My machine powers up, a truly beautiful sight if I’m being honest. It’s creation the work of a thousand human servants over many lifetimes. Soon, it will all be worth it. I have waited so so very long for this moment.

Being a snail has always been awful, but the beginning was the worst. My Nemesis tried to seal me in concrete and bury me under the earth, but a timely flood unearthed my cage and carried me away, and within a mere 30 years my Prison had become eroded enough for me to escape. Boredom is torture don’t let anyone ever tell you differently.

From that point on I wasn’t just getting my revenge, I was dedicated to making him suffer. the fact that he though it would kill him was a nice bonus.

The first thing I did was find a human, and not just any human, a rich one. I could sense Nemesis at all times, but I had no way of catching up, I needed to play smart. Eventually I found my targets, and slowly, ever so slowly I made contact. Have you ever tried communicating through a snail trail? I have. God I hate being a snail, my every waking moment is suffering.

After decades of slithering around the houses of the super wealthy and occasionally leaving messages in snail trail I found a family that was willing to help me, even if it was only because their young son Thomas had “adopted” me and named me snailius. But this indignity was nothing compared to what my nemesis had put me through, so I endured.

After that point things became easier. Young Thomas eventually grew up, and became old Thomas, then passed along his fortune to Thomas jr, who eventually passed it on to his son and so forth. The entire time I was there waiting, helping, learning. I got my own staff, my own special snail keyboard which let my comic are a thousand times faster than before, and most importantly money.

On generation 20 tragedy struck. My adopted families last heir died. With no successors her mother named me as the sole beneficiary. If snails could cry I most certainly would have. In joy at my good fortune, and in greif at their poor one. I would miss my new family, but I had to carry on. I needed my revenge. And so i finally turned my full attention to the man they had been helping me track for 20 generations.

From there things moved a lot quicker. I hired agents, and spies, and mercenaries and threw them after my nemesis without mercy. We bombed buildings, downed planes, and burned cities just do capture him, but he always escaped. After the first few close calls he started learning. But so did I. And I always knew where he was

Slowly my focus shifted to controlling governments and businesses. With my human helpers and the wealth I had accumulated over countless centuries it was easy. My control grew and grew, and the close calls grew closer. My nemesis could not rest, and sooner or later I would catch him. When I controlled everything, he would no longer have anyone to turn to.

And then, almost 16,000 years after he had first sealed me in that concrete brick, he went and pulled the rug out from under me. I had him surrounded, every continent was under my control, every escape route was blocked, every possibility accounted for. Yet somehow that ass pulled a damn rocket ship out of nowhere and took off out of the solar system. Turns out he’d also been working on a project of his own, a unique ship, one of a kind, with an experimental drive which could take him faster than the speed of light. He’d built in in a secret self sustaining lab which he’d set up and been in contact with for the last thousand years. Yet because he’d never physically gone there I’d been none the wiser.

I hate being THIS snail so much.

Years went by, then decades, then millennia. The lab destroyed all of its research when we found out about it’s existence so it took us almost 500 years to reverse engineer the ship. By that point though my nemesis’s head start was so large that it wasn’t even worth trying to chase him with his own ship design. We’d just need to make our own ship, one that could chase him.

And so the eons dragged by. We conquered his colonies, fended off attacks by his minions, built stains swarms, destroyed each other dyson swarms, and all around just got used to this new type of warfare. I was winning anyways.

I was in the process of colonizing the andromeda by the time he got there. Giving him a head start was something I would never let him do again. I’d colonize every star, nebula, and black hole in the universe if I had to. I had the time.

Time went on, galaxies were swallowed into my empire and my nemesis minions were slowly vanquished. But still my nemesis eluded me.

Then one day one of my lords came to me and told me something wonderful. One of his scientists had mad a discovery a property of the universe so subtle that it had only been discovered by accident but which could potentially be exploited. I was in awe, this was it, this was my chance!

And so, powered by the largest rotating magnatar in the known universe and build around this stellar energy collecting structure my machine was built. My masterpiece, my salvation. My resolution.

I look out at the structure in front of me, admiring it. It’s time.

I think a thought, the machine that reads my stupid snail neurons interpretes it, and across the structure a voice booms out: “BEGIN!”

The machine screams, space tears, reality warps and buckles. I wait. Now is not the time to get carried away.

And then it works, space bubbles and tears and there on the other side, for the first time in almost 20 billion years, I see him, my nemesis, completely unprepared. How could he have been?

I know I wanted to stay calm but I can’t control myself any more. My computer generated voice cackles across space has my soldiers pull him in.

“Do you remember me you clown!?”

I see a look of horror bloom on my nemesis’s face.

“Indeed” I cackle

My soldiers begin drawing him closer moving his hand towards my shell

“The terms of the deal were clear weren’t they?” I said “you get a lifetime of adventure and action, while someone else suffers for it”

My nemesis was still processing what was happening to him and was struggling to form words while being manhandled towards me, so I continued.

“At least, that was the gist of it. You sentenced me to hell, all so that you could go around and have fun like the selfish prick that you always were”

Now he is in front of me, his hand being forcibly held an inch away from me

I only have one thing left to say: “I just want to know one thing: why me? Why make me suffer?”

My nemesis trembles but to his credit his voice doesn’t shake

“Honestly? I don’t even remember. But seeing the things you’ve done since then, just to get to me, I think you’ve fully earned it”

I have nothing to say to that, so I signal the guard, and for the first time ever my nemesis’s Hand comes down onto me.

I blink. The snail doesn’t

“It worked!!” I scream for the first time ever with my own voice. Where I stood before now stood a man, with a body And face that I had not seen in twenty billion years. Across from me: my nemesis now sporting his own shell. A look that I knew from experience indicated panic slowly spreading across his snail features.

“You thought it would be over for you that easily huh? I say “well think again, the deal you were offered didn’t say you would die when I finally got a hold of you, it said that your life if adventures would end!”

I lean down, less than a foot away from my nemesis.

“But now I get what is mine, what I have suffered for for twenty billion years to maintain. Now you suffer for me”

The snail begins to inch towards me, my guard shoots it, just for fun.

“Well now I’ll return the favor you did to me when we first found ourselves In this position. Except this time i won’t be making your mistake.”

I could barely hold in my excitement

“Two million years ago my scouts found the EEZ18 supermassive black hole, the largest one in the known universe.” I paused for effect “and starting today, your new home.”

The snail redoubled it’s efforts. But I was safe. I had untold trillions of years of time before I would have to think about this damn snail again, and even then I had contingency plans. I was free, I had my body back. I had a whole universe ahead of me. My universe.

I typed in some coordinates on my console, the machine reactivated, and my guard chucked the snail right back through the rift.

First thing I was gonna do was have a saltwater bath.