Chapter 2
Samus sat alone and loosely at her desk in the captain's quarters of her space ship. It had not been an easy ship to acquire, but through years of bartering and other means of persuasion, she managed to find a ship to sail the stars that only required fifty Vikings rowing instead of the usual seventy-five. It pleased her to see her indentured servants so hard at work, rutting at the air like teenage couples.
Armstrong Houston thrust open the door and penetrated her quarters' threshold. "Commander Aran, there is a problem to report. Also, I've brought you some baklava from our pit stop at Bakersplanet."
"I hate baklava..." Samus tucked away the universes that she had been so prudently caring for with a screwdriver and tossed a particularly mangled one into the dragonsfire incinerator behind her, where thousands of embers shaped like dragons dug away at the galaxies until they dissipated. She put down the screwdriver, which was literally a screwdriver in the sense that the handle was in the shape of a sports car with hot rod flames being occupied by two people (of nonspecific age, gender, and ethnicity, to avoid an inevitable shitstorm from the social justice planets) macking on each other, and looked at her subordinate disapprovingly for no reason.
She thought of her dead parents.
"Armstrong Houston, I have spent my entire life trying to shape the perfect universe in my image. Thus far, all have proven feeble under the strain of such an ideal, and I fear that the sheer energy I expend in the effort will cause this universe to collapse and kill everyone before I get a chance to create perfection. In other words, my concerns are far greater than anything you could hope to spit out of your eating cavity. But do go on."
He playfully nibbled at a wad of gum with his chainsaw teeth. "This isn't of much importance when positioned against your universal eugenics project. I just wanted to say that our portal to the Gator Dimension has been used up. The wranglers have run out of prey for our mead hall!"
She bit her lip and cast her vaguely lusty gaze toward the man. "What of it? My sole source of food is my seething rage at the filthy Overdimension that's taken everything I once held dear, and the Vikings can survive off of their beard storage for months should they run out of sustenance. You would be the only casualty, and to be perfectly honest, I do not care enough to prevent that."
"True, but is that living?" Armthong Houston slammed his hands on the table like someone in the midst of cheating on his coworker. "What is a life if it is spent guzzling down beard nutrients and rowing through the vistas of the cosmos without immediate higher purpose? Are we to say that our worth as a species is determined solely by whether or not we survive, rather than whether or not we reach the potential we wish to? Surely, a businessman would be considered a success by society if he became the richest man in the world and lived to 900 years, but what if his goal was to finally find his love? He'd have money for all of the prostitutes on this plane of existence, yet not one could fill the crevice in his soul that only a true fuckmate, one that loved him for who he was instead of what the tabloids said, would occupy."
His commander looked at him quaintly, with an expression akin to that of a frat boy looking at a porno mag. It was the perfect storm for her to have an organism, but she didn't. The species went extinct shortly after. "Your words touch me, Armdong Houston. However, I feel you have wasted my time. I have but one question for you: in the perfect universe that I plan on crafting, would this sort of philosophy and hedonism even be necessary?"
"Yes, because nobody will ever be satisfied with utopia." Armdingdingdong Houston winced in a final look of desperation, kind of like the face of someone who wants a fuckmate, but at the same time not like that at all.
Samus rolled her eyes and grabbed her associate with the grapple beam.
Armbong Houston was flung into space, where he proved unable to survive against the cyborg space vultures from Sector 12. His family would receive monetary compensation weeks later, but it wouldn't alter the fact that they were still related to Armstralala Houston.