(TAYLOR HEBERT) INTERLUDE

The pocket watch snapped shut with a sharp, high-pitched clink that lingered a beat longer than it should have. A moment later, and without ceremony, the blue-white portal collapsed in on itself, leaving behind a man standing where there had been empty space and the slightest distortion that smoothed itself out soon later

He adjusted the cuff of his sleeve, brushed nonexistent dust from his coat, more out of habit than necessity. Then, slipping the watch back into his pocket with a small, practiced motion, he took in his surroundings with a brief, casual glance. 

The street around him carried on as if nothing had happened. A car passed, someone laughed somewhere down the block, and the wind dragged a loose scrap of paper along the curb.

He took a step forward, then stopped.

At a glance, it was ordinary: the city noise, and the usual mess of human living stacked on top of itself. Nothing that demanded attention. 

Then he looked again.

The very fabric of this reality was laid bare to him without resistance, layers giving way to something deeper, something fundamental. And though his expression didn’t change at first—it rarely did these days—his gray eyes stilled.

“…oh.”

It wasn’t a pleased sound.

What lay beneath wasn’t hidden so much as it was… unacknowledged. Connections, invisible to normal perception, running through everybody, anchored somewhere beyond the limits of a single world.

He followed one.

It slipped sideways into another version of the same place and same moment, and the scale of the intrusion began to take shape, vast enough that the mind instinctively tried to simplify it and failed.

His hand went back to the pocket watch without him thinking about it, thumb resting against the cool metal case. He didn’t open it, and didn't need to. 

“…I see,” he murmured, more to himself than anything else.

It wasn’t discovery so much as recognition of a pattern he would have preferred not to recognize.

Survival, taken to its logical extreme.

These entities weren’t parasites in the usual sense. They didn’t consume and discard. No, they cultivated. They allowed things to grow, made conflict happen, and allowed different versions of chosen worlds to run their course while they watched and recorded and became better.

He looked up again, eyes narrowing.

For the first time in a very long while, he didn’t immediately know where to go or what to do next. And that—more than anything else—set a persistent, unfamiliar tension in his chest.

Professor Paradox stood there a moment longer, listening to a world that carried on anyway 

Then he exhaled.

“…this complicates things.”