They called themselves the Spacetime Gourmands, a species floating in zero-G, laughing with jaws unhinged, born from the leftover dreams of Jupiter’s helium hurricanes. No bones, only gelatinous tendrils that could knot themselves into hats or telescopes or voting booths on a whim. Their cities? Fractal origami folded from dead comet nuclei, vibrating on resonant frequencies that made the rings of Saturn look like litter.

The arena, a cathedral ten kilometers long glass tube stretched taut between Saturn’s rings like a dental floss snapping dead stars’ teeth. The Spacetime Gourmands hung there, audience, spectators: a swarm of translucent jellyfish-thingies with necks longer than my arms and cheeks that gurgled liquid starlight when they giggled. “Darts game or astrophysical suicide?” one boomed, its voice a chorus of dying stars, while another slurped its tentacle-ear and mumbled about “gravity’s corpse” in between nibbling black hole fudge.

The game protocol was simple hit the 100-segment board, floating in a vortex at the tube’s gut, where the rules of everything got punch-drunk. But they hadn’t factored in my knack for making reality’s pacemaker skip a beat.

Sudden spacetime ripple announced itself via my opponent’s shoe crushing my experimental wormhole generator, a “borrowed” from the lab’s junk drawer. “Recursion or you’ll recur?”, he laughed, now upside-down mid-sentence, as gravity rebelled against its own pull.

Previous dart’s imprints on the wall now bloomed into a fractal of 40-mile traffic tickets left by every civilization above “Type 3” on the Kardashev scale. I licked the residue—a tang of antimatter lemonade off a prior throw. “The key’s in the singularity!”, Sir Vacuum croaked, his voice now an echo in an empty subway station’s throat.

“The universe’s elasticity, is just elasticity minus the math!" I counter-argued, balancing on a soap bubble now orbiting Saturn. Historic throws, having pierced the wall, now dribbled black holes from their tips like a faulty ink pen.

The room tilted, desks floating like wayward asteroid, the arena’s physics committee (a lone neutrino) shrugged out of existence.

I backhanded the gravity well forming near my foot. “You asked for a rulebook, I brought the author!”,

Suddenness. The Author’s rules throbbed in my marrow. “Each dart—” he’d hissed, back when I’d asked if throwing a black hole’s grandmother counted “must penetrate all ten kilometers of this glorified spaghetti strainer. Grav-pulls only. Ten hours maximum. If it doesn’t breach the far wall’s metaphysical parchment, you’re demoted to interdimensional mucus.”,

“Meaning” he sighed, plucking a quark from his collar, “every dart must chew through spacetime’s molars like aspirin. Exit fresh or explode into wet noodles. Thirty hours, three tries, and absolutely zero plot conveniences.” A supernova flickered in his throat as he added, “And don’t ask about the black hole fudge—someone’s thesis.”

“Spin’s not conserved here, Meat-mold!” Sir Vacuum sneered, his ascot unraveling into a live-action deconstruction of General Relativity Made Even Less Intelligible. His “clothes” were quantum states, flickering between tuxedo, squid. I ignored him. Instead, I marinated my knuckles in liquid dark matter, the stuff hissing like a greengrocer’s complaint when I poured it.

“So” I growled, “rules are optional if you’ve ever owned a pet named ‘Mildred the Insignificant Quasar’.”

I grinned, the Author’s voice a whisper in my ear (his ear now a pulsar): “Remember, the universe’s elasticity minus math? It’s just you and your teeth and a prayer to any god who forgot how gravity works.”,

I fired a salvaged universe’s yawn. It groaned, gravity leaking from its seams. “Behemoth One” screamed “TACHYONS!” as it plunged—then stuck mid-tube, its grav-pull so weak it kept asking for a ‘time-out’. Sir Vacuum snickered, his monocle now an active volcano: “Pathetic! This isn’t darts—it’s a kamikaze interpretive dance!” His suit unzipped to vomit a textbook on Relativity for Simpletons.

The dart unspooled into existence, a neon-green comet hiccuping its way through the tube. It did not drop. Did not loop. It sailed, defying all known physics but theirs, which were “guidelines scrawled on a napkin during Titan’s happy hour.”

The 10-km void became its stage. The dart’s journey was a 5-hour cabaret of disasters:

• First 8 minutes: Drifted through a nebula’s lingerie section, getting stuck in a dead star’s garter belt of helium.
• 9th minute: Befriended dark matter. ”How’d you end up here?” “Ghosts forced me.” ”Cool.” They napped together like sloths in a supernova.
• 3rd hour: A neutron star sneezed; it backhanded the dart into a black hole’s waiting maw but the hole gagged (politeness apparently).
• 4th hour: The dart became sentient, then atheist, then a minor deity of chaos before remembering it was paid labor.
• Final minute: Punched through a spacetime demilitarized zone, igniting a 14-second war between the Gourmand’s rules.

Sir Vacuum’s wig caught fire, his outrage a supernova. “This is disintegrity—!” He attempted to unbirth the dart with math, but his calculator ate his soul to protest.

I let a quasar hum inside my throat before answering. “Check clause 4.12(b),” I said, tossing Sir’s ascot into a singularity-shaped hat, “about ‘sentient projectiles required to breach reality’s wisdom teeth.’”

Dark matter mixed with my dust’s voicemail recording (”you forgot the mucus in the event horizon”). Voicemail turned into a black hole’s diet plan). The arena’s walls began vomiting neutronium —until the dart’s tip caught on a poorly folded spacetime origami crease.

Sir Vacuum adjusted his fractal ascot, the edges shimmering with quantum static as I hurled the dart. “Spin’s not just a vector here, it’s a geodesic!” he declared, his voice warping like a radio broadcast interrupted by solar flares. My wrist flicked, sending the dart spiraling into the event horizon’s maw, where it embedded itself in a singularity’s jagged ceiling that groaned under the weight of paradoxes.

The Gourmands hummed the tubular organs, their tendrils weaving into disco lasers for fun. “Come on Meat-Fleck, the multiverse’s waiting for its eulogy!”, Sir Vacuum boomed, now wearing entropy as a scarf. His teeth were now reverse-flowing rivers.

The arena’s air? Nonexistent. My breath formed no vapor, just a grimace. “The tube’s integrity is not a democratic debate!” the Author roared, no sound carrying. The wormhole gurgled, now a carnival ride vomiting fractal roller coasters.

Sir Vacuum’s laugh echoed in reverse. “You’ve weaponized the plot hole!”

“Better than letting gravity have its way,” I said, now riding a spacetime ripple. Behind the far wall shivered, its parchment skin fraying. One Gourmand dissolved into applause, applause into white noise.

“FIFTY-SEVEN AND TWO-THIRDS MINUTES LEFT!” the neutrino judge hissed, its voice a broken synthesizer.

I lunged. Grabbed the first dart sticking out the wall like a giant splinter. Twisted. The wall sagged. The tube’s glass skin blistered, letting in the cold of: maybe existence wasn’t worth it. The Gourmands’ laughter now shivered, sound still a myth.

Sir Vacuum, half-disintegrated, screamed: “I’ll appeal to the metaphor!”

“The tube doesn’t do metaphors!” I screamed back—no sound, just mouth movements. The second dart, the voicemail black hole imploded, mid-air, unspooling into a scroll of unpaid parking tickets and Sir Vacuum’s PhD thesis: The Role of Anxiety in Early Neutron Collapse.

A shard of dark matter scraped from a cosmologist’s 3 a.m. panic, wrapped in a black hole’s lint. I nocked it, breath a static scream. The Author—snoring in a footnote somewhere—adjusted.

“The ten-km span? Expanded.”

The arena stretched. Like a rug in a nightmare. Ten kilometers became ten lightyears of spacetime’s bad haircuts—twisted, gravity-starved, now a gauntlet of quark jousts and neutron-star tollbooths. Sir Vacuum howled as his bowtie (a captured neutron star now a singularity suffocating under its own event horizon’s poetry collection). “SHE HAD TO CHEAT—!”

“Cheating requires rules”, I spat “and the rules breathe like asthmatic whales now.”

I plunged my palm into Jupiter’s left eyelid—the only spot where liquid spacetime freezes edible—and forged a projectile humming with the existential dread of unfiled warranties. Sir Vacuum’s monocle (now a supernova nursery) hissed: “Negative vectoring! You’ve quantized my posterior!” His tail, a B-movie lightsaber made of unsinkable regrets, almost impaled a Gourmand mid-giggle. Their gelatinous hats unravelled into a combobulation of dying stars, hissing, “Faster than light? Is that calculus?”

My dart? It wobbled, not a thing but three interdimensional sneezes—sudden, explosive, its tip a sentient paradox dripping Gödel-number graffiti on spacetime’s sheetrock. Sir Vacuum’s monocle (a captured white dwarf star) exploded into a nursery of quasars. “That’s not how gravitation—” he sputtered, his bowtie now a black hole strangled by its own event horizon.

My dart spun, spun, drilling through a singularity’s bellybutton. Sir Vacuum’s hatpin—my borrowed singularity—started sprinting, yanking spacetime into a Möbius-strip hairpin, folding the arena into a Klein bottle of “no, not again”, whimpers. A Gourmand napped into a supernova’s afterbirth, snoring sonatas that unraveled my hair into polynomial dreadlocks.

The wall, split. Not a clean hit—but spilled, like jam. The void beyond squawked “BETS ARE OFF!”, as the rules reorganized: now the arena was a trampoline, and gravitons hissed like geese. Sir Vacuum (now a reverse-aged toddler fused with a quark) clawed at his dissertation dissolving into a cake recipe.

The neutrino judge (its soul a single exclamation point) hissed: “BREACH IS 78.2% valid. 8, 10: needs more deadpan. One hand tied behind cosmos.”

The Spacetime Gourmands erupted: half their hats imploded; others turned their tentacles to microphones, screaming “DO IT AGAIN! BETTER!”

The Gourmands were delirious. Their gelatinous hats unfurled into Doppler-shifted umbrellas, catching quarks mid-decay. One’s elbow had vaporized into a laugh track; another gargled with a mouthful of neutronium. “Elasticity-minus-the-math?” they bubbled, a chorus of collapsing superclusters. “The judge’s beard is the prime witness!” They awarded no points.