DeDanaan

Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged : Wowbagger The Infinitely Prolonged was - indeed, is - one of the MultiVerse’s very small number of immortal beings. Most of those who are born immortal instinctively know how to cope with it, but Wowbagger was not one of them. Indeed, he had come to hate them, the load of serene bastards. He had his immortality inadvertently thrust upon him by an unfortunate accident with an irrational particle accelerator, a liquid lunch, and a pair of rubber bands.

The precise details are not important because no one has ever managed to duplicate the exact circumstances under which it happened, and many people have ended up looking very silly, or dead, or both, trying. To begin with it was fun, he had a ball, living dangerously, taking risks, cleaning up on high-yield long-term investments, and just generally out-living the hell out of everybody. In the end, it was Sunday afternoons he couldn’t cope with, and that terrible listlessness that starts to set in at about 2:55 when you know you’ve taken all the baths you can usefully take that day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspaper you will never actually read it, or use the revolutionary new pruning technique it describes, and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to four o’clock, and you will enter the Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul.

So things began to pall for him. The merry smiles he used to wear at other people’s funerals began to fade. He began to despise the Universe in general, and everybody in it in particular. This was the point at which he conceived his purpose, the thing that would drive him on, and which, as far as he could see, would drive him on forever. It was this: He would insult the Universe. That is, he would insult everybody in it. Individually, personally, one by one, and (this was the thing he really decided to grit his teeth over) in Alphabetical Order. When people protested to him, as they sometimes had done, that the plan was not merely misguided but actually impossible because of the number of people being born and dying all the time, he would merely fix them with a steely look and say, “A man can dream, can’t he?” And so he had started out.

He equipped a spaceship that was built to last with a computer capable of handling all the data processing involved in keeping track of the entire population of the known Universe and working out the horrifically complicated routes involved. He is still insulting people. He accidentally insulted Arthur Dent twice, because of Arthur’s odd jumps through time. Wowbagger has a peculiar alien tallness, a peculiar alien flattened head, peculiar slitty little alien eyes, extravagantly draped golden robes with a peculiarly alien collar design, and a pale gray-green alien skin that has that lustrous sheen about it that most gray green races can acquire only with plenty of exercise and very expensive soap.

Watson, John : Wonko The Sane. If you took a couple of David Bowie’s and stuck one of the David Bowie’s on top of the other David Bowie, then attached another David Bowie to the end of each of the arms of the upper of the first two David Bowie’s and wrapped the whole business up in a dirty beach robe you would then have something which didn’t exactly look like John Watson, but which those who knew him would find hauntingly familiar. John “Wonko The Sane” Watson is tall and gangly. He lives in an inside-out house overlooking the Pacific Ocean. That is, to visit you park on the carpet. There’s a sign on the wall that reads, “Come Outside.” He considers the rest of the world to be “The Asylum,” because it seemed to him that any civilization that had so far lost its head as to need to include a set of detailed instructions for use in a package of toothpicks was no longer a civilization in which he could live and stay sane. Wonko knows more about the dolphins than any other human being alive.