For four hundred and fifty years Lassy Vapours sat staring at a very slow-drying gelatinous glob. As much as he knew he should just leave it, he couldn't. It seemed to stare back at him. Not with eyes, but with tiny universes. Universes that pulled him in and would not let him go until the glob had dried up.

He once read that a Quarol Alabaster glob took four hundred and fifty-one years to dry up. That meant only one year left, and Lassy Vapours still couldn't find Lassy Vapours. He couldn't find himself in that universe. No matter how hard he stared he just couldn't get there.

Oh, he got close. He found his twin universe. He found his twin galaxy. He found his twin solar system. He found his twin planet. He even found his twin city, but the closest he could get to finding himself was finding an empty chair next to his twin wife where she, in his out-of-time-observational perception, had spent the past thirty-five years eating a pizza.

He had never tried a pizza, not having ever been to Earth. In the glob, Earth was just a big round shopping mall with a vast sea of parking lot. It was filled with ravenous creatures that were once Earthlings and various alien species who had forgotten to write down where they had left their cars, and had gone viciously mad searching for them. Parking lot zombies.

Regardless, he had grown tired of watching his wife eat pizza many years ago and his gaze was now fixed on the journey he thought he might have taken if he hadn't, indeed, been stuck hypnotized by a glob. So entranced was he, that he hadn't noticed how encrusted his very outdated suit had become with all the worst things that come out of a person's body.

He hadn't noticed how he had withered away with starvation and dehydration, and that he was actually quite, quite dead.

This made him all the more desperate to find himself before the glob dried up. The journey he stared into led him to a planet he, being the scholar that he was, was sure did not exist in the reality and time of his dead self, only the missing self he was searching for.

There he saw five monks. In the peripheral of his stare, each one looked like him (which was very exciting)...but when he looked directly at them one by one, none of them had his face and each was horribly scarred (which was very disappointing).

He saw that this moderately damp planet had two moons, each in orbit on opposite sides. On one moon, a naturally occurring moon, he saw prisoners of various alien races. On the other, an artificial moon, he saw the garbage of various alien technologies, food stuff packaging, washers and dryers made to wash and dry alien technologies, washers and dryers made to wash and dry the washers and dryers of various alien technologies, old and thoroughly enjoyed adult toys, the cremated remains of pets and relatives, and otherworldly knick-knackery.

"Where are you Lassy Vapours??" he asked himself once an hour, hoping that an answer would follow eventually. It never did. He once thought he heard a shrill "Here I am!" but it had only been the call of a Towerscapian subway bird. "Heeeriiiam! Heeeriiam! Heeeeeeeerrrrriiam!"

Damn birds.

He had a tendency to get distracted from his journey whenever one specific space ship entered his story. It didn't happen all that often at first, but recently it had been showing up more. He found it fascinating although he hated how it distracted him from his quest.

It looked like a giant discarded light bulb.

He figured that it looked this way to either go unnoticed ("Hey, is that a spaceship? Naaaah, it's just a giant light bulb someone really big threw out.") or to be feared ("Oh my! Look at the fucking size of that light bulb someone threw out! Imagine how gigantic someone would have to be to need a light bulb that big! Perhaps it's God's lightbulb! Oh no, not God! Let's get out of here before he gets back with his giant God lamp and a God-sized knuckle sandwich!")

For a moment, Lassy Vapours wasn't sure whether he was God and perhaps he had lost his light bulb.

Perhaps all his light bulbs.

It was just as well that he remained hypnotized. If he had seen the state that his physical self was in, he would've died of disgust. Many of the body parts he had come to love and cherish had become little more than crusted dust. It turns out that he had dried up a lot faster than the glob. Once it had dried up, he would be gone forever. Unless of course he found himself.

His journey had led him to terrifying places, to lonely corners, to seedy establishments, to family dinners, to warehouses filled with poultry, to torture chambers of gore, and to romantic balloon rides. It mattered not how dark, how depraved, how lovely, how dangerous the place; he was merely an observer. Always watching unbeknownst to anyone and everything.

He stared into the worlds inside a glob, lost and desperate, for he only had the glob and no longer a world of his own.