Marion Tass was a dreadfully lonely woman. She had no friends, a tedious job, gossipy coworkers, and a severe wheat allergy that failed to make normal bread products taste terrible and wheat-free bread products taste decent.
As a teenager, she had dabbled in the usual self-harm that most maladjusted kids her age went through, but the feelings of wanting everything to end weren’t what had left, it had been her tolerance for pain. She could no longer stand the thought of running a blade down her forearm, not because she so strongly desired to live, but because of the inevitable pain and slight possibility of surviving.
She couldn’t hang herself, because she had never been very good at tying knots and would probably be slowly strangled to death, rather than the gratifying instantaneous end she so longed for.
There were horror stories aplenty about failed drug overdoses that ended in nasty bouts of vomiting, diarrhea, and worst of all, survival; there was no way she could risk that.
Even the idea of simply putting a bullet in her head was too much to ask; everyone who managed to kill themselves using this method unfortunately weren’t around to tell her whether or not it hurt, and everyone who had failed would quite enthusiastically relate the excruciating pain they felt(provided they had been competent enough to get the bullet anywhere near their head in the first place).
Instead, she would go about her daily routine, never attempting to improve herself or seek a change of pace. She simply accepted the fact that her life was miserable and was going to be miserable until Nature or God or Dr. Ketes the strong euthanasia advocate decided it was her time to die.
Sometimes, when she lay in bed at night and had some sort of difficulty falling asleep, she’d wonder what steps she had to take to prevent herself from ever existing. At first it seemed quite simple: she’d just go back in time and persuade her mother to have an abortion, or kick her in the stomach a few times, or kill one of her parents prior to the pregnancy, or kill one of her grandparents before the parent was conceived, or find a way to make her parents break up before they decided to have sex without a condom because it just felt so much better.
But then, it occurred to her that none of that would work, because once she managed to prevent herself from existing, she would never have gone back in time to do the deed and thus would’ve been born, only to go back in time and prevent herself from living, and so on and so forth. Every solution to this she tried to come up with always ended in a never-ending time loop; there was no way to cause herself to stop existing.
It was only a pipe dream, and yet, it frustrated her to no end that she couldn’t come up with a plausible solution.
~
Lady Luck was a tall and gorgeous woman, with skin the color of pure copper, hair the color of obsidian, and eyes the color of gold.
Unfortunately for the human inhabitants of the third dimension, her intentions for them were not nearly as lovely as her face, and she took great delight in tormenting them with her childish games.
This time, she was building a Perfect Human Being to send to every planet with humans on it, for the sole purpose of convincing them that a wrathful God existed and would subject them to a fiery and horrific afterlife should they refuse to comply with the morals revealed by the said Perfect Human Being.
The catch, of course, was that in no way, shape, or form would the Perfect Human Being be perfect; it would have its personality “filled” with randomly chosen character traits from a randomly chosen human being each time. She would do this by spinning two wheels, one rather large having over six hundred different traits to choose from, and the other incomprehensibly enormous and difficult to read with approximately fourteen novemdecillion human beings to choose from, give or take a few octodecillion. Once a trait or person was landed on, they would no longer be an available option for the next spin.
The personality was very close to being filled with the next spin Lady Luck was about to take. In fact, she was quite confident that it was the last spin she was going to need before her Perfect Human Being was ready to be unleashed on the universe.
And wouldn’t you know it, when she spun that ridiculously big wheel of humans, it just so happened to land on the forty-three-year-old Marion Felicity Tass in Prescott Valley, Arizona of the United States of America on Earth in the Milky Way galaxy in the Virgo supercluster.
Miss Tass was transported in front of Lady Luck instantaneously.
“Hello, my dear,” Lady Luck purred sweetly. “Welcome to the Fifth Dimension! I’m sure you’re quite confused, so let me explain. I’m going to suck out a bit of your personality and stuff it into this human I’m building so it can terrorize every member of your entire species!” She gave Marion a glorious smile and waited patiently for her reply.
Marion hadn’t been paying attention to a word she said, because all around her, it seemed that fantastical creatures were continuously redoing tasks or teleporting to different places or doing other things impossible in her original dimension.
Lady Luck chuckled and took Marion’s chin in her hand, directing her so that they were eye-to-eye. “Oh my, you really don’t understand any of this, do you?”
“Wha… whuh… where am… is...?” She was so bewildered, the words refused to properly form.
“You are in the Fifth Dimension,” Lady Luck explained calmly. “You are an inhabitant of the third dimension, subject to the fourth dimension, and unaware of any higher dimensions. As such, you cannot manipulate the fourth or third dimensions as I or my fellow Fivers are able to do. Similarly, while we can manipulate some aspects of the fifth dimension which we inhabit, there are certain rules we literally cannot break, no matter how hard we try, and we are completely subject to the sixth dimension’s whims. The seventh dimension and higher are all completely meaningless to us, yet I’m sure they control us somehow, just as you’re unaware of our presence or plane of existence and are still directly affected by the things we do to you.
“Does that make sense?”
“Probably,” Marion said, still feeling a bit muddled.
“That’s good enough.” With a devious grin, she took hole of the trait wheel and gave it a mighty spin. “Let’s see what your contribution will be, my dear!”
“Contribution?”
“Yes! You’re going to give up a bit of a personality trait in exchange for ascension into a fourth dimensional being. I think I forgot to mention that little perk in my introductory speech, but no matter; it’s all on the table now.” She kept her eyes glued to the wheel.
It landed on Cynicism.
Lady Luck reached into Marion’s head—how she did or why she felt nothing, Marion didn’t and would never know—and pulled out every bit of cynicism she had, stuffing it into the Perfect Human Being.
As it turned out, there was such a plenteous amount of cynicism that the Perfect Human Being’s personality threatened to explode from overstuffing.
“Oh, dear me,” Lady Luck said. “I suppose we’ll have to spin and see what gets taken out and given back to you, Marion!”
She managed to conjure up a wheel of the traits already in the Perfect Human Being and gave it the hardest spin she’d ever gave. Marion watched as the fourteen traits spun—Confusion, Obedience, Restraint, Cynicism, Obsessiveness, Unpatriotism, Complacence, Paranoia, Melancholy, Stubbornness, Modesty, Subtlety, Arrogance, and Dignity—and began to think of all the great things she’d be able to do with the gift of time travel.
The wheel eventually landed on Stubbornness. Lady Luck scooped out the exact amount of it that was overflowing the personality and shoved it into Marion.
“Have fun experimenting with your new powers,” Lady Luck trilled, and kicked her into the fourth dimension.
~
Once faced with the ability to manipulate time whilst having a sudden surge in stubbornness and a small empty spot in her personality, Marion became more determined than ever to prevent herself from being born.
What she failed to take into account was that, while she was able to interact with it, the fourth dimension still had strict rules that needed to be followed. Being greater than the third dimension, its consequences were far more dire: rather than failing to do anything, or causing some destruction, or being destroyed, anything that threatened to violate the rules of time would be wiped from existence, its imprint forever wiped from the fourth dimension and downward.
Marion still set out on the daunting task of indirectly committing suicide, going to the most convoluted lengths possible. She had the brilliant idea to go into the future, when time travel would surely have existed, and ask some bright-eyed time traveler to kill her great-great-great grandfather, but was disappointed to discover that the humans of Earth had wiped each other out before they had managed to advance that far.
She considered trying to find a different and perhaps slightly less war-inclined planet, but realized she had no idea how she would find it or even get there, and was thus stuck with Earth.
She finally decided on carefully tracing back her family ancestry to the point where they were primal amphibians, and squished the one she had descended from.
What led her to believe that going back so far would somehow solve the paradox of her preventing herself can probably be attributed to her lack of cynicism and abundance of stubbornness.
The result of her ancestor-squashing was, unfortunately, not only the removal of Marion Tass from existence, but her parents, and her parents’ parents, and so on and so forth until Earth itself had to be destroyed to prevent the human race and, more specifically, Marion from ever existing.
Lady Luck had prepared for this; she had done it a few times previously and always had a back-up for when the human did the inevitable, but after this she decided it was simply time to stop. The process of matching everyone with their personality doppelganger was boring and not worth what little amusement watching some fool destroy their home and themselves brought.
At this point, it was especially crucial that she refrain from letting any planets be destroyed; she had a savior to unleash.
This was a rather short story I wrote more as a way to organize my thoughts and less as a concrete stand-alone story. I've been having a hundred ideas nagging at me for a while and I'm trying to earn money to buy a bunch of new albums, so most of my time is divided between writing, deleting what I just wrote, and filling out boring surveys(which is partially to blame for my lack of posts lately. The other part is just laziness).
If you have some objections to the way dimensions are depicted in this, please tell me what I did wrong.