What was one percent anyway? He flourished his hand across the table dramatically, as if his arm was a space eel in its dying throws, taking with it all the people standing on the terrain. It was an impressive sweep, casting about four-thousand innocent civilians down four-hundred meters of mountainside. He noted to himself to tell Ivo to have a clean-up crew dispatched to the base of Ebrin Knoll to deal with the bodies when the people actually started dying.

Mother would disparage him for his childish destructiveness – he called it necessary nerve narcotics. Shoveling people off cliffs was enjoyable, why did they make these facsimiles so ravishingly realistic, so hungrily hypnotic? They bounced around like jellybeans, waddling around on two straws, hauling small things here and there to make big things and then breaking down the big things with other small things.

“I see you are expending more than just the lives of the Hrithers now…”

He spun around tightly like he was unraveling a straight jacket designed to turn a body into a corkscrew. His clumsy weight jogged the table and a few more jellybeans went tumbling down a mountain along with some thatch houses from a town that was clinging to a plateau.

“And what could I possibly be wasting now that is so important that you decided to –“

“—time.” The mother spoke with a conviction as if the word was expected to open a hole in the center of the room and unveil the answer to why galaxies spiraled.

Some jellybeans had collected in a group near the edge of the cliff where the recent catastrophe had struck. One was using its two straws to tie knots in a rope.

Whenever authority struck out at him, a welling inside his abdomen demanded attention, screaming to cease the internal pressure by denying the strike its final say. He considered it a strategic maneuver to decide when he released that pressure. Now wasn’t the time.

“Time isn’t like the matter that you spin idly between your fingers, Rop. This galacticdom you sleep inside is churning out time at a hundred white dwarfs a minute and its still starving.”

Now wasn’t the time. Rop would let her have her monologue if it allowed him reprieve later on.

A hand crashed through the hillside, carving off a heap of spongestone that then heaved itself down the cliff as if chasing a windup toy. Eighteen jellybeans, their sixteen straws, and a pile of rope were dragged into a smear of debris as Rop placed a palm against the table to alleviate his legs from their thankless day jobs of hauling his weight around.

The mother closed her eyes and tighten her mouths as if to gate the impatience that was about to scream out of her body.

“Rop. We don’t exist in a vacuum where work is discounted by moving a planet to the left and then back to the right and shouting about zero displacements. You act like your actions are valueless. Even this minute of me hammering something into that brain of yours will be a noticeable unit on some time level gauge...”

Rop’s relaxed stance and blank attitude was unwinding the locks on her mouth gates.

“ROP!”

The walls shook. One-hundred and twelve Hrithers died. Jellybean witnessed jellybean in parade of miraculous deaths that future jellybean scientists would torment themselves with for years as they tried to fit their square models into the round holes of these unfortunate individual’s demises.

Here a copse of Hrithers was flung upward off their planet to space, instantly exploding. There a family of four Hrithers having arrived from migrating across the Begmore Sea were chomped by a stray ocean current. On the horizon the sun shook, its glancing rays striking in their tiny button eyeholes all jellybeans in charge of piloting heavy machinery like planes and cargo ships, resulting in the generally-avoided meeting of heavy metal and various hard surfaces. This topped up the toll by ten-thousand.

Approximately two-hundred choked on food that was teetering on the edge of their breathing pipes. Eighteen-thousand rainbowed the pavement as they were turned into stamps by falling things. One was impaled by a misfired javelin. A group of ten hikers walking single file along a mountain pass were disemboweled by a careening chairlift as it flew past their exposed guts. And the rest were mishaps caught in the ruckus of the apocalyptic events. All These unfortunate Hrithers would find themselves buried in mysticism and folklore for having died so inexplicably.

The mother sealed the gates to the holes in her face that had sent forth the sound waves which had inflicted this carnage on the jellybean people. The table was a color-menagerie soup. Rop turned back to the table to hide the start of a smirk that had sprouted across his face. He daintily drummed his fingers along a prairie that was nearby, crushing an entire herd of Diggors during their morning graze. They were sideways jellybeans with four straws to him. What was one percent anyway?