Nubs: A Love Story

Time travel is a dangerous profession. Michael Nubstein was once a brilliant scientific mind. When he was 20 he invented the time bubble. Standing within the bubble, Michael could travel to anywhere in time and space he could imagine. That is until the unthinkable happened. Michael traveled back to the year 1950. There he met a girl named Janet. They fell in love, quite possibly more in love than any two people had ever fallen in love before. Due to a flaw in the time bubble’s design, once used to travel to a destination, there was a 24 hour period before the bubble returned to its original location and time. If Michael wasn’t inside he would be stranded where he was forever. Michael wanted so desperately to remain with Janet, but he had responsibilities to return to in the future, and Janet refused to go with him. So he did the only thing he could think of and stepped into the time bubble with her standing on the outside. Holding her hands through the barrier until the last second, he promised her that he would return. But something went horribly wrong. The time bubble disappeared into the future before either of the two lovers were ready. Michael screamed in pain as his hands aged off of his body before his very eyes. The poison of time flowed in through his open wounds and he quickly lost his mind. Upon returning to his time, the year 2000, tears filled his eyes as his love slowly vanished in the haze created by the time poisons coursing through his body. The poisons also attacked his spine, paralyzing him from the waist down.

50 years in the past Janet screamed as well, but hers was quickly silenced by the lightning created by the imperfect time warp. She was destroyed instantly. However, Michael’s hands remained, and even more impressively, they were sentient and held the intelligence of Michael. Perhaps they were saved by the emotion the lovers shared, or perhaps the fickle mistress that is time travel spared them. Either way, they lived, and they longed for a way to reunite themselves with their body lost in time, and to reunite their body with its love lost in oblivion. However, it quickly became apparent to the hands that their owner was not returning for them, and they must find a way to get to him.

The way to reunite with Michael did not become obvious to them until 1977, just a few years before Michael would be born. There was a cartoon on that introduce two young new super heroes to the world. Zan and Jayna, the Wonder Twins were the inspiration that would change the world of the disembodied hands forever. The Wonder Twins could transform into anything by touching their rings together. The brilliant hands of the once brilliant man knew what they had to do and worked day and night to create their own power rings that would allow them to become whole again. In 1980, the same year that Michael was born, the hand completed their rings and transformed into the only thing they had thought of for the last 30 years, Janet.

Janet was created as an infant, but as she grew destiny would have it that she was meant to be with Michael. The new Janet, being created from only parts of a human was not a complete human herself. Janet grew up knowing only a miserable existence. She had use of her head, her neck, and her legs, but not her torso and arms. She was also created with no feet; just nubs. She was in the lab to see the brilliant 20 year old genius Michael on the day of his time travel accident in hopes of him fixing her, but she found something else entirely. She heard a scream from the lab, and as she rushed into the lab in her special wheel chair that she could control with her leg nubs, she found a handless Michael laying on the floor sobbing; a man with no hands and no use of his legs. He wasn’t what she was hoping to find, the shell of his former brilliant self; in fact he was the exact opposite of her, but in that moment she knew, he completed her. They fell in love, got married and became the Nubsteins, and they even had an extremely fat dog and disproportionate son, but his adventures are another completely different story. This story ends in knowing that the Nubsteins lived happily ever after, taking care of one another in ways that only they could. Now do not feel bad for the Michel and Janet, for they had adventures like no others could. There was even a while where they put on fancy tight costumes and fought crime as amazing vigilantes, but that was short lived. If there’s one thing you can take away from this story, it’s this: Live life to its fullest, no matter what you have to overcome. At least you have hands.