Legcramp awoke lying in the irradiated wasteland that was once the Pacific Ocean. A mutated fish that had grown several hundred legs skittered past him and into a nearby pit of raging green fire. A tumor-laden bird dropped from the overcast green sky and landed with a splat beside a three-eyed skull. The howling wind sounded like shrieks of agony and mediocre J-pop. Legcramp sat up with a groan. He had a serious headache and his dope clothes had been vaporized in the blast.

‘Yello!’ said an annoying voice. Legcramp looked to his right to see a small, ugly, green man with big floppy ears and adorable pointy shoes walking towards him. Legcramp raised an eyebrow.

‘I yam ye Apocalypse Goblin!’ said the man.

Legcramp rested his head in his hands. ‘Oh for fu—‘

‘You’ve done a yery yaughty ying!’

‘Please speak normally.’

‘No yan do! Yis is my yormal yoice’

‘Please speak normally or I will actually kill you.’

‘Okay, jeez. You sound like you’re fun at parties. By the way, I do actually do parties.’ The Apocalypse Goblin handed Legcramp his business card. ‘Birthdays, Halloween, weddings, funerals, you name it. I charge 29.99 an hour.’

Legcramp tossed the card into a nearby fire pit. ‘What do you want?’

‘I’m here to deliver your divine punishment, kid. There’s only so many planets in this solar system, and you just ruined one. The gas giants are goners, Mars is controlled by robots, Mercury is Mercury. Venus and Earth are really the only good ones left. Well, just Venus now.’

‘What about Pluto?’ Legcramp asked.

‘Pfft, you still believe in Pluto?’

Legcramp flopped onto his back. Killing everyone didn’t feel as good as he had anticipated. ‘So what’s my punishment?’ he asked.

‘You gotta fix this,’ the Apocalypse Goblin said.

‘How I am supposed to do that?’

‘There’s a time machine in the FBSSOSLT’s western facility. Get to it, go back in time and kill yourself. Not you yourself, the other yourself.’

‘Wow, you actually got the acronym right. Also wouldn’t killing the past me cause a paradox or something?’

‘Nah.’

‘Why not?’

The Goblin shrugged. ‘Because.’

Legcramp sighed. It wasn’t like he had much else to do in this wasteland anyway. ‘I’ll do the thing.’

‘Yat’s yantastic!’

Legcramp sat up with a scowl. ‘Hey, what did I say?’

‘Sorry, it’s a reflex.’

‘So where is this western facility, anyway?’ Legcramp asked as he climbed to his feet and stretched.

‘West,’ answered the Goblin. ‘You could go east too but that would take longer.’

‘You don’t have a map or anything?’

The Apocalypse Goblin scoffed. ‘What do I look like, a freakin’ cartographer? Figure it out, it’s your punishment! I’ll see ya there.’

The Goblin took a deep breath, then proceeded to bend down and swallow up his own legs, then torso, then head, until he had totally swallowed himself whole and popped out of existence. Legcramp gave a bemused ‘Huh,’ then began walking in a random direction, hoping that it was west.

Legcramp had been walking for six days, or at least he thought it was six days. The ever-present sickly green clouds overhead blocked out the sun, so he had no real way of knowing. At least he knew he was going west now, thanks to a helpful community of newly-evolved fish people. On the horizon behind him, Legcramp could make out the incomprehensible form of Cthulhu freaking out over what had become of his city. Legcramp flipped up the hood of his whale-skin poncho (kindly donated by the fish-people), in the hopes it would reduce the likelihood of the Old One noticing him. The radioactive wind battered his grey skin. Enough sunlight filtered its way through the cloud cover to sizzle him in the day. He felt his power waning with every passing hour. When Legcramp had been on a crusade to the end the world, he never thought ending it would affect him too.

Legcramp continued to trudge across the charred seabed for weeks, skirting around mutant monstrosities, sucking history from un-vaporized shipwrecks and taking shelter from the acid rain in irradiated whale carcasses. Occasionally he would find steaming lakes, where seawater had avoided evaporation from the non-nuclear nukes. Other times he would run into settlements built from blackened sandstone and scrap metal, and occupied by mutant people birthed by the blast. Legcramp didn’t know how far he was from any continent, let alone how far he was from the facility itself. None of the horrifying mutants knew anything about his destination, either. Theoretically, Legcramp could just leap thousands of kilometers at a time over and over until he landed near the facility, but history to eat was in scarce supply. He barely had found enough to keep him walking, let alone jumping all over the planet. He needed to conserve energy.

‘So there I was, about to get sacrificed in front of this skeleton empire…’ Legcramp was telling the giant octopus bartender. The bartender nodded his engorged head as Legcramp spoke, but Legcramp doubted he was really listening. The bar was in the crumbling ruin of a former oil platform, and the drinks were made with a mix of diluted acid rain and irradiated oil. They were bad. Really bad. But they were better than nothing, and the oil possessed millions of years of history. Legcramp cringed as he took another sip. In just a few weeks of post-apocalyptic survival, he had been reduced to this. Pathetic. Just as Legcramp was about to get to the exciting part of his story, someone burst through the bar’s corrugated metal doors. She wore an outfit made from the skin of mutants, and carried two swords on either hip. Legcramp gulped as he realized who it was. Armwrestle took a seat beside him and ordered a drink.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ she said.

‘Before you say anything else, I do kinda regret causing the nuclear apocalypse,’ Legcramp quickly reassured.

Armwrestle laughed. ‘I’m over that. This is actually pretty cool. I’m like a wasteland vagabond, traveling from town to town, adored by many, feared by all. I’ve got a movie adaptation in the works.’

‘You sound like you’ve got it good,’ Legcramp moped. ‘I’ve been sent on a quest by a goblin.’

Armwrestle downed her pint of acidic oil in one swig. ‘What’s the quest?’

‘Gotta kill myself.’

‘Suicide is never the answer,’ Armwrestle said in her most motherly tone.

‘Oh no, this is more like temporal homicide.’

‘Ah, that’s fine then.’

‘Wanna help me?’

‘Sounds like fun.’

Legcramp downed another glass. At least he had company, now.