It all started with a single question that he'd had as a child.

On one bright and sunny morning during one particularly boring holiday, as he sat on the front porch of their house while talking to his father about stud guns, he'd asked, "Dad, does it explode? If you don't do it properly, I mean."

Before he knew it, it began calling to him... so much that all his other passions suffered from it. Originally, it began as a slight fondness- making a joke on it here and there. Soon enough, it started to steal at his mind. Before he knew it, he had become an emissary of it. He was the high priest of the destruction wrought by the explosion, the chosen one to spread the message of the golden eruption.

As one would expect, his friends soon began to clear themselves from his presence. One by one.

Soon, he was left alone to his own delusions. Shockingly to nobody, the man's delusions only grew worse. His lab could no longer satiate his desire. His eyes, bloodshot from staring at the flames of the hundreds of experiments he'd carried out on a daily basis, longed for much more. The man's entire body ached to feel and to be encompassed by the warm and unfathomably pleasurable feeling of being at the epicenter of the explosions that he'd spent his entire life worshipping.

Thus, he found himself standing in the middle of a crowd, wearing a vest lined to the brim with explosives, with a maniacal smile that unnerved all who neared him clearly visible on his face.

After all, how could he curse his fellow humans to go without seeing such a glory? He wasn't selfish, after all.

The man brought his hand to his vest, intending to trigger the bombs on his vest.

It's a bit hard to believe that this all started with that one question... Leading him to this inescapable rabbit hole...

The man sat on his ancient bed within his dilapidated house as the void of ghostly nothingness around him seemed to reach out for him, devouring more and more of his existence until nothing but a shred of his existence remained. Each and every day, he felt emptier, more hopeless than he had the previous day. He could barely cling onto the little bits of his past self as they were violently torn apart from his soul; day by day, one by one, no longer to be felt nor observed by either himself nor those around him. Each and every single moment of his waking thoughts soon became a nightmare that was infinitely worse in comparison to the world around it.

Bags formed under his eyes; his breathing was constantly heavy; his knees were always weak; his back was slouched; his mind was fogged.

He lay on his back and closed his eyes...

However, instead of the dark and dreary abyss that he was used to, he found himself on an old and dreary road that looked like it had been worn out by hundreds of years of use. Around him, the path was filled with an infinitely disorienting swarm of images as a constantly shifting cacophony of sounds played from unseen orchestras. Each step that he took shifted the image, sometimes slightly and sometimes beyond the boundaries of his comprehension. From a dragon's den, with bright orange sparks flying all about to a swirling burst of starlight and nebulae to the twisting fabric of time, space and non-existent concepts- there seemed to be no end to it all.

Eventually, he came to the end of the road, and instead of a bright and golden door or a messenger from the heavens to congratulate him on finishing his journey, the man saw something odd. A child sat on the middle of the path with a few crayons on his hand, scribbling onto a small sketchbook that he held on his hand. Every single time he finished a stroke, the landscape shifted, making the nauseating discomfort a bit worse for the man. The man took a step forward to get a better look at the child, whose face seemed obscured by absolutely nothing, In fact, it seemed to shift along with the background, but it always held an unearthly sense of nostalgia- like an old portrait of his father, or rather, himself.

"Why am I here?" the man spoke, his words barely above a whisper "Why did you bring me here?"

The child stopped and stared directly at the man as a blank expression rested on his face, seeming to look both at and through him at the same time.

"To remind you; of me, of who you were, of what you were... of what we were. Look around, the worlds that you'd made, the sounds that were the orchestration of your sublime thoughts. They are still here, like a treasury of untapped infinity. Waiting for your call- for you to seek it." The child took a deep and haggled breath that didn't belong to a person of that age- it sounded far older, far wiser than it had any right to be. "So, please... don't forget why... don't forget me..."

The man woke up in his bed. The situation around him hadn't changed, but he had. The strength to resist was far stronger now. His fervor was renewed, and thus his eyes lit up with a burning desire to work harder- the hopes of a time far past now rang far louder than ever.

He took a deep breath and stepped out to meet headfirst the world that had caused him so much agony.

Blinding light from my window tore through the fabric of my thin curtain and violently brought me back to the world of the living. With an annoyed clap of my hands, they were gone, replaced by two much thicker ones that could perform their duties far better. I slowly walked across my four-roomed apartment to my sitting room and sat down on the old and slightly uncomfortable couch that I had bought a few years before. I stared at the blank T.V screen, my own dark and twisted reflection staring back at me with as much ferocity. The remote suddenly lurched towards me as if thrown by an unseen hand.

I vividly remembered playing with my brother, back before anything mattered.

'I wanna be able to do anything I want!' I had foolishly told him, not realizing that I had sealed my fate.

'But that's not a superhero!' He replied, with a confused look on his face.

'It doesn't matter!' I said back to him, unwilling to relent.

I soon came to realize that nothing I did really mattered if... in the end... I could just beat him at the game with a random BS power that I made up at a thought.

I put the remote down and pondered to myself... What is the point of omnipotence? Does anything really hold any value if you could instantly get what you always needed? Character growth becomes no more than a concept that only exists inside the mind of a me who disappeared a long time ago.

Absolute power sucks absolutely

I have no fear, no joy, no pain or hate. All I know is to feed. From my birth, nothing else has ever truly satisfied me. Many tried and failed to make me see the light, but as I stared at the infinite, dark, empty abyss only one thing came to my mind. Confusion.

Why do so many people claim to have found the beauty in this wasteland of a planet? All I could see was a whole load of people that needed to die. As I hummed in thought, I finally realised something;

I don't care.

Money? can I eat it?

Power? I don't need it.

Violence? Why should I care?

Death? It happens every day, pal.

Even though this world sucks, not everyone deserves to die. Even if I did have the power to kill everyone, why would I do it? Also, I'm far too lazy to even try such a task

I stared silently at the man. He was in his thirties, slightly overweight, tall and had a never-waning grin. He swept his brown hair from his dark blue eyes and looked at me.

"I ordered this last year, ya know?" he stated with a thick non-discernerble accent. And as the dreaded words set in I had only one response.

"Shut the hell up, please shut the hell up."