Saturday, Sept. 07, 2002 - 8:09 p.m.

Click. The world ended.

Everything outside the little box room ceased to be. Inside, life, of a sort, still existed.

The room was. It didn't have a place anymore, or a time, as such. It just was, and it had people inside it.

Or, more accurately, gnomes. The gnomes had been trying to do something to blow the walls off of the room, and escape from their little cell, but had obviously forgotten how powerful their gnome magic was. Years of pretending to fish had dulled their instincts. But now the gnomes would be in the room forever, or until they died, but gnomes are immortal so that wasn't really a viable option.

"You're an idiot, Beardy." Said one of the smaller gnomes. "You should've known that spell would do that."

"Look, stupid, I don't know any more than you about all this 'Earth Magic'!" Beardy said, in his defence.

"You said you did." mumbled another gnome, who went by the name of Plug Socket.

"Just... shut up. What's done is done."

"YOU JUST BLEW UP THE PLANET!" screamed an outraged gnome, who's parents had named him Ceiling. "YOU CAN'T JUST FORGIVE AND FORGET!"

"What other choice do you have? Anyway, it's your fault for joining in with the chant." said Beardy, quietly. "And I didn't 'blow up the planet.' We made it stop existing. There's a difference, you know?"

Ceiling and Plug Socket glared. The smaller, but just as angry gnome, who had just decided he wanted to be called Paperclip, kicked the huge (by gnome standards) book of spells. "Now what, then?" he asked. Beardy glanced down at the book.

"We see if we can fix it. It's all we can do."

"And if we can't?"

"Well..." Beardy glanced up at the ceiling, before mumbling "I don't know."

"Transdimensional Travellation!" squeaked Paperclip. "It'll take us to other places! It says 'ere in this leaflet thing, it says: "We at Transdimensional Travellation pride ourselves on being the most efficient, cheapest interdimensional travel agents in the quadmultiverse system. Pixies, Gnomes, and Lesser Fairies only, 'humans' need not apply." And we can use that!!"

"Oh, that should be useful then, just in case." said Beardy, as he watched Paperclip bounce around with excitement, before collapsing from exhaustion. Had always been hyperactive, that one. Another gnome, Hairdryer, who had been hiding in a bucket in case the spell went wrong, popped out and landed on top of the book.

"Told ya so." he said.

"What did you tell us?"

"That it'd go wrong. I said it would, and it did, cos I was right." he grinned. "Now let's fix it, shall we?"

"I hate you." said Beardy, under his breath.

----

And so the gnomes came to be stood around the book, in a circle, with Hairdryer reading the spell. It was a spell of reversal, they were trying to go back to where they had been before, to put the world back into existance. Unfortunately, they didn't have a clue how to do it. So far, Hairdryer had set his beard on fire, Paperclip had turned into a giant toad, and Ceiling had become eerily translucent. Like one of those fish you see sometimes, with their insides on show. They hadn't got anywhere near close to actually reversing what they had done, when, after around five solid days of experimenting, a strange looking pixie-creature had appeared in the room with them.

"Oi! You're the fools who destroyed our realm, aren't you? You blew up Earth, didn't you?" it shrieked. Beardy eyed it suspiciously, before glancing over to Paperclip, and nodding.

"Um... I guess you could say that. Why?" he asked.

"Because we have to kill you now, before you leave this dimension and disappear. Revenge is difficult when a person's unfindable, you know? It's a bit like living in nothing. Tricky." The pixie looked bitter, but pixies were always bitter about something, and never had a nice thing to say about anyone.

"Oh, well... we were just leaving, actually. Goodbye." said Beardy, and the gnomes flickered out of existance. The pixie just floated there for a while, staring.

"...I hate gnomes. Gnomes should die. I don't like them. I don't like them. I don't like them. I... agh, what's the point?" it said, before flickering out of existance also.

The world still didn't exist, but by now everyone had lost interest in this little fact. Lost interest or stopped existing, anyway. Air breathers had problems, of course, and anything that had depended on the planet for survival, also. Pixies, fairies, and the like were all creatures of some other dimension, on an extended holiday. They liked earth, but now they had to find a new place to terrorise the natives. Things like world endings happened sometimes, but they coped.