Each of the stories featured herein is set within a Universe of the writer's creation, while all being a part of a larger, shared Multiverse.
At the Ooorah Mothership, we call this the M'Verse.
Writers have free rein to tell the story they want to t...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Drying his bare arm with the same dirty rag he'd been supplied at the start of his career on the Ooorah Mothership, Ensign Scrudbucket scowled at the grease- and grime-encrusted toilet of Bathroom 24-B, Stall 13-C. He swore he'd just cleaned the bloody thing. And now it looked worse than when he'd started! But, having served aboard this colossal generation ship for the entirety of 2022, he was no stranger to the weird, the uncanny, and the downright strange.
And that was just from all the political scandals back on Earth-2!
Scrudbucket sighed and pushed the rabbit's left ear to start the music back up. As the song "It's Funky Enough" by The DOC started playing, he plunged his hand in stink and got to work on the toilet. Again.
Wait—
His head jerked back to the fluffy white rabbit sitting on the bathroom countertop, emitting funky music from its ears—just like the stereo unit that'd been sitting there, submerged in an inch of water, mere moments before.
"Forget it!" Scrudbucket stood, in the process de-snaking his arm from the toilet, and tossed the rag into the corner. This was too weird. He pulled the rabbit's left ear, stopping the music, hated how he seemed to intuitively know to do this, and promptly left Bathroom 24-B.
Things weren't any better in the access corridors. For one, his dog, Sparky, was serving as a taxi service for the ship's many cats. Sparky did great—aside from the way he panted, blinked with just one eye, and dragged his left foot—but then a fat orange cat jumped aboard, and the dog heaved himself forward, collapsing under the combined weight of the kitties. A black cat who sat atop Sparky's head worked the dog's ears with its claws. But Sparky didn't budge. So the black cat hopped off and started cleaning its paws.
As if that wasn't bad enough, everybody on the ship walked around in matching togas and mushroom-shaped helmets. They all chanted the same tuneless verse: "We are Toadies. All hail the Almighty Toad King. Hail."
Finally, it seemed cigarettes had come back into fashion in the time it'd taken him to clean the toilets. This did Scrudbucket no good. He'd already made a huge scene about quitting—the other crewmembers had shamed him into it because he smelled bad and his fingertips were going yellow.
Really nice, guys!
He'd have a word with the captain about this...
Only the captain wasn't really the captain. Scrudbucket stopped outside the captain's partially open door, mid-knock, staring at an old lady hailing from some alien race. She had grey hair beneath her mushroom helmet, with wrinkly white skin visible in the areas her toga didn't cover, and tentacles coming out of her face. Each tentacle was smoking a cigarette.
"Um, where's Captain Jin—"
"Don't say that name!" Her badge said Captain Doris. Scrudbucket saw she had a fuzzy pink unicorn horn in one of her eight hands. "We don't say that name since COVID broke out."
"I mean I had my suspicions, but..." Scrudbucket scratched his smooth cheeks. "Jinnis planned the pandemic...?"
Sirens blared. A turret descended from the ceiling and shot a mass of cables at him. The mass exploded outwards into a data net, ensnaring him in its swank and luxurious cyberweb.
Within a microsecond Scrudbucket was reduced to trillions upon trillions of lines of code. It was kind of an upgrade.
"At ease, Ensign!" Captain Doris raised the unicorn horn to her eye, as if studying it further. All her tentacles took synchronized hits from the cigarettes. She shook her head and blew out the smoke. "When our former captain worked with terrorist groups to reproduce Naked Horn Disease in albino unicorn populations, thus negatively affecting their mating rituals and thereby crippling them, that's when they became the enemy! And so are you!"
Somewhere in cyberspace, Scrudbucket was relaxing on an AI-generated approximation of a beach. The sky was green, the moon was shining, and the sand felt more like snow—but it was hot, and this was exactly the sort of thing he'd rather be doing than cleaning five hundred toilets a day on a spaceship so big you needed to take the teleporters in order to make it to the mess hall before they stopped serving simulated lunch and moved to simulated afternoon snacks.
He opened one eye and saw Captain Doris blurred into the horizon, fizzing and crackling over the purple water like a screen on the fritz. Her tentacles gyrated this way and that, and he could just make out what she was saying:
