Far in the future, to avoid Entropy and Heat-Death, Humanity has uploaded themselves onto the fabric of space-time itself; “beneath” the quantum field. Effectively gods, so ancient that many of them have lived more in millenia than the universe in modern times have existed in seconds, creating matter and energy through manipulating the quantum layer.
There is only one question left that science has been unable to answer: What will the next universe be like? It has already been confirmed that they will survive a big bang going off, and will survive no matter what alternate physics will be in play, but how it will turn out is completely unable to be predicted.
After aeons of waiting, when the universe has been dead many millions of times longer than it was ever alive in the first place the time finally comes, and a new Big Bang occurs. Humanity collectively watch in anticipation, and then:
They get a front-row seat to an Overgod creating a High-Fantasy D&D-esque cosmology multiverse, complete with Gods, Magic, Elemental, Astral Planes and Far Realms. And they have no idea how any of it works. But Humanity knows one thing. THEY WANT TO KNOW ALL THE THINGS!
How does a ludicrously advanced sci-fi human civilization of might-as-well-be Space!gods and a D&D-like High Fantasy cosmology react to each other?
tiktok sea shanty (cant find it on YouTube but it’s one of my favorite videos it’s a tumblr post)
do you not feel filled with love?
these are some of the videos I found nd loved
hope they make you smile!
If you know the songs in these, or any of the others in the notes, I whole heartedly encourage you to sing along to them while they play. Singing along to a song is always fun, but there’s something completely and wildly different about singing alongside one person and singing alongside a hundred, or a thousand or more. Something very human, very good.
This is my mom. If you’ve read my short story “Salted,” this is who Garchi is based on.
When she was 7, she tried baking a cake all on her own. (In my story, it’s a chocolate cake because chocolate being poisonous to aliens was an added layer of space orcs shenanigans. The one my mom made was a basic yellow cake or something.) She’d helped my grandma make them before, so she grabbed this old cookbook and got to work. Being 7, she didn’t understand fractions. Thankfully, this particular recipe called for ingredients in whole measurements.
All except for salt, apparently.
My mom says she remembers being confused for a while and trying to figure out what ¾ meant. It was the only thing that made her pause, so that’s why she says she’s pretty sure it’s the reason salt was the only ingredient that turned out wrong. She decided it must mean 3+4 teaspoons of salt.
My grandad was the first one to come in from the fields. (Yes, my 7-year-old mother was baking in the home unsupervised. It was rural America in the 60s. Thems different times.) He’d been working hard and was hungry and the cake smelled great, so he cut himself a big ol’ slice! Just like Vera in the story, he took a big bite, paused, ate the rest quickly, got a drink of water, and left to go back to work outside.
My mom tried a piece and spat it out. Same thing with my grandma and uncles when they tried some. Not even the dog would eat it.
I love this story. Obviously- I mean, I based one of my stories on it! Grandad was well-known in the small town we lived in for how active he was, the work he put into his yard and flowers, and how he went out of his way to make people laugh and tell jokes, or challenge people to race him on his mobility scooter when he rode it down the street to the post office. Grandkids loved his collection of joke books- And the candy stash that was never hidden all that well. He loved his family, especially my mother, who was his youngest child and only daughter. He proved that love in many instances, but my mom remembered that eaten slice of super-salty cake well enough to retell it time and time again to her own children. I like to think that he and my grandma, both of whom grew up during the Great Depression, watch over their still-living family and descendants and cheer us on as we try our best in a world that’s changed so much.
