Just a little more than what a dishwasher might use to run a load of dishes

BILLIONS OF PARAGRAPHS LATER...

Dishwa awoke amid the ruins of the Command Center of the Knights of the Kitchen, lit by sparse croppings of flames which reached across the razed lands to the smoky horizon, and by occasional motes of light which found their way through the roiling clouds above.

Dishwa tried to stand and get their bearings, but their ankle was broken and the debris below them made a poor foundation. Sharp air ripped through his lungs when they coughed.

"Here," a hand extended towards him, holding an inexplicably unopened bottle of water. "Take this."

It was Justin Time.

"How did you...?" Dishwa started, before finding they could barely even bring out a voice. Or, He? How long was it? He tried again. They?

Failing, he opened the water, a welcome rejuvination for his parched throat. He/they?

"You should know by now I have a knack for narrow escapes. Dustin didn't make it, though."

Fuck. Even Dustin Echoes perished? Thoughts were racing through Dishwa's mind. Where was Worlds Clyde? If we won, then why is the story still going? This has to be another paragraph, right? And what about Lee?

If this world still existed, then Lee failed.

All that work was for nothing. What next?

Justin helped Dishwa over the log. The mountain bike served well as a mobility aid for the trail, but this entire section sucked. There were so many logs.

"Did you know Dishwa's not even a real name?"

"What?" Justin responded. "Sure it is."

"Nope," Dishwa added. "Disha was a real name. In the real world. But it's a womans name."

"Huh," Justin added, as they made their way over the last log. "Did you know Justin's not my real name?"

"No way."

"Yeah way. It was 'Nick'. Like, 'Nick of Time'."

"Wow."

Trillions of more paragraphs passed. Their trail continued as the world fell away into nothing.

Justin and Dishwa found themselves the only living beings, trapped in a narrative that wouldn't stop generating. There were no more enemies to defeat, no more adventures to be had. Their coming of age came quadrillions of years ago. Their characters had developed.

The laws of entropy had taken it's final grip of the universe. But Justin and Dishwa were outlaws. They persisted as the universe faded to a grey static.

Trillions of years passed, or seconds. Even negative time passed. It doesn't matter-- time isn't a construct that makes sense in the absence of an entropy gradient.

"There's no time. I don't think I make sense any more," Justin said to Dishwa, breaking an eternity of silence. "I can't do anything 'just in time'. So, I guess this is goodbye?"

And so it was; and Dishwa was alone.

It wasn't fair. If the death of time means Justin gets to die, then why couldn't Dishwa die if there were no dishes to wash?

Then, like a lightswitch being flipped, the world came into existence again. He was on a bed, a light bounced, cars beeped outside. The expanse of nothing was replaced with constant something.

The door swung open. It was Hypothetical Lee.

He bounded into the room- wait, she, she is now a woman - with excitement bursting through her voice.

"Dishwa! We won! Have you heard of the Boltzmann brain hypothetical? That was what we needed in the end. The Knights of the Kitchen were bound to win, but nobody can beat entropy. With the heat death of the universe, we can Boltzmann anything into existence! So, I just said, 'What if the random whirrings of the heat-death atoms simply fell into the configuration of a universe where we had already won? Like shaking a box of legos and them coming out build properly?' I also thought, 'What if I was a woman?' and that was that, but I like it this way. But the Boltzmann Brain is the most powerful hypothetical, you just-"

But eternity had shuffled familiarity out of Dishwa's mind. Lee's words rung hollow through Dishwa's mind, this otherwise normal apartment was something Eldritch to him. Dishwa didn't even scream.

"Aw, geeze," Lee said. "Fuck. Let me just... Kind of... Guide your hands here..."

Lee took Dishwa's hands, guiding him to the dishwasher in the apartment.

"Just... Twist this counter-clockwise... Yeah, we do it once a month. Months exist again. We won't be here that long, though."

The dishwasher's plug unlocked. Dishwa's hands, under Lee's guidance, took to task. Their journey was finally coming to an end. This universe, a prison, was soon to collapse. Not a heat death, but a true death, and a mercy.

They brought the plug to the garbage can together, Dishwa's catatonic state following Lee's guidance. Some understanding flowed through his time-traumatized mind.

"Scrape the contents out... Yeah, it's nasty. But we're almost there." Her voice was shaky. Contrived literary characters should never have been given sentience.

"Now, rinse the plug..." And so they did so together. They were almost done.

"And it's righty-tighty, to put the plug in... We're almost there. Twist it until it clicks..."

The dishwasher plug was now clean.

They twisted it into place.

And it clicked.