Everything, Nothing, and All Things In Between

Multiverse

"Ok, where do I start? Can't really start at the beginning, that's too late, but there's not really a word for before the beginning. Wierd how words work, isn't it? If there isn't a need for a word, there isn't one. If there's nothing bad, then there isn't a word to describe something good. Funny. But I'm getting off track. Let's start this story, just slightly before the beginning.

"I awoke in a world without a world. There was nothing. The beginning hadn't even begun yet. So I just floated there, aimlessly. Eventually I got bored, so I took the nothing, and made it into something. But again, there wasn't really a word for it yet. Anyway, I had some fun, smashing these big balls of rock into each other. The explosions of the suns were spectacular as well. Very good light show. But then something very peculiar happened. Something was moving on one of these rock balls. Deep under the water, soon to be known as an ocean, something was moving. Something was alive.

"So, curious as I was, I took a closer look. It wasn't very impressive. Just a little thing. Microscopic even. Then it split on half. Then it did it again. It was very confusing. I'd never been confused before that point, but then again, nothing was alive yet neither. I left the small things alone for a few millennia, and it turned into a slightly bigger thing. They were very different to the small things. They killed one another. It was very interesting. So I watched these strange things change over and over again. Then they walked.

"Over and over again, these things kept turning into other things. It interested me more than anything else, so I just kept watching. There was a lull for a while, so I turned around, and found even more things. My something was slowly turning into everything. I loved it. After exploring the other things I went back to my first one. Apparently the slightly bigger things turned it o even bigger bigger things. Things that made lots of noise. They were much different from the little things at the beginning. They were soft and docile, but these big things were loud, and they shed blood. I liked watching that. Then one of the rock things crashed into it and killed them all. That was very sad. I turned back to the other things to see how they had changed. I floated around for a long time, viewing things. At one point I found some colourful rocks. I think I remember them from when I created the something.

"One day, after a long long time, I felt something strange happen. I went back to my first something and found that it had changed even more. Much more drastically than last time. There weren't big things, just little squishy things. They made noise to, but I was very different to the big things noises. I learned that they made words for everything, there was even a word for words. But you probably knew that. I couldn't see anything from where I was, so I went outside what the humans called, 'reality'. And I found something that worried me. Time had fractured. At first I fretted over it, worried something had broken, so I viewed it over and over again, humanshad a habit of making things explode by the way, but there was only one thing different between the world I made and the one that made itself. It was minuscule but I noticed. In the one I made, a man stepped over the root of a tree he was passing by, but in the new one, he tripped over it and muttered curses. It was very strange.

"I went about my business, keeping a close eye on time from that point onward. And it happened again, not soon after. It happened a few years before the first one. A fox ate a rabbit, but in the new one, it hesitated and missed. Poor fox. Testing this, I made a gust of wind the blew a newspaper into someone's face. They stumbled around and bumped into someone else. They got married four years after that. That's sweet. But in the original, they walked right past each other on their way to work. It was fascinating. Eventually it happened again and again, only sometimes through my intervention. It was beautiful. So many possibilities. It was amazing. But I was sad. Looking down at you humans, I wanted something you had. Companionship.

"So I took a piece of myself, and gave it its own life. It took its own form, different from my own. I taught it everything I knew. It even had a different opinion from me. It was very pleasant. They even made their own something. Over time, what was known as the multiverse grew, as did our numbers. But eventually, there was a bad one. Dormammu. He wanted to rule over the multiverse. It was a unanimous vote against him that it was a terrible idea. He attempted to try it anyway, so we were forced to take action. We fractured his power and cast it across infinity, sealing him within something known as the Dark Dimension. Even now he's still trying to take over infinity. A futile effort thanks to Stephen.

"So anyway, the multiverse continued unimpeded. However, what could be considered peace to us was brought to an end by a mere man. Nathanial Richards. His most common alias across realities being Kang. He discovered the multiverse. We were interested in seeing his research, at first. However other Kangs had other ideas. They broke out onto war, each Kang on his own. But one of them discovered something, a creature that came from the chaos they sowed. He called it Alioth. He uses it to assume control over reality. Thankfully, before that happened, we cut off the Kangs from the rest of the multiverse without them noticing, isolating those realities to contain him. He assumed control of everything, using his technology to create the TVA. He pruned timelines regularly. An abominable thing. Whenever he got bored or tired, he'd manipulate people into killing him, only for another variant to be on the other side of the door. He disgusted us.

"Eventually he lead a Loki and a Sylvie to kill him. But the Loki knew what the final Kang was planning, so he killed him and sent a well timed knife into the throat of a blue one that came through the door. Which leads us to a lot now."

Loki and Sylvie look at Orion in shock. Loki opens his mouth a few times, closing again, before finally glancing down at the two Kang corpses that were in the room. "So why is a being off your status here, talking to us?"

If he had a mouth, Orion would have smirked. "I'm here to offer you a job."
The two disguised Jotuns look at one another before nodding. "We're listening."