I'm not like the other schmucks.  That's the first thing you should know about me.
I mean, sure, I don't smell so good, and I like a delicious, fresh brain just as much as Joe Zombie down the road, but I'm different.
What you've got to understand is that I'm an original, true-blue 2012 edition.  Year Zero.  Retro, baby.  I didn't jump on the bandwagon like so many other zlobs.
That's what I tell the ladies, but frankly, I sometimes wonder why I bother.  They hardly ever listen to me anyway.  And isn't that just a sign of the times?
I haven't met a smoking hot zombie chick since the spring of '13.  Things were different back then.
Let me tell you...

Things fall apart.
In the Shire, the hobbits hold a referendum.
‘We refuse to be governed by stewards in Gondor who have never even been to the Westfarthing!  Tariffs on mushrooms are far beyond what any reasonable gaffer should expect to pay!’
In Narnia, the Emperor-Beyond-The-Sea decides not to send his son, after all. Foreigners should fend for themselves.  He lets winter reign, instead.
Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.  Yeats and Randal Flagg knew that.
In Wonderland, the cards are being sorted.  Red cards with red cards, black with black.  The vorpal sword is cutting the pack down the middle; that is how the vote came out.
It’s the same everywhere.
In Gormenghast, and in the Night Land; on Trantor and Terminus; Hy Brasil and Atlantis.
It’s the same everywhere.
It’s all very sad.  But what can you do?
The hobbits voted; and we did, too.

This little bit was written in response to Tom of Watt.  Shoot me a prompt, and I'll have fun trying to come up with something...

​Lazarus watched the next wave as it swelled.  The latest Universe rippled, flashing from a point to a cloud, a cloud to an eternity of sparkling matter and light, and then collapsing back into itself in a mouldering entropy of decay.
Lazarus sighed.
“What?” Said Peck, frowning slightly.
Lazarus stared at his friend.  It was true, they had existed since before the beginning of time.  No doubt they would exist beyond the end of eternity.  Still - Peck really was a dolt, sometimes.
“It’s just…” Lazarus hesitated.  He watched the next bubble of spacetime whispering its way into existence, balancing on the edge of possibility.  It was full of promise, full of potential.  But Lazarus knew how things would go.  It was always the same.  How could he express that to his friend?  Was there a word for it?  The disappointment he felt every time the sparkling potential crashed down through inevitable spirals of dissipating energy, matter condensing and radiating, forming and exploding, the dance of atoms up the elemental chain, the formation of planets - brief dense clots in the infinitely spreading, thinning cloud of existence - and then life, fragile, sensitive, as delicate as a daydream, blooming, flourishing…and then fading (after a moment or a million mom§ents, it mattered not), crushed under the final, inevitable realisation that the whole of its host reality was locked in - a closed system - an energy signature which was destined for only one thing: the long flat line, and the end of all potential before it had even properly begun.  And if that wasn’t bad enough, to have to sit here, like Lazarus and Peck sat, lodged in the phase-shelf between the endless expanding bubbles of Universe after Universe, to watch it again and again, forever…
“Never mind,” muttered Lazarus, turning away and flipping a stone off into the front of the latest expanding Universe, where it lodged in the heart of a fledgling galaxy, displacing the central black hole, which in turn flew off, starting a chain reaction which terminated the entire Universe in a soft, disappointed hiss...

The throbbing in Tom's jaw was like a box of bees.  He couldn't imagine a pain worse.
"But I saw the damn dentist last month!" he complained.  "I ain't made of money."
He tried to hold out another day, but it just got worse.
"How much will you charge to take the tooth?" he demanded.
The dentist told him.  It was too much.
Tom cursed.
"You could sell me the pain, instead," suggested the dentist.
Tom had heard about such things, but he was wary.
"You won't go taking nothing but the pain?" he asked.  He had good memories he wanted to keep, strawberries in the sun with Lisa, and his mother's voice when he was a lad, and the feel of his son's hand in his own.  Technology wasn't perfect.  Mistakes had been made.
"Not a thing," promised the dentist.  He strapped Tom in and put the induction helmet in place.
THRUM! Went the machine.
And, CLICK!
And, "Wow!" said Tom, sudden relief flooding his mouth.  The pain had vanished.  Where it had been there was just a silky, blank whiteness in his mind.
"All done," said the dentist.  "A clean extraction."
Tom nervously prodded his memories.  Everything seemed in order.  And after all, there was no pain.
The dentist paid Tom the agreed price for a grade III toothache.  When Tom had left, the dentist logged via secure server to the Department of Corrections and uploaded the pain, for which he was paid twice as much as he had paid Tom.
"Ow!" shouted the convict the next day, when the toothache was applied.  "Stop!  Please, stop!"
"And you won't ever do it again?" said the Judge.
The convict swore he would not.
He left whistling.  The first thing he did was buy a whole basket of strawberries.


The End

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She was too young to die.  
That’s what Chloe had screamed, as the car hurtled out of control, ploughing over the roadside barriers, and careening down the steep mountainside towards the rocks and crashing waves below.
“Nope,” said the voice next to her.  “Just too Chosen.  Assuming you look lively and use your powers, that is.”
Chloe looked over.  A huge badger was sat in the passenger seat, regarding her with large, inscrutable eyes.  Behind the badger, the rock face continued to flash by outside the window.  Only it had slowed to a crawl.  Something odd was happening with time.  But that would have to wait.  Right now Chloe had odd animals to deal with.  She would move on to the odd other stuff in due course.
“Are you...death?” Chloe asked the badger.
The badger stared at her solemnly.
“Only to earthworms,” it told her.  “Now come on.  I’ve slowed time down, but there’s only so much I can do.”
“Hmm?” said Chloe, whose previous experience of talking badgers was approximately zero.
“Chop chop,” urged the badger.  “Make with the powers, already.  Unless you want to end up spread over this very pretty coastline, that is.  Your choice.”
“But I don’t have any...” she started to protest.

Ki looked at the thing he had made.  From his vantage point three rungs up the ladder of phase space, he could see it spread-eagled in nineteen dimensions.  It had spheres and lines, energetic colours, delicate curves that were beautiful in their endless inevitability.  It was pretty.
“Well, it’s not bad,” allowed Ola, grudgingly.  “I still prefer mine, though.”
The two pan-dimensional entities were comparing their attempts at substrates with which to fill lower Universes.  It passed eternity.
Ki regarded Ola’s most recent creation, and frowned. 
It was true: hers was certainly more elegant.
“I like the lights,” he muttered.  “Lights are a nice touch.”
“You think that’s good?” Ola replied, complacent in her victory.  “See what happens when I do this...”
Ola leaned into the little Universe, Phase Space telescoping around her as she gave it a flick, sending it rocketing along one further dimension: time.
The substrate flared brightly, much to Ki’s surprise, exploding in a kaleidoscopic panorama of colours, before dissipating gently into a barely perceptible hum of thin-spread background radiation.
“Well, good game,” sniffed Ola.  “We must play again.”
She stared at him, waiting for a response.  But Ki was too flabbergasted by what he had seen.  Time - in one of the lower realities!  Imagine that!   And the way her substrate had behaved, flaring then dissipating.  Why had it done that?  And what if it could be made to do something else?  The possibilities were...
And when he realised she had spoken to him, Ola was already gone, off to strut some higher rung of phase space, looking to win more contests.
Ki didn’t mind.  She had given him an idea...