In the Season 5 Red Dwarf episode The Inquisitor, a rogue android travels time/space judging those he considers “unfit to live”, those being judged are judged by their own personality, they have to justify themselves/their lives or they are erased from history, and replaced with someone who never had a chance to live, when the subject is erased from the time/space continuim, they never existed in the first place, as far as history is concerned they never existed, they are a null entity
The Inquisitor performs the surgical removal and the rewriting/re-knitting/repairing of the timeline with a Temporal Gauntlet
By the strangest coincidences, you happen to find The Inquisitor’s Gauntlet during your travels, it fell through a rip in the time-space continuim however, and it has been damaged, it no longer works on humans, however, it does work on other organisms, plants and animals
The same rules apply, if you use the Gauntlet to erase one entity from existence, you must replace it with another, the damage to the system limits you to restoring a currently extinct entity
There is also a cumulative random 5% chance of failure each time the Gauntlet is used, the more you use it, the more unreliable it becomes, if the gauntlet malfunctions in use, it erases itself from the time-space continuum, and it erases the hand and portion of arm of the person wearing it, it basically vanishes taking the wielders hand and forearm with it
After all, it did fall through an Orange Whirly Thing in Space, some damage was inevitable…
I would limit myself to no more than three uses of the Gauntlet myself, and here’s what I would erase/restore
Erase Ticks, useless, bloodsucking parasites that are only good for spreading disease
Restore Trilobites, I always thought trilobites were cool, and they’re certainly more useful than ticks
Erase Mosquitoes, another useless disease-carrying insect
Restore Dodo birds, I always wanted to see a real, live Dodo bird
Not sure what the third use would be, I’d simply hold it in reserve until I figured something out
Bear in mind, the Gauntlet deletes all instances of the target lifeform throughout time/space, so if Mosquitoes were deleted, animals that eat Mosquitoes would have simply evolved to eat a different insect instead, since mosquitoes would never have existed anyway
What lifeforms would you Erase/Restore?