"nmbrfursgytvoo..." It sounded like incoherent mumbling to Arthur, but that assessment was ridiculous for two reasons: a half-a-second ago, he had just plugged his ears with his index fingers, and now he had no ears to plug and no index fingers to plug them with. He also had the feeling that he shouldn't have eyes either, and began to wonder why his vision was so blurry. "NMBRFURSGYTVOO!" Arthur swished his nonexistent arms about in the air-or lack thereof-and responded in kind with "blshksigswym," rather surprised that his vocal chords, which had just been sent into orbit around a nonexistent planet, had resonated so well. He reached up and rubbed his eyes a little, shaking his head and laughing to himself at how silly oblivion was. Directly in front of him behind a glass desk sat a pudgy, powdery little guy. "NUMBER FORTY-TWO, YOU'RE NEXT!" he said.
"AAAAAAAAAAAH!" said Arthur, and fell on his backside, really miffed that he had one.
Have you ever caught yourself in a look of full and unadulterated denial? You know, like that look you get when you are awakened in the morning by light blue puffs of smoke coming from an Altarian cigar held between the dull teeth of the 8 foot-tall, 320 lbs Bishanian Gorilla humming quietly next to you in bed and picking fleas out of your hair? Well, that was the same look Arthur was wearing on his face right there and then.
He was in a room that had been decorated in moveable paints: tiny painted matadors were being gored repeatedly by several hulking bulls, who then proceeded to sit down and have tea on the back wall behind the singularly grumpy looking thing sitting behind the desk that looked exactly like an albino balloon animal. "FORTY-TWO, FRONT AND CENTER," it said in a mocking baby voice. Arthur propped himself up slowly and guided himself forward with a wobbling outstretched finger.
"Whaaa..." The bulls had stopped drinking tea and were now looking at him over their French cuisine menus and giggling cheekily.
"Name, species, and home world, in that order please?" The gruff doughy mass kneaded its stomach, forming a clipboard and a pen, and swung its tiny breadstick legs around. Arthur drew his head back in horror.
"WHAAAA...?"
The glob sighed. "My name is Mr. So-and-so, and I come from The Nation of Idiots on the planet blankety-blank?" Arthur smiled lightly, smoothed his robe down, placed his hands delicately on the tabletop, leaned forward, and, clearing his throat acutely, answered with "WHAT IN THE HELL IS GOING ON?"
The little man drew in his breath slightly, and then beamed back at him. "I see somebody doesn't want to rest in peace, ay? Oh, all right-" he scanned through whatever was on the clipboard "-Mr. Cobrice!" He chuckled, a little too much for Arthur's taste, then scribbled something down. "Your new identity is Tygathian the III of the Poidriff Consortium...Ooo, the newest member of the royal family I see...Very well." He handed Arthur the stomach pen. "Sign here, initial here"-Arthur absent mindedly went through the motions- "and look here." "Now just wait one moment, I'm not this Cobrice character you…oh that smells delicious." Arthur looked up to see the creature holding what appeared to be a crock of Swedish meatballs; his sense of idiocy was quickly overridden by one of pure hunger. "Thank you for choosing the Reincarnation Station and have a pleasant...well, since you won't remember this...go suck on a dead Horgathian earwig" said albiloon, scooping up one of the meatballs and flinging it straight at Arthur's face. The meatball hit Arthur squarely between the eyes, right when he was going to ask the albino thingy if it had washed its hands, and that was the last thing he remembered before everything went blank.
Long ago in the annals of time, farther back than monster ballads, Tang or the "Where's the beef" woman, even before the dawn of existence, two particles of space dust floated aimlessly in a sea of nothingness without emotion, knowledge, or swatches. A minor shift in that vast nothingness, and suddenly both particles were floating towards one another. Soon, they would collide with each other, and one of the particles, for no particular reason, would utterly decimate the other, and send its component parts hurtling throughout the vast nothingness. If there had been anyone present with the capacity for emotive response, they may have felt an immense excitement at the greatest becoming known to the universe: the Big Bang, Genesis, Primus Biggus Mistakus. The principal consequence of these actions was the creation of the universe as we know it, but beneath the undercurrent of this monstrously haphazard design, one of the most completely coincidental, yet mind-staggeringly enduring relationships in the cosmos had just come into effect: one particle, which would suffer several reincarnations at the hands of crooked vendors, had, for lack of a better word, been destroyed by another particle, which was seemingly naïve to the fact that it had just dispersed its comrade through oblivion, and to this day, still does not comprehend its timeless vain of annihilation.