In the year 3042, aboard a rusting service vessel named Plunger XIV, a massive coolant leak had just turned the command deck into a skating rink. Captain Bazook, formerly banned from four spaceports for excessive snacking, skated across the polished floor with the grace of a walrus on rollerblades.
"Status report!" he barked, slamming his mug of anti-gravity espresso onto the console. It promptly floated away.
Beside him, Crumb—the ship's sentient toaster with a personality modeled after ancient poets and disgruntled librarians—buzzed to life.
"There has been a gravitational anomaly in the breakfast aisle," Crumb said, voice glitching between Shakespearean English and traffic alerts. "Also, I am not cleaning it."
Bazook squinted at the holographic readout. Several blinking red lights flashed in tandem, spelling out "LOL." That couldn't be good.
Enter Glorp: the alien linguist whose skin changed color based on mood, wifi signal, and ambient jazz music. He interpretively danced into the room, flailing his arms in alarm while communicating something urgent—though Bazook was pretty sure it was just his mating ritual again.
The emergency wasn't an asteroid, or alien pirates, or galactic taxes (though those were terrifying). It was something worse.
Bazook had, while trying to download space sudoku, accidentally activated the ship's Quantum Blender—a prototype engine designed to scramble space-time into a delicious smoothie of multiverses. The side effect? Reality itself had a 14% chance of becoming a sitcom at any moment.
And the Blender was humming.
"Crumb," Bazook said, gripping the console with only mild panic. "I need you to override the Blender's poetry protocol before this turns into an intergalactic episode of Friends."
Crumb blinked once. "Too late. Laugh track engaged."