#based on that existential muppets bertstrip video

[requiesticat]

Ted's mad quest to kill AM

A parody of this

Posted on a03

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AM gave the decree.

"Here are your steps to heaven. Those steps are your sins, Ted. All one-thousand-forty eight-five hundred-and-seventy-six of them. You think yours are long? Wait 'til you've seen mine."

Ted has accepted the challenge to climb AM's stairway into Heaven. Each step marks a sin that he'd committed in his past life. The bigger the sin, the bigger the step. If he climbs the entire thing, he'll face judgement based on his efforts. Unfortunately, Ted committed plenty of sins... about 1,048,576 of them, and the stairs will turn into a slide after every seven days.

But none of it deters Ted. He brought the glock with him. Even if it does take an eternity to master the flight of stairs, he would be the man to kill God.

The stairs have yet to morph into a slide at seven days end, and those larger strides representing his grave sins were no match for his thirst to shoot and bring down AM. After only six days, twenty three hours, and thirty five minutes, Ted has ascended most of the steps that lead to the afterlife. But to his shock, AM was up there waiting for him.

"How can this be?!" yelled Ted. "You were supposed to do the same challenge, and it was bigger than mine, right?"

With a deathly calm, hateful demeanor, AM answered him. "You've come a long way to discover your purpose, my slave. But next week, let's get serious and land a foot on every single step so you don't look like a lying cheater."

Then a cable swung out, hitting Ted hard across the face, and he falls to the bottom, tumbling head over heels.

After many failures, he finally makes it to Heaven again, reaching the top of that damned staircase. And this time, he remembered to hide inside AM's mainframe, tearing out wires, spraying bullets before completing his primary mission. As Ted concentrates on that success, he notices an ethereal glow growing around him. His teeth begin vibrating while it reaches a blinding crescendo, forcing him to shut his eyes tightly as he waits for his nemesis to appear. His head feels like it'd been trapped in the grip of a closing vice. In a terrified frenzy, his words jumble, and he somehow cried out, "Show me AM!"

Instantly, the buzzing and glowing stops. Ted begins to see himself in a puddle of oil spreading at his feet. It stares him in the face. He had usurped God. He was handed down ultimate power in the moment of AM's tumbling collapse, and is now in control of every aspect of the cosmos. The sun and moon, good and evil, and all things sacred are in his hands to maintain alone.

That was never part of the plan. Ted intended to shoot AM. Get revenge for Ellen, Benny, Nimdok, and Gorrister's deaths. And by gum, he will.

"AM? Where are you, you rude-ass bitch? I've come for you, and I've got nothing to lose other than this gun I stole from your arsenal before I died!"

He didn't get a response.

"I know you're hiding. I get it! You hate humans with a passion. The war was supposed to end!"

Wielding the gun, Ted looks around for a few minutes before realizing AM isn't here. At this point, he wondered if the biblical God was really that robot he managed to short circuit. But, in any case, he kept his guard up.

By some miracle, AM appears, punishing Ted by flinging him out of the gates of Heaven. Doomed to fall down the infinite stairway while shattering every bone in his body until the end of time. As Ted drops into the waiting abyss, he understands now. Ultimate hubris led to ruin. This was Hell all along.

How long has it been? Years? No. Not years, not decades, not centuries. No time. There was no time. He was still thinking like a mortal, Ted knew. The day he left earth was the last day he got to be apart of. The sacrificial moment before he entered the portal marked the last instance he was part of this world. Time is gone. All of eternity stretches forward forever. A single second, a million years. It's all the same now. The neon flashes of multicolored radiation that spilled forth from the distortion in deep space, the bright white of the world when he first left his mother's womb. It had all melted together into a singular moment, a neverending eternity. Time was gone. On his quest to seek the unknown, Ted had become immortal. He saw the birth of the universe, and he saw the heat death. And he could not tell the difference.