I should warn you, this is mild crack born from a sleep-deprived mind high on hours of both Nostalgia Critic and TBBT. I have no idea when in TBBT!canon it's supposed to be set.

All property belongs to its respective owners, which just makes sense.

The Continuum Discontinuity

1

First Contact

Ludo Fore Putavimus

—HP Lovecraft Historical Society motto

She had spiked his taco.

That pig-tailed little twerp had spiked his taco. First chloroform and now this. She was so fired after this… after he figured out how to remove the duct tape that kept him stuck to his chair. But she was so fired!

The Nostalgia Critic hopped about in his chair awkwardly, yelping into the tape that kept his mouth shut and would hurt like hell when it inevitably got torn off his goatee. He didn't like to think about that any more than he had to. Obscenities and vague mother-related insults flew through his mind, determined to be shouted at the Chick… as soon as he got out of this stupid chair.

Oh, God. An accordion. Playing, somehow, Toccata and Fugue, no less. There was no way this could end well. The Critic attempted to look stoic as he stared down the door where the Chick would enter. Looking stoic was incredibly difficult with duct tape on one's face. The accordion came nearer and nearer, its half-chaotic tones increasing in volume with every second. Where had that insufferable mutineer put his pistol? He needed that thing. He needed it so—

The music stopped.

S—t.

The door opened.

And in walked the Nostalgia Chick, pigtails neat and smile disturbingly bright. She gently placed her instrument on the desk in front of him and patted him on the head.

"Hello," she said cheerily.

"Mmph mm," grumbled the Critic, glaring at her bitterly. "Mm mph mm!" he added, for effect.

The Chick laughed and jumped up onto the desk. She folded her legs neatly, placing her hands on her knees in the most unsettlingly demure manner humanly possible. The Critic maintained his stoic pose and puffed out his chest in an attempt to look intimidating. It worked for birds, didn't it?

"You look pretty stupid right now, you know that?" the Chick stated simply, smoothing her slacks.

"Hrmph!" growled the Critic.

Tossing back a pigtail and treating him to a smile that would make the Joker wet himself with fear, the Chick leaned ever so slightly forward, extended a hand, and tore the tape from the Critic's face.

"GAH!"

"That's what you get for all those awful girly movies," the Chick said in a clipped voice.

"Is that why you've taped me to a chair after putting sedatives in my dinner?" the Critic demanded. "Revenge?"

"…Duh."

I'm more than slightly screwed, he thought, swallowing.

"Also, I ate your nachos."

"You fiend!" The remark was only half-sarcastic. He could have used some nachos at that point.

The Chick twirled a pigtail around the index finger of her left hand, reaching behind her with her right. When her hand returned to his line of sight, the Critic saw his handgun. Instinctively he tried to reach out for it. The Chick laughed at him. After that came a long and awkward silence.

"So…" the Critic began.

"So?"

"Since you've gone through the whole shtick of drugging me and taping me to a chair, mocking me with my own weapon, and you've already said you want lots and lots of revenge, are you going to go the whole nine yards and just tell me your evil plan before I fire you?"

The Chick sighed and pressed her palm to her forehead.

"It was worth a shot."

"No, no it wasn't."

"Considering how mentally damaged we both are…"

"That's just you," said the Chick. She slammed the Critic's cap down over his eyes, crushing his glasses into his nose in the process.

"Ow," was all that came out.

The Chick crossed her arms, tapping his gun against her shoulder. The Critic couldn't even see her unless he tilted his head up at a ludicrous angle and ow, the pads pinched his nostrils. She spotted his wince and grinned cheekily.

"Now I think I'll tell you what I'm going to do."

"Of course."

"You're going to vanish."

"Classic."

"No one will ever know what happened to you."

"You're getting into cliché territory, Chick. Are you sure you're not brain damaged?"

"Also, I'm going to rip a hole in the fabric of space-time."

The Critic blinked several times in rapid succession, his mouth moving without a sound coming from it. When his larynx finally decided to work, all that could spew from his throat was, "Wait, what?"

The Chick's smile would cause icicles to form in the deepest pits of Hell. He never would have pegged her for this sort of a lunatic. Had his semi-sadistic tendencies towards her driven her over the edge? If so, should he be apologising profusely, pitying her, even? It sounded like a pretty good idea.

The murderous way in which she wrapped her fingers around his tie and yanked as hard as she could suggested otherwise. The Critic choked, spluttered, gasped, and made all the usual noises people tend to make when they're being garrotted with their own clothes. The Chick's normally soft, sweet face was twisted into a mask of hatred.

"Bratz," she hissed. "You sick little…there aren't words."

Are you still bitter about that? It was almost a year ago! the Critic wanted to cry out, but there was the whole choking thing and oh God he could see stars. This was it, he was going to die, he'd never rant about anything ever again and images of that stupid anthropomorphic duck were flashing before his eyes, his lungs were burning, he'd never be able to confess his stalker-love to Catherine Zeta-Jones…

And the Chick loosened the tie at the exact point where the Critic could have sworn he had stopped living. He gasped for air.

"You're insane," he rasped.

The Chick gave the statement an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

"And, on top of almost murdering me, you're going to…tear apart space-time?"

"Oh, yes," the Chick affirmed gleefully, clapping her hands. She smiled, showing teeth. Any minute now, When You're Evil would start playing from some unseen speakers and there would be a massive thunderclap. The Critic almost expected her to grow fangs.

"And how do you propose you're going to do that? You're not a mad scientist, you're an environmental—"

"Haven't you ever wondered what a brutal homicide of logic, beyond the scope of any of the crap you've ever seen, would do to the Universe?" the Chick inquired wearily.

The Critic swallowed. The Chick put down the gun. The accordion didn't do anything particularly out of the ordinary.

"How," the Critic said. Normally, his tone would have been a dangerous one, promising an explosive death for anyone who refused to answer, but he had just been drugged—again—and nearly strangled to death by his own—female—employee. He wasn't feeling particularly intimidating at that moment.

"Well, doing something perfectly pointless to illicit a perfectly illogical outcome but knowing that the outcome will, due to the vast quantity of paradoxical lunacy it contains, achieve its primary goal—doesn't that make your head hurt a bit?" asked the Chick, pulling a face.

"A bit?"

"Exactly. I mean, it loops over on itself almost infinitely if you think about it too long," she said, pressing two fingers to her temple, "which means it's the perfect plan to rip a hole in the Universe. And, if you'll pardon a horrifically painful villain line, there's really no way you can stop me."

"Obviously," the Critic snorted. "I'm duct taped to a chair."

The Chick laughed. "And the best part, of course, is the fact that no matter how this goes, you're out of my hair and I can tackle as many masculine movies as I want."

"You know, most employees just come up and demand a raise."

"Most employers just dock their employee's pay," said the Chick through her teeth, "not lock them in basements."

"You chloroformed me!"

"And you killed half of my brain cells with the retribution! I should… you know what?"

"What?" asked the Critic, narrowing his eyes.

"Bat credit card."

The Critic screamed incoherently. He was sure that at least some of the noises he was making were swearwords in caveman-speak. When she got tired of the noise, the Chick tore off his hat and hit him over the head with it. The two glared at one another for a long, silent moment.

"Well?" exclaimed the Critic, wishing he could gesture wildly.

"You're right, you're getting really annoying now," the Chick said. She hopped down from the desk, picked up the gun, and shoved the barrel under his jaw. "Please shut up."

The Critic heard an ominous click that he very much wanted to point out was unnecessary, since the gun was single-action, but he didn't want to provoke the itchy trigger finger. Obligingly, he kept his trap shut. As if to add insult to insult, the Chick patted the Critic on the head.

And then she attacked his face.

What the hell? yelled his mind. What is she doing? Why is she doing it? Couldn't she have moved the gun before…oh, well. Might as well make the best of it.

And he would have. It wasn't bad, per se—he could tell the Chick had some measure of experience—but it was weird. He would have responded in some way or other, had the Universe not chosen that moment to rip in half and suck him into the gap.

"Bye-bye!"

It was oatmeal day. The masterpiece on the table before Doctor Sheldon Cooper, PhD., steamed sumptuously. The evaporating particles of water wafted in the gentle breeze of the air conditioning and gently brushed his olfactory senses with the delicate odour of one and-one half teaspoons of brown sugar blended into a perfect one-cup measure of oats. Sheldon gently dipped his breakfast spoon into the scrumptious mixture, savouring the brief, sacred moment before he put the first bite into his waiting mouth. He had one thing on his mind as he chewed: that the best part of this meal was it wasn't French toast.

Leonard was taking his morning shower—which Sheldon didn't quite understand; the bowls used for oatmeal certainly weren't the pinnacle of insulation innovation—which left the good doctor to consume his meal in silence. Calm, blissful silence.

That silence found itself suddenly shattered in several million tiny, weeping pieces. Sheldon winced at the sound of a terrible, bloodcurdling shriek from outside the apartment building. It sounded suspiciously similar to a female cat in heat. He did the natural thing, and continued to eat his oatmeal, every five bites imbibing a tasteful sip of apple juice. In the meantime, the screams degenerated into incredibly loud whimpers and gibbers. How annoying.

When the last spoonful of perfection had been masticated and consumed, Sheldon began the process of cleaning his dishes. The shower shut off and the cries outside broke the laws of sound, somehow increasing in pitch.

"What the hell is that?" exclaimed Leonard, poking his dripping head out of the bathroom door.

"Shall I list the possibilities alphabetically or in descending order of probability?" Sheldon asked coolly, barely turning his head to look at his soggy roommate.

Leonard sighed and rolled his eyes. "Does it matter?"

"Of course!" Sheldon yelped, affronted. "Obviously, while alphabetising—"

"What's the most probable explanation?" Leonard interrupted quickly.

Sheldon pressed his lips together. "Penny's returned from an encounter with one of her many ex-boyfriends."

"Thank you."

"You're welcome, I suppose," Sheldon replied.

The bathroom door closed with a timid clunk and an even more timid click, and Sheldon returned to his cleaning, humming the Pinky and the Brain theme to himself. The E-sharp cacophony continued. With each passing second, Sheldon's annoyance towards the noise increased tenfold.

Leonard emerged from the bathroom fully clothed, although Sheldon noted with some irritation that his roommate's socks didn't match in any conceivable way. Blue argyle and cherry red polka dots? The slender physicist sniffed.

"I don't think Penny has the lungs to maintain a racket for that long," Leonard pointed out, brow furrowing.

"Oh, you might be surprised," Sheldon replied. "The female voice is really quite an impressive apparatus."

A series of rapid knocks joined the clamour. Leonard groaned and Sheldon's lateral pterygoid experienced a brief spasm of annoyance. Audio from How the Grinch Stole Christmas rushed through his (incredible) brain.

All the noise, noise, noise. There's one thing I hate: all the noise, noise, noise!

Leonard walked over to the door and opened it, revealing a very irked-looking Penny. Her yellow hair was unkempt, her clothes were ruffled, and the expression on her face declared that she was willing to commit more murders than Herman Webster Mudgett.

"What is going on?" she demanded, arms crossed.

"We don't know," Leonard replied.

Penny pushed past him and walked up to Sheldon. "Have you started experimenting on the neighbours?"

"How could you think me capable of such a thing?" scoffed Sheldon. "It would be inhumane and unethical, not to mention that mice are much less expensive."

"I had a feeling you would say something like that," Penny said, nodding and appearing assured. "So who's screaming their head off outside?"

"Grammatically, it's widely considered more acceptable to use 'his'," Sheldon said.

In unison, Penny and Leonard replied with a philosophically stimulating: "What?"

"Most grammarians agree that 'him' or 'his' is more acceptable than 'them' or 'theirs' with regards to pronouns referring to persons of uncertain gender."

Penny sighed. "Anyway. What is going on? And why won't it stop already? And…why haven't you gone to investigate?"

"Most grammarians also agree that beginning sentences with conjunctions is also incorrect," Sheldon pointed out. Penny groaned.

"She's right, Sheldon," said Leonard.

"Hundreds—thousands—of experts on the subject of the English language can't all be simultaneously incorrect, Leonard," Sheldon replied in exasperation.

"That's not what I was talking about," muttered Leonard, apparently rather irked, although Sheldon, being the creature he was—which was only logical; why would he ever be any other creature?—didn't entirely know why.

"You can't just disregard the laws of grammar, Leonard," Sheldon continued. "Cast aside those rules and you begin to throw others into the garbage. Soon you have murder sprees in broad daylight, mass looting, famine, a zombie apocalypse, and players being kind to one another at hockey games! One lone serial comma could be all that stands between humanity and anarchy."

"…Uh-huh," said Penny. "You still haven't answered the questions."

"Well, I haven't ascertained the answer just yet," Sheldon huffed.

"Why don't you do that, then?" Penny asked.

Sheldon briefly pondered the number of ways he could slander Penny's maternal progenitor in inflated diction before sudden understanding would dawn on her face. That number, naturally, was sixty-two. Before he had the chance to employ a single one, however, the cries and whimpers ceased. The trio frowned in perfect unison.

"Any minute, now, the lights are going to start flickering and there'll be a dramatic violin screeching somewhere," Penny muttered.

"Come now, Penny," Sheldon interjected, "this is reality, not an Uwe Boll production."

"Well, she might not be that far off," Leonard said, adjusting his glasses. "I know sometimes I hear psychotic giggles in the back of my head if anything remotely funny happens to me."

"You're imagining things," Sheldon said with a sardonic chuckle.

The apartment's light bulbs continued to perform admirably, but the shrill trilling of an out-of-tune violin could indeed be heard from downstairs.

Out of tune and out of key, thought Sheldon irritably.

"See?" exclaimed Penny. "It's like a horror movie!"

"Come now, Penny," said Sheldon. "Can't you recognise those notes?"

Penny crossed her arms and scowled while Leonard bit his lip in thought, trying to place the cacophonous tune.

"The downstairs neighbours are watching Sherlock Holmes," Sheldon concluded. Penny sighed and threw up her hands.

"That still doesn't explain the screaming," Leonard pointed out.

"If you feel a need to investigate, feel free! I see no point in introducing myself to the sort of person who makes such noise for their own amusement," Sheldon replied.

"They could be injured, Sheldon!" exclaimed Penny.

"Are you attempting to manipulate me into accompanying you outside?" Sheldon demanded. "It won't work."

Two minutes later...

"'It won't work,' huh?" Penny said smugly as the trio walked down the stairs, Sheldon first. Sheldon sulked. "I'd say it worked pretty nicely."

"Don't flatter yourself. My curiosity overcame and overpowered my indifference and proceeded to bludgeon it into unconsciousness," Sheldon retorted.

"It worked," translated Leonard.

Sheldon shot his roommate a withering glare while Penny sniggered in a mildly grating manner. The trio reached the end of the stairs, and Leonard attempted to be courageous and chivalrous through offering to go first "in case there was something potentially hazardous" outside. Penny shot that down by pointing out that if whatever had screamed was dangerous, it wouldn't have been whimpering for five minutes straight. Sheldon refrained from replying that a skilled thespian would have easily mimicked the sincerity of constant cries for the sake of luring in a victim, like SCP-087. Interestingly enough, that eldritch creature utilised descent down a stairwell also. Fascinating.

The automatic doors slid gracefully open and the three stepped into the Pasadena sunlight, Penny with that unsettling eagerness usually associated with schoolgirls in anime. The two males entered the light with all the gleefulness of a pair of vampires with extreme photosensitivity. A level of humidity that was not stifling yet still managed to cross the line from bearable to displeasing hooked its soggy fingers around the back of Sheldon's neck almost immediately.

"Unngh," groaned a voice. Sheldon's head turned sharply to the left to face the sound.

"It's coming from that way," the physicist said, pointing.

"Yeah, we couldn't tell," Penny replied.

"…Is that sarcasm?"

Penny sighed. "Yes, Sheldon, that was sarcasm."

"Thank you."

The bushes near whence the voice came rustled in a most ominous fashion, and Sheldon began to give slightly more credit to Penny's horror film hypothesis. However, the simple fact that all of what was going on was doing so in broad daylight debunked the theory thoroughly and with intense prejudice. Yet then came the gurgling moan, and the theory gained credibility again.

Blast! Sheldon thought irritably.

"Hello?" said Leonard, tilting his head ever so slightly to the left and leaning towards the wall as he walked.

"…tsss…"

"Is it a snake?" asked Penny.

"Snakes cannot imitate a human scream, Penny; they do not have the proper lung capacity, for one," Sheldon explained, "and for another—"

"…Who's that?" mumbled the voice.

"Hello?" Leonard called out, voice timid.

"Who's there?" The voice took on a defensive, semi-aggressive tone.

"Depends on who's asking," Leonard replied.

The voice groaned, this time out of exasperation instead of pain. Sheldon smirked with approval; Leonard often had that effect on people. Penny stepped in front of the experimental physicist and extended a hand towards the voice. Sheldon found this tactic impractical, in that Penny could not truly see the source, only make vague guesswork as to its location…but there was no reasoning with the maternal instinct of the common female, and Penny's appeared to have been switched on.

A brown-haired head rose up from the top of the bushes, with a hand pressed to its crown. The head tilted up, and a pair of half-confused, half-irritated green-blue eyes looked up at the trio. Penny rushed towards the person who possessed the head, inspecting him—the person was rather obviously male, as could be gathered from the tuft of goatee that sprouted from his chin—for heaven knows what. Penny didn't seem to realise that she was not a doctor and therefore not qualified to make any sort of judgment on the man's condition.

"What the hell are you doing?" the man demanded, appropriately. He squinted at Penny, appeared to make a sudden realisation, and began frantically rifling through the dirt. "Where… where are those… where?"

Sheldon hadn't realised until then that sentence fragments could cause physical pain.

"Aha!" exclaimed the man. He raised his head and pressed a pair of oval spectacles onto his nose. He patted his own head several times, evidently rather confused, and promptly his facial expression became one of dejection. "Chick still has my hat, dammit," he growled.

"Would you kindly speak in properly constructed sentences?" snapped Sheldon, thoroughly irked.

The man looked up at Sheldon over the rims of his spectacles. Leonard took two steps back. Penny tilted her head, looked from the man to Sheldon, back to the man, and back to Sheldon, searching, apparently, for some sort of explanation.

"What is going on?" Leonard exclaimed. "Who are you?"

The man turned to Leonard and stood, folding his hands and smiling. "Hello, I'm the Nostalgia Critic. I remember it so you don't have to!"

Sheldon almost fell over. What on earth was Douglas Walker doing in Pasadena?

"Wait, what?" Leonard said, blinking rapidly.

Walker crossed his arms and raised his eyebrows incredulously. "Are you deaf?"

"No," Leonard sniffed.

"Well then! Who are you?"

"I'm Leonard," began Leonard, "this is Penny, and that's Sheldon."

"Hello," Sheldon said.

"Where am I?"

"How can you not know where you are?" inquired Sheldon.

"Because one of my employees ripped a hole in space-time, which sucked me out of my chair and dumped me in a bush?"

"I see," laughed Sheldon, "this is part of a joke, isn't it? Similar to the faux-duel with the Angry Video Game Nerd, yes?"

"NEEEEEEEERRR—"

Oh dear.

"Wait, are you saying you're actually the Critic?" asked Leonard. "But—"

"Why wouldn't I be?" demanded the man who may or may not actually have been Douglas Walker. Sheldon, for once in his life, found that he was honestly confused.

"Well, because the Critic is fictional, of course," said Sheldon.

"I take offense at that."

Oh dear, oh dear.

"I'm confused," Penny admitted, tossing up her hands.

The possibly-slash-possibly-not-Walker-lookalike-slash-escaped-mental-patient pulled a face. "That makes two of us, honey," he said.

Sheldon found himself semi-unconsciously bristling at that last word. The reason was, he was certain, that even he, inexperienced with social conventions as he was, would never refer to a female by any sort of personal term of endearment within five minutes of meeting her. The doctor's left eyelid twitched ever so slightly.

"Please, if you would," Sheldon said, "clarify. Are you are or are you not Douglas Darien Walker, internet comedian slash celebrity?"

"Who?"

Oh dear.