Today was one of those special days I assumed I would wake up from later. I had seen, in the span of fifteen seconds, some sort of lobster man crash through the window, an unsuspecting middleaged man get disembowled by the aforementioned monster, the untimely demise of the murderous bastard, and now a pink haired girl floating a few feet off of the ground, strange wand thing in hand, clad in a sparkly, frilly fairy princess dress I'd expect my five-year-old niece to wear out for Halloween.

She looked to the lobster corpse on the ground, then to me. I shifted uncomfortably, which apparently she took as an invitation to scream at me, "What did you do!?"

It had not been a great day leading up until this point, honestly, and my nerves had been frayed well before I saw another guy just a little older than me have his guts torn out of his torso. I confess that I shouted back at the strange, hovering teenager, "What does it look like? I shot him! He was coming right at me! He fucking clawed that other guy in half!"

As I waved at the balding, besuited man with my free hand - I was not about to shoot Marvin in the face - he tried to reach for me, "Help... help me please..."

At that point, the girl disappeared from my consciousness and I knelt down, grabbing the guy's hand. I was only trained for first aid and I was fairly certain this was in the realm of seventy-eigth aid. I don't know if a surgeon could have saved him if he was already on an operating table in a hospital. "What's your name?"

"D... Daniel. My name is Daniel."

"Okay Daniel, I need you to hold on. Stay awake for me. There's going to an--"

"Excuse me!" A voice interrupted.

I tried to ignore it and restarted, "There's going to be an am--" A slap to my face stopped my promise and I glared up. "WHAT!?"

Pink princess sparkle whatever glowered at me with her hands on her hips, "Killing is wrong!"

I blinked. I looked from the dying man on the floor to the dead monster. I touched a thumb to my temple and rested two fingers on my forehead as I trembled. "Ohmyfuckinggod," I half-sighed, half-grumbled before bellowing, "DO YOU THINK THAT I DON'T KNOW THAT!"

She floated back, eyes wide with shock. I guess people didn't tell off fairies or hallucinations very often. I waved back to lobster McGee, "Maybe you should have educated that fucker and I wouldn't have had to SHOOT HIM."

"I was tryi--"

"Please... mom... I need to call..."

My mind became a string of profanities as I knelt back down and tried to comfort the dying man, was his name David? Fuck. I fished his cellphone out of his pocket, "Okay buddy just hold on. What's her name?"

"Sparksong, what is wrong with you!?" I heard another voice, another teenaged girl, maybe older. This was getting tiresome. I didn't want to be here. I held up the phone to D... d... Daniel's - there we go! - to Daniel's face to try and unlock it.

"I was going to call you, but that man with the gun stopped me!"

"Bullshit!" The other girl spat before she dropped down beside me. I didn't really get a good look at her. "Sir, I'm going to need you to move if I'm going to save this man."

I looked to Daniel and pressed the now unlocked phone into his hands, "All yours, buddy." He turned his head to me, eyes lacking focus. It was hard to step away, but I did. I'm not sure why I listened, but at least this newcomer sounded reasonable.

I shuffled away and watched, tired, as the blue ponytailed, slightly taller, clearly older, and also dressed like a fairy princess girl formed a glowing green ball of light in her hands. She pressed it to the dying man and the magic began. Viscera slithered back inside him and flesh reknit in moments. Daniel fell asleep, but he was breathing regularly now.

Blue hair turned to me and smiled, "Thank you for helping. We're sorry we got you involved with this."

"What do you mean!? He killed Cancer!" Protested pink.

Wait, cancer?

"Sparksong, I know you got stuck with the love element, but Christ Almighty you need to stop it with this trying to change every last villain shit. I almost didn't get here in time to clean up your mess."

Lobster guy actually picked the name cancer? He wasn't even a crab...

"I could have saved him from himself, Angel."

And like, of all the names to pick, cancer? Really?

"Maybe if he wasn't actively trying to kill people. Sometimes, more times than I'd like, you've got to shoot the Joker."

I came out of my stupor to realize everyone but the girls and I had fallen asleep, "Uhh... what's going on?"

Blue girl, Angel I guess, looked at me, "Oh, that's right. You're immune to this spell."

"Well I guess that's an answer to my question, but why is everyone passed out?" I chalked up my strange calm to the fact that my adrenaline probably called it quits sometime during their argument.

"It's a spell to help uh... smooth our mistakes over. Mystery is working her magic and everyone so they forget. You'll remember, though."

I decided not to ask who Mystery was, "Why?"

She smiled sadly, "It's one of the ways into the magical world. Some of us get keys, wands, or trinkets to help us in. Killing a monster is another way. Welcome to the good guys."

Dark twist at the end, which is expected given the subject matter. I'm just going to hope it was a false copy of her husband at least, or that her hell is going to be him realizing he doesn't need her - and leaving her alone forever.

I didn't really have the space to cram it into the prompt, and I didn't want to color other people's ideas too much, but mostly I was trying to imply a threat of a magnitude beyond human comprehension, such that even an entity we perceive as infinite and all-powerful must focus their entire being to fight it.

The conceit here is that God may as well be infinite to us as 3.5 dimensional beings, but on the realm of other Nth demensional beings, perhaps He is not so infinite after all. It's a cosmic horror answer to the question "If God is all-powerful and all-good, why is there evil in the world?" God is busy making sure every last soul on Earth and in the afterlife doesn't become a Cthulu snack.

Glad you liked the prompt, though. Perhaps I should have worded it differently. :)

Happy to hear it. Thanks! :D

To the guy who replied and deleted: I appreciate you looking out. Glad you enjoyed the story and got the joke after posting. :)

Rick wasn't entirely certain what had happened. He'd heard something bust his front door open, so he grabbed the shotgun his dad had given him when he bought his first home. He wasn't all that in-practice with it, but he'd been to the range a enough times to know how to load, aim, fire, and clean it. Honestly, he forgot about it most days and felt iffy a about having it at all until about ten minutes ago.

Next had come the weird part. He'd gone through his house, calling out that he was armed and hoping that would scare the intruder off. When he finally got to his front door, it was closed. He stepped up to check the doorknob when he realized, too late, that there was no such object. He yelped as his fingers touched not metal, not wood, but icy darkness. Recoiling from the slab of shadow blocking his doorway, Rick felt a tremendous pull jerk him back against it. He screamed and tried to shove free of the blackness, but every part of him that touched it adhered to it. Eventually, tired and freezing, he whimpered one last time as he fell unconscious.

Next he was aware, he awoke on a carpet of pine needles and twigs, with towering trees overhead. It was still dark, but the moon slipped through the alpine canopy. Something grabbed at his ankle and he cried out again, reaching for something, for anything. His fingers found that shotgun and for the briefest moment, his soul found hope. He snatched the weapon up and aimed it at the silhouette by his feet. "Get off of me!"

The creature, humanoid but not fully human, leaned in and tilted its rodent-like head, a menacing growl escaping its widening maw. Blam! Rick had pulled the trigger without even realizing, his fear taking over. The barrel had been lined up with the monster's face and should have pulped it, but... it was gone?

He sat up and tried to make sense of what was happening. The flash of the gun had illuminated it briefly. It had a head like a naked molerat, except for its mouth was full of needle like teeth. Its skin had been leathery and red as though stained with blood, and its arms had ended in twin claws that were much better suited for digging through flesh than dirt.

Then he felt something stab into his back. Rick howled in pain as he whirled on the rouge creature and pulled the trigger again. Nothing happened; he'd forgotten to cock it. Still, the beast reacted and was suddenly two feet to the right of his barrel.

"Get away!" He screamed.

Then there was a flash of brilliant gold light that washed over the monster. Out of nowhere, an enormous figure in gleaming armor charged into the light and slammed into the horror with its shoulder.

"To the ninth hell with ye, filthy rouge!" The interloper bellowed in a low, but discernably female voice. She brought her massive sword down upon the stunned creature and wrent its head from its shoulders.

The creature fell to the floor in a heap, leaving Rick and this knight person alone.

"Uhh... thanks," he said, still trembling. "What the hell was that?"

The woman took her helmet off, revealing a green face and tusks at each corner of her mouth, "Are ye daft? That was a rouge. Awful beasties, faster than an arrow and hungrier than a ghoul."

"And... red, I guess."

"Aye. Red as the blood in your veins."

Rick shuddered, "Well I don't know what the hell is going on here, but thanks for the rescue. Is there something I can do to pay you back?"

The woman grinned, "Aye, there's something you must do. The goddess Aiena has seen that I spare your life from that beast. Swear to worship her always, take the oaths of devotion, and I shall leave you be."

"Wait... what if I don't?"

"The goddess does not take kindly to those who repay her heroism with arrogance."

Rick wasn't the most religious person, but he still had his own beliefs - and they weren't ones he wanted to change. "B-but I am already, I mean, I already believe in a god. I can't just--"

"And did your god save you here?"

Rick looked from her to his shotgun and sighed. He might have, "That's not important."

"Which god is it? Toralin? Lyra?" She leaned in and gritted her teeth, "Say it's Yondun and I will slay you right here."

He backed away, "It's none of those! Please, just leave me alone!"

She raised her sword, "Aiena demands your conversion. If you will not accept her, you will die."

"Stay away!" He shouldered the shotgun. When she stepped forward, he fired. Brilliant light appeared where the buckshot should have pierced her armor and blown out her back. Sparks flew from the radiant barrier, but she did not stop. Rick stepped back, remembered to cock it this time, and fired again. The results were the same.

"In the name of Aiena, I judge ye wanting!"

And that was when the woman exploded. It wasn't a big ball of fire like the movies. It was mostly smoke, blood, and gore. Fragments of her breastplate slammed against... something in front if him. It was blue and translucent and it shimmered.

Rick was done touching weird non-solids for the night so he just backed away and swept the area for others, "Hello?"

"Greetings," said a voice from behind a tree. "Please take care where you point that thing. I'm neither as fast as that rouge, nor protected as that paladin was."

The bewildered man lowered his shotgun and fell to his knees, "What the hell is going on?"

The bespectacled figure stepped out from behind the trunk, little balls of light floating around him. He wore a classic wizard's hat and robes, "Ah, see, that is my fault. I'm having trouble getting a spell to work and I needed help from someone outside my context."

"You what?"

The man adjusted his hat, revealing long, pointed ears. "I'm sorry for the trouble I have caused you, but I needed a wizard from another world."

"A wizard...? I'm a computer scientist."

"Oh, blast! I could have sworn I told the spell to seek out someone good with using archaic language to design and properly write complex instructions for an automated entity to follow. What is someone who does that called in your world."

Rick cleared his throat and responded sheepishly, "Uh... a computer scientist, actually."