There's a long history behind this piece that I won't go into in-depth. The short version is that the original idea was from back when people were speculating that A Crack in Time would be the last game in the series, and this was sort of a follow-up. I recently reworked it to be more of an anniversary piece (several months late to the party), and here we are.

The concept is a little weird, and I may have chosen the wrong way to go about a couple of things, but they seemed to work well from my perspective. If you disagree, feel free to tell me so; I'm always open to new ideas.

Oh, and sorry about the title. I couldn't resist the puns that the opportunity presented.

As far as warnings go, there are spoilers for... uh, pretty much the entire series- minus Full Frontal Assault- up ahead. It's also pretty fluffy, but that's standard fare at this point. Enjoy~

A lot had changed over the course of a decade.

The room changed, decor transitioning from dragons, to space, to something post-apocalyptic and then back to space. Even though they had to share the spotlight now, it wasn't so bad. There were still strange alien-monster toys- or rather, "models"- displayed around the room, balancing the hyper-realistic space marines nicely.

The owner loved space.

Space was huge. So huge, in fact, that it boggled the mind of a toy. How could something so huge exist? It was hard enough to sneak down to the living room in one night! If the neighborhood wasn't the end of it, then what was?

Clank was the only one who got all philosophical about it. The little wind-up robot was always trying to collect more information and make sense of it, to expound upon theories he'd already formed. Ratchet didn't always understand, but, nowadays, that didn't bother him. They'd had ten years to get used to one another's quirks, they were way past butting heads over something so trivial.

That wasn't to say that arguments never took place, because they did- on a fairly regular basis- which puzzled the other toys to no end. Aside from the sulky purple dragon gathering dust on a high-up shelf, Ratchet and Clank were the oldest toys in the room, and had been the owner's favorites for years... so why did they have such a hard time getting along? An articulated plush cat and a toy robot weren't such an odd partnership, considering the owner's sister stuck an elf and a neon orange weasel together. After the third time someone asked, Ratchet threw the miniature wrench he'd been given at the perpetrator, and only went to retrieve it when he was sure that nobody was looking. It was a pity that it didn't come back in real life, like it did during games.

Games with the owner were something else. Anything and anyone was- no pun intended- fair game. See those mice from the ruined Mousetrap set? Sandmice. Summoned with a silly looking helmet, used a miniature hovercraft to supply air support.

We need a plot? Uh... this planet on the bedspread occupies the most desirable orbit in the galaxy! Quick, save it from the evil alien... blargh, what are the evil aliens? Oh, the evil alien Blarg who wants to replace that planet with his own! Why does the planet need an orbit? ...it's an artificial planet, and it doesn't have its own orbit, because the Evil Alien Blarg just made it. For his friends. The Not-So-Evil Alien Blarg . They don't have their own planet anymore. Wait... this is supposed to be the bad guy. He's the reason they don't have a planet anymore! He's evil! Quick, turn him into a chicken!

And so it went.

Planets and galaxies changed, new toys came and left; some stuck around, lurking in drawers or storage, but most were happy to play their part and move on to new things.

It was a pleasant little routine. Any given 'storyline' would last for a few weeks- maybe a month, at most- before everything was wrapped up and a new game began. Neither Ratchet or Clank could remember exactly how many 'adventures' they'd been on, but there were installments in the saga that stood out above the others. Fighting the owner's sister's round plush dolls had been a memorable one, if for no other reason than the fact that the owner had to change his story at the last minute- claiming that it wasn't the dolls that were in the wrong, but rather, 'Captain Copernicus L. Qwark'- in order to keep the peace between them.

The owner borrowed Sasha from his sister- with her permission this time- and redeemed Qwark in the effort against a new toy, another robot, who he hastily named Nefarious. Unwilling to let his new toy be 'killed off', he simply set Nefarious off to the side- on the shelf alongside the dragon- and let him sit while he told other tales.

As the owner grew up, the games got more and more complex, until he realized that he had never actually given his heroes their own back stories. He'd thought Qwark out- sort of- and stopped long enough to give Nefarious a reason to hate 'squishies' (which originally referred to plush toys, rather than 'organics', but those lines blurred at some point), but he'd been too preoccupied with his fanciful plots and establishing the universe to lend much thought elsewhere.

So, after a deadly game show, super-spy stories, and a plot that had everything to do with changing size, he invented Percival (Percival!) Tachyon and set to work defining the Polaris galaxy.

It was all well and good until the final confrontation, since a showdown that dramatic needed a new setting, but that was when things quickly went sour.

When he'd been lost in the story, Clank had actually been lost in real life.

The owner tried to make do, distracting himself with the pirates that he'd used in the last story. When all human eyes were off of him, though, Ratchet set about searching every crevice in the house, aided by Cronk, Zephyr and Talwyn. Even when they were temporarily put in storage and he'd checked everywhere- under the couch, behind the TV, in the cupboards- he simply expanded his search radius and tried to ignore the tag-along that was Qwark.

The other toys- the ones that weren't part of their universe, and even some that were- didn't understand. They knew that the oldest among them always seemed to be at odds, and just couldn't wrap their minds around why Ratchet was in a frenzy looking for the tiny toy robot. One- an immigrant from the sister's room- murmured something indistinguishable about the weasel from his home, but Ratchet hadn't been paying attention at that point and, frankly, didn't care.

Then the owner picked the story back up during an extended trip to his cousin's house, and introduced one Alister Azimuth to the plot. They were the same type of toy, an articulated plush that had gone out of style years and years ago, and had been gifts to their respective owners from a grandparent. Alister belonged to the owner's cousin, who played with the owner some afternoons.

Actually, the owner and the cousin played every afternoon, but it was a while before Ratchet realized that. They were playing two plots at once, one involving their plush cats, the other involving the cousin's colorful robots and a very confused Clank, who'd been pilfered by a younger cousin during a family get-together, and then reappropriated by the older cousin.

By the end of the plot, their owner- owners?- were at an impasse, which ended up Ratchet and Clank (and even Qwark, Nefarious, and a handful of others) being lent to the cousin in exchange for Azimuth and the 'Denizens of the Great Clock'. The cousin adored them- treated them with care and played with them like they were her own- and sent them on their fair share of adventures. She liked to pretend that Qwark was the galactic president, despite overwhelming evidence that he was not qualified for such a position.

She pretended that established planets could be moved to her room, because she'd fallen in love with the story that her cousin had spun for her- Veldin and Terachnos could exist in the same galaxy, right?- and, when that plot grew stale, invented a new planet to explore. She invented Susie, and her host of Beanie Babies became the inspiration for a series of 'critters'. Her father's fascination with 'That space movie' and its big, round, not-a-moon space station became the basis for Ephemeris. She stuck friends and enemies and Qwark in a group and merrily sent them on their way.

And, eventually, she returned them to the owner, who had moved on to war heroes and CIA operatives in the time they'd been gone. Disappointing though it had been, the future brightened when colorful alien beasts made a reappearance amongst the figures on his desk.

The dragon on the shelf liked to claim that they would be joining him soon, but Clank went back to theorizing about space, Ratchet returned to fixing broken toys, and life as they knew it failed to end.

"When we eventually are retired, we will, at least, have one another."

"Now there's a theory I can understand."