. With a bit of searching around the timeline, Malik found the Starman was going to be used by the hooded alien for… something. It was unclear. He labelled the Starman the stabilizer, due to his calmer nature compared to the horsemen.

But did this happen in other timelines? There was only one way to find out. Malik back out of peering across his timeline, and back to the void between worlds. He jumped into one nearby – that timeline’s RPG-maker worked to destroy that one as well. Another timeline ended the same. Even if the group had tried different things in those ones, the outcome was static.

A plan popped into his head after visiting that nearby timeline. He didn’t know how well it would work, if at all, but he had to try it.

Malik hurriedly aimed for the outskirts of Satralia and jumped forward into his timeline – only a week ahead, now that the RPG-maker’s destruction of the timeline was inching closer. But instead of setting foot there, he sent himself to the very fabric of the timeline. He found himself floating amongst a sea of digits, strings of code and files. He knew Pestilence’s file had to be around somewhere.

He pulled the strings of code towards him to check what files they had inside. He dug through hundreds of strings that held nothing more than lives that only had him in the back of their minds. It took longer than he would have liked, but eventually, he found Pestilence’s file. He dipped his right tentacle in, the file rippling like water. It then opened up before Malik. He swam up to the image of Pestilence’s back, and began to draw on it.

The blue and yellow lines were as precise as the image was in his mind. Before long, he had finished the marking. The likeness of Pestilence’s blue counterpart – a large presense in a small adventure within many more timelines than the RPG-maker – had been drawn upon his back, just below his right tentacle. In the blue Mook’s left hand was the Apple of Enlightenment, the very thing that guided him.

With his task done, he returned to the void between worlds. As his vision cleared, out of the corner of his eye, he spotted a white crackle of energy surround a nearby timeline. The timeline went dull then… crumbled apart. He turned his attention to it and stared wide eyed at the remains of the timeline. Somehow, something else – or someone, perhaps – had done this. Whatever the case was, it wasn’t easing his fears for the future.

In his panic, Malik ripped the RPG-maker’s goggles off his head and scrambled out of the machine. He turned over every piece of paper, blueprint and piece of furniture looking to find something that could destroy a creation with ease. He soon found his answer – a crowbar lying on the floor of his neglected bedroom. He grabbed it, then ran back to the RPG-maker. From its finale to its genesis, he hurriedly tore it all apart. Every sheet of steel, all the things that glowed and spun – every single little bit.

He then searched for something he could contain it all in – the RPG-maker was rather large. He eventually found a large steel box with a pair of tacked-on wings and an engine that he forgot the original purpose of. It would do. He crammed the RPG-maker’s remains inside, then for the first time in years, went outside.

He dashed to the spring flower that sat at the base of the ridge a few meters behind his house. The spring flower launched him into the air as soon as more than one tentacle stood on it. After landing on the ridge, he ran to its nearest edge. He revved up the box’s engine until a flame fired from the end facing him. Then, with all the force he could muster, threw the box into the air. It flew far, far away from him, into the starry sky.

Malik watched the box fly farther and farther away from him, until it was indistinguishable from the stars. He was free of the machine, at least. But he couldn’t help but feel like somehow, a part of him was…

…missing.

Severed from him, perhaps.