The garage now roared with chaos. The air cracked with static as the Unstable Temporal Phase Array belched purple lightning, warping the walls like taffy. Dozens—no, hundreds—of Jerrys now filled the room, each one a slightly different flavor of mediocrity. Some wore golf visors, others polo shirts. One held a putter like a sword. A few looked marginally more competent, with clipboards and serious eyebrows, while others were arguing with a tennis ball or trying to eat drywall.
"I deserve to be respected!"
"I just wanna hit par!"
"I think my short game needs more love and less existential horror!"
Rick's garage AI stuttered and glitched as its sensors overloaded. "WARNING: Timeline stability is currently set to: NOPE."
{Void Nebula}
Richard leaned back on a spiked obsidian throne he'd just carved from the still-smoking corpse of a space leviathan, its massive eye sockets still twitching. The throne pulsed with eerie life, each spine humming like a haunted tuning fork. Rick lounged beside him, casually sipping something disturbingly green and bubbling, likely illegal in seventeen systems. His drink briefly screamed, then went quiet. Morty, curled into a ball, was still crying.
"You said there would be girls that would be interested in me," he whimpered.
Richard tilted his head, amused. "There are. All space leviathans are females who eat males to get their eggs fertilized for reproduction. The most interesting thing about them is that they are the only species in the universe where the weaker the male, the stronger the child. Thus, they are interested in you."
He let the words hang in the vacuum, his smirk widening. He then turned serious as splatter of purple blood glistened on his coat as he blinked, then sighed. "Rick," he said flatly, "you feel that?"
Rick, who was halfway through vaporizing a three-story beetle with nipple-mounted plasma blasters, paused and looked up. "Oh yeah. That's some next-level Jerry-ing. Let's portal back before he folds space into a pretzel."
{Garage}
Things were… Jerry-shaped chaos. Meeseeks were popping in and out like cosmic popcorn. Some simply screamed upon arrival and self-deleted, others yelled "Kill me!" or began golfing with existential dread before vanishing in what could only be described as mercy exits.
The Jerrys had begun to bicker among themselves. Alliances were formed. The flags were made out of socks. Cults had risen. One Jerry wore a colander like a crown and had declared himself The Prophet of Par. Several others knelt before him, chanting about golf as a spiritual release.
Just then, a glowing portal sliced through the temporal mess. Rick and Richard stepped through. Rick immediately gagged. "Jesus, it smells like fear sweat and Dad B.O.," Rick muttered.
Richard stood still for three seconds of dead silence, then cracked his neck. He strode to the humming, sparking device and, without a word, punched it. The machine sparked, screamed like a dying fax machine, and gave up the ghost in a puff of sad, blue smoke. Every extra Jerry vanished like a bad dream from a worse nap. The silence that followed was so profound it had weight. Holy. Cleansing. Uncomfortably moist. Original Jerry, very much not improved, stood frozen mid-yell, holding a bent golf club like it was Excalibur from the clearance bin.
Rick sauntered over, drink in hand. "You know, Jerry, some people break reality trying to save loved ones or escape apocalyptic timelines. You did it for golf. I'm both impressed and repulsed." Richard walked up to Jerry, handed him a small card, and turned away like a judgmental Batman. "My disappointment in you is impersorable," he muttered as he returned to sit on the sofa and pinched his temples.
Jerry blinked. "What's this?"
Rick looked over his shoulder. "Is that the number of a therapist or an executioner?"
Richard shrugged. "Neither. It's the address of a dimensional driving range where every ball is sentient and screams when hit. Might be the only place in the multiverse that'll let you feel successful."
Jerry stared at the card with a kind of reverence. Beth stepped in, arms crossed, surveying the mess. "Let me guess. Jerry broke space again."
Rick raised his drink. "Bet your last surgery bill on it."
Summer peeked in from the hallway. "There were like fifty Dad cults chanting outside before they all vanished. We good?"
"Yeah," Richard said, wiping blood off his gloves. "Until the temporal echoes attract something worse."
Beth sighed. "What worse?"
The garage lights dimmed. A low, guttural howl echoed from nowhere and everywhere, vibrating bones and probably nearby planets. Rick raised an eyebrow, his face lit by the blinking warning lights. "You ever heard of a Chrono-Leech, Beth?"
Beth's face paled. "You have got to be kidding me."
Richard grinned, tapping his wrist device again. "New plan. Rick, let's go kill a time parasite."
Rick grinned widely. "Now that's a Tuesday."
The portal whooshed open again, casting a menacing blue glow. "Wait!" Morty yelled from upstairs. "Are we going again?!"
"Morty, Morty, Morty," Rick called back, "you wanna stay here with Dad's self-worth cult or fight a monster that eats regrets?"
Morty ran down the stairs like a feral gremlin. "I'm in." They stepped through the portal just as the garage began to shake from the presence of something vast and hungry slipping through the cracks Jerry had torn in time.
Behind them, Jerry looked at the card again, then turned to the Meeseeks Box. "I can still fix this," he whispered.
Beth just smacked it out of his hands. "No."