It was a partly-cloudy Thursday morning when Grady Brandt’s eyes were first opened to the reality of an infinite number of parallel universes by the voices in his toaster oven. Nothing about the morning hinted even vaguely at what was to come: there was no black bird cawing on the windowsill as he woke, no distant rumble of thunder as he rubbed his eyes and fumbled with the alarm clock, no shooting pain in his groin as he rolled out of bed. He took a perfectly ordinary shower before breakfast and no eldritch glyphs danced tantalizingly out of view in the fogged-up mirror as he washed his hair. He didn’t even crack his shin on the door of the refrigerator as he opened it up to root around in the mess of condiments and slightly over-ripe chicken for the carton of yogurt he knew was in there somewhere.

No, contrary to the laws of radio drama, even opening the door of his haunted small appliance failed to produce the kind of orchestral stab that usually features prominently in stories this ridiculous. A turn of the wrist later, the old Sunbeam was ticking away the seconds to Grady’s forever-altered sense of what was or could be, but our hero was none the wiser and there were no juddering cellos to wring suspense out of a hypothetical audience, so he turned back to the fridge and wondered if there might still be any of that good apricot jam left, too.

Had he been a more intuitive sort, he might finally have noticed the portentous edge to the ding that signalled both the arrival of the infernal chorus and the readiness of his toast. The fridge door all but filtered that edge out, however, and the search for the apricot jam distracted him from whatever might have remained, so he was still entirely unprepared for the fabric of reality to bend, twist and reshape itself around him as he popped the toaster oven open once more and reached inside.

“GRADY!”, intoned the voices of the damned.
 “GAH!”, yelped their chosen agent as he jerked his hand back suddenly and singed his wrist on the upper edge of the door’s metal frame.
 “GRADY BRANDT, WE ARE THE SOULS OF THE DAMNED, AND WE HAVE AN IMPORTANT MESSAGE FOR YOU!”
 Grady cradled his wrist in the other hand and goggled at the toaster in disbelief.
 “GRADY BRANDT, YOUR REALITY HAS BEEN FOUND WANTING AND IT NOW FACES CANCELLATION. YOU MUST RIGHT THE WRONGS OF YOUR STREAM AND FINISH THE WORK THAT WE CANNOT, OR YOUR VOICE WILL SURELY COME TO AUGMENT OUR RANKS.”
 Aching, endless seconds burned by while Grady struggled with the implications of the chorus’ words. An entire plane of existence in peril! A host of voices from beyond the veil communicating with him, guiding his hand to avert disaster! Unknown forces that could conceivably snuff out billions of lives and stars on a whim! How to even begin to respond to this torrent of possibilities?
 “You’re a toaster,” he sputtered.

The chorus sighed.