Summary: The Auditors believe they have found the perfect way to destroy the world, starting with its supposedly intelligent creatures, but, like all their plans, it doesn't quite work the way they intend. The resultant mess drags in just about everyone who's ever wandered through a Discworld book, as they all race to save the world from the lunatic in whose hands its fate has been placed. Pheer, I tell you, PHEER.
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Perpetrator's Note: Discworld, alas, does not belong to me, nor do any of its inhabitants. This is merely an absurd idea that wormed its way into my head, and wouldn't get out until I wrote it down. I've taken some liberties as regards the Auditors—I'm fairly sure they all died at the end of Thief of Time—but they're necessary to the plot. I make no money off of this, so please don't sue me—all you'll get is an ancient, wheezing Geo and the few packets of ketchup at the bottom of my refrigerator.
Life, as anyone with any practical experience can attest to, is as impossible to eradicate as a really good cockroach infestation. It's too tenacious, too stubborn, too adaptable to ever be fully quashed—blow the world up with a nuclear bomb, and within a decade you'll get flowers with horns and eight-eyed slugs. Life is everywhere, like it or not, and there's not a damn thing anybody can do about it.
Nevertheless, there are those who would try. They call themselves (when they refer to themselves at all) the Auditors, and it is their singular driving ambition to see all life wiped out, preferably starting with humanity and its related sapient species.
Three of the little grey creatures now hovered over the great flat circle of the Disc, watching in silence.
At length one spoke, and said, It has been proven we cannot destroy humanity. Humanity must be made to destroy itself.
How? a second asked. It has also been proven that humanity is the most stubborn of all life forms. There are none upon the Disc mad enough to undertake such an action.
And the third made a noise that might have passed for a laugh. None living, it said. We have made a search of those who have gone, and found one that we believe may well be capable of—and willing—to bring about the end of the world.
The second looked quizzical, if an empty grey robe can be said to look quizzical. Indeed? it asked.
Indeed, affirmed the third. It is the dead who will destroy the living. Which is, if you think about it, how it should be.
There was a pause. You said 'you', the first robe said.
Well, yes, but it was a 'you' in the metaphorical sense, not in the sense of 'you' in personal. I would never—oh, hell.
There was a brief burst of blue flame, and the robe dissolved into smoke.
Well, the first said at last. Now that that's taken care of, let us see to the first stage of our plan.
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Being dead was not at all what he had thought it would be. Of course, he'd never given any thought to what it would be like to be dead, and since he had given nothing, nothing was exactly what he got. He was, to the best of his knowledge, Nowhere—not in space, not in heaven or hell or that weird place the Crocodile God priests talked of; he was...nowhere. Surrounded by blank whiteness, with neither up nor down, hot or cold...nothing. Really, being dead was dead boring.
He didn't know how long he'd been dead, since there was no time in this place, but it felt like forever. The world had been such a fun place, and this...this was worse than oblivion, because he was still fully conscious. He had no form, no body to speak of, but he was fully aware, and bored out of his mind.
It was into this seemingly endless boredom that three grey robes popped, quite suddenly, without a sound. They hovered before what passed for his sight in the blankness, fluttering slightly in spite of the lack of wind.
We have an offer for you, one said, or rather, seemed to say—he heard no words, but he registered them nonetheless.
"Yes?" he said, or tried to say, though having no vocal cords made this rather difficult.
Yes, it said. We will allow you to return to the world, so long as you promise to do us a...favor.
"What sort of a favor?" He hadn't been used to doing favors when he was alive, but death was so dull he'd do almost anything to get out of it.
We will give you a kingdom, the robe said, a powerful kingdom, with minions at your beck and call, and...
"...And?" he prompted.
...And we want you to do what you will with it.
If he'd had a body, he would have blinked—that wasn't what he'd expected, though really, he hadn't known what to expect. "That doesn't sound like much of a favor. What do you get out of it?"
He had a sense that one of the robes was grinning. We will see, it said. We will see.
He considered it for perhaps half a second. "Deal," he said happily.
It happened in a flash—one minute he was lost in Nothingness, without form and void, and the next he was standing on thick green meadow-grass, small flowers waving about his bare feet, an endless blue sky stretching above the jagged edges of mountains that marched off to the end of his vision.
He looked at his hands—how strange, to have hands again—and at his feet, and at all the vastness of the world around him. And he laughed.
The three grey robes had followed him, hovering over the impossible green of the meadow. They regarded him in silence a moment, and then one said, Welcome back, Mister Teatime.