Problobly
Legacy Name: Problobly

When Zvi came home with a sentient bit of mud, I was fascinated. What kind of strange magic was this? What mysteries would I be able to uncover? In the end, it turned out to be very uninteresting. A simple animations spell gone awry. Phosephore remarked lazily, while filling her nails, that for all she knew, she could be responsible for it. So, the bit of mud with puppy dog eyeballs lived in the ruin of the back garden and did nothing more useful than stare at us pitifully whenever we walked by.

Eventually, Zvi got tired of it. She’d been obsessed with tossing things into the Rift to see what it would spit back out, so one day she just scooped up the blob and took it with her to the void, and tossed it in. Nothing came back out, so she left in disappointment, only to come back a few days later and have the Rift spit a living eyeball back out at her. Low and behold, it was the old mud blob, transformed and now capable of telepathy. What horrors, what wonders, had it seen on the other side of space? As soon as she brought it home, I excitedly began assembling my notebooks, begging the ether-and-teeth-surrounded-eyeball to tell me everything it’s great eye had seen.

It cleared it’s non-existent throat importantly, I readied my pen - and then it began telling me a story. I wrote rapidly, though with confusion. It was a story about two sisters in Ziara. There was a war going on, there was intrigue, it was all very fascinating, but after several pages I began to wonder where this was all going. As it pronounced, with great pomp, “Chapter Two!” I finally had to interrupt.

“Excuse me, sir, or, um, great eyeball blob, whatever it is you call yourself - is this a vision you saw in the Rift?”

“Yes!” it exclaimed, getting a bit misty over it all, “Isn’t it the most beautiful tale you’ve ever heard?”

“Well, er, not quite, but - you saw all of this, exactly, in the Rift?”

It was just that, it’d begun to sound a bit like… well, I couldn’t be sure, I’d never read them, but Absolum has a trash fiction series that is a dystopian drama about Ziara, and I’d only ever read the back cover synopsis of a few of them, just to be able to snigger at the content he fills his brain with... but this tale was beginning to sound a bit similar in concept. The eyeball was beginning to look a bit guilty. I didn’t know an eyeball surrounded by teeth and ether could look guilty, but it can.

“Alright, alright,” it said with a sigh, “I didn’t witness anything magnificent, I was just as bored as I was in the back garden. At first, that is. Then I realized I could access anything in the universe with just a small twist of my mind, so I worked myself into digital archives, and it was mostly all numbers and nonsense, but eventually, I found this story,” here he began to get a bit misty again, “And it was just so beautiful! So emotional! So intense! And I began to wonder about the sort of being that would make such a story, and then I began to wonder if I could make such a story, and if there were other stories like it in the universe… and, well, because I could consume material so quickly, out there in timeless space, I read volume after volume, series after series… but I always held this special love for this story, the one that had introduced me to all the rest. So, I began to create my own story. I took what I knew of the world, and I looked into a corner of the city that hadn’t been looked into, and I found my characters there. Ready for me to take the lead, to tell them their futures -” I swear if it had hands, they would be clasped at it’s breast right now (if it had one of those as well), as it looked heavenward, overcome with emotion. “I created this story! I have been weaving it for what feels like eons, but you see I have no hands to write with, so -” here I finally threw down my pen in disgust.

“So you tricked me into being your free scribe? I’ve had enough of this.” And I stormed off, muttering things to myself as he pleaded after me,

“Please, kind sir, just one more chapter! Just one!”

I told Zvi later, as we drank tea in the evening, “I can’t believe you got something back from the void only to have it be a fanfiction writing eyeball.”

She, of course, found this hilarious, but I can not believe our continued bad luck.