One Shots

Timeless

In the emptiness, a sound. Throughout the lifeless, motionless, soundless continuum, the smallest of ripples. Unplanned and unanticipated, this tiniest of movements was, in fact, a contingency. The original ideal, of course, was to remain in nihility. Whether for better or for worse, however, the first, smallest, wave appeared, emerging from nothing and going nowhere.

This, the first, is never remembered, however. After all, stories are not told about the small and weak, despite their being the first; the cause, even. No, stories are told about the big and the bold, those who brought the change, not those who heralded it.

Still, the vacuum remembers that initial nudge, the anticipation before the storm, the courier for the masses. It remembers, because it was curious, and it looked deeper. It poked itself into the cracks the ripple had created, the crevices in the facade of the void.

This searching made the waves bolder, the tiny ripples that flooded in from the smallest of fissures. It began to shape them into the kind that stories are written about, the kind that have songs sung for them. The interest in them goaded them to be bigger, bolder, all jostling for the most attention. Before they knew it, they grew larger and larger, expanded, and eventually, exploded.

Outwards they flew, forcing the vacuum to recoil, and still that was not enough. Bigger they became, farther they explored. Everywhere they ventured, mysterious occurrences. Tiny sparks that tickled the pioneers' sides, quickly patted out and ignored. And substances.

From the waves fell tiny things, all the first of their kind. The waves didn't know what to make of it, but they were curious, eager to know. The waves, in their ethereal forms, could not understand these things, these objects made of particles and molecules and atoms.

And all of this interest and unknowing, caused the waves to become greedy. Some of the things were deemed valuable – the glowing, the shining, the rare. These things were hoarded, hidden from others, and shoved together into tiny piles. These piles swirled together in the waves' embrace, the substances all trying to mix with one another.

All across the waves' ranks, many tiny nuclear explosions occurred at once. The waves were shocked, these tickles bigger than the sparks before. They begged more attention, and earned themselves great surprise. The waves startled, dropped their piles, froze for a moment to stare.

Their precious materials, the things they had hidden away from others out of jealousy, just begged to be noticed. They shone brighter than anything they were made up of, and the waves were intrigued. These new discoveries, named quickly by the waves as a series of motions and swirls (which roughly translates to 'rare explosions'), seemed desperate to be noticed, but if touched, they either chased the waves away with pain, or exploded again, this time into nothing but the same shiny particles they were made of.

Greedy again, the waves began brushing against the rare explosions carelessly, trying to regain their lost possessions. This was rather useless, however: as soon as the particles were collected, they just made new rare explosions.

The waves agreed to leave the rare explosions alone, since there was nothing to be done about them. They decided to avoid them as much as possible, but every so often, a wave slipped up. They touched a one, and it exploded again (these second explosions were named so creatively by the waves 'second rare explosions').

The rare explosions began to gather things around them. Fields of force, other particles, sometimes even smaller waves were sucked into their pull. The waves called this dangerous field of force the 'pull field'.

Just when the waves though they had began to understand this place of mystery, named by them simply 'Existence', something occurred.

A small wave, quite similar to the Harbinger, as the first wave was known, noticed a small spark that tickled it. It took notice, looked closer, and saw something tiny, smaller than even itself.

It ran to its brethren, excited, and showed it to its larger kin. They, too, were intrigued.

And the tiny thing, upon waking in the embrace of what seemed like nothing, did not know what to do.

(A/N: Hi! So, this was originally going to be a little story based in the infinite time between when the universe was first created and when time began. I know it's only a few milliseconds to us, but imagine how many millennia could've passed in that lack of time. Thus the name: Timeless. It was just a little thought experiment for me, but I hope you enjoyed nonetheless! I wrote this probably a little less than a month ago, so it's got my more recent writing style, as opposed to the first few chapters of Love, Em, for example.)