Alone on the red desert planet a man rested on rock. Or at least, a being that was at one point a man. Long ago, he was a human being by the name of Jon Osterman. He held a doctorate degree and studied the mysteries of life through science. One single accident, one single chain of events broke that all. After seemingly vanishing into thin air, over several months glimpses of a glowing blue figure would materialize for seconds at a time. An entire nervous system here, a skeleton screaming in pain there. Then one day, the shining blue body formed in the facility's cafeteria.

On that day, the omnipotent Dr. Manhattan was born from what was once Dr. Jon Osterman.

Now, here he sat, on the deserted red rock planet, far away from the tiresome burdens of the humans that failed to understand him. Not that they could. Not that they wanted to. At one point, he too had perceived the world as they did. Now, however, those days were so far flung from his being he couldn't begin to perceive the universe and everything in it from the narrow minded, self-absorbed perspective of a human being.

The impossible sound of approaching footsteps snapped Dr. Manhattan away from his thoughts as he slightly tilted his head towards the sound of someone- or perhaps, something- walking across the soft desert sand and hard, rugged crimson rocks. A pale skinned man with tired, gray blue eyes approached, the slight echo of his sneakers followed by the dragging trail of his slightly-too-big-jeans accompanied his walk. His long blonde hair flowed behind him as he casually rested his hands in the middle, joint pocket of his gray hoodie, his body language reflecting the tired look in his eyes and blank expression. Dr. Manhattan eyed him curiously, before looking away and carrying on with his own thoughts.

The man took a seat in the dirt next to the rock that the glowing blue being sat upon, resting his legs criss-cross style. "Hello, Jon," the man greeted.

Manhattan remained silent, not even bothering to acknowledge his visitor's presence.

"I apologize for our… earlier interaction," the man continued.

After a moment of silence, Manhattan finally spoke. "I know why you're here, Visitor."

The Visitor crossed his arms, looking up at the man beside him. "Of course you do. Well, go ahead and say it for me."

"You know that I'm aware of your little creation," Manhattan mumbled. "Your little Frankenstein's monster of things you like, mashed together into one spot. You don't want me to interact with it."

The Visitor frowned. "I could do without the judgmental tone, but… yeah, pretty much."

"Rest assured, I have no interest in your work. I'm of no concern to you."

"You sure? The last thing I need is something stupid from you. You know, like moving a battery a few inches out of the life-saving range of one Alan Scott, for example."

"Why would I do that?" For the first time, Manhattan turned to look in the eyes of the man who sat beside him. "After all, you could just do that yourself, correct? I recall you moving a jacket with a repaired pocket watch outside of an intrinsic field experiment test chamber so that one Jon Osterman does not get caught in said experiment."

There wasn't any spite or malice in his voice. There wasn't any real emotion in his voice, in fact. Just a cold, logical tone that carried a heavy weight. The Visitor looked away. "Point taken," he muttered. "So we're in agreement, then? You leave me alone, I leave you alone?"

"Yes," Manhattan responded simply, facing away once again. "Now please, kindly take your leave."

The Visitor, rising to his feet, replied "Way ahead of you." He walked off into the red sands, a white portal opening up and swallowing him, before it vanished.

"What a troubled young man," Manhattan thought, before pushing the Visitor out of his mind.

Somewhere, in another world, on Earth's moon, stands an impossibly old professor. A man who was sucked into his own creation, a machine created in the 1950's to utilize special properties found in quartz crystals. An accident with an assistant resulted in an explosion, which in turn caused everything to go wrong. Now, in the present- or was it the future? Perhaps the past? To him, it was all the same. The same river, whether he was going upstream, downstream, or docked, it didn't matter in the end.

A few feet behind him stood another version of himself, one from a different point on the river of time. Accompanying him were three teenagers, looking at him and the red, destroyed Earth above them with confusion. "What are you doing here?" the other asked.

"I'm allowing myself to feel the full impact of my failure," he replied simply.

One of the teens, a tall man with black hair, spoke up. "Ok, who's he?"

Another teen, a man in a green jacket, replied, "He's a parallel Paradox!"

Paradox smiled. "Young Ben has an innate sense of temporal metaphysics," he noted as he turned to face them, "which will serve him well in his future." With a quick glance towards the earth beside him, he added, "Or should I say past?"

"And I drive good, too," Ben said to the black-haired man with a smirk.

"We can breathe on the moon in the future, but you can't fix my car?" The black-haired man asked the two time travelers, stunned.

"What should I do?" the other Paradox asked, ignoring his question.

"Well, obviously not what I did," Paradox replied to himself. "But whatever you do, you better do it quickly. Time is running out!"

The other Paradox pulled out a pocket watch as he finished speaking, a blue light engulfing the four of them and taking them back to another point in time and space. With them gone, he returned to staring at the dead planet before him.

"Hugo, of course!" The sound of his own voice escaping from someone else's lips to his left snapped his attention away from the planet once more. Standing next to him, the Visitor stood, as if he simply popped into existence. "If it were a snake, it would've bit me!" the Visitor continued, his voice matching Paradox's perfectly.

"So, it would seem as though vocal manipulation is well within your range of skill sets," Paradox noted.

"A writer's pan-dimensional avatar has a lot of skill sets, professor," the Visitor replied, his voice back to normal. "It was your assistant, by the way. You had a hundred thousand years to figure out that monster was your assistant, but you still needed the help of three random teenagers to help figure that out."

"Still peddling that old lie about being an avatar for someone else, I see. I would've figured out it was my old lab assistant eventually. What are you doing here, anyways? This whole set-up seems eerily familiar."

A frown crossed the Visitor's lips, his tired eyes losing the bits of liveliness that they held moments ago. "You're not much fun, are you?"

"I can be quite fun." The professor held up a paper bag full of the same type of candy and smiled. "Would you like a gumball? They're good for calming nerves."

"Later, perhaps. Walk with me, I would like to show you something."

"Show me what, exactly?"

The two of them walked together on the moon's surface as Paradox awaited the Visitor's reply. In what seemed like an instant, the two of them were suddenly walking in a completely different point in time and space. An empty, blank, white void that stretched on seemingly forever. Paradox glanced around, before looking back to the Visitor. "I see," he muttered, a serious weight to his tone. "So you're still going to do this then? You've reset just to do it all again?"

"I have to create something wonderful, Paradox," the Visitor replied silently. "A multiverse, all of my own, the likes of which can only exist in a place such as this, the canvas of reality."

"You're still dead set on tearing apart other worlds so you can selfishly be the architect of a multiverse, then."

"And you're still going to stop me, I take it."

"I've prevented the end of the world for over a hundred thousand years. On at least one occasion, the young Ben Tennyson and I worked together to stop the end of the entire universe. It's my duty to stop people like you."

The Visitor turned to face Paradox. "How can you stop the one that writes the story of all reality? I was born here, in the Canvas Space- or the 'Source' if you prefer- from an idea. I rewrite reality to bend to my will, professor. I'm a writer. How could you hope to stop me?"

Paradox smiled. "A writer? Funny. I know what you are, and a writer you are not. You wear the skin of one like a puppet. A writer is what you disguise yourself as, at the core you are a chameleon that changes identities depending on the story you are in. But I suppose I shouldn't give away your secrets so easily, should I?"

A smirk crossed the Visitor's lips. "It sounds like you've been talking to some people behind the scenes already."

"I'm sure you have yourself. I believe I heard you made contact with someone calling themselves… The Beyonder, I believe. So many people with titles for names these days…"

"We're collaborating on something, sure, but that won't come to fruition for a while. I know you made contact with Richard, but I don't know how you expect them to help you. They kind of just show up and criticize people."

Paradox smiled. "Precisely what I had in mind for him, my boy."

The Visitor shook his head and smiled. Looking over his shoulder to his left, his smile grew even more. "Beautiful, ain't it?" he whispered. Paradox followed his gaze. A map of sorts, suspended in the air, showed several circles inside of a giant circle. "Grant Morrison really is a genius," the Visitor continued. "They mapped out a whole multiverse and it made so much sense… the Multiversity Guidebook published by DC Comics- in my opinion- is the perfect template for other creators to forge their own multiverses with. Especially mine… this one that I've forged and continue to forge by combining the best aspects of other worlds."

"Can you truly call all of… this your own work?" Paradox asked. "Personally speaking, I don't see how you could describe this as forging a multiverse. It seems to me more like you're tearing things apart and stitching them together again."

"The creation of steel requires more than one metal. Does that mean the creation of steel isn't 'forging' to you?"

"Apples to oranges."

"It's a matter of perspective." The Visitor crossed his arms. "And I can tell I'm not going to change yours."

"Likewise. So then…" The Visitor crossed his arms, a smirk ever so slightly forming on his lips. "I guess the game's back on, then?"

Paradox stared at the individual in front of him, trying to get a read on them. "If you call this a game, then I suppose so, yes. In that case, the game would certainly be back on."

After a moment of pause, the Visitor held out his hand. "I don't think you'll be able to stop me from doing this, but I'd certainly like to see you try."

Paradox shook his hand. "You might be surprised."

"We'll see."

A portal opened bedside them and the Visitor took his leave. "See you around, Professor," he said. "I got a business meeting."

As soon as he was gone, Paradox shook his head a little. "I suppose, with time, even they might get better."

A pale skinned man in a business suit walked calmly through a black, empty void of little shooting stars. His left hand lay at his side with a tight grip wrapped around a briefcase. The man in question, often called the "G-man," came to a stop at the sight of another man before him. The Visitor, to be specific. The two stared each other down for a moment. Then, in a stuttering, almost inhumane voice, the man spoke, "Come to… lay your hands upon me again, Mr. Visitor?"

"No," he replied calmly. "I came to issue an apology. Your employers reached out to me and… to make a long story short, we came to an arrangement."

The G-man raised an eyebrow. "An… arrangement?"

"Indeed. First off, I greatly apologize for my previous actions. Really could've handled things so much differently. You don't need to accept it, but I felt the need to say it."

"…I see…"

"As for the arrangement in question, well, your employers are going to call you any moment now with the details."

"Call… me?"

To the right of the Visitor and left of the G-man, something started to ring. G-man turned to face the source of the sound, only to see a small, wooden table with a single, black rotary phone resting dead center on it. The phone rattled a bit as it rang out once more. "I believe it's for you," the Visitor casually remarked as the G-man gave him a curious look. Cautiously, he approached the table and, after a brief hesitation, picked up the receiver and put it to his ear. "Hello?" he muttered into the speaker.

As soon as the voice on the other end reached his ears, he stood up straight and attempted to put on a calm and collected demeanor. "Ah, hello… sir," he said quickly. "…Mhhm… I see… Yes. …Yes, I understand completely. …Are you… certain? …Very… well then. Yes, good day to you too… sir."

"Your employers, I take it?" the Visitor asked with a smirk as the G-man rested the receiver back on its hook.

"I don't know how… you managed a deal with them," the G-man muttered as he turned to face him. "But… I am certainly… impressed. It would appear as though, for the time being, I will be in your… employment, until further notice."

"Indeed. Now that we have that sorted, Wakeman. Deliver that knowledge to her, will ya? I know you didn't after… yeah."

G-man smiled. "Of course, sir. Will you need anything… else?"

"Soon, maybe. I have to work out a deal with someone, but I don't think I'll need your help with that."

"And who might that be? If you don't mind me… asking."

"I don't mind, but I'm not gonna say who. They're not worthy of being name dropped until they agree to my terms. That's how they spread themselves, almost like a virus, you see."

"In…triguing. Very well, I'll meet up with Ms. Nora Wakeman and pass along your… forbidden knowledge to her for you."

"No need to be so utterly cryptic about it, but go off, king. Catch you on the flip side."

As the G-man walked off into the distance, the Visitor watched him vanish from view. Once he was gone, he put his hands in his hoodie's pocket, closed his eyes and smiled. "One chapter," he muttered to himself. "Just as promised."

Author's Note: Let's try this again, shall we? Check out my new discord server in the bio on my main page.