***
Andrew Nolan finished off his morning coffee and toasted muffin at the Deus Ex Machina café in the downtown area, nestled in between the high rises and under the shadow of the Viking Bank Bureau building. “Hopefully business will be good today” he said determinedly to himself. Ever since the monkey butler uprising of 2014 people just weren't interested in buying Victorian pottery.
He had his regulars of course, Finngar, the Swedish thunder demon, whose dinner guests didn't respect the finer qualities of kiln dried Lincolnshire ceramics. And ‘crazy’ Dave, who insisted that his time machine was reliant on the conductivity of handmade teapots with a specific floral, patterned underlay. Andrew declined to point out that ‘crazy’ Dave could just write a letter to future-‘showed you that I’m not crazy’ Dave, to come back in time and share his time machine plans with past-‘still crazy until the time machine works’ Dave.
But it was this kind of thinking that led to the paradoxical mindfuck stoppage of ’21. Where some person came up with an idea so ridiculously absurd, but still entirely logically stable, that most of the population went into self-induced, thinking comas. All records of the idea were subsequently completely destroyed.
Andrew stared into the milky depths of his coffee, was this all his life had amounted to? He remembered the days when he wanted to be a rock star or an astronaut. Now he was a failing businessman in a failing industry who spent most of his time secretly resenting all of his best customers.
Finishing the last of his coffee he got up from the Italian styled chair in an assuming corner of the coffee shop, tipped the barista and stepped out in the fresh dew laden morning air. He only managed to walk a few feet up the street when he was struck square in the chest by a flaming radioactive chainsaw from space. Gutted about this turn of events, he stumbled, fell, and eventuallylaid out on the pavement after a convoluted series of death rattles. As the ambulance arrived Andrew passed out from blood loss, little did he know that this was to be the turning point in what was a fairly mundane life.