>Set down desk and then check the time.

Is this even a clock? If so, it hasn't moved the entire time you've been fucking around here.

You only just now noticed. Time is pretty flexible for those who ostensibly have a near-infinite breadth of it.

As you look at the numbers on your clock, the part of your mind that seeks for patterns grasps the numbers in hand. Something about this number tugs at your consciousness like a rowdy tyke indicating nearby ice cream. 8:13, 8:13... Well, numbers can often mean something. You remember Aradia finding you in the land of the dead one day and deciding to follow you for a while. flitting about you joyfully, flicking her fairy dust to and fro with each beat of her wings as she encouraged you in your quixotic mission and then told you about 6:12--12 trolls each 6 sweeps old in 2 teams of 6, a number that would appear and reappear at critical points in their history to haunt them like a refrain, an obsession--the session leader's birthday, the date they played the game, the number of years after the apocalypse that the Black Queen and agents they'd exiled would show up in the wasteland, the number of hours they'd play the game. So why now, here on Earth C beyond the rules of paradox space, and why 8:13 specifically? 8 kids and 13 trolls? But there were never 13 trolls, not in either of the sessions... Right? You are pretty sure about that.

You veer away from realization at the last second and decide to stop playing around with squishy, flighty concepts involving numbers. Numbers are stupid, and hard, and pointless, and you have much more real, concrete, scientific work to be doing that does not involve numbers at all, work that involves going into a dark shadow world and resurrecting dead spirits using your amazing magic powers that you got from a video game that let you become a goddess in your new isekai universe.

So there.

>Plug GUN into rotary phone. Then, read the GUN.