Chapter 1 - Storm

I woke up to a loud wind storm outside my ship. I heard endless clinks as small pebbles and debris pelted its hull. The wind howled and I heard tree like organisms shaking, adding to the cacophony. Despite trusting in my craftsmanship, I couldn't help but worry if my ship could take this. This wasn't Earth, I had no clue how powerful wind storms could get here. It's not like there was some galactic federation or interplanetary network I could connect to to check. Most likely, this planet had been devoid of sentient life since its conception, and had never had a visitor, until me. I don't even know what universe I'm in.

I could not be bothered to learn the history of every star system and universe. I don't think it's even feasible. While I did posess teleportation, space travel, and universe hopping, it's not like I could time travel, or learn a language by asking around. I did, however, learn a bit about the universe I'm from, and by extension the universes closest to it. I've found nine alien races so far, each between 40 and 120 light years away from Earth.

Oh, and I should mention, I'm not from your Earth, but our universes are very similar, I was raised to call it Earth, so I'm going to continue to do so. The biggest difference is that mammals have 6 legs and humans have 4 legs, arranged in a square. Our thighs go up and out, and our calves go nearly straight down. Before you say I look strange... just remember, I feel the same way about you! I'm still baffled you guys don't constantly fall over. This part of the story, however, took place before I learned about your Earth.

A loud bang shook me out of my thoughts. I bolted upright and quickly got out of bed to assess the damage. Looking around the interior, I couldn't find anything out of the ordinary. I did a diagnostics check and I wasn't losing pressure, either. I suppose it's fine. Out of paranoia and an abundance of caution, I decided to check the external cameras. Darkness. Right. I turned on the light and panned the camera to look at the hull. Panning right, nothing. Maybe a few scrapes and chipped paint. Panning left, also nothing. I flipped through some of the other cameras. It really was nothing. Whatever rock hit the ship obviously didn't do any damage.

Satisfied, though a little disappointed in my waste of time, I went back to sleep. Sometimes something interferes with my dreams. There are 4 eldritch horrors I've found so far that I call "the corruptors". Occasionally they try to give me an encoded message through my dreams, it's always very disorienting, but those dreams are the only reason I came to this planet. The last one I had told me to come here.

In this night's dream, I was floating in space, orbiting a purple planet extremely quickly. After a minute or so, a claw with 3i+2 fingers came out of the planet and grabbed me. I don't know how it went from the size of a planet to the size of me so seamlessly, but that's the beauty of dreams. They don't have to make logical sense, they can be as impossible as an MC escher drawing. What does 3i+2 fingers look like? Couldn't tell you. As soon as I woke up I lost the visual. Then, I heard a voice as I got pulled in towards the planet.

Ugh, what? I think... I heard 4 voices talking at the same time, but no it was at separate times... somehow. Like, they were at the same time on one axis, but at different times along another. Seems the entity was talking along one axis so that I could follow, but put each message along the other. It was trying to be slick about me not knowing which entity it was, but it was fairly obvious. Only one of the 4 messed with planar and sometimes even volumetric time. They're one of the two I've never seen before, but I've nicknamed them Chronos, since it's kind of obsessed with time. And no, they aren't my favorite corruptor.

Chapter 2 - Red Spike

I woke up in a pool of sweat feeling super tired. I always felt this way after getting one of their dreams. This dream was the same as the one I got last week, except I think I caught a slight congratulation in there. Either way, I'm taking this as a good sign. I have successfully figured out what they wanted me to know. I'm so sick of the corruptors. I'm pretty sure they could wipe out the multiverse in an instant, but the only reason they don't is because that would be boring.

I made myself some coffee and tried not to think about my throbbing head ache. I rested for a good hour or so. Eventually, I decided to get out and do what I needed to. I put on my space suit, still feeling a little tired, and exited my craft. It was a nice day out on this planet, the two red dwarfs hung in the sky, and I spotted a small scaley critter with 6 legs going about its day. This planet looked a lot like Mars, but with life.

I pulled out my ghost busters esque device and scanned the area for any corruptors. I'm 99% sure they produce their strange particles so that I can find them. My device was basically a geiger counter, but it detects that strange particle they emit instead of gamma radiation. Nothing else in the universe creates that particle, it doesn't exist anywhere except being emanated from the corruptors at all times. Levels looked normal (zero) until I got a single click. I was going to do the math to figure out how far away one was when another few hundred clicks arrived, the device began to buzz and the graph showed a red spike. They're here.

I checked to make sure I had my visor down, and I did. The visor was rated for up to 8 watt lasers hitting my retina, and blocks out all UV and greater. I looked all around me and didn't see anything... until a 3 foot tall millipede unearthed itself and rose several feet into the air. It stretched its legs and shook them around, getting used to the lower resistance. After a second or so it looked down at me, the red sunlight reflecting off of its gold accents. The world around me changed, the flat infinite plane becoming an obvious sphere, maybe only half a mile in diameter. The red dusty soil transforming into blue and pink neon stripes, that moved outward from the line between me and the millipede. The clouds turned red and shifted into human faces, laughing at me.

I haven't come up with a name for this corruptor yet. I just call it the millipede. The millipede loved changing the space it's in, and was by far the most comprehensible of the 3 I've interacted with.

The millipede warmed up its mandibles, and spoke in a low, gravelly, voice. It seemed to have a reverb, like it was speaking from two sets of vocal chords. I remembered to take out my pen and notepad before it started talking. This thing is only fully understandable if I can re read what it said a few times.

"As like many times before, t has the property b. T is you and b is a positive intelligent adjective. Given that c had the task of d, I assumed you would lack the property u. C is the time corruptor and d was contacting you through the dream. U is the ability to take in information and process it in a meaningful way. We will do x in one m. X is that we are to execute g(e, f), where g is a function that gives the first input the property of the second. E is the Earth from reality X199F03630 and f is the state of burning. All h, which happen to have the property of l=2, will cease keeping their inside different from the outside. H are humans and l is the leg count of a creature. Finally, m is the length of time equal to 2,678,400 seconds. Y has not the property p, where p is the ability to change our effect on the multiverse and y is t. Clear variables in memory."

As per usual, when this stupid millipede started talking it took me a few minutes to fully parse what it was saying. Why does it have to talk like it's writing a math paper?! Basically, it was going to burn an Earth I had never heard of and complimented me for being able to understand Chronos. That's the gist of it. I blinked a few times, processing this. An entire planet of sentient people, charred to ashes. Hmm. Yeah, hard to think about but I wasn't going to let it happen.

The millipede vanished in a poof of black ash filled smoke and a few spiders rained down from where it was. The ground's colors and the sky returned to normal in less than a second, as if nothing had happened at all.

Hmm. I pondered another thing it said. "which happen to have the property of l=2". They have 2 legs huh? Wouldn't they just fall over all the time? Perhaps their feet extend backward a considerable distance to balance. Either way seems a little strange, why wouldn't they have 4 legs? Did they lose 2 when evolving or perhaps they came from a lineage of 4 limbed mammals? Were they even mammals? I was very curious about all of this.

I got back in my ship and powered up the universe hopper. Typing in the coordinates, I wondered about how 2 legs works on a human. After a short scan, stats appeared on the screen before me. Differ distance 7.128309 * 10^-12, ruleset was an exact match, contains an Earth, time to next travel 0.803784 days. Okay, pretty good, but I'll have to wait until tomorrow before I can hop universes again.

Stay tuned for chapter 3