Sayonorara

...

Somewhere in the infinite entirety of existence, a phone was ringing. The number displayed on the caller id was, and probably still is, 593-768-9274. If this is your number, give up already, unless you have a very good reason for this call.

This phone has been ringing for a while, though. The ringing has contnued since before such a thing as a telephone was ever invented. This phone belonged to a certain Arienya Eledreya, up until the point where this being was awoken by the sound of its ringing one early afternoon and threw it out the window. Or, more exactly, the airlock. She forlornly watched it sail away through the empty oblivion of space and sighed. Maybe it would have been simpler just to have answered it. The wonderation of what a telephone of all things was doing on her ship never even occurred to her.

Meanwhile, the telephone continued to ring. It is a magical telephone, and had no need of a connection or power.

Arienya had no purpose in life; she simply drifted about the galaxies in her ship, unable to control the thing. She had no idea how she had gotten there, who she was, or even what she was. She did know that she was immortal, and knew that for the simple reason that she had been drifting about the universe for as long as she could remember, which was well over two million years, and hadn't eaten a thing, or excercised, or anything. She also knew that she was incredibly bored, and that the only thing that needed doing, or even, that she could do, was clean the place up. It looked like a family of flying squirrels lived there.

A family of flying squirrels did live there, for that matter, but that was simply because there was no gravity to keep them on the ground. They and their nests, and Arienya as well, simply floated around and amused themselves to the best of their abilities.

But Arienya liked the mess, and did not want to clean it up.

Then the brilliant idea whacked her in the face with a sledgehammer.

She would not think.. Already several of the squirrels had done that, judging by the way that they bounced off walls, ceiling, and panels full of indecipherable symbols alike, chirping all the while. Reeling from the recent impact, she announced it to the room of squirrels.

“I will quit thinking!”

The squirrels ignored her.

What she was doing tugged at a memory buried deep withing the corroded depths of her mind, but the memory failed to surface. The realization that people who do not think tend to do really stupid things, however, did.  With a small movement of her web-like energy wings, Arienya floated over to the enormously poofy pilot's chair that she had been using as a bed and strapped herself in. She pulled the control lever out of is socket...

...and immediately the ship skipped over four galaxies like a piece in an inter-galactic game of checkers. She jolted the small stick to the right and the ship skimmed over the surface of the gargantuan black hole at the center of the next galaxy. Arienya cackled with insane laughter.

Then the purple planetoid loomed ahead and passed by so quickly it was never there and as the blue-green planet behind it filled the view screen, gaining size and detail with each passing millisecond, she noticed it. The ocean loomed, and seemed to reach out for what would be its newest addition to its cloying depths.

“Eh?!” she said, her tentacles sticking straight out from her head. Time seemed to slow. The squirrels simultaneously turned to face her, impervious to the now slowly approaching surface of this alien word, and turned into monkeys. The monkeys reached for her, drifting slowly from their original positions. Then time resumed normally, the ship plummeting sickeningly once more. Then the monkeys created a hole in reality and pushed Arienya through it, quickly following.

They deposited her on a desert island on the very same planet, just in time to watch her home do a back flip into the ocean. It would probably be lost to her forever. But she wasn't sad.

“Good riddance,” Arienya said, as the irritating monkeys vanished, one by one, around her.



On the shore of a continent on the opposite side of the sink-site, an uninterested reporter reportied on, while standing at the edge of, the riots that had been going on ever since Delenia Sha Vestha, the empress-elect, had disappeared three days ago, rumoured to be murdered, on what was supposed to be her coronation day.

“As you can see, well, really, its quite obvious, people are in quite an uproar. The general public is doing itself proud this week, with violence-levels matched only by the-”

The mob suddenly stopped its senseless violence, and one man, dressed in a pair of pink plaid trousers, blue dress shoes, a stylishly glittery shirt, and a bonnet, interrupted the reporter.

“A cenva ship just crashed into the ocean, don't you know?”

Another person somewhere in the crowd unhelpfully pointed out, “That doesn't happen very often.”

The reporter slowly turned around and peered out over the ocean. “Really? Should I report on that, then?” He paused. “Does anyone really care?”

Murmurs of dissent emanated from the crowd.

“Very well, then,” the reporter said, and as the mob regained its anger, continued his report, the purple turban he wore as unmussed as before the utterly uninteresting incident occurred.