The Great Cosmic Strike

Chapter 1: The Great Conveyor

In the heart of the Multiverse, where time folds in on itself like an origami crane and space is a tapestry of shimmering threads, lay the Great Conveyor. A massive, incomprehensible machine, it spanned dimensions and eons, its purpose as mysterious as the beings who operated it.

Here, every entity — no matter their form or nature — was tethered to a task. From the glowworms of the Nebulous Rift weaving starshine into cobwebs, to the seven-headed Thought-Forges of Dimension X processing the dreams of the sleeping, the labor never ceased. The Conveyor demanded productivity. Why? No one knew. It simply was.

Today, as always, Krixl Zynxx punched in. A shapeshifter from the Wobbling Plane, Krixl had held countless roles: nebula spinner, probability adjuster, and, for a brief stint, cosmic janitor. Now they were a Time Binder, tasked with ensuring the threads of causality didn’t tangle.

Krixl despised it.

“Another cycle, another eternity wasted,” they muttered, their gelatinous form oozing into the Time Locker to retrieve their tools. “Why do we do this again?”

Their colleague, Targle the Ninth — an amorphous cloud of sentient gas — chuckled. “To keep the Conveyor running, of course. If it stops, we all stop.”

Krixl’s pseudopod wavered. “But… do we? Or is that just what they say?”