"Mendala," Short Story Teaser

An excerpt from my story "Mendala," a hilarious multiverse travel story! Follow our trusty chronocourier as he traverses multiple universes and times to find a rare and valuable treasure: a dodo egg!
I made a bunch of these to try and get more awareness on my writing, and I'll be releasing them gradually on KZbin
Read the whole thing at:
rnkfiction.blogspot.com/2022/11/mendala-short-story-about-2200-words.html
Full text of excerpt:
The vast majority of people are not equipped mentally to handle hopping from one timeline to another. After a few jumps, the cognitive dissonance creeps up on most people and starts to mess with their perception, until they can hardly remember where they came from, let alone when. But we lucky few who are able, through some quirk of mind or anatomy, to leap across different universes without losing track of ourselves can make good money bringing things that are common in one timeline to another where they're unusual.
That's not to say it's easy. There are a huge number of tiny variations that both link and separate different timelines, and I have to find my way back to the right one through a combination of technology, luck, and persistence. And bravery. I remember one time I managed to hop into a timeline where the orbit of the Earth was a few thousand meters further out from the sun. Thank goodness I made the jump during daytime, because instead of finding myself in a sudden rendezvous with some very hot magma, I suddenly discovered that I was flying.
Flying, or, as I discovered after a few seconds, falling. I got to watch the ground get closer and closer as the computer on my wrist measured the differences between the timeline I was flying--er--falling in and the one I had been aiming for, determine which quantum fluctuation was needed to get away from that branch of the multiverse, and transfer me through a series of jumps that would slow me down, put me back where I needed to be to touch the ground in the branch I was aiming for, and get me into that branch without another shift. Was it worth it, to risk my life like this? Considering the fact that I was the one person in a few hundred million that could manage it, maybe.
#shortstory #sciencefiction #comedy