There was a parrot on the HMS Gregarian who knew the coordinates of an old sunken ship from the days of pirates. It recited these numbers constantly, but no one knew what the numbers referred to. The parrot’s deceased owner had wanted to pass the information along, but generally couldn’t bring himself to talk to people. Thus, he spent weeks, months, reciting the same string of numbers until it was all the parrot would say.
Many of the sailors onboard had their own theories about what the numbers meant.
The treasure went unfound by any of them, though. And so it was only hundreds of years later when a team of archaeologists explored the wreck, and found a man from 50,000 years ago still alive down there, living in a large underwater cave, where he grew enough crops to keep the air fresh and provide him with food. The man had a small tobacco farm, and a pipe which he had fashioned out of bones from the skeletons of the expired crew. The man had apparently been aboard the ship when it went down, frozen in a block of ice. The ice melted after everyone else drowned, and this man found himself on the bottom of the ocean, but close enough to this underwater cave to swim up into it.
Ridiculous, why is he still alive after probably hundreds of years living in this cave? There could be some sort of unique property of a certain type of moss or algae that grows in the cave. There could be many things. But there aren’t.
The left-side tire blew out, sending the semi trailer careening, flipping off the road. Sammy jumped out just before the explosion, and found himself in the middle of the dessert, sitting on a cactus made of icing, chocolate flakes everywhere. And thousands upon thousands of ants swarming over the monstrous cake. He tried to fight them off, to save what he could, but there were too many. They ate it all up.
They ate his feet, too, and it was many years before he was able to fashion new ones. He never could get them quite working right, so he just attached giant springs to his legs. These were a disaster, and quickly got him killed.
He was a superhero whose only power was the ability to grow taller. But he could never grow smaller again afterwards, only taller, and taller, and taller. When new challenges presented themselves, his natural inclination was to just grow a bit more, until the problems seemed more manageable. Eventually, he became his own problem. He was too big to interact with others, then he was too big to even stay near others, for fear of crushing them. Eventually, he was too big to breathe, as there wasn’t enough atmosphere. He gasped his last, and everyone else on the planet died with him, as he sucked up the last of the oxygen on Earth.
Somewhere far away, a great bearded man watched it all through a telescope and shrugged, unable to intervene, only to watch history unfolding, and barely even comprehending the magnitude of the things he witnessed. That night, he disassembled the telescope, and went for a long swim in the bay. In the morning, he would do something different with his life.