The End of the World Was Not Entirely My Fault

“Onward, Tiberius!” roared humanity’s last champion, as he steered his mighty steed toward the gates of the Dark Emperor’s fortress.

With a squeak of bloodlust, the giant mutant hamster–who was still undeniably fluffy and adorable despite being the size of a horse–barreled into the wrought-iron gates, reducing them to scrap metal. Sparks jumped from the hamster’s armor as the twisted bars scraped against it. The warrior leapt from the hamster’s back, executed a perfect yet unnecessary backflip, and landed in a fighting stance. Overhead, red lightning crisscrossed the sky, a sign that reality itself was buckling under the trauma wrought upon it by the Emperor’s unfathomable power.

A figure in flowing black robes glided through the air over the courtyard, arms outstretched, a triumphant sneer on his face. He regarded the hamster-riding intruder austerely, then abruptly stopped narrating his own actions in the third person because he couldn’t think of a clever segue.

“Hello, Nate,” I said sardonically, reveling in the unfettered use of adverbs which my rank granted me. “The long hair and beard are rather excessive, wouldn’t you say? And I distinctly remember that patch being over your other eye, last time we met.”

Nate, last of the Philbricks, curled his lip. “That British accent doesn’t sound any less fake than it did fifty years ago.”

I brushed a speck of dust from my sleeve. Unfortunately, it turned out to be ash, not dust, so it left a worse smear than it would have if I’d just left it alone. I smacked at it a few more times in a fruitless effort to clean it off. “At least I haven’t aged,” I pointed out, gesturing to him. “We’ve gone rather grey, haven’t we?”

“It’s gray,” Nate corrected. “Don’t think I didn’t hear you replacing that ‘a’ with an ‘e’, Mr. Fake-British Villain.”

I clicked my tongue. “Why have you come here, Nate?” I said wearily, yet curiously, but also resignedly. “You can’t hope to defeat me. The others didn’t. Deck Matthews and C. Scott Frank with their moose cavalry and unicorn knights, respectively. J.E. Purrazzi and Janelle Garrett with their ghost-harnessing robots. All of them are in the dungeons now. And as for E.B. Dawson’s space armada in the skies, Grace Crandall’s vampire pirates on the coastlines, and Her Majesty Queen Hannah Heath of New Atlantis with her cyborg merfolk armies in the seas, my dragon armies will overwhelm them before yon sun has set.” I gestured vaguely to the east.

“It’s over there,” Nate pointed out, jerking a thumb over his shoulder to the west.

“DO NOT INTERRUPT MY BARELY-DIEGETIC PLOT EXPOSITION,” I thundered ominously and also frighteningly. I then regained my composure and continued. “Beth Wangler is still doing her mysterious-old-witch-of-the-woods shtick, but all the heroes she keeps training to defeat me fail over and over again. And as for K.L.+Pierce, I’ve got seventeen—”

“AHA!” In a flash of light, a woman in glowing robotic armor appeared and aimed a blaster at my head. “It’s over, Dark Emperor!”

I sighed and snapped my fingers. Kirsten disappeared, instantly teleported to my very extensive yet increasingly overcrowded dungeons.

“Make that eighteen iterations of Kirsten locked away,” I said. “She will insist on zapping back in time over and over again to try to defeat me. My electric bill’s high enough without her overwhelming my containment shields with one time paradox after another.”

There was a long moment of silence, even longer than the usual moment of silence, which lasts for approximately 1.31562 moments of moderate noise. “Well?” I said to Nate, annoyed.

“Oh, sorry,” he said sardonically, daring to steal one of my adverbs. “Are you done with the plot exposition yet?”

“Well, there’s nobody left, is there?” I snapped.

“Fine, then.” He drew a lightsaber from his belt and turned it on with a loud FWISSSSH. “Let’s end this.”

Immediately, bolts of red lightning crackled across the large machine behind me which I didn’t bother to mention before because it would have broken up the flow of dialogue. It looked like a large metal orb floating in the middle of a complex chassis of metal parts. Endless lines of computer code whizzed across the surface of the orb. There was a loud BOOM, and lightning shot from the machine toward Nate’s hand, blasting the lightsaber to smithereens.

“OW,” he exclaimed, beating at several of the smithereens, which had set his gratuitously long beard on fire. “What was that?”

A polite yet firm voice emanated from the machine. “Your weapon has been blocked on grounds of copyright infringement. Weapon source: the Star Wars franchise, licensed to Lucasfilm and Disney.”

“What?” Nate exclaimed, in flagrant disregard of the fact that he had already exclaimed something several lines before.

“It’s a Copyright Field,” I explained. “Experimental tech which I harvested from the ruins of the Googleplex after the Battle of the Nine Zuckerbergs. It will prevent you from using any weaponry taken from a copyrighted universe.”

“You fiend,” Nate spat.

“Thank you,” I said. “Note, if you will, the very obvious and unprotected dial on the front of the machine, with settings for ‘Off,’ ‘Medium,’ and ‘High.’”

There was an awkward pause. “Why did you point that out?” Nate asked.

“I have absolutely no idea,” I confessed.

Abandoning his combative strategy, Nate decided to try talking to me instead. (Because that always works so well against impossibly-powerful reality-warping Emperors.) “Look, Kyle—” he began.

“I haven’t used that name in a very long time,” I said austerely. “You will address me as ‘Cyle,’ with a hard ‘c.’”

Nate frowned. “But it’s pronounced exactly the same way.”

“No, it’s not. The difference is clearly audible.”

“No, it’s not!”

“Oh, sure, Mr. Grey-versus-Gray!”

“That’s different!”

“Is not!”

“Is too!”

“Wait, wait, hold on.” Nate held up a hand. “We’re wandering from the point here.”

I cackled mirthfully. “Indeed we are. That was all part of my villainous plan. At this very moment, we are crossing the thousand-word threshold!”

BOOM. There was a noise not unlike the breaking of the sound barrier, and green light flickered through the air.

“There,” I said, dusting off my hands. “That ‘BOOM’ was word 1,001. This story is now officially no longer flash fiction.”

Nate gasped in horror. “We used to be friends!” he cried. “You were supposed to bring balance to the universe, not leave it in OW!”

Lightning from the Copyright Field had zapped him again. “Your dialogue has been blocked on grounds of copyright infringement,” the robotic voice announced.

I smiled. “Stealing from Star Wars again, are we?”

Nate gnashed his teeth. “You’ll never get away with OWWWWW!”

The lightning enveloped his entire body this time. “Your dialogue has been blocked on grounds of copyright infringement. Dialogue source: Star Wars, Star Trek, Stargate, Starsky and Hutch, Harry Potter, all four Indiana Jones movies, all thirty-eight Rocky films, All My Children, The Dick Van Dyke Show—”

“Yes, thank you,” I said to the machine, “I think you’ve made your point.” I used my awesome vaguely-defined telekinetic powers to lift Nate off the ground and suspend him in mid-air. “I am now the Champion of All Narrative, Nate,” I said dramatically. “Tell me…what were you the champion of again?”

The Copyright Field buzzed warningly.

“Shut up,” I hissed. “It’s an homage.”

Nate, I noticed, was smiling. This worried me. Then he raised his fingers to his lips and whistled loudly. I don’t know how people do that, do you? I mean, I’ve tried, but I can’t figure out how—sorry, got sidetracked for a second there.

The deafening pitter-patter of millions of little feet met my ears as a horde of hamsters poured over the walls and began to gather around me, squeaking and occasionally cleaning their tiny round ears. Nate’s giant hamster contributed a few louder squeaks of his own.

“It’s over,” Nate said with a grin.

“No, it isn’t!” I protested. “Hamsters? Seriously? How are they any match for me?”

Nate shrugged. “Go on, then. Get rid of them.”

I looked down.

They were adorable.

“I’m not going to hurt hamsters!” I spluttered. “What do you take me for?”

He laughed snickeringly. “My plan worked, then.”

I glared at him. “If your plan was to use a bunch of hamsters to corner me in my fortress, I can’t say I’m impressed.”

“Oh, that was only part of it.” His gaze went to something behind me. “Now, Kirsten-19!”

I turned around just in time to see Kirsten appear out of thin air yet again and seize the very-obvious dial on the Copyright Field.

“NOOOOOO!” I cried, joining the grand old tradition of defeated villains throughout history.

Kirsten-19 didn’t turn the dial down, however. She turned it up.

“You fool!” I boomed, still maintaining the sacred conventions of thwarted villainy. “You’ve doomed us all! Do you have any idea what that machine will do now?”

“Your reality has been blocked on grounds of copyright infringement,” said the Copyright Field. “Source of dystopian-future-and/or-alternative-timeline-trope: Back to the Future, Doctor Who, X-Men, It’s A Wonderful Life, The Muppet Christmas Carol, Doctor Who, Lost in Space, Teen Titans, Gravity Falls, Phineas and Ferb, Doctor Who, The Dick Van Dyke Show—”

“Your empire is collapsing under the weight of its own clichés,” said Kirsten, with the characteristic smirk of a time traveler.

“You have been hoisted by your own petard,” added Nate.

“Oh, you’ve waited decades to use that expression, haven’t you?!” I shouted, indulging in one final interrobang as my powers over the forces of story began to wane. “I’ll bet you don’t even know what a petard is!”

“Adiós,” said Nate, as he dissolved into smithereens.

“PHILBRICK!” I bellowed, as a rift in reality swallowed me up.

“And Pierce!” Kirsten reminded me as time folded in upon itself. “I deserve equal credit in your rage against the dying of the light!”

The universe shuddered, the foundations of causality crumbled, and—

E.B. DAWSON: If I could interrupt, Kyle…

KYLE: Pardon?

E.B.: When I asked you for your thoughts on the future, I was talking about PFW marketing plans for 2021. Not…whatever the heck that was.

KYLE: Yeah, but that’s the whole point of Phoenix Fiction Writers, isn’t it? Aren’t we working towards the day when we’ll battle each other for dominance over all of space and time?

E.B.: …

KYLE: Isn’t that the entire point? I thought that was why you asked me to join in the first place.

E.B. Dawson has left the chat.

KYLE: Hello?