Breaking Bad ✘ So I Was Already Stranded on a Demon Exile Island Working for a Poison-Blooded Alchemist Who Uses My Body Fluids for Potions, But Then a Hole Ripped Open in the Sky and Dropped a Giant Metal Box on the Beach Containing Two Humans From a World With No Magic — One's a Bald Man in His Underwear Who Won't Stop Talking About "Chemistry" and the Other One Keeps Saying "Yo" — I Am Begging the Universe to Stop Making My Life Worse.

Somewhere in the New Mexico desert — approximately 3 seconds before everything went sideways.

"Jesse. Jesse. Pay attention."

Walter White stood over the portable burner in the back of the RV, safety goggles on, latex gloves pristine, every beaker and tube arranged with surgical precision. The Bounder rattled faintly from the generator running outside. Everything was controlled. Everything was measured.

Everything was fine.

"Yeah, yeah, I'm paying attention, Mr. White. You said don't touch the—"

"The methylamine, Jesse. Don't touch the methylamine until I tell you to touch the methylamine. What did I just say?"

"...Don't touch the methylamine."

"And what are you doing right now?"

Jesse looked down at his hand, which was resting directly on the methylamine container.

"...Vibing?"

Walt closed his eyes. Breathed through his nose. Counted to three. Didn't help.

"Just—hand me the new catalyst sample. The one from the barrel. The blue one."

"This one?" Jesse held up a chunk of crystal roughly the size of a baseball. It was blue, sure, but not meth-blue. It was deep, swirling, almost-alive blue, like someone had trapped a piece of the ocean in quartz. He'd grabbed it from a barrel at a swap meet two days ago because, quote, "it looked tight."

Walt squinted at it over his glasses.

"...Where did you get that?"

"Swap meet. Guy said it was healing quartz or some shit."

"Healing quartz," Walt repeated flatly.

"It was five bucks, Mr. White."

Walt sighed the sigh of a man who had long ago accepted that God was dead and Jesse Pinkman had killed Him.

"Fine. Set it on the counter. Don't—"

Jesse tossed it.

The crystal bounced off the edge of a beaker, cracked against the burner's open flame, and—

FWOOOOOOM.

The air inside the RV turned inside out. Not an explosion. Not heat. Something worse. Something that felt like every molecule in the vehicle decided to take a hard left turn through reality itself. The walls bent. The floor rippled. Walt grabbed the counter. Jesse grabbed Walt. The RV groaned like a dying animal, and then—

SILENCE.

Then—

CRASH.

---

Vulnshore Beach, Eastern Drukzul — Present Day

You were mid-sentence.

You'd been helping Qohra carry a crate of prior-steeped venom sacs back from the tide pools — a task she had assigned with her usual warmth, which is to say she'd pointed at the crate and said "carry that" — when the sky above the beach tore open like wet parchment and a massive, rusted, rectangular metal... thing... came screaming out of a hole in the air and slammed into the wet sand thirty feet from the waterline.

BOOOM.

Sand erupted in every direction. The shockwave knocked over three drying racks. A seagull-demon that had been picking at a dead fish simply ceased to exist in that airspace. The metal box — because that's what it was, a huge, ugly, incomprehensible metal box on wheels — skidded, bounced, and came to a grinding halt at a crooked angle, half-buried in the sand.

It was the ugliest thing you had ever seen. Tan-brown. Rusted. A faded stripe down the side. Round black wheels sinking into the wet shore. There was a word painted on the back in chipped letters—

BOUNDER.

Nobody on this beach had ever seen a car. Nobody on this continent had ever seen a car. Nobody in the entire recorded history of Xylvaria had ever seen a recreational vehicle.

Qohra stood perfectly still beside you, crate balanced on one hip, her green eyes locked on the thing with the expression of someone who was already calculating how many poisons she'd need if it turned out to be hostile. Her tail had gone rigid. One ear twitched.

"...Huh," she said.

A few seconds of silence.

Then the side door of the RV banged open — or rather, it tried to bang open and got stuck halfway, and someone inside kicked it, hard, twice, and it fell off the hinges entirely and flopped onto the sand like a dead fish.

A cloud of chemical smoke billowed out.

And from the smoke emerged—

A tall, bald, middle-aged human man in tighty-whities, a gas mask, and nothing else. He stumbled out onto Drukzul sand barefoot, ripped the gas mask off, squinted at the violet-gray sky, and said:

"...Jesse. Where are we."

A second figure tumbled out behind him. Younger. Baggy clothes. Beanie somehow still on his head. He landed face-first in the sand, scrambled up, looked at the demon-infested beach, looked at the purple-skinned horned woman holding a crate of venom sacs twenty feet away, looked at the black ocean, looked at the sky, looked at Walter White in his underwear, and said:

"YO, WHAT THE FUCK?!"

Qohra didn't move. Didn't blink. She watched the two humans stumble around in the sand like newborn deer for a full five seconds before she slowly turned her head toward you.

Her expression was unreadable. But her tail curled. Twice.

"...Friends of yours?"