The World That Forgot Time
In the days before everything fell apart, time was a commodity. People wore watches like jewelry, prized moments as if they were rare gems, and never dared waste a single second. But then the Clocking Event happened, and time itself began to unravel.
No one knows exactly what caused it. Some say it was a glitch in the fabric of reality, while others believe it was the work of a rogue god trying to speed up creation for fun. Whatever the reason, the result was the same: time fractured.
- Seconds stretched into hours.
- Hours collapsed into minutes.
- Years became memories that never quite happened.
The world became a chaotic blur: days passed without notice, seasons became irrelevant, and the concept of tomorrow was as alien as a unicorn doing taxes.
But in this broken timeline, one thing remained constant: the laugh.
Meet Jinx, the Clock King’s Right-Hand Man
Jinx wasn’t a hero. He didn’t care about saving the world. He didn’t even care about surviving. What Jinx cared about was finding the punchline — the perfect joke that could bring this absurd world to its knees. He was the self-proclaimed “Right-Hand Man” to the last surviving monarch of this twisted, temporal mess: The Clock King.
The Clock King, a ruler who had inherited the throne of nothingness (a pile of clock hands and broken gears in the shape of a crown), had once been a revered timekeeper. Now, he was just another mad monarch in a world where minutes didn’t matter.
“Jinx!” The Clock King called out from his throne of shattered hourglasses, “The Great Boring Nothingness is approaching!”
Jinx scratched his head and looked up at the sky. The once-blue sky was now a sickly shade of purple, streaked with wisps of golden clouds.
“What is that, exactly?” he asked, casually swiping a half-eaten sandwich from the ground and taking a bite.
The Clock King stared at him, shaking his head in exasperation.
“You’re not even listening to me, are you?”
“Nope,” Jinx replied, then grinned. “But in my defense, this whole time thing is a little confusing. It’s like, what’s the point of being on time if no one even knows when anything’s supposed to happen?”
“Exactly!” The Clock King shouted. “That’s why we need the Crown of Perpetual Motion! It can fix time! It can reverse the collapse! We can make the world right again!”
Jinx blinked, then sighed dramatically.
“You mean the glowing artifact we’ve been chasing for five years, and we still haven’t found?”
“Yes!” The Clock King yelled, leaping from his throne, his golden robe shimmering. “It’s the only thing that can set time right again, and then I can restore order to the world. I can bring back timeliness, punctuality, schedules!”
“Ugh, schedules,” Jinx muttered under his breath, feeling an existential wave of nausea.
But the Clock King was oblivious.
“Once we get the Crown, we can put everything back to normal. I will be known as the Savior of Time!”
Jinx adjusted his tattered cape and rubbed his chin thoughtfully.
“And what if we don’t?”
“What do you mean?” the Clock King asked, his eyes narrowing.
“Well, what if,” Jinx said with a devilish grin, “we don’t try to fix time at all? What if we just… let it keep falling apart? I mean, it’s not like we’re really surviving anyway. We’re just stumbling from one nonsensical moment to the next.”
The Clock King frowned.
“You’re missing the bigger picture. We have to save the world.”
Jinx chuckled.
“Save the world? From what? A world that doesn’t even exist properly anymore?”
The Great Boring Nothingness
As if to prove Jinx’s point, the Great Boring Nothingness arrived in a dramatic, yet completely anticlimactic fashion. It wasn’t a looming darkness, nor a fiery inferno. It was… a giant beige rectangle floating in the sky. The rectangle was utterly blank, a massive sheet of plainness that seemed to suck in all excitement, leaving behind only a deep, yawning void.
“It’s here!” the Clock King exclaimed. “The final collapse!”
Jinx raised an eyebrow.
“It’s just a… rectangle? That’s what we’ve been terrified of for five years?”
The Clock King nodded, his face pale.
“It’s a symbol of the ultimate lack of meaning. It’ll erase everything. No more chaos. No more time. No more jokes.”
Jinx tilted his head back and laughed, the sound echoing across the lifeless land.
“Oh, come on! It’s just a rectangle! Nothing can be more boring than that! That’s the end? The Great Nothingness is just… beige?!”
The Clock King clenched his fists.
“It’s not funny!”
“Exactly!” Jinx grinned, his eyes twinkling with a mischievous spark.
“You know what this means?”
“No, what?” the Clock King asked, his shoulders slumping.
“It means we win!”
The Clock King stared at him blankly.
“What do you mean?”
“We’ve been fighting for five years, right?” Jinx shrugged. “But now, this is the last moment. The ultimate inconsequence. No need to worry about fixing time, or trying to save anything. The end is just… boring. It’s the perfect joke.”
The Clock King stared at him, trying to piece it together.
“So… you’re saying… we should just embrace the nothingness?”
“Exactly! Nothing can be worse than the Great Nothingness… except trying to fix it.”
The Clock King sighed deeply.
“I’m going to miss being a timekeeper.”
The Joke’s on Us
As the beige rectangle began to consume everything, Jinx and the Clock King sat on the edge of a broken tower, sipping lukewarm tea. The landscape around them melted into an infinite void of nothingness, but instead of feeling fear, they simply started laughing.
“Well,” Jinx said, wiping a tear from his eye, “at least it’s finally over.”
And with that, the last laugh echoed across the void, leaving behind a world that no longer cared about time — or anything else.
