If you really want to know about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is how there was this experiment, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, what the hell do you care?

Where I want to start talking about it, is there was this college scientist named Ingrid and she had this goddam device. I don't know where she got it. Probably on the campus somewhere. She used to talk about it with this bastard Plinth, who didn't know his ass from his elbow.

They were probably messing around, you know? I mean, I don't know for sure, but you'd think so. I don't really like to imagine that, though. It's depressing to think about old people doing stuff like that.

Anyway, they used to try to make this device do something. I guess it looked kind of like a pocket watch, and it had "Ex uno, multis" written on it. That's Latin, it means "from one, many" or some goddam thing. I don't know why the hell people talk in some language that doesn't even exist any more. It's just a way for one phony to try to impress a bunch of other phonies.

This gadget was supposed to give you some way to control all those time things that keep happening. I mean, I can see how they'd want to do that; those things are a pain in the ass, with stuff always moving from timeline to timeline jumping all over the goddam planet, and things going backwards that you'd think would be going forward.

But after a while, Ingrid died. It's kind of depressing to think about, if you know what I mean. But this Plinth bastard had gotten rich in the meantime, so he bought the thing from the college and took it back to this fancy house he had.

Anyway, a few years passed and Plinth kept working on the gadget. But one day he figured out how to make the goddam thing turn on. And I guess it started to explode like a bastard. I mean, it pretty much wiped out the whole goddam city, if you want to know the truth. So the only thing that's left there now is this oval sea.

That's all I'm going to tell about. I could probably tell you how there are these octopuses that live down there, only instead of eight legs they have nine for some goddam reason, and so they call them nonopuses instead, but I don't feel like it. I really don't. That stuff doesn't interest me too much right now.