Author’s Note: My intention was always to go back and do a full re-write of SalQuest if I ever came back to it. However, no matter how many times I turned it over in my head, I could never get things to work out. Instead, I ultimately ended up adding more chapters continuing where I left off from SalQuest: Draft One.
After trying to hack away at it for about the tenth time in the year and a half since Draft One, I finally decided it was time to put a fork in it, even if it meant resorting to a hackneyed, screech-to-a-dead-stop of an ending. As a story helping me work through my writer’s issues, I think SalQuest, (along with another project I wrote under another pen name), has already served its purpose. Going back to it repeatedly like this, with all the baggage it brings, and the impossible standards I keep foisting on myself with it, well, it isn’t very healthy to keep flaying myself with this whip over and over again.For those who haven't read the previous parts, this "series" starts with Final Story of Salvador Roberts, and continues with SalQuest.
2.15 - Dreams within Dreams
By the time the movie was over, I had gotten tired again. The previous night’s sleep had not been restful, and the nap Violet had made me take earlier had not been long enough to compensate. Watching the movie, some shitty vampires-in-space flick, and making quarter-assed sarcastic commentary over it with Scorpina had eased enough of my anxious energy that I was able to more fully relax, and as a result, my lack of proper sleep started catching up to me.
As she clicked the movie off, Scorpina noticed me yawn and smiled. “It’s a bit early, but I think you need the rest. Go get some sleep. We’ll come bug you in the morning.”
I nodded, then gave her a tired smile. “Thanks.”
“For?”
“Keeping me company.”
She grinned cheekily. “You want some more?” She nodded to the bedroom.
I glanced the door, then at her, then back to the door, then at her. I couldn’t say I part of me wasn’t tempted, but I still was not about to throw myself into a reckless situation. “Nah.”
She made a little pout. “Aw. Am I ugly? Am I too fat or something?”
I rolled my eyes and the rail-thin woman grinned. “You’re attractive. If you joined me, I don’t think I’d be getting any sleep.”
She laughed and winked at me. “Nice save!” Standing up and stretching, she said, “Alright, I’ll leave you alone for real. Have a nice rest. Please don’t try to kill yourself again. It’s a big turn off.”
I smirked. “No promises, but I shall try my best.”
With another chuckle, she headed out the door. I dropped my smirk as the electronic lock beeped, reminding me I was still caged in. But I was tired anyway, and I assumed they’d be letting me out to have the next meeting anyway.
I turned and pulled off my shirt, going to bed in my shorts and boxers, as was my custom. I closed my eyes and tried to let myself just sink into the tiredness, instead of letting my thoughts start whirling again. I don’t know if I actually managed it on my own, or if Esper did me the favor of lightly nudging me to sleep, but I found myself dropping under easier than expected.
***
My dreams are normally fairly random and chaotic, same as most people’s. Scenes and conversations and characters will shift in and out of my awareness, and my mind will usually just roll with it. I’ll be talking to one person one moment, and then I’ll look the other way, then look back, and I might be talking to someone else; I don’t care, though, I keep rambling on about whatever I was saying. Or maybe I’m walking down a city street, turn a corner, and I’m in a forest. Many of my dreams often have me traversing through exotic locations without any particular goal, and so it won’t be unusual to start a trip with one goal in mind, only to find myself doing some other task by the dream’s end without realizing the plans changed until after I wake up and can assess things in hindsight.
Throughout my life, however, there have been dreams that actually had something of a story to them. Even if the scenery or characters shifted a bit, there would be enough coherence that when I woke up, I could recall the plot, such as it was. Sometimes these stories had even continued from one dream into another. Not on consecutive nights, but a dream involving battling a zombie horde, ending without a real conclusion, might pick up again months later, with me living another “episode” of the zombie storyline. In the newer dream, I’d even remembering the events of the previous dream as though it were past events I’d lived through. And it wasn’t just part of the dream that remembered an older dream; I’d kept a diary for a while, and the details lined up.
In a way, I’d fancied that these sorts of dreams were glimpses of another life, one much more fantastical and adventurous than my real one. There’d even been times when I became self-aware in my dreams. I’d never really achieved full lucidity, as such; I could never just wave my hands and take full control of events. But sometimes I’d been able to shift the direction of a how a dream would go by anticipating what might happen next and making an overt effort to change things. Other times, it was more subconscious, with me noticing some inconspicuous element in a dream that would suddenly become very important because I happened to get fixated on, expecting something to come it, and so my dream would bend to accommodate. At the very least, I would often find myself realizing I could fly, or at least swim through the air, through sheer force of will; I wouldn’t necessarily question it enough to become fully aware I was dreaming, but I would find the experience familiar enough to just intuit how it worked.
The fascination with these alternate worlds in dreams naturally lead to me incorporating dreams into some of my works. The Dream Wars was a storyline I had conceived of as an eternal struggle between dreamers and the dark forces that attacked the sleeping psyche. First were the Awakened Dreamers, those sapient minds who gained full self-awareness in their dreams, and who could leave their own dreams to enter the greater Dream Realm, and into the sleeping minds of others. Allied to them were the Dream Spirits, sentient concepts born of other people’s subconscious that imprinted into the Dream Realm and gained their own awareness; usually, these took the form of mythical creatures and characters and fictional archetypes. Opposing them were the Driven, lost and forgotten concepts of human imagination that sought to damage their negligent creators out of revenge for being abandoned. Then there were the Dream Demons, primal terrors of humanity given form in the Dream Realm, praying on the fear and imagination of sleeping minds.
I’m sure it’s a fairly cliché concept, but most of my ideas for the Dream Wars came from my own experiences moreso any given piece of media. The Dream Demons, for example, were all based on nightmare creatures I had encountered in my own dreams. The Awakened Dreamers were based on characters who had appeared to protect me from said creatures, until I learned how to fight them on my own.
But once I became more exposed to already existing stories about such themes, the enthusiasm for my own version wore off. Such was the fate of many of my ideas. Even so, the concept of the Dream Wars was something that I always canonized internally as a sort of meta-fiction that affected all of my worlds. By my own canon, the Dream Realm touched the minds in every world I ever created, and would continue to create, alongside whatever other cosmology that world already had. There were Awakened Dreamers in every single world, regardless of whether any of the stories set in said world would mention them.
Among my many characters, there were a handful I had based directly upon myself, and all of them had been Awakened Dreamers. Ergo, it was no real surprise that in this world of all my stories cobbled together, it would turn out I was as well. As I drifted into the first real sleep I’d had since I got here, my dream self Awakened. And there to greet me was a character central to the lore my Dream stories.
Before me stood a man, nearly eight feet tall. His entire body, save for his head, was dressed in a black bodysuit of pure shadow. Framing his form was a rich purple cape with ragged edges and a high color. He was human in appearance, with sharp features, close cropped brown hair, and piercing blue eyes. He was, perhaps, surprisingly under-designed for a being of his stature and purpose, but there was no denying his sheer force of presence.
Cosmic Guardian. Patron God of Imagination. Protector of Sapience. Ruler of the Dream Realm, and Leader of the Awakened Dreamers.
“Dreammaster.”
“Hello, Salvador .” His voice was deep, stern, but not unkind. He stood with arms crossed, looming over me, his cape enhancing the impression of his stature as it gently drifted and flowed around him like a living thing. Yet, as intimidating as his presence could feel, there was a comfort of quiet strength emanating from him. He was one of the more beneficent gods of my Multiverse, after all.
“Guess I am an Awakened Dreamer after all. For all the good that does me.”
“It does you better than you might assume.” He glanced behind me. I turned. The world around us was rather muted for a dream: a flat black landscape, ending in a softly glowing, pale white line for a horizon, like the corona of an eclipsed sun. The sky was a dim, featureless gray, barely distinguishable as lighter from the pitch black ground. Despite this, I could see with perfect clarity; dreams didn’t care how light was supposed to work.
To that point, in the distance behind me, I saw a vast crystal pillar. It glowed with white light, random streaks of color shimmering over its multiple facets. With no other landmarks around, it was impossible to gage the thing’s true size, or its exact distance. It could be the size of a tree and was only a hundred yards away. Or it could be the size of a mountain and was miles off.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“The key.”
“Key to what?”
The Dreammaster reached out his hand past me, holding it over my shoulder. He positioned his fingers a few inches in front of my eye, to mimic pinching the whole of the vast crystal between his forefinger and thumb tips. Then, suddenly, he moved his hand to the side, and the crystal followed him, held between his digits as if it had always been only the size of a dollar coin. I would have sworn it was larger, but in this realm of dreams, optical illusions were as real as anything else.
I turned as the Dreammaster brought the crystal up to his own eye and inspected it. Then he glanced down to me, and held the crystal out in front of me. I held my hand out, and he dropped the thing into my palm. It was light, almost like a feather, despite falling straight into my palm like a small stone. I felt a sensation that seemed an impossible combination of cool and warm and electric. I stared at it for a long moment, then looked up at him.
“What is it?” I repeated.
“It is the core of this reality, the crystal that manifested your creations on your world. It is the catalyst by which this reality was forged, using your mind as a blueprint.”
I let out a breath. The Dreammaster’s words alone were not strictly proof of anything, but hearing him say it, I felt no reason to doubt him. “So, it was the crystal. This is all a simulation, then.” I looked up to him. “So, am I trapped in this thing? Am I just, like, a digital copy of myself, downloaded into it? This is all taking place in a shard of that crystal?”
He gazed at me calmly for a long moment before answering. “No. You are here physically. Your body and mind were reconstructed, in the same manner as every other being in it was. This reality is a physical construct. But it exists within a vast shell, composed of the same substance as the crystal. When it detonated, the surge of energy created a feedback loop that linked it back to its origin point, creating a pocket dimension in which this world was formed. The shell is the boundaries of that dimension.”
That definitely sounded like something I would write, which just made me doubt the story now. Perhaps the Dreammaster was simply theorizing based on the sorts of origin stories my cosmic lore tended to lean on. He was, after all, involved in at least one story project that had used a very similar origin.
He tilted his head to the side to look at me. “Salvador , I am not making this up.”
He could read my mind, of course. He was already in my dreams, after all. I was just going to have to get used to never having private thoughts again. “Forgive me if I’m a little skeptical.”
“Cynicism is useful, up until it isn’t. I am telling you, in as much as my own powers enable me to know, that the reality you currently exist in is a miniature universe unto itself, floating in a crystal sphere, itself adrift between realities.”
“Okay. So what is the crystal?”
“It is the energies of an unformed universe, condensed into sheer existential possibility.”
I scowled. “Come on. That’s just more of my own story stuff. I’ve got at least five versions of an ‘unformed universe composed of pure cosmic energy that sapient minds can use to warp reality’. The Roil, the Ethyrium Universe, the Fae Realm, the Dream Realm itself, the Chaos Realm. Hell, there’s probably some others I forgot.”
“Why do you assume your ideas are inherently false?”
“Because it was just a story contrivance! Not based on anything in reality! It was only ever a cheap, hand-wavy excuse to not have to explain how super powers or altered physics worked in some of my projects. They worked because ‘reality warping energies’ just react with the imagination to make supernatural shit happen.”
“Like a crystal that can bring your characters to life.”
I opened my mouth to retort, only to pause. I looked down at the piece of crystal in my hand. He got me there. “Fuck.” I looked back at him. “So, what, I guessed the true nature of reality in my stories?”
The Dreammaster shrugged. “I can’t say whether it is your reality’s true nature as such. I don’t know the relationship between the crystal’s universe or your own. However it happened, the forces of these two realities collided, and you happened to be the one at the center of its effects. That it bares resemblance to anything you conceived of in your own stories is most likely a coincidence.”
I shook my head. “That’s a level of coincidence that just doesn’t happen.”
“Well, it seems that it did. Besides which, your own concepts are derivations and extrapolations of ideas from other people’s stories. It is quite possible that you, and all the other authors and storytellers who have conceived of similar tales, have all been influenced by a truth humanity has occasionally gleaned without fully comprehending. Your stories of realities composed of ‘existential potential’ may just be one more interpretation of a grander cosmology your species had yet to fully uncover.”
Putting it that way, it made a little more sense. It was still far too convoluted for me to really believe. But this whole situation was already impossible. Who was I to scoff at such cosmic speculation? I still couldn’t fully buy into it, but it wasn’t any crazier than the idea of Hell actually existing, or my brain being downloaded into some alien computer or whatever the fuck was actually going on.
“Alright.” I held up the crystal piece. “Suppose I buy it. Suppose we really are in some dream bubble reality covered in that crystal. Where does that leave me? I just, what, live out my days on this planet, or plane, or whatever it is, until I die of old age, or one of the monsters or supervillains kills me?”
The Dreammaster’s expression turned a bit stern. “You don’t think far enough. Try to stop being so self-defeatist, and consider things beyond your immediate circumstance.”
I frowned. Must be real disappointing, to be an actual God, and find out your own creator is stupid, useless, mortal piece of shit. He frowned at me, and I knew he was reading my mind again. The self-conscious realization made me feel worse, but it also forced me to confront that this was exactly the negative thinking he meant. So ready to wallow in my self-pity than do anything to fix myself.
“I see life has not gone as you had once imagined,” he said, a tinge of compassion in his voice.
I frowned down at the crystal. “Honestly? I never imagined much for myself. I never thought very far into the future. For a long time, part of me kind of just assumed I’d be dead by now. I don’t even really know why. Depression, I suppose. Convinced I’d never make it even if I tried. Convinced that being an adult was going to suck shit no matter what I did for a living. So I made a lot of bad decisions. I took the easiest way out of every situation, which was often to not try doing anything at all, until my hand was forced. I pissed away my youth going through the motions and never actually applying myself. I was content to day dream instead of learn how to actualize those dreams. I...”
I felt my eyes well up. Whether from sorrow or rage or just sheer helplessness, I couldn’t tell. “I’m sorry. I failed you all.”
The Dreammaster shook his head. “Not at all. You told some of our stories to others. You did write for some of us. You did what you were able, given the circumstances.”
“It wasn’t good enough. I never accomplished even a hundredth of what I imagined. Only a bare handful of people ever heard about my stories, and even less actually read them, and the ones I had to show were dog shit rough drafts. When I told people that I liked to write, I should have had a stack of novels and comics under my name to prove it. At the very least, I should have had a professionally put together website with hundreds of stories in the archive.”
“Salvador . You wanted to be a storyteller, and you told some stories. You aren’t a failure just because you didn’t become a millionaire author with some of us becoming iconic cultural phenomena.”
“Goddamn it, it wasn’t about the money or the fame! I mean, yes, obviously, a writer wants readers, and it’s always the dream to be able to make a living doing your art. But all I really wanted to do was express myself, and I just fucking couldn’t. I’d’ve been content with a small fan-base giving me a little pocket change for my efforts, if I had only just fucking made anything beyond a handful of trash-level shorts. So maybe you’re right, on a technicality, I told a few stories to a few people, and that by definition makes me a storyteller. Well, every goddamned person on the planet is a storyteller by that logic. I was supposed to be an author, and I fucking failed at it. I didn’t just fail, I was so fucking incapable that I could barely even start to try! It was the only thing I ever cared about doing with my life, and I wasted it, and I can’t stop being disgusted with myself.”
The Dreammaster’s gaze lingered on me for several moments, then he shrugged. “I suppose there is no convincing one who thrives on melancholy.”
I winced. Tears hadn’t started spilling, but I wiped the wet from my eyes. “I’m just melodramatic.”
“As I said.”
I held up the crystal. “Okay, so what, then? The crystal is the key? The key to what? Just tell me upfront, my brain’s too frazzled for this cryptic hint bullshit.”
The Dreammaster pursed his lips, but decided to concede the point. “Fixing your situation. The crystal responded to you. This world, made from its energies in conjunction with your imagination, exists in a bubble of warped space, encased in a shell composed of that very crystal.”
It took me several seconds longer than it really should have to piece it together. “You’re saying I could use the crystal the same way here? If I can reach the edge of the world and touch the shell, I could use its power to summon more characters? So I could, what, create an army that could defeat all the monsters and aliens and whatever swarming around the Allied Freed States?”
“You could do more than that. You could alter this entire reality as you saw fit.”
A God. He was telling me that I could become a God. A real one. Or a least, a simulated one, for this simulated reality. An author directly molding the universe beyond mere words.
The possibilities were staggering. I couldn’t quite believe it. Even existing in this realm of my own dreams made manifest, with the situation I was in now, the idea of achieving such a state of being seemed preposterous. Could a single mortal mind, much less one as screwed up as mine, have the capacity to command such power? I didn’t have a superhero’s will power. I didn’t have any grand knowledge. I wasn’t self-disciplined in pretty much anything. I was a depressed, half-suicidal wreck. I could just imagine trying to fix things, only to fuck everything up worse.
But if I did nothing about it, when I had the chance to solve everyone’s problems, that just made me an even shittier person, didn’t it?
God, I just loved feeling guilty, didn’t I? And I just loved taking the easiest way out. I could try to solve this world’s problems, or I could curl into a ball and wallow in my depression, being useless to everybody, myself included.
I had already failed my creations as an author. This hellhole hodgepodge reality was my fault. There was no other way I could make it up to them. And, for the first time in my entire life, I was presented with the chance to do something of actual importance. And I already had the attention of the superheroes to help me, if I could convince them to give it a shot.
I frowned as a thought occurred to me. “Do they know? The superheroes, I mean. Do they know what this reality is?”
“Those affiliated with the Centurions Network are aware of this world’s structure. They do not know the significance of the crystal shell beyond that it defines the borders of this reality.”
“Guess you didn’t see a point in telling them?”
The Dreammaster gave a small frown. “Most of the people of this world do not dream. Not really. They are sapient, but the Dream Realm does not properly exist here. It was molded by the countless minds of sapients from numerous planets across numerous dimensions over the course of eons. This small reality, born only from your own imaginings, lacks that foundation. The ordinary citizens have only crude glimmers of dream-thought when they sleep. The named characters from your stories sometimes dream, but they are muted and insufficient. When I appeared here, I was barely able to achieve self-awareness. Only when you arrived was I able to properly manifest; as it stands, you are the only one I can reach for now.”
“Surely you’re not the only cosmically aware being who showed up, though. Timeframe, Temael, Universa, any of Tabitha Cain’s gods, even Tempra and Temprus would have tried to use that knowledge to their advantage.”
He shook his head. “As far as I have been able to deduce, beings powerful enough to be considered truly cosmic did not manifest here. The energies the crystal drew upon to make this world were finite; it would have taken many times more than was gathered to manifest even a faint echo of just one of us.” He gestured to himself. “I think I may be a unique case, given my nature. On a technicality, I exist right now as a mere Dream Spirit, based on versions of myself you conceived of before you elevated me to Cosmic Guardian status. I have the memories of my higher self, but very little of the power.”
“I see.” I stared at the crystal again. “I guess that might explain how some of my stronger characters didn’t make it. There were planet-busters on that obituary list. If this place isn’t truly Endless, all-out battles would have shattered this world by now.”
“It would seem to be the case. The crystal could only spare so much power for any given individual.”
I let out a long breath. “Well, this is some interesting worldbuilding so far.”
He gave a small smile. “It was your forte.”
“Not really. Every world I made was always incredibly shallow.” I held up the crystal. “I’d like to think I could change that, but—I don’t know. I don’t know what’s best. Right now, I think getting rid of the enemy armies is the thing to shoot for.”
“Whatever you decide to do, I shall abide by it.”
“Thanks.”
We stood there for a few more moments, before the Dreammaster looked up. “So you are aware, I have been hiding this conversation from the psychics keeping watch on your mind. If you wish it, I can mask your waking thoughts as well.”
I blinked. “You can?”
“My powers have been reduced drastically, but they still function uniquely to all other psionics and mental magic, and supercedes the mechanisms of other dream-affiliated powers. I can make your mind inviolable to all but myself.”
I thought it over. I was wary of doing something drastic that might put the superheroes on alert. As cautious as they were being with me, I really didn’t want to set them off. Moreover, while having my thoughts being constantly monitored was getting a little suffocating, the fact they could catch when I had a mental breakdown and help stabilize me wasn’t something I was sure I wanted to let go of yet.
But was that actually smart? It also meant that if they decided, they could just scramble my brain. If I told them about the crystal, what was to stop them from rewriting my mind and making me use the power for their own ends? I wanted to say that as superheroes, they would do the right thing, but from what this world had done to them, from what they told me already, I didn’t know what lengths they would go to.
The ugly thought, that maybe I deserved to be mind wiped and used as a tool and tossed aside when done, crossed my mind. For once, I didn’t feel much like entertaining that kind of self-destructive thinking. If I was going to actually try to do right by these people, I wanted it to be under my own power. Even if, in the end, it did end up smarter to let the psychics puppet me to do it, I wanted to have the choice to let them, at least.
“Can you undo it while I’m awake?”
“I can only influence you while you dream. I’ll only be able to remove it once you sleep again.”
“Alright. You know what? I want to see what they’ll do. Go ahead.”
The Dreammaster nodded, but that was all. I waited to feel some effect, but I didn’t notice anything different. “Um…”
“It is done. As to your mental faculties, I have hardened your mind against self-destructive tendencies. I haven’t cured you of your anxieties, but it should blunt the impulse to kill yourself, at the very least.”
“Wow. Okay. Thanks again.”
He looked to the sky once more. “I think our time is coming to a close.”
“Am I going to see you every time I sleep?”
“Would you like to?”
“Would you?”
He sighed. “I suppose you are the only one I am able to talk to. Not that I am starved for conversation, as such. But I have played the role of your guide before, I don’t mind doing so again.”
“Alright.”
“Good morning, then.”
And then I was awake.
2.16 - To the End of the World
The first thing I was aware of was something cold and wet poking me on the nose. When it fully registered, I jerked back and flailed, getting tangled in my sheets.
<Morning lover> said a husky thought-voice as I yanked the sheets off myself. Snow sat next to the bed, staring at me in that tell-tale way where you just know a dog, or wolf, is smiling at you.
I scowled. “That isn’t funny,” I grumbled, rubbing my nose.
Her tailed thumped once. <I didn’t think so either, but Esper and Scorpina insisted.>
I rubbed my eyes as I swung my legs over the side. I felt a little groggy, but the feeling was already fading as my brain calibrated itself to wakefulness. I had been dreaming about something... what had it been about...? It seemed important, but dreams were hit-or-miss as far as how well I could remember them. Something about... the Dreammaster... and... the crystal?
The crystal. The world’s shell. The key to saving this place. I felt a mixture of dread and hope as the weight of it hit me all at once. And yet, instead of going into another paralyzing mental spiral, I managed to take a long breath and compose myself. It seemed the Dreammaster really had done something to stave off the worst of my anxieties. I still felt a pit of nervousness, however. The choices I made from here had a small chance of leading me to an unprecedented salvation, and a high chance of any number of irrecoverable disasters. And the more I thought about it, the more the Dreammaster’s buffer seemed to strain.
I almost felt myself drop right back into the mental pit. I might have, if Snow hadn’t spoken up again. <You were asleep for awhile, apparently. Scorpina said you went to bed a little early, but it’s already past 10 o’clock. They were getting a little worried, so they wanted to wake you up.>
“Guess they figured the dog would be the least imposing, huh?”
<Actually, I volunteered. But yes, I figured you would be less freaked out.>
“Why didn’t they check on me psychically? They between shifts?”
<You know, I asked them that, but they didn’t say. Violet looked a little worried, though.>
<Hey Violet> I thought. I got nothing back. <Hey! Esper! Brain! Whoever else was watching me! HEY!> Still nothing. I thought of an extremely lewd image involving Violet and Esper together. Even that didn’t net a response.
Snow cocked her head to the side at me. <Sal?> Her thought-voice had a tinge of worry.
I glanced at her, realizing I had just been staring at the wall like I was about to have another episode. “Sorry,” I said. “Just testing something.”
<Testing what?>
“Don’t worry about it,” I said.
<If you say so. I’ll let you get dressed.> She stood and turned; she had her arm-harness on, and used the robotic hand to open the door.
I got up and found my shirt, pulling it on. I went to the bathroom, did my business, and came back out. Snow was still in the living room, sitting on her haunches, but while I’d been busy, Violet and Max had come into the room. Or they had already been there, waiting for a signal from Snow in case I’d started acting funny.
I glanced to Violet and once again thought of the incredibly lewd scene with her and Esper. Then I thought of her getting decapitated. I wasn’t trying to be a psycho. I just couldn’t think of anything else to force a reaction than thinking something utterly shocking. I wasn’t clever enough to think of anything else in the moment.
She just stared back at me intensely. For a moment, I thought she might trying to bluff a non-response to my inappropriate thoughts, but then she looked to Max and shook her head. “Nothing.”
Max gave me a hard look. “A couple minutes ago, the telepaths were suddenly shut out of your head. You have an explanation for it?”
Only a couple minutes ago? I guess time experienced in dreams really did flow differently. The Dreammaster must have waited until I was just about to come out of REM sleep to speak to me. So what now? Did I try to bluff them or just be upfront?
“Sal.”
I was a terrible bluffer. “Do either of you know who the Dreammaster is?”
The two glanced to one another, then back at me. “Not familiar,” said Max.
“Okay. Well. He’s like a God of Dreams. I never had him interact directly with your worlds, though, so I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of him. And according to him, he wasn’t able to reach anyone else since the world formed. He was a bigger deal in my older stuff, where he was sort of a guardian and guide to some of my more self-insert characters. Point being, I met him last night, and he offered to put a psychic shield on me. I went for it.”
Max’s stern expression turned into a scowl. “Why would you do that?”
“I’ll be honest, while I appreciate the mental support, I kind of like having my thoughts to myself.” I glanced to Violet. “Besides, I know it wasn’t exactly a treat seeing what was in there.”
She made a thin frown, and I wondered just how much she had actually seen. “You realize we have to have someone physically present to keep you on suicide watch now, right?”
I took a long breath. “I get that. Look, I can’t promise I’m suddenly cured of my depression, but the Dreammaster said he was able to help smooth out some of my anxieties. I know you don’t have a reason to trust me, but I don’t feel like suddenly trying to off myself is in the cards anymore.”
“Well, you’re right, we don’t have a reason to trust you,” said Max-Out. “Or this Dreammaster. You realize whatever you saw could be any number of things other than this supposed guardian, and even if it is him, we don’t know who or what he is.”
“I can give you a list of people who might have known him,” I said. “Maybe they can vouch.”
“That doesn’t clear the suspicion of anything else. A stronger psychic, a possessing spirit, a demon, a witch, an alien. Or your own psychosis manifesting, and possibly triggering new powers in reaction to your circumstances.”
I winced. “Fair point. But other than that last one, how many of those things could sneak in here to do something like that?”
“Sal, you are a complete x-factor. We have no idea how your presence really works here, or what it means.” Max stood up from his lean on the back of the couch. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to be on guarded lockdown until we are absolutely certain of what exactly you are, and what we have to do about it. And that’s going to be harder now without psychic support.”
“You surely dug everything out you could have by now,” I said, frowning. “If you’re as ruthless as you claim, with so many psychics on your roll call, you’ve probably downloaded a copy of my whole brain somewhere to pick apart.”
Violet and Max shared a glance. “We scoured your brain while you slept the first time,” admitted Violet. “We know everything there is to know about you. But how much of that information is true versus something encoded when you manifested here, or picked up by your locator power and incorporated into your psyche, we have yet to determine.”
I opened my mouth to respond, only to realize I had nothing to counter with. No rational explanation, no convincing argument, no real ground to stand on to explain that they didn’t have to be so paranoid about me. With that in mind, I suddenly wasn’t sure how smart it would be to tell them what I now knew about the world. I closed my mouth and deliberated with myself, leaning against the wall and looking to the floor as I let out a long breath.
The other two waited, staring at me for a minute, but I let them sweat it out. I waffled constantly between just telling them everything, staying coy, or just not telling them anything more. Every time I thought I had made a decision, just before I was about to speak again, I chickened out, and turned it over again in my head. Even with mystical reinforcement to my brain, I was completely fucking hopeless. But to be reasonable, with a revelation of this magnitude, was I wrong to be paranoid as well? What if I told them I had the literal power to change the world, and Max decided to just punch my head off right here and now, rather than risk even the slightest chance of me risking their reality further?
Max ran out of patience after a full minute of silence. “Sal, whatever you’re debating with yourself, just spit it out.”
“I’m not sure yet,” I said.
Max pursed his lips. “Let me be clear about this: our situation is precarious to the point we cannot take chances. We’re pretty well bunkered in, but we don’t know for how long until one of the enemy armies finds some way to breach our shields. If you know something we don’t, something we can use, or something we need to be wary of, we need to know now, not later.”
I managed to look him in the eye and not flinch from his stern gaze. “I need a little time. Please. I, uh, I really need to sort some things out before I’m sure.”
“Did the Dreammaster tell you something strange?” said Violet.
“You could say that,” said Sal.
Max stepped up to me until he was looming over me. This time, I couldn’t stop myself from cringing back. “Salvador . I told you I don’t have a problem with you. I get you’re just a civilian whose never been in a situation like this before. I get that you’re in an impossible circumstance.” He leaned down and put a firm hand on my shoulder. “But let me make one thing absolutely clear. If I must conclude you are a threat to us, I will put you down. I don’t want to, but I will.”
I swallowed hard. My voice came out in more of a whisper than I would have liked. “Why do you think I need some time?”
He held my gaze for a moment before letting out a long breath through his nose. Finally, he pulled back and let go of me. “I am going to give you the benefit of the doubt that you meant it when you said you wanted to help. I just want you to be clear about our situation.”
“Crystal ,” I said, not even realizing the pun.
“Alright,” he said. He looked to Violet. “We have work to do. Send whoever’s free down here.”
<I can stick around, sir> said Snow.
His expression softened slightly as he looked to the talking wolf. “Sorry. The jumpjets need a maintenance check-up. It’d be best to get them done now. You can come back after.”
<Yes, sir.> Snow glanced to me. <Keep my seat warm, Sal.>
“Sure. Later.” I couldn’t help but smile a bit. A talking dog with robot arms. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a character idea who was just silly fun like that.
Max left with her, while Violet lingered behind a minute. She looked to me with a sympathetic half-smile. “All cards on the table, I did get a full look at your mind. And, I don’t think you’re as bad a person as you like to paint yourself. I know you feel a tremendous amount of guilt over this. Over us. Rest assured, your sympathy is appreciated, but none of this is your fault.”
“You telling me that doesn’t convince me otherwise.”
“I know.”
“So you believe me now, about being your author?”
She hesitated, frowned, then gave a little shrug. “I saw enough to be convinced, but the fact is, I still can’t trust how much of that information is real. I’m willing to believe it. But just like you can’t be certain of anything when a bunch of telepaths are plugged into your brain, there are aspects of this joint reality that cannot be fully trusted. We still cannot just assume anything.”
“Fair.”
“I also wanted to say, beyond this situation, I know you feel guilty over not writing most of our stories. You really don’t have to feel guilty about that. You created us either way, gave us life and purpose, even if only in your dreams. Whether or not you got any of us down on paper, that didn’t really effect us directly. You can regret that you didn’t do more artistic work in your life, but that shouldn’t translate into guilt over us.”
“So you’re saying my sense of guilt is really just a vanity problem.”
She pursed her lips. “I’m not saying that.”
I let out a little amused grunt. “You know, it’s funny, hearing that coming from you. You were one of the few characters I actually did write a story for.” I shrugged. “Course it was a smutty one, so how much that counts is up for debate.”
“It wasn’t just a smutty story. You had me heroically battling a witch to save people.” She cocked her head to the side. “A lot of people have lewd thoughts. I’m not going to judge if expressing those thoughts is what got you to actually write like you always wanted to.”
“Thanks, I guess.”
“I forgive you for what happened in that story, if you’re hung up on that.”
“Thanks.”
“Alright. Well. I’ll send someone down. You do seem more even-headed, but we still need to watch you. I’m sorry if that’s bothersome, but you understand our situation, I hope.”
“Yeah. I do. No worries.”
“Okay. I have to go. I trust you can stay out of trouble for a few minutes until someone else can get here?”
“Sure.”
With that, Violet nodded, turned, and headed out the door, leaving me to see if I was even capable of coming to a decision over what to do next.
2.17 – A Friendly Weapon
The first thing I did once they left and I could go properly catatonic from the astounding revelations without interruption, was to use my locator power to test the Dreammaster’s claim about the crystal. He wasn’t wrong. My locator power did indeed immediately detect the presence of the crystal sphere, surrounding the world.
2,500,000,000 miles away. At the closest “edge”.
I dropped down onto the couch. No fucking way. I double-checked my power, then triple-checked it. Two-point-five billion miles. Jesus Fucking Christ. We were standing on a world-disc the size of an entire solar system. And that, apparently, included up and down as well. I used my power to check where the border of “outer space” started. Like on Earth, it seemed the atmosphere only went up about 60 miles before it thinned out enough to qualify for the vacuum of space. Which meant there was at least two and a half billion miles of empty vacuum.
I had, for moment, considered that all I might have to do was get out of the Allied Free State’s borders, then take a vessel, or find a superhuman, who could just fly me straight up to the crystal wall, by-passing having to go through thousands of miles of occupied territory. No such luck, apparently. I would need to at least find a faster-than-light ship to make that kind of journey, and someone to fly me there.
I checked my power for that, too. The nearest functioning FTL vessel was smack in the middle of Mutronian territory, thousands of miles away. The nearest broken one was two-hundred and thirteen miles to my left, and I had no way of knowing if it was repairable, much less how to pilot it.
As I thought about it, though, it probably was my only viable strategy. Was there any sort of faster-than-light low-orbit vehicle? There would be nothing like that on land. I could think of one character who was explicitly faster-than-light who could theoretically carry me the distance, but my power didn’t trigger for them. Likewise, planetary-distance teleporters weren’t pinging off my power either.
That meant there would be no easy way to rush to the finish. I’d die of old age before I could reach the edge by land or air or water. Hi-jacking the nearest functioning FTL ship would be a suicide run, and I didn’t actually know if “space” would be any safer. For all I knew, the force field that protected the country was utterly swarmed with flying forces that patrolled over the dome of the force field.
I did make me wonder, though. An absurd number of celestial bodies could fit inside that distance. In my original plan for it, the Endless Frontier was supposed to be the only physical structure in its universe, an endless plane with no actual stars or moons or other bodies beyond it; the skies of any given chunk that showed such things were only showing the impressions of that world-chunk’s sky, projected upon that world’s atmosphere for effect.
Without much else to go on, I started thumbing through various space-bound objects my power could pick up on. I specifically pictured planets floating in space, just so my power wouldn’t detect chunks of those worlds in the Frontier instead. The Moon? Nothing. Mars? Nothing. Venus? Nothing. I ran through all the solar systems various bodies I could remember, then tried more generic things like meteors and asteroids. Nothing registered at all. I even checked for simply “planets” and “stars”, which could have easily fit within the distance. Still nothing. Was it really just empty space up there? Seemed like a creative waste.
On a whim, I asked my power where the Earth was. It informed me I was standing on it. I tried to rephrase it as “the planet Earth”, and it once again told me I was standing on it. What the heck did that mean? I guess even trying to narrow it down to a “planet” and not a “world disc”, this world was basically what constituted the Earth in this reality. That did beg the question, if this was a disc, where was the bottom? My power told me it was 105 miles down. I blinked. Really? I wondered if that meant there was a civilization on the other side as well, or if it was nothing but empty rock. How exactly did gravity work in this dimension? Much like how the sky shifted between night and day despite the lack of a sun, did things just stick to the disc because that’s just how a physical world was supposed to function? What did that—
The electronic lock beeped, forcing me out of my thoughts. In stepped a woman with short green hair, and tan travelers clothes. I had expected a visit from another new person I had never made, but this woman I had directly created. Jennifer Smith, The Weaponeer.
She grinned wide as she saw me, and clasped her hands together in front of her chest. “Are you there, God? It’s me, Jennifer!”
“S’up,” I replied.
She gave a short laugh and flipped herself over the side of the other couch, settling into place as she gave me a full thrice-over. “Hmm… Kinda cute. Little scrawny. A bit young. Not at all how I pictured you.”
“Not as young as I look,” I admitted.
“Oh yeah? How old really?”
“Forty.”
“Huh. You wear it well.”
“Didn’t used to. I really let myself go. Everything, I don’t know, reset when I showed up here.”
“I see,” she said.
And then, before I could even blink, she was on top of me, slamming me down into my seat, and holding a dagger to my neck. I gasped and writhed under her, but she had me completely pinned, pressing her weight down on my legs, using her elbows to pin down my biceps, as she used one hand to yank my head back by my hair, and her other to press the knife just shy of breaking the skin.
I absolutely panicked. My survival instinct forced me to buck against her, to try and grab her, but the way she was leveraged on top of me, I could only uselessly paw at her upper arms a bit, uselessly kick my legs at the knee, and gasp in pained shock. She just gave me a slightly bemused smile as she gazed at my face studiously.
“Wh-wh-what are d-doing?” I stuttered.
“Heard you wanted to die,” she said. “Let’s see how true that is.”
I couldn’t think straight. I could barely breathe. I knew it was useless to resist her. I tried anyway. I grit my teeth and clutched at her sleeves. I didn’t… I didn’t want to die. I sure as fuck didn’t want to die in a way that would drag it out, bleeding to death from a cut jugular. The fact the rest of Cavalry would save me before I could didn’t even register.
The Weaponeer was ostensibly a hero, but only in the sense that she didn’t have any overtly villainous desires. She didn’t want to steal from or oppress people. She just wanted to live her desire to be a battle champion. All she cared about was a good fight. She loved challenging powerful heroes, and she was more than willing to help heroes battle villains, just for the thrill of it.
So I had no clue if she was really going to do it or not. I had no idea what five years in this world would have made her into. And frankly, with her knife digging into my neck, and the pain and panic overtaking my thoughts, the nuances of her character seemed less important than the fact she was holding me right on the cusp of a fatal injury.
Even now I was frozen up in my terror. Part of me wanted to go just go limp and accept it, like a mouse giving up when the cat’s jaws claimed it. Part of me wanted to defiantly tell her to go fuck herself and just do it. Instead, I just stayed locked up, panic-glaring at her, unable to do anything.
She just grinned and I felt the knife press harder. It only occurred to me later that she must have summoned a dull blade into her hand, because her normal weapons would have sliced clean through my neck at that point. She pushed it in further, until it started cutting off my air. Something broke through the panic. Anger won out. Unable to draw breath to insult her, I made a clumsy attempt to spit in her face.
She didn’t react as the small spray of spittle splattered her cheek. Her grin just widened. And then, she suddenly pulled off me, leaping back into a perfectly relaxed position on the couch. I let out a huge breath, breathing heavily, and shaking like a leaf. I took a few moments to force myself to calm down, and she just maintained that bemused smile, watching me.
I coughed and huffed, trying to get my breath back as I scrambled upright in my seat. I was shaking like a leaf, but I glared at her in hot anger. “Wh-what the fuck was that?” I asked when I could find my voice.
“Just seeing how good your self-preservation instincts are,” she said, nonchalantly. “Also seeing if you had any extra powers you weren’t telling us about.”
“The psychics would have figured it out,” I said, forcing myself to settle down.
“Except now you’re immune to them,” she said. “When means you have the capacity to gain new powers. Which means you might have something else up your sleeve already.”
I shook my head. “That’s not my doing. It’s due to the Dreammaster.”
“Who?”
I sighed and waved her off. “Don’t worry about it.”
“Kinda think I should,” she said. “He sounds like he could be bad news.”
“And you’re not?”
She broke out in a laugh. “And what exactly do you know about me, oh great author?”
“Your name is Jennifer Smith. You were a loser geek who idolized anime heroes, particularly the wandering ronin archetype. When your Power Potential unlocked, you got the chance to live out that fantasy. Insanely fast healing factor, the ability to summon impossibly tough and sharp weapons of any sort from thin air, absolute mastery of all forms of physical combat, and the ability to move and strike with superhuman force while in a combat situation. You named yourself the Weaponeer, and challenged heroes and villains and monsters alike. But the world you were empowered in was not the sort of world that wanted such a person. Yours was an otherwise mundane Earth suddenly afflicted with the presence of massively powerful superhumans and super beasts, and human civilization was just trying to stay intact. The battles you wanted were too destructive, and you weren’t satisfied using your powers simply to hunt normal criminals. So you wandered the world, growing depressed when you realized for all your powers, you couldn’t really live your dreams.” I paused and looked her over. “Um. Sorry about that.”
Her smile turned more friendly. “Well. Not bad. Nothing a strong enough telepath, or someone who read my records couldn’t figure out, of course. As for the dreams thing, don’t worry about it. In the end, I found the perfect world to live my desires.”
I supposed that was true. This was a reality where there were no end of conflicts to engage in. She probably would have been happy basically living out past the Barrier, spending her days cutting through the armies, even if it ultimately wasn’t enough to stop any of them.
“So why are you here, in Blue Haven, and not out there on the battlefield?”
“Eh, even I like to take a break now and then. Be social. Check up on things. So I’ll come back from beyond the Barrier to do jobs in the cities sometimes. Under supervision, of course.” She rolled her eyes. “For some reason, these guys want to keep their buildings intact. So I fight with kid gloves here.” She shrugged. “But anyway, Blue Haven needed help putting down a particularly tough baddy recently, so I came in to lend a hand. I’m only here temporarily, though. I’ll be leaving tomorrow. I insisted I be the first to guard you, because I wasn’t sure I’d get a chance to talk to you otherwise.”
“Fair enough.” I leaned back and let out a breath. I tried to think of what to say next, only to be interrupted by my stomach growling. I realized I hadn’t eat breakfast yet.
Jen smirked. “Can’t let God create on an empty stomach.”
I blanched, stood, and went to the fridge. “Not exactly creating things at the moment. But I’ll fill my stomach, regardless.” I checked the fridge and found enough items were stocked to make myself a hearty omelet. I wasn’t much of a cook, but I could make that much. I glanced back to her. “You want anything?”
“I’m not hungry, but maybe I’ll try a bite of yours, just to experience your creative power at work,” she grinned and winked.
I rolled my eyes and got cooking.
As I cooked, I pondered the dream again, and what I was going to say to Max, Violet, and the others when I had to present my case. Should I just tell them about the Crystal and pray they didn’t just kill me? If I could convince them I was genuine in wanting to help, having all the resources of the Centurions network to help me reach the world’s shell would be fantastically useful. Assuming there was no actual narrative force directing my presence here, it might even be possible that a concerted effort to rush me there with a whole army of superheroes protecting me along the way might even actually work out, instead of leading to some convoluted disaster. Wouldn’t that be how it normally went in a story? I’d set out with a crew and a space ship, and then five minutes into the trip, something would cause the ship to explode, all my body guards would get killed, and I’d get captured by enemy forces and have to claw my way through an arduous journey through hell to try and save the world?
Right. Sure. If I had showed up in Mutrionian or Hive or Terror Zone or Hell territory, I’d already have been killed. Eaten live, or mutated into a monster, or killed and turned into a cannon fodder zombie.
I blinked as the sting of smoke hit my nostrils, and I cursed as I realized I had partly zoned out after starting to cook the omelet. I hastily scraped up the burnt side and flipped it over, spilling half the filling out and shredding the egg shell in the effort. With an annoyed grunt, I just let the other side cook for a bit longer, then scraped the whole mess onto a plate to make a “loaded scrambled eggs”. Good enough.
Coming back out to the main room, I saw Jennifer had pulled what looked like an older model of Gameboy from her pocket and was busy playing something. She looked focused on the device, but I knew she had been keenly watching from her peripheral vision, and listening for any hint of trouble. She did spare a glance at my plate, and cocked an eyebrow at the half-burnt eggs. “Cajun style?” she quipped.
“Good for the digestion,” I quipped back. I offered her the plate. “Want a bite?”
She considered it a moment, before saying, “nah” and going back to the game. I sat down at the little table off to the side, which I took as a little dining nook. It actually didn’t taste too bad, really. Not enough to pitch it and start over, anyway. Thus satiated, I pushed the plate aside when I was done and set my chin in my hands, staring at the wall as I contemplated my next move some more.
Jen glanced up at me again. “Penny for your thoughts?”
I looked back at her, holding her gaze for a moment. “I just don’t know what to do. You mentioned self-preservation instincts, well, I have no idea if the next thing I say or do is going to convince one of you to just kill me.”
She clicked the game off and slipped it into a little pouch on her belt. “Well, for what it’s worth, I have nothing against you, and I don’t stand to benefit from killing you, and I’m only an honorary Centurion, so I’m not super worried about pissing off the higher ups. So, you can speak freely with me.”
I glanced around, and used my power to immediately locate several cameras and microphones hidden throughout the room.
“Even without telepathy, I’m clearly under extensive observation.”
It also suddenly dawned on me to check the room for someone who might be invisible. I ran down the list of characters I could remember off the top of my head who had that power. Several of them weren’t locatable, the few I could detect were miles away. Of course, that meant very little, given that as far as I knew, wholly new people with invisibility powers were probably running around, or anyone in this group had invisibility devices or spells. The entire Cavalry team could be lined up against the wall, watching this conversation, and I’d have not even known it. I checked my power just to be sure, and thankfully that wasn’t the case, but who knew? Who knew if the psychics and mages and mad scientists throughout the Centurions Network had managed to already reverse-engineer my locator ability and make themselves immune to it? Who knew if—
“Boy, you’re a real space cadet, huh?” I blinked out of my thoughts again as Jennifer came over and sat down across from me, leaning forward, elbows resting on the table as she studied my face.
“I have a lot to think about,” I said, leaning back in my chair.
“No doubt,” she said. “So let’s talk it out. Bottling it all up can’t be healthy if you keep going half-comatose every time you get a random interesting thought. Nevermind someone taking you out while your guard is down.”
I couldn’t help but give a little scowl. “I’m not exactly motivated to go gallivanting around, picking fights.”
“Uh-huh. So why did you want a list of active power systems?”
I paused. “Well. You got me there. Obviously a world like this, I’m going to need protection if I am going to actually try staying alive.”
“So, anything you can use?”
I hesitated. “Not really. Nothing immediate. Galean Magic, maybe, with some training. A Relic, if I could find one. Maybe power armors or supertech guns, if I could get my hands on it. Stuff like that. Nothing that’d really be a threat against any of you, if that’s what you’re wondering.”
“Hmmm. Have you tried performing any sort of magic? If you wrote all our worlds, you should know exactly how it all works.”
“I haven’t tried anything yet, no. Haven’t really had the chance.” I motioned around. “Also, attempting to throw fireballs in an enclosed space isn’t smart.”
She gave me a sly smile. “What if I convinced them to let you use the training room?”
“Um… is that smart, do you think?”
“C’mon, what’s the worst that could happen?”
I could easily imagine. The more I demonstrated I might actually be a danger, the faster I might end up getting my head lopped off or getting vaporized by a power blast at super speed. I had a real worry there was a decent chance I already wasn’t going to make it out of this building alive.
“I’m not setting you up or anything, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
I met her gaze, and could see the mirth there. But I could also see the anticipation. I realized she was very well just saying this because she found being cooped up in this suite was actually getting pretty boring. The Weaponeer was a woman of action, and if she couldn’t find a good fight, she at least liked to stretch her legs when she got the chance.
All things considered, it might actually do me some good as well to not be so cooped up in here. It was all too easy for me to spiral myself into anxiety and indecision, just sitting on my ass all day, spinning my thoughts. Which would just as soon as anything be what got me killed.
“Alright. Why not?”
“Great! Let me talk to them.” She took a moment to stare into space as she went through a telepathic exchange.
Meanwhile, I went to wash the dishes. I felt a slight giddiness rise up in me, a sudden nervousness at the thought of taking any sort of action at all. It was all well and good to come up with ideas, but actually taking the first step, well, there was a reason so many of my stories never got written. I tried to calm down by letting myself take solace in the brainless chore of doing dishes. I always did them right after eating, my parents having browbeaten it into me that leaving dirty dishes in the sink was unacceptable. A final bit of calming mundanity, before I was about to take another step into the world of superhumanity.
2.18 – Mystic Might
It actually took some cajoling on the Weaponeer’s part to let me do it. Without being able to monitor me telepathically, they really were paranoid about letting me do anything. Max almost refused to let me leave the suite until I came forth with everything on my mind.
I’m not sure which of the others swayed him, because he clearly didn’t have much faith in Jennifer. But eventually, they let me out on the condition that I would be training with lethal weapons aimed at me the whole time. The gym, a three-story large room wide enough to fit a whole house unto itself, was full of equipment meant to test the limits of superhuman powers as well as more mundane combat training. This included automated heavy-duty machine guns that could fire any number of ammunition types, and I was told to go to a part of the gym’s main area where no less than seven of them could be trained on me, ready to fire on command.
The area had also been lined with magic runs that formed a rock-solid barrier from a wide variety of magics and other forms of paranormal energies. Ostensibly, this was actually supposed to protect the gym from getting wrecked by stray blasts during training, but it would also ensure that I wasn’t going to be blasting my way to freedom if I suddenly discovered I could throw nuclear fireballs out of nowhere.
Just to really be safe, though, they also set up a force field dome to cover the section I was in, forcing me to stay trapped in a place about twice the size of a boxing ring. And also, aside from Jennifer, two other members of Calvary , the Amazing Animal and Fire Fighter, were watching from the sides, leaning against the nearest wall. They said nothing as I came in, just watched me with a scowl and a bemused smile, respectively.
Jennifer joined me in the domed off area, but kept enough distance to let me work. She wanted to see my results up close, and she, more than anyone else on the team, would be able to survive damn near anything up close, even without any armor.
It was all very intimidating, but it also drove home just how much of a risk they thought I might be. I doubted they were actually scared of me outright, but the level of caution they were taking banished notion in my mind that I was a normal person to these people.
“Alright!” said Jennifer, clapping her hands together with a grin. “What would you like to try first?”
I had already been thinking Galean Magic was the most obvious. It was stupidly simple to cast, being based, I am embarrassed to admit, on an attempt to combine JRPG elemental spells with anime attack names into a fantasy magic system. I’d come up with it when I had first started getting into anime back in college, so this was well before “video game mechanics” became a nearly ubiquitous feature of isekai light novels and anime, before “cultivation mechanics” had become equally ubiquitous for web serials and web toon style comics. As such, I didn’t include anything like literal stats or an MP meter or anything. You simply made a gesture with your hands and yelled a phrase, feeling the flow of elemental magic around you, and using those actions to “focus” that power towards a target.
Spells were either multi-target, single-target, a wide-spray or a linear shot, and consisted almost entirely of elemental attacks, healing spells, and barrier spells. This basic set of magic was something any sapient being in Galea could perform, to the point it was part of basic military combat training. There were some people who had a gift of more unique magic powers, such as the main character of the Galea stories, Rorrim, who had “Mirror Magic” unique to himself, letting him reflect or reverse other types of magic that were cast. I doubted I was so gifted, so I was just going to try and go with the basics.
“Scorpina said you all have Galean Combat Magic, right? So it does work outside of the Galean world fragment?”
“Yep!” said Jennifer. She made a quick swipe of her arm with the fingers of her hand held straight for a chopping motion, yelling “LIGHTNING SLASH!” as she did so. Arcs of electricity suddenly erupted from her hand and down her arm as she yelled “lightning”, and as she swiped her arm forward and yelled “slash”, the electrical arcs formed a single jagged crescent blade of plasma that flung off her arm at the speed of an arrow to smash against the barrier field, sending out a splash of sparks as it impacted.
Despite what Scorpina had said, it was still slightly surprising to see the Weaponeer perform a lightning attack like it was nothing. Jennifer had always been a purely melee-type character, not counting when she might occasionally throw her weapons for a long-range strike. She was usually so goddamned fast it wasn’t worth the effort unless she couldn’t reach them otherwise.
This also solidly confirmed that my ability to instantly recognize my directly-made characters did not come with any insight as to what new abilities they had gained since emerging into this world. I glanced between Jennifer and the two other men watching from the wall. No matter what their individual super powers, I was going to have to just assume that every goddamn person I met was a multi-magus carrying super-tech gadgets in their pockets.
“Give it a try,” said Jen.
I took a breath and looked forward. The section we were in was a wide matted floor aligned left of center from where we entered, meaning there was a lot of open space and no real target to focus on. If I turned to face the closest wall, I’d be firing spells right at the two other superheroes. The force field was actually invisible until interacted with, so I had the illusion of just standing in the middle of a large open space dotted with equipment stations.
I guess I didn’t really need to target anything in specific. I opted to face the second-closest wall, a considerable distance away, and took something like a firing stance. I actually no idea what to expect the sensation to be like. Was I actually supposed to “feel” the elemental energy around me? Like how they charged up mana or chi or whatever? Was I supposed to focus intently on my target, or try to picture the spell’s effects in my head? It had been nearly twenty years since I’d even thought of Galea at all, and I didn’t even remember what all the spell levels were called. I vaguely knew the “Slash” type attack was somewhere in the mid-range.
“Come on, just wave your arm and yell something.”
“Um…”
“Having a little trouble?”
“Well, I was going to start small, but I don’t actually remember what the smallest spell was called. Or what the motion was.”
“Ah.” Jennifer pulled back her right arm, turning her hand upwards as she formed a fist. Then, almost casually, she thrust her arm own, turning her hand as she spread her fingers wide. “Lightning Puff!” she said almost conversationally. As before, she said the element just before making the motion, and said the spell’s name as she was making it.
A little sparking ball of electricity flew forward at the speed of a lobbed baseball, got about ten feet out, and sputtered out of existence.
“Ah, okay. Thanks.” I tensed my body despite how simple the spell looked, and replicated the move. I went with flame just because I had already been thinking about throwing fireballs. Also, it was the coolest element. Or warmest, I suppose. “Fire Puff!”
There was only the briefest sensation of mild heat in my hand, before a little fireball shot from the open palm. I had felt no build up of magic or elemental power or anything, the fireball was just suddenly there as soon as I completed the motion. I couldn’t help but watch a little bit stunned as the puff of flame, about the size of a softball, sailed a whole fifteen feet before it snuffed out.
I looked at my hand, then back to where the fireball had gone out. I shifted my stance this time tried it with my left hand, picturing the spell going further and faster. “Fire Puff!” The resulting ball of flame didn’t look appreciably larger or hotter, but it did seem to go a bit faster, and traveled the full distance to splash against the shield, causing the briefest heat-haze flicker across the dome.
“Fire Puff! Fire Puff! Fire Puff!” I alternated my arms as I shouted thrice, willing the fireballs to be stronger. The three came out with the same speed and force as my second shot had. For better or worse, Galean Spells were locked to their specific output cap. My first shot had only been weaker in execution, I supposed, because I hadn’t fully been able to picture it working. But now I could.
“Damn,” I said softly. “I’m a fuckin’ wizard.”
I looked to Jen, who gave me an appreciative nod. “That’s pretty good for a first try! How do you feel?”
Honestly, I felt fine. I knew it was possible to exhaust yourself physically if you cast Galean spells of high strength or lesser spells in rapid succession. I never really worked out the actual “physics” of the magic, or how generating it related to the body. But I felt fine for the moment. Even a little giddy. For all my misgivings about my situation, for this immediate moment, I felt a sliver of revelry at the realization that I actually had an honest-to-god super power. Okay, sure, the locator power certainly counted as one, but it wasn’t the same as an ability that actually let you directly impact the world around her.
I turned back to the wall. Galaen Combat Mages weren’t specifically aligned to any particular element, usually, at least not until the higher levels. “Lightning Puff!” A ball of electricity similar to Jennifer’s flew forth, the briefest tingle of static brushing against my skin. “Ice Puff!” A snowball shot forth, accompanied by a brief tickle of cold. “Rock Puff!” A clump loose, dusty gravel shot forth, a slight scratchy feeling on my hand, the pieces vanishing a few seconds after the impacted the barrier field. “Wind Puff!” A concentrated burst of air pushed forward, a gentle breeze whispering over my hand. “Water Puff!” A ball of water shot forth, a brief sensation of wetness on my hand.
“Huh,” I said, looking at my hands. I felt a slight sheen of sweat form on my brow. I wiped it off and looked at it, and assessed how I felt. Maybe slightly dizzy, but slight enough I could have been imagining it. I guess I felt like I had just run up a single flight of stairs, at worst.
Jennifer was smiling. “Good, good. You got the hang of it already.” She looked me over. “Feeling alright?”
I nodded. “Just getting warmed up, I think. What’s the next one? Sorry, I haven’t thought about Galean Magic in twenty years, so I don’t remember all the specifics. I’m going to need a refresher.”
“Alright, well, Puff spells are pretty simple, but the levels cap off for most people pretty quick. Most can’t get past the third or fourth spell level.”
“Huh. That’s right.”
“Okay, then, the next one is the Whirl.” She held her arms in front of herself, close to her chest, her right over her left, with the palms facing each other, and space wide enough to fit a basketball in. She turned and said, “LIGHTNING WHIRL!” as she turned her arms in a twisting motion, moving her hands around each other while pushing them outwards, until the left was over the right, the gap between them smaller, as if she were spinning a ball and shoving it forward. A conical spiral of lightning fired from the space between her hands, covering about ten feet in front of her in a spread-shot attack. Depending on how they were clustered and positioned, the motion could have probably caught most of a single person’s body, and partly hit two other people standing very near them.
I tried it out using Fire. Another brief flicker of heat as a gout of flame projected forward, still only going about ten feet before stopping. The flames lasted only a couple seconds, and did not travel any further even though with my next three attempts, I tried to mentally will it to do more. The limiters on these combat spells really did seem hard set.
I ran through the other elements, and by the end, I felt slightly winded.
“Well, well, you might be a natural talent!” said Jennifer. “Usually takes some practice to nail that so well!” She shifted so both hands were reared back. “Alright, next one! LIGHTNING BURST!” This time, she thrust both arms out, and brought both hands together, as if dual-casting two Puff spells. Instead of two small balls of energy, however, one big ball formed and launched like a cannonball from her palms. When it struck the barrier, it exploded hard enough to make me stagger back from the flash of light and peel of thunder. I actually stumbled back and fell on my ass, and felt all my hair stand on end from the burst of static generated by the spell.
Jen noticed me fall and grinned a little sheepishly. “Whoops!” She went over and offered a hand. “Sorry about that. The barrier spell is supposed to neutralize the spells better, but I must have clipped the edge of the force dome where it passes in front of the barrier.
“Oi! Don’t kill him by accident before we’ve made an official decision!” hollered Fire Fighter with grin.
“Oh, he’s fine! You’re fine, right, Sal?” She looked down at me with a smile that was not nearly as sympathetic, or apologetic, as I felt it should be.
My heart was thudding and I felt a bit numb as I looked up at her. I blinked away the spots in my vision the flash of light had caused, and I had to take a breath. My nerves were suddenly rather rattled, but I also felt myself managing to stay collected. Was this the Dreammaster’s mental reinforcement helping me resist sudden shocks to my system? Or was I actually more capable than I had been giving myself credit? Or was the numbness going to fade and I’d suddenly curl into a ball and start crying?
Jennifer’s grin faltered as I just stared at her, my expression mostly flat even as I wrestled with my feelings. “Sal?” Her look did shift more apologetic this time. “I’m sorry, that was reckless of me.”
I forced myself into motion, resisting the urge to go into another spiral of anxiety. I took her hand and let her pull me up to my feet. “I’m fine. I’m fine.” I glanced around, and walked to the edge of the barrier field limit, before turning and facing the opposite side of the dome. “Alright. Maybe something less immediately destructive. Water Burst!” I launched a sizeable chunk of water from my palms, which flew across the length of the enclosed space, and smashed hard against the magic barrier. Although it did kick up a sizeable spray, the barrier did seem to absorb a great deal of the impact, and most of the water evaporated before hitting the ground.
The Weaponeer cocked an eyebrow at that. “Any strain?” she said, looking me over.
I looked at her, looked at my arm, and instead of answering, I immediately said, “Water Slash!” and made a slicing motion with my arm. A razor-sharp crescent of water sliced through the air and crashed against the far edge of the dome. I had remembered the Slash was level four. I had cast it without any trouble.
“FIRE SLASH! LIGHTNING SLASH!” I launched both attacks back-to-back, alternating arms as I did so, and they similarly slammed at full-force against the far wall. And only then did I feel a sudden wash of fatigue. Not enough to stop me, though. I paused a moment, took a breath, wiped the sweat off my brow, and tried twice more. “ICE SLASH! WIND SLASH!” Both successful. But once more, another wash of fatigue, this time a bit stronger. I took another breath, and promptly went down on one knee, closing my eyes for a moment and making myself breathe steadily.
“Sal?” said Jennifer, leaning over me.
“I’m alright. Just getting tired. Need a moment.”
“Alright. Let’s stop here. Wouldn’t be safe to fire off anything stronger in this enclosed area anyway.” I heard footsteps as the two men approached us. I felt Jennifer shift as she turned to face them.
“Multiple fourth level casts on his first try,” I heard Fire Fighter say. “Not the best aim, but otherwise flawlessly executed.”
“Aw, level four ain’t all that. Most of us can go that high, and it didn’t take us that long.”
“Superheroes already experienced in wielding powers can,” said the Animal, his voice as gruff as before. “Mages of other disciplines can. Your average citizen? Records indicate most can’t get past level three, and it takes weeks to months to train the body to gather and direct that much power. Launching full force Fire Slashes off the bat? That’s a gift.”
I hear a brief, sort warbling hum, and from the sudden shift of air, I knew the force field had been turned of. I opened my eyes just as the Animal roughly grabbed my arm and, quick as a striking snake, latched a pitch-black bracelet on my arm. I jumped as he grabbed me, and instinctively tried to yank my arm back, but it was impossible to break his superhuman strength. He let go of me a moment later, once the bracelet was secure. I stumbled up to my feet, taking a few steps back, and clasped the smooth black metal cuff.
The Animal just glared at me, crossing his arms and scowling. Fire Fighter’s bemused smile had shifted to a wary frown, as even he gave his teammate a disapproving look. Jennifer put her hands on her hips and rolled her eyes. “You didn’t have to do it like that, you tool.”
Animal’s glare shifted to her. “He’s lucky I didn’t just stab him in the skull right there. This proves it, right here. We have no idea what powers he’s capable of. Even if I believed he was being completely forthright, this three sudden power manifestations in rapid succession, all unlinked, all within someone who is supposedly just a normal person.”
“We were supposed to ask him to accept the ZM cuff first, then go from there,” said Fire Fighter. “Say he does have the potential to become a god, you want to be on his bad side?”
Animal growled at him. “If you’re that afraid of his wrath, you should be backing me up on this.”
“Afraid? No. Cautious? Yes. Rolling the dice on a potential miracle? Absolutely.” He turned and winked at me. “Not to kiss your ass too hard or anything.”
I looked at the manacle. It looked like a smooth obsidian, and I recognized it immediately. This was Zero Metal, the ore that neutralized most forms of super powers on direct skin contact.
Jennifer looked at it. “Stuff doesn’t effect my powers. I can break it off, if you’d like.”
I shook my head as I looked back up to them. “No. No, I completely understand. I’m frankly surprised you didn’t do this to me while I was asleep.”
I turned away from them, and just to be certain, I tried to cast an Ice Puff spell. Nothing happened. “Huh. Well. That’s that, I guess.” I turned towards them, only to flinch as the Animal took a step towards me.
“What about your locator power?” he half-growled.
I wondered where Snow was. My power found her a couple hundred of feet away, in another part of the facility. I looked at the Animal. I was almost tempted to lie, despite everything. But I was in no position to be pushing back. “That still works.”
He let out a long breath through his nose. “At least your honest. You’d be dead if you weren’t.” He then turned and strode out of the room, his cape waving dramatically behind him. Belatedly, it occurred to me he’d have instantly known if I was lying just due to his enhanced senses. But I was a terrible liar anyway.
“Don’t worry, I’d have slapped his ass across the room before he could actually hurt you,” said Jennifer with a grin.
“Thanks,” I said flatly. “So what now?”
“Back to your room,” said Fire Fighter. “I can take over watch if you want, Jen.”
“I dunno, I think he likes female company more.”
“Damn,” he said, giving me a mock frown. “And here I thought I’d get a chance to score with god!”
Jen laughed. “What the hell? Were you just faking all those come ons with me?”
“No, but if I can score some points with the divine, I’ll keep my options open!” The two looked at me as I gave them an annoyed expression, and they shared a laugh.
“Let this be god’s First Commandment,” I said, holding up a finger. “Seduction will get no one anywhere.”
The two laughed again, and Jen said, “Good thing you didn’t spawn out near Delwor, then. It’s only a hundred miles from here, y’know.”
I’m not sure if I was actually able to assert self-control, or if my body’s attempts to both flush and go pale canceled each other out, but I just maintained a flat look as I stared at them. I clearly gave off some kind of discomfort signal, though, because they both snickered at me.
I sighed and turned, starting to walk out of the gym. “I’m heading back. Figure it out yourselves whose coming with me.”
2.19 – May As Well
Jennifer’s comment lingered a bit as I strode back to my part of the base. All my actual close friends were men, but most of my day to day social interactions had been with women, if only by way of most of my jobs having majority female co-workers and customers. My friends, just due to being scattered acrossAmerica , I only really got to see or talk to a few times a year. So, yes, in a way, I suppose I had gotten used to being around women more often. Nevermind the obvious appeal of hanging around superhuman supermodels.
That was the usual cliché of those isekai stories, wasn’t it? Some schlubby nobody guy getting sent to another world and ending up in a love polygon with a harem of women in his supporting cast. For a moment, I allowed myself to be amused by the idea of some greater narrative force guiding my actions here, conveniently saddling me with a group of loyal ladies to more easily influence my actions.
But even as I tried to let myself enjoy the thought, sour feelings immediately welled back up. Within seconds, I went from almost managing to give myself a sensible chuckle, to almost spiraling into another anxiety attack as I reminded myself I was even more on Cavalry’s shit list now that I had proven I could actively gain new powers.
Not that Galean Combat Magic in itself was much to write home about in a world with dozens of other power systems at play. It certainly was no threat to Cavalry. I looked at the Zero Metal cuff and scowled. As soon as I’d gained the power, they’d taken it away. I couldn’t blame them. The fact that I now looked like some kind of magic prodigy to them, that did not help my case in this circumstance. And now I had to wonder if Jennifer had deliberately coaxed out that revelation specifically to test me for Cavalry’s sake.
Made sense. Outsider to the group, so it’d be less suspicious that she’d want to push the limits of what I was allowed to do here. Especially in her case, being someone who didn’t like being cooped up in a room too long. And if she was leaving tomorrow, then the timing was ideal. Perfectly in character, so there wasn’t even a need to lie. And the pretty face to put my guard down didn’t hurt. And, of course, I had been curious to test the possibilities.
Paranoid thinking. Most likely it really had been serendipity, not conspiracy, and I had just bumblefucked my way through it like everything else. I sighed again as I approached the door to the suite. The electronic lock beeped right as I got there, reminding me that I was being watched like a hawk.
Before opening the door, I glanced behind me to see if either Jen or Fire Fighter were following. I hadn’t heard anyone, but I wouldn’t put it past them to just sneak behind me such that I wouldn’t have noticed. I ran through the list of people I knew were here, and my locator power placed them all over the facility or across the city. Spark was actually in the next city over. So I supposed one of them would be stopping by shortly.
I entered the suite, stepping into the main room, and settled onto one of the couches. I just stared at the ceiling for a few minutes, not really thinking about anything in particular, trying not to spin myself into another mess of indecision.
I had to tell them. I just had to tell them everything, and let the chips fall where they may. I looked again at the Zero Metal cuff. They really could have just killed me by now. If they really wanted more information, they could have just tortured it out of me very easily, even without telepathy options. Even taking into consideration their good natures as superheroes, for how bitter some of them seemed to be, they could have just locked me in a jail cell to rot until they figured out what to do with me, or kept me in a coma. They had made sure I was safe and comfortable, within reason.
Okay. I just had to do it. I just had to push past the anxiety, and just leap forward, or I would stay paralyzed forever. “Hey,” I called out. “Not sure who’s actively listening, or who is available, but I’m ready to talk.”
The lock beeped within thirty seconds. I started as a skeleton dressed in an open green shirt and brown slacks walked into the room. Ribcage. Real name unknown. Origin never quite figured out. A mysterious undead with the power to telekinetically control bones. Originally a member of the Body Warriors, a group of body-part themed mad science experiment superheroes, the concept of which I hate to admit I ripped off from a friend of mine back in the fourth grade.
“Yo,” he said in a clear, deep voice, despite the complete lack of vocal chords. He motioned for me to follow him. “I was on my way to guard you, but if you’re ready to talk, the boss is ready to listen.”
“Okay then.” I got up and followed. He stayed silent as we walked, even keeping his hands in his pockets as though this were a casual stroll. He led me to the original meeting room, where only Max-Out, Halo, Violet, and Tact were present, sitting around a smaller table. They invited me to sit across from them.
“Alright, Sal. What have you got for us?”
“This is coming second-hand from the Dreammaster, but here it is: you know about the crystal sphere surrounding this reality?”
The others traded a glance, debating telepathically for a moment. The information had not been in the files Tact had let me access.
Max looked back to me with a stern expression. “This Dreammaster. We checked up on him. A Cosmic Guardian of the Mind or some such.”
“In some stories, yes. He was also more of just, like, a Dream Wizard in others. Another character I reused a few times. But most of his canon cast him as a Multiversal-scale deity, guarding the minds of sapients throughout the Power Universe, and a host of other settings from around that time. His other big story connection was with the Dream Wars, which came later, and officially expanded the Dream Realm to all my other settings.”
I motioned to Ribcage. “Power Universe is where you come from. And the Animal.”
Tact made a little grunt. “Interesting. What did you call my world?”
“Centurions Universe.”
“Clever.”
“I’m sorry to say I didn’t get around to you guys much.”
He waved me off. “More than some of the others got, apparently.”
“Yes, we have already established that you see yourself as a failed writer,” said Max irritably. “That’s not important right now.”
“Sorry,” Tact and I said simultaneously.
I continued. “He doesn’t have his Cosmic Guardian levels of power, if that’s your concern. If he did, he’d have done what he could to fix things here. As it is, he’s been reduced to a sort of Dream Phantom. He doesn’t really have any power, except for direct influence over dreams. And, I suppose that power runs deeper than normal telepathy, so it’s what’s allowed him to shield me from you. Because I’m the only person on this world with sufficient mental history, I guess, or maybe just because I’ve seen him in dreams before, I’m the only one he can directly contact right now. But he does have some ability to gather knowledge from people’s minds, still. Or perhaps he can read information form the environment, due to the cosmic energies that formed it. I don’t know, I didn’t grill him on the specifics. The point is, he told me about the crystal sphere, and I used my locator power to confirm it exists.”
Max nodded. “Alright. So how does that help us?”
I let out a breath. “The crystal sphere is composed of the same substance as the crystal I had on Earth. The Dreammaster says it should react to my mind the same way.”
Max blinked. They all traded a glance once again. For several long moments, they deliberated, until Max met my gaze again. His features seemed even more hardened. “What are your thoughts on this, Salvador ?”
I swallowed under the intensity of his gaze. “What are your thoughts?”
“I’m asking you,” he said.
“I want to help. I’m not entirely sure what the best course of action here is, other than I need to get to the crystal to do anything significant. If I got to it, I think I could summon armies that could wipe out the monsters laying seize to this country. Or maybe I could find a way to, I dunno, pull them all away, de-materialize them back into the crystal, like we did with everyone one Earth. I’m not sure how to accomplish that, but I won’t know anything until I can get to it. The thing is, the crystal, according to my locator, is two and a half billion miles away.”
I leaned forward. “Can you get me to it? If you are able to get me there, I’m sure I can do something to save you. Even if…” I hesitated.
“If what?” said Violet softly.
I swallowed again. “I know you have no reason to trust me. I more or less trust you. I want to do the right thing here. If you’re doubtful of trusting me with the crystal’s power, I’ll talk it over with the Dreammaster, get him to take the shield off my mind, and you telepaths can do whatever you need to, to ensure I don’t fuck this all up.”
The others telepathically deliberated again, but I could see Max’s features soften slightly, and the others relax a bit more. “I don’t think that’ll be necessary, Sal,” said Max. “But I wouldn’t rule it out. You understand, this is going straight to the top.”
“What do you mean?” I said, a little confused.
“You know we’re a city-scale branch. Frankly, what you’re offering to us is astronomical, and way beyond our pay grade. We’re going to get in touch with the other branches, and figure out which of them are going to be the ones to handle this. You’re going to need an army of our highest-powered members to get you there, and none of us are in that weight class.”
I nodded. “Alright. Thank you. Anything else?”
Max gave me a long look, then glanced down to the Zero Metal cuff, before meeting my gaze again. “I’m not going to lie. There’s a non-zero chance they’re going to order us to kill you. And if we refuse, they’ll send someone to come do it themselves.”
I nodded. Even for all I was their miracle chance. Even for all I said I’d be willing to let them use me like a puppet for the greater good. There was always the risk I would change my mind and fuck them over. The telepaths had scoured my brain. They knew my every impulse, for good and for bad. Like any real world human, my mind was not so simple and direct as most comic book and cartoon characters. And no matter how much he sincerely meant it at the time, it would be as good as mass-suicide to trust the fate of the world to someone who could relapse into suicidal depression and nihilistic drives at a crucial moment.
“Guess I gotta keep this on for now, then?” I said, tapping the ZM cuff.
“Afraid so,” said Violet. “And we would like you to stay in your wing until we have this all hashed out, alright?”
“Understood.” I let out a long breath, then glanced them over. “Anything else?”
Max shook his head. “No. You can go.”
I stood and walked out.
Violet decided to follow me this time, but waited until we were back out in the hall to speak up. “You’ll still be under strict observation via the cameras, but I think we can ease off on suicide watch. Most of us are working right now, but if you still want some company, a couple of the others can be available.”
“That… um… I don’t know. I guess I could use the distraction. Then again, I’m not sure I want to be in a room with someone who might kill me at any moment.”
Violet frowned. “Sal, none of us want to do that. I promise you that. And none of the other heroes will want to, either.”
“And yet, they’ll do it for the greater good.”
“It’s…” she shook her head. “The leaders of the Centurions Network are some of the most heroic members of the superheroes I’ve yet met. Despite everything, they still believe we can take the better path to survival. So I actually highly doubt they will actually try to have you killed. At the very worst, I imagine they’d find a way to quarantine you somewhere safe. But there’s a higher chance they’ll just offer you a job as a consultant. Even for all the information and resources we now have, who knows? Your locator power could still be a great boon.”
“I will choose to believe that,” I said, as much for my own sake as hers.
“Good,” she said. After a pause, she said. “Sorry about Jennifer.”
“It’s fine,” I said. “Wasn’t my worst experience with a pushy woman.”
“I suppose so.” She stayed silent from there, until we reached my door. The electronic lock beeped again. “You going to be alright on your own?”
“Sure. I’ll ring up room service later if I need to.”
“Actually,” came another voice, “I’d like a few moments of your time, Sal.”
I jumped as I turned to see the Amazing Animal had come up behind us in total silence. I shared a glance with Violet, who frowned slightly. I looked back to the Animal, who seemed to be making an effort to scowl slightly less at me.
“Uh… sure…” I said. “Long as you don’t kill me.”
“Not before we talk.”
Violet stepped forward. “Alex…”
“I’m not going to do anything,” he said, waving her off. “Something’s just been bugging me a lot is all.”
Violet glanced towards me, but I nodded and the electronic lock beeped, letting me open the door. I waved him in after me. “Let’s talk, then.”
2.20 – Plot Holes
The Animal pulled back his panther mask as he stepped inside, revealing a stern faced young man with sandy-brown hair. Despite being in his early thirties by now, he looked barely older than 19 without the mask. His healing factor kept him in peak health, and slowed his aging by quite a bit, but the look in his eyes, and the way he carried himself betrayed any notion that he was “young”.
He came around to sit on the chair next to the couch, and I sat on the chair opposite. He crossed his arms and continued to give me the hard look, his gaze much more intense now that his eyes weren’t covered by the lenses of his mask.
I forced back my nervousness. “How can I help you, Alex?”
He continued his intense stare for a moment, but I didn’t back down from it. “I’ve been turning it over in my mind since I saw you. What it must mean.”
“What?”
He motioned to me. “What do you mean, what? You wrote our stories. You wrote us as friends and long-time teammates. You telling me it’s a total coincidence you look just like him?”
It suddenly clicked, and I could have kicked myself for not thinking of it before. Just another example of being too self-absorbed and short-sighted to be fully cognizant of my situation. Though to be fair, I had had a lot to process, too many things to keep track of at once, nevermind being on the knife’s edge of anxiety the whole time.
“Ah. Yes. That.” I shook my head and couldn’t help but make an amused little scoff. “Wow. To be honest, I’m surprised you didn’t say anything before.”
“I almost did when you walked into the meeting room. I don’t think anyone else even noticed, but I don’t think any of the others actually saw him outside of his costume. I thought you were a shape-shifter about to pull a fast one on us.” He motioned to me again. “You look just like him, and your voice is basically the same. But you don’t smell like him. Or act like him. Or talk like him. And then you claimed to be someone else anyway, and I could only assume it was a coincidence. But if you really are our author, then it isn’t just a passing similarity, is it?”
I nodded. I know exactly who he was referring to. “Ben, Hot-Head, he was something of a self-insert character. I made him up as a kid, a little joke on how I had bright red hair, and I’d wear my jacket like a cape during recess.” I chuckled. “Actually, I can’t even take full credit for that. Another kid in class doodled me with my jacket-cape and having actual fire hair. I iterated on the joke to make a superhero character based on that. So, I gave him my look, and yeah, when I played superheroes, I liked to pretend I was him.” I shrugged. “Then I grew up. I kept Hot-Head as a character in my superhero universe, and he developed into his own person, and I stopped self-inserting. But I kept the look, because why not?”
Animal frowned in thought as he leaned back in his seat. “And Kat?”
I felt a pang in my chest, stronger than I expected. That was one character I had been avoiding thinking about. “What about her?”
“She was Ben’s girlfriend. Was she based on someone?”
I made an amused grunt. “In a way. Around the same time I made Hot-Head, I came up with the name Catgirl. Didn’t really have an idea for the character, just a name and a vague idea of her appearance. But shortly after that, I had a dream where I was being attacked by a group of men who wanted to kidnap me to weaponize my imagination. Like they had a machine that would bring my characters to life under their control. But a good-guy scientist beat them to the punch. He rescued me, then used the same type of machine to do the same thing. He brought some characters of mine to life to be my body guards, to fight off the guys trying to kidnap me. Kat was one of them.
“After that, Kat appeared in a few more of my dreams, either to protect me from monsters or to hang out on a journey. I liked to imagine she was actually another person out there, whom I was meeting in a shared dream. I didn’t really believe it, of course, but it was a nice thought. But that’s where Kat came from. She was my dream guardian, Ben was my superhero self, it seemed natural to pair them together.”
“I see.” He paused in thought for a moment, then made a little nod. “Kind of romantic, I’ll give you that. And me?”
I ran my fingers through my hair and let out a sigh. “Boy, we’re gunna be here all week if you want to know the source for every single one of you.”
“I’m just curious how you got the ideas for us.”
“Superhero comics.”
“You weren’t friends with an Alex in your world?”
“I was friends with an Alex in High School, but you weren’t him. I made you up before I got to know him. Aside from one project in particular, I really don’t pull inspiration from people I know. Cartoons, comics, anime, the vast majority of my characters are more directly inspired by media. You, in particular, are sort of a jumble of three different comic book characters: Batman, Spider-Man, and Wolverine. Though I guess you’re mostly based in Spider-Man.”
“Never heard of them.”
“That’s because I didn’t do fan-fiction. I ripped off a ton of existing ideas when I was younger, but I didn’t literally take pre-existing characters and try to integrate them into my own stuff. And once I got older, I made a hard point to not so blatantly rip ideas off. I like to think that worked out for the best. A lot of the rip-off characters didn’t even turn out to resemble any of their inspirations anyway, but I didn’t really do much with any of them. I would do, like, one adventure, and then they’d just get shuffled off into the backlog of the setting.” I shrugged. “But anyway, I didn’t even do that thing were I put existing superhero comics as comic books in my worlds. At least I don’t think I did. Or if I did, it was throwaway lines in more recent works, to establish that the setting was real-world Earth.”
“Hmm…”
We were silent for a while. I felt pretty on edge around him, given the attitude he gave me, but I also couldn’t blame him for it. The Animal had originally had a more friendly personality, but the amount of crap I’d run him through changed him into a more reserved, brooding type. And that was before he got stuck for five years in this crapsack jumble-world.
“Anything else?” I said.
He took another long moment to think. “I don’t know. I feel like there’s a lot I want to say to you, to ask you about, but I think all of it just comes back to you being an author, doesn’t it? You said it before. Your own life was boring and mediocre, and you escaped into stories to liven it up. You wanted to write your own stuff, so you did, and it was naturally going to be dramatic and violent, just like the comics you read. What more to it is there?”
He shrugged. “Part of me wants to ask ‘were we ever going to make it?’ As in, back in my home world, did you ever have happy endings planned for us? But it wouldn’t have mattered, would it? Stories need conflict. To keep writing us, the world always had to be in some kind of peril, wouldn’t it? So even if you gave us a happily ever after, it’d all get undone eventually, wouldn’t?”
“Hate to break it to you, but that’s all of human history,” I said. “Countries rise and fall, there’s always some war going on somewhere, economic disparity creates crime no matter what part of the world you’re in, illnesses and accidents and natural disasters wreck people’s lives no matter how well off their living circumstances might otherwise be. I never had an ending in mind for the Power Universe, as such. It was a multi-title superhero project with a line of stories set in the future as well as your present. I guess I can say that your era of superheroes did bring about a time of peace to the world, of technological advancement, so you can take heart in that. But yes, new threats eventually rose again, and new heroes, or long-lived returning heroes, got back into the fray, and the whole thing started up again for the stories set in the future.”
He nodded. “Makes sense, I guess.”
We were silent for a bit more. “So… Hot-Head…”
“You saw the obituary list?”
“I did.”
“He went down swinging, for what it’s worth. Took down an entire Mutronian platoon.”
“Good to know.”
“And Kat?”
He shrugged. “No one’s seen her for a year. After Ben died, she immediately quit the team and ran off. No one’s seen her since. We could find her for you, if you wanted.”
I allowed myself a few moments of fanciful consideration before I let my better judgment take over. “Better not. Maybe it’s cowardly or stupid of me, but there’s a temptation there I don’t want to face.”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Temptation?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know how to say it. She’d almost be like an ex I broke up with way back in High School. There was a time when she was my literal dream girl, my ideal fantasy woman, and that time was decades ago, and we’re both different people. And also, she was meant for Ben, not me. And she had him. And now he’s dead, and god only knows what she’s been up to, and how she’d react to me. But you know how it is. You never forget your first love.”
I sighed. “Weird to consider my ‘first love’ was a figment of my imagination, but my dream experiences have always felt pretty vivid. It really was like meeting another person, and I was smitten back then. But that was a long time ago.”
“Hmm. What about Jule? What was her deal?”
I shrugged. “By the time I came up with Jule, I definitely did not think of Hot-Head as directly representing myself, and I didn’t think of Kat as my dream girl anymore. But, I’d be lying if there wasn’t some vicarious fantasizing there. So, sure, give them a kid, why not? And because it’s superhero comics, have that kid have a wacky fantastical origin, like being from the future and coming back as a teen, or having her be genetically engineered or whatever, so you can skip all the boring ‘raising a kid’ part of the storyline, and have her be a functional young adult so she could be a superhero alongside her parents.”
I made a dismissive motion of my hand. “Sloppy Saturday morning cartoon writing.” I hesitated a moment, and said, “Still, she wasn’t on the obituary.”
“She’s stationed with the new Intrepid in Cyrene City
I thought it over for a moment. “I dunno. She’s not really any different than the rest of you, all things considered. You’re all my kids, really.”
“You ever have any real kids?”
“No. And I wouldn’t have named them Jule, even if I had miraculously gotten a girlfriend named Kat.”
His expression didn’t change, but he gave a little exhalation that might have been the hint of a chuckle. Some more moments of silence passed, before he opened his mouth, hesitated for a moment, then said, “Hot-Head wasn’t the only one I’ve met who looked like you.”
I tried to think back. There was one crossover story I did between the New Force (Hot-Head and the Animal’s original team), and a group called S.T.A.R. Corps. “Speedmonger?”
He nodded. “Guy in a silver suit, from another dimension. He and his team met us once, when they ended up in our world. We fought them for a minute, until we figured out what was going on. Speedmonger looked the same as Hot-Head. They even talked about how they might be dopplegangers. Had the same civilian name, too.”
I nodded. “S.TA.R. Corps was… well, there’s a whole lecture of backstory there, but basically, I had a dream one night about my friends and I as superheroes, and I made a whole superhero series based around it. In that case, I cast myself as Speedmonger because, well, that’s who I was in the dream.”
He nodded. “Ah. Makes sense.” He looked at me closely, his gaze looking more studious than stern. “There’s someone else, too, though. Ben once told me Speedmonger wasn’t the first doppelganger of his he ran into.”
“If you mean Cold Front, that was a whole Dark Mirror Universe trope thing, where you make a universe where evil opposite versions of the heroes exist. Lot of Power Universe heroes had doppelgangers there.”
He made that almost-laugh again. “Actually, not who I was thinking of, but yeah, that makes sense, too. But I mean this dream-wizard guy named Imaginary.”
I let out a breath, leaning back in my chair as I looked to the side. “Wow. That’s right. I almost forgot about him.”
“And what was his deal?”
I looked back to the Animal as I made a non-committal gesture. “He was a character from one of my fantasy world hero groups. I guess he was technically my first real self-insert character, but I was so young when I created him, it’s hard to say I even had much of a personality to impose onto the guy. But he looked like me, because even as a little kid, I had this fascination with the interaction between the real and the imaginary. Like, I knew I had a big imagination, already making worlds and characters hand over fist from a young age, and sometimes imagining myself meeting my characters. Not like an imaginary friend thing, I mean, even back then, I was thinking up stories about getting thrown into my own worlds.
“Imaginary, the dream-wizard, he was that idea made into a character, I guess. Like, I didn’t really think of him as myself directly, but kind of like with Hot-Head, it was more of a ‘what would I be like if I’d been born as a superhuman in this world’, or something like that. Imaginary had a gimmick about being able to bring his imagination to life in the form of summoned creatures and the ability to animate inanimate objects.”
Then I grinned a bit as one memory connected to another. “Of course, then I rebooted him as some kind of cosmic dream spirit in the Tabitha Cain stories, and there he became a direct reference to myself. He had this theme of having a hard time focusing on reality, and if he didn’t have a purpose to pursue, he’d lose his sense of self and dissolve into the Dream Realm until something beckoned him back into the Material Realm. It sort of mirrored the idea of disappearing into my own head so deeply, I literally would go insane and end up in the nut house. Not that I actually believed that would happen, but, you know, it was an allegory for not being able to get out of my own head, I guess. Maybe part of me did actually worry about that at the time, that I’d lose my mind getting too caught up in my own imagination.”
The Animal just looked at me as I went on, until I realized the intensity of his gaze once more. I paused and cocked an eyebrow at him. “What?”
He spoke calmly, in a measured tone. “Salvador , do you realize what you’re saying?”
I frowned. “What do you mean?”
The Animal gave me a moment to figure it out, but I just stared at him, confused. “Sal. Think about it. This whole impossible situation. Your fascination with meeting your own characters. These self-inserts.”
He waited another moment. I don’t know if it was genuine obliviousness on my part, or some part of me not wanting to figure it out. But he gave me the time, and eventually, it clicked. I was already sunk back into my chair, but I somehow managed to sag more into it as the revelation dawned on me.
“Oh hell,” I muttered.
“It’s just a thought,” he said.
I shook my head. “No. No, I… I don’t write myself this way… I don’t…”
The Animal didn’t say anything, just let it all settle into place. I was going to say, “I always give my self-inserts powers”, but I had literally just learned Galean Combat Magic, and this locator ability had been with me from the start. I was going to say, “I always put my self-inserts in as a native of the world in their stories”, except the way I appeared in this world would technically qualify, as I generated into the world just like everyone else. Also, that was not entirely true. I’d fantasized plenty of story scenarios where I was just myself, somehow meeting my characters when they crossed dimensions.
Such a scenario really wasn’t possible, was it? Not in my reality. My world still didn’t have magic and psychics and cosmic forces that could bend reality to people’s whims, and mysterious crystals that brought people’s imaginary characters to life. That sort of thing only happened in stories. In my own stories. Even the Dreammaster’s explanation of how all this could be possible, of extra-dimensional physics somehow generating fantastical worlds from people’s heads, in exactly the way I had imaged for some of my other settings? Bullshit I had been tapping into some sort of “universal subconscious.”
This was just another story. I was just another self-insert character. This was all just another fleeting fantasy of mine. A brutally self-deprecating one, given the wreck I had been up until now, but even that was just an imaginative indulgence in the end, wasn’t it?
I tried to think back. Around the time the crystal hit me, I had been feeling absolutely shitty about my lack of writing productivity. My whole time here, I’d been shitting on myself for being a failure of a writer. But Violet and the Dreammaster had pointed it out, if indirectly. I’d been eating myself up with guilt over my lack of writing, but whether I wrote them or not, my characters lived their lives in my head, independent of whether I even told their stories to anyone else. My shitty feelings over my lack of writing wasn’t about guilt over failing my characters, it was despair at my lack of fulfillment, at my lack of self-actualization. And what did I do when my failures brought me into the pits of depression?
I withdrew. I fantasized. I went into my own head and tried to work things out. And in moments of sheer desperation to accomplish something, I forced myself to write. Maybe this time, instead of trying to brainstorm a new series with new characters, or developing yet another gimmick for a setting or power system, I decided to explore one of my oldest self-indulgent fantasies. It just made too much goddamned sense to not be the answer, staring me right in the face this whole time.
I looked up to the Amazing Animal, just one of the thousands of fellow figments flickering through my psyche. I’m not sure what expression I was giving off, but his own face became a mask of concern.
“Salvador ?”
I stood and let out a long breath. There was one quick way to solve this whole ridiculous situation. “Alex. If it’s not too much trouble, I’d like you to kill me.”
He frowned, and stood as well. We were actually about the same height, but his superheroic stature and dramatic costume definitely made him seem bigger. But I wasn’t intimidated this time. “What brought this on?”
“I have a hunch. Please. Take your claws, pop them through my skull.” I put my fist up against my eyes. “Like this.” I then swiped my fist across my neck. “Or cut my head off. However you think is fastest.”
“It was just a thought, Sal. Even if it’s true, what is killing you going to actually solve?”
“It will force our author to bring this story to an end. Or at the very least, it will force him to move on to the next step.”
“And what if it doesn’t?”
I put my hand on Alex’s shoulder, and he actually flinched. “Animal. All this nonsense about flying off to the edge of the world and doing god knows what with the crystal, I have the feeling it isn’t going to happen. Knowing myself as an author, knowing the traps and pitfalls I get caught up in when I try to write, especially something as grand as an epic quest to save the universe, one of two things are going to happen with this story. Either I never actually get it done, and I leave all of us, all of you, in the inescapable limbo of an incomplete story. Or I pull some bullshit maneuver to rush out an ending just to get it all over with. And I gotta tell you, I would rather at least get an ending, then leave this trainwreck dangling forever. And right now, the best thing I can think of is to force our author into a deus ex machina.”
He looked frozen with pained indecision for a moment. Then he closed his eyes, and for several long seconds, he contemplated. I could guess he was doing his due diligence, psychically contacting his teammates and deliberating, and they in turn deliberated with their superiors. Finally he opened his eyes, looking calmer, but still troubled.
“Alright, Sal. We’re going to trust you with this.” He took a step back and held out his right arm, prepped to swing. From his gauntlet, a set of three two-foot-long blades extended. I tried to keep my eyes open to face my death, but I flinched and shut my eyes as soon as his arm moved. He was fast, though, and by the time my lids fully shut, my head was already severed.
ARC THREE: THE FINAL STORY OF SHARKERBOB
“Would you believe it took me two years to think of that solution?”
Sharkerbob opened his eyes again. He was in a blank white expanse, with only a thin grey line denoting a horizon, and a pale shadow at his feet indicating his own placement on an otherwise featureless ground. Before him were two office chairs, just like he used to own in his apartment, although these models looked new, and decidedly not like they were about to fall over if he leaned too far back.
In one of the seats, he saw himself.
Hi. My name is Salvador Roberts. I’m the “real one”. The “Sal” you’ve been following throughout SalQuest is who I’ll be calling Sharkerbob, because that’s the name I use online to post my genre fiction. You can call me SalRob, just to distinguish us better. And we’ll be switching back to third person just so it’s easier to keep track, starting right now.
SalRob motioned to the empty seat. Sharkerbob scowled and rolled his eyes, but took the invitation anyway. “So,” he said as he plopped down into the chair. “What the fuck was all that about?”
SalRob shrugged. “I hate myself and my lack of ability. You were my attempt to process that. Writing therapy, as a friend called it.”
Sharkerbob’s scowl maintained as he gave his author a once-over. The man was fat, bald, clearly in just as bad, if not worse, shape than he’d been when Sharkerbob had “died” and ended up in the Endless Frontier.
“So what was the plan, then? Was there one?”
SalRob made a dismissive wave, “Oh, you know how it is. Big, grand idea. Haphazard, sloppy execution. I had the idea that it was going to be this big, epic, deep quest of self-analysis and self-indulgent nostalgia, hung on an adventure to save reality and maybe finally fucking get over myself. I had a whole itinerary and a companion team planned out for you.
“But things changed. I took too long and lost steam. I didn’t write any of it. Frankly, I didn’t want to. It was too goddamned depressing, because the whole affair was going to be about a bunch of miserable people being miserable about each other. And it was going to end with you discovering a dark, terrible secret that would turn you against the world of your creations.
“Spoiler alert: the Endless Frontier was going to turn out to have been formed from the Earth itself having been sucked into the explosion of the crystal, its mass being converted into the physical foundation of the Frontier. You were going to lose your goddamned mind over it and go on a quest to annihilate everything, and try to use the crystal to restore the Earth. I wasn’t entirely sure how it was going to play out, but eventually you’d kill everyone and destroy the Endless Frontier. From there, you’d either confirm that the Earth couldn’t be saved, and you’d just, I dunno, let yourself fade away as punishment. Or you would manage to restore the Earth, and then you’d re-appear in the field were you got shot, along with those militia men. Then you were going to grab one of their guns and blow your own head off.”
Sharkerbob swallowed. “Jesus, man. You’re a fucking psycho, you know that? Can’t actually kill yourself for real, so you throw a self-insert into a suicidal depression story? How fucking bad off are you?”
“You know how bad it can get.” SalRob let out a breath and looked up into the pale sky for a bit. “I actually refused to write the story for nearly three years. It was that gutting to even try and face that level of mental toxicity.” He looked back to Sharkerbob. “Well, actually, that’s not wholly true. The first part of this project, I wrote a short story called the Final Story of Salvador Roberts. That was the whole affair of you finding the crystal on Earth, right up to you getting shot. I intended it as a self-contained one-shot, but left something of a writer’s window at the very end as, surprise, surprise, a possible hook for a new setting origin. I even came up with several ideas it could have been tied to. But SalQuest, that’s what I called your time in the Endless Frontier, that came to me a year or so later, but like I said, I resisted the urge to do it.”
“So how long as has it been?”
“I wrote Final Story in 2017. I fucked around with SalQuest seriously as an idea probably in early 2019, but like I said, I put it off. Too depressing. Plus, as usual, despite my planning, I couldn’t work things out in my head. Had a few false starts, but none of it went very far. But then, late 2021, I sat down and just start pumping out chapters, just for lack of anything else to write at the time. I somehow got almost a short novel’s worth of meandering fluff about you landing in the Frontier and meeting Cavalry. And then I stopped, because I intended to go back and do a rewrite. And of course, nothing worked out. Then, in late 2022, I wrote a few more chapters, continuing where I’d left off in Draft One, instead of working on the rewrite. And now, it’s January 2023, and I just added a few more chapters continuing from that, because I still couldn’t figure out the rewrite. But this is the third time in a row I’ve written you into a corner, and so I was planning on absolutely forcing a stop this time, and going hard on actually doing the rewrite for real this time. But… well…”
“But you still can’t make it work.” Sharkerbob scoffed. “Five fucking years, and you still couldn’t get it done? Sounds about right.”
“If it helps, I did keep writing other things. Not as much as I should have, but that’s always been the case. A lot of things still didn’t work out. I’m still so unbelievably jaded, it’s hard to even get started thinking about making new things anymore. But I will say this, I got a whole web novel written, an honest-to-god actual superhero adventure, and it’s got it’s flaws, but I think it’s probably one of my best works to date. And, well, I kept writing the erotica. I’m recently retired from that now, but it turned into this whole huge mess of stories and lore.
“Actually, on that note, this whole Final Story/SalQuest thing being writing therapy? One of the things I wrote ended up featuring my erotica pen name being self-inserted into this whole meta-fictional storyline I ended up doing with one of my series. I ended up working out some of my writer’s angst with that project as much as with you, but without nearly as much suicidal self-flagellation.”
Sharkerbob blinked. SalRob was rambling on, as the man was want to do, and all he could do was sit and listen and try to keep up. He really had nothing to add to the conversation, other than, “You made another self-insert story about facing your creations?”
SalRob made a humorless smile. “I’ll invite him in.” He waved to the side, and suddenly, a swirling vortex of energy appeared, opening to a scene of a nighttime view of a sleepy mountain town. Through the portal emerged yet another red-haired young man, wearing travelers clothes and a cloak, looking the spitting image of Sharkerbob, or more accurately, of SalRob from the prime of his youth.
The man glanced to Sharkerbob, who stared dumbly back at him, then to SalRob, who just gave him an almost apologetic smile, then back to Sharkerbob.
“I’m sure you’re familiar with Salamando,” said SalRob, motioning to the new arrival. “Recently retired, as I said.” He paused. “Or do you go by Wander officially now?”
Salamando sighed, and pinched the bridge of his nose. “You did it to yourself again, didn’t you?”
“You remember Final Story?” said SalRob. “SalQuest?”
Salamando scowled at him. “I thought you swore off continuing that,” he said. “It was too depressing, remember?”
SalRob shrugged. “What can I say? I’m a masochist.”
Salamando motioned to the side, and another chair popped into existence, dropping out of another portal. He sat down in with an exasperated sigh. “You’re a piece of shit is what you are.” Salamando turned to Sharkerbob. “Alright. Let’s hear it. What did he put you through? Did he make you blow up the world? Did you meet Tabitha yet?”
“Uh…” Sharkerbob glanced to SalRob, then back to Salamando. “No… Honestly, I barely got to do anything. I was there for maybe a few days, and I spent most of that time locked up in Cavalry’s base.”
Salamando cocked an eyebrow at SalRob. “Are you fucking serious? You didn’t even try to do the adventure?”
SalRob threw up his hands. “Of course I fucking tried! But you remember what a trainwreck of an idea it was before you split off. I mapped out plans and character profiles and I really tried to come up with something that would actually work, but it went no where, until I finally just sat down and started writing chapters off the cuff.”
“So you pantsed it, like you did with me?”
“Pretty much. Seems to be the only way I can write anything, anymore.”
Salamando rolled his eyes and made a disgusted scoff. “You should have just dropped it and let it die, like you do everything else.”
SalRob glared back. “Fuck you, man. You know what I’ve accomplished since Final Story.”
“Yeah, you did Graven. Congratulations. You managed one web novel which you rushed the ending to because you bit off way more than you could chew with that concept, then you just fell back to doing porn for another three years.”
SalRob grinned ruefully. “Are you complaining, Mr. Smut Penname? If I hadn’t, you wouldn’t have gotten to eventually frolic in your own little porno-adventure paradise with a cosmic Kat.”
Sharkerbob’s eyebrows raised at that, giving Salamando a curious look, but he didn’t interrupt.
Salamando’s expression cooled to something like a half-glower. “Well, I’m grateful you gave me a nice send off. I thank you for that, and I mean it. But part of you doing that was to help you actually move the fuck on from your issues, not continue to wallow in them.” Salamando pointed to Sharkerbob. “How many times are you going to do this? How many fragments of yourself are you going to put through hell because you can never manage to actually pull the damn trigger?”
Sharkerbob finally cut in making a back-off gesture. “Woah, okay, cool it a second, will ya?” He glanced to Salamando. “Cripes, how bad off are you that this is how our erotica self ended up?”
Salamando waved him off. “Sorry. I’m sorry. I thought I’d gotten over all this myself. I had my own little psychotherapy sessions back in my own world, and I’ve been living pretty well since. I just… seeing him again,” he waved to SalRob, “I’m getting flashbacks.”
“I can imagine,” muttered Sharkerbob.
Salamando forced himself calm, closing his eyes and taking a long breath, before turning to look at Sharkerbob with a more sympathetic expression. “So how are you? Seriously? If you’ve really only experienced a few days since Final Story, you must still be pretty deep in the shit.”
SalRob opened his mouth to say something, but without looking at him, Salamando jabbed a finger at his author. “Shut the fuck up.”
Sharkerbob glanced to SalRob, but their author made a point to lean back and put his hands up in a resigning gesture, keeping his lips shut. He looked back to Salamando. “I was… I was pretty messed up. Anxious and depressed and constantly on the verge of a freak out. But… I dunno. The psychics there helped tamp that stuff down somewhat. But, really, as soon as it clicked what was actually happening, that I’m another self-insert character, I just… honestly, I don’t know what to think. Still freaked out? But kind of detached, since now I realize all the shit I’ve been feeling is just us processing again.”
Salamando nodded. “Alright. Okay. We can work with that.”
“Can we?”
“I was split off to be part of the Omnyverse. It’s—” He paused, then blinked, and let out a little sardonic grunt of a laugh. “Oh, that’s right. You don’t know what an Omny is yet.”
“Omny ?” Sharkerbob parsed the word, running it back through his mind. “That sounds generically cosmic.”
Salamando made a sardonic smirk. “Oh, its a little more complicated than it sounds, trust me.”
Sharkerbob quirked an eyebrow at him. “Did I hear it right, something about a Cosmic Kat?”
Salamando’s smirk became a rueful grin. “Boy, this is going to take some explaining.” He glanced off to the side, towards some nebulous idea of a fourth wall. “And sorry, readers, but I’m not going to do it here.” Looking back to Sharkerbob, he said, “Suffice to say you’re ideas about supernatural femdom underwent some significant power creep.”
Sharkerbob looked to SalRob a little taken aback. “Okay, for real, how out of ideas are you by now?”
SalRob scowled back. “Hey, it may have been a steaming pile of cringe, but the Omnys got me out of a writing funk worse than any you’ve ever experienced. You think you had it bad in Final Story? You haven’t seen shit.”
“Unfortunately, he’s right,” said Salamando. He turned back to his author. “But as you said, the Omnys got you out of that rut. So crawling back into it in order to work on this shit show of a story, it’s a slap in the face to all of us. It’s been too damn long by now. The moment’s passed, you hashed out a big chunk of your issues with me, so why are you reverting back and putting him through all your bullshit again?”
He shook his head and glared at his creator with renewed aggravation. “Your heart isn’t even in it anymore, is it? Maybe when you did that first big set of chapters of SalQuest, okay, maybe then you were in the right headspace for it, and it was important you got them out of you. You were doing the Omny series then, too, so fair enough, that’s the headspace you were in. But I’ve read your continuations. You’re just grasping at straws at this point.”
SalRob another exasperated sigh and shrugged. “I don’t have anything else, okay? I retired the erotica. None of my other attempts at genre writing after Graven ever worked out. I got back into drawing again, finally, and it’s been a new direction for my creative energies. Ostensibly, I want to make comics again someday, but… I got nothin’. I’m worse than ever at coming up with narratives I actually care to write about. I can still make new characters, but I’m too jaded with all the past failures to do anything with them. I can’t commit to anything, which was always a problem before, but now it’s worse than ever. I can’t focus anymore. I’ve got… my real life’s not been working out too well. I just…”
He paused for a few moments, while his avatars just waited for him to continue, Salamando still glaring, Sharkerbob looking like he just had no idea what to say. Finally, SalRob continued. “Lately, since the Omnys, since coming back to SalRob, meta-fictional stuff seems to be all I got left going for me, and, I just… you know, Final Story/SalQuest, it was the last big story I felt had any juice left. It was an intimate piece of art, it ostensibly had some themes I could actually work on, I was working with a huge backlog of concepts I could cherry pick for inclusion as I wanted, it had the potential to be at least another long form project. But, in the end, I bull rushed through it like I always do with everything.
“I couldn’t plan it out, but I suck at improvisational stories, too, because I can’t come up with engaging complexity to my plots. SalQuest ended up with two major conflicts: Sharkerbob’s personal crisis, which, let’s be real, he just needed a therapy session and some good company to help him through it, like Salamando got. I mean, I’m not a fucking teenager, I wasn’t going to have him go through a whole coming of age story, where all the conflicts he goes through, reflect his own flaws he has to figure out for the very first time, and learn to grow to be a better person and shed the naiveté of youth or whatever. That’s boring and predictable and rote, and doesn’t fit the issues I was trying to tackle, which was simply why I failed at being a writer.
“But as a consequence, the story then becomes this self-indulgent misery fest, where Sharkerbob just talks his way through his issues, constantly beating up on himself for feeling stupid and useless until, I guess, eventually, circumstances force him to snap out of it and step up. And once that’s done, what’s the other threat? The Enemy Armies. And all the superheroes and adventurers and whatever, they’re all a unified front against those Armies. The way the Endless Frontier got set up, the world fragments never did the political faction war bullshit, so there’s not ten novels worth of side quests and political finagling to get the various superhero and adventurer organizations to put aside their differences and work together for the common good. They were already inclined to work together against a common threat. I don’t feel like crowbarring that kind of faction war complication in ,and I’ve never been good writing that kind of stuff in the first place.
“So that means that the external conflict, defeating the Enemy Armies? What stops the Centurions from just rushing Sharkerbob to the crystal and solving the problem? Nothing. Nothing at all, except, I dunno, maybe the space ship they take to get there gets blown up part way along the trip, and then the story becomes a long, drawn out slog of a survival battle novel or whatever, and I can’t give enough of a shit to actually write that stuff.
“So I’ve been trying and trying and trying to brainstorm ways to make it all work out, trying to come up with a different set-up for the world, trying to make everything more robust and interesting, but I can’t settle on anything. I’m already stuck on certain things I established in this version, but I want to change it, but I don’t, but I do, but I don’t, but I do, and then I keep suddenly remembering certain details I should have included from the beginning, like the Dreammaster, or just now, Animal recognizing Sharkerbob looks like Hot-Head, and—”
“Alright, we get it,” said Sharkerbob. He shook his head and looked to Salamando. “It never gets better, does it? We’re going to be like this forever, aren’t we?”
“Well, you and I don’t have to be,” said Salamando motioning between them. “I gave it up. It was incredibly hard, but I learned to do other things. And now, if I want to do something creative, I do it, and I don’t beat myself up over not doing it.”
“It also sounds like you have a pretty supportive living situation to enable that,” said Sharkerbob.
“Yeah, I do. I won’t deny I’m very fortunate that way. You want in?” Salamando looked to SalRob. “I’m assuming, since we’re all having this conversation, that you’re done with him? If so, you mind if I take him to the Omnyverse with me?”
Sharkerbob glanced between Salamando and SalRob. SalRob leaned back in his chair and looked to the sky again, mulling it over. Sharkerbob knew that look on his face, knew the gears were starting to spiral away in his head.
Sharkerbob decided to cut in before the spirals got too big again. “Gunna be honest, man. I can’t really stop you from continuing to try with me, but from where I’m standing, it looks like my story has already served its purpose for you. What do you really gain from dragging it out until it becomes just another corpse in your backlog?”
SalRob was silent for a few more moments, before he made another little shrug. “I don’t know. Nothing, I guess. I feel like it’s all I got left. But maybe it is just another shackle keeping me from moving on.”
Sharkerbob hesitated a moment, before saying what needed to be said. “Maybe it’s time I retire, too.”
SalRob winced, but as much as it pained him to admit it, there was a certain truth to what his own self-insert avatar was saying. He looked Sharkerbob in the eye and said, “Maybe.”
Salamando spoke up again. “Look, man. No one’s saying you can’t still make stuff. Go be an artist for a while. Find something else to write about, some other subject matter or medium or whatever. But you have to move past this hang-up over your failed projects. Put an end to this whole era of self-flagellating meta-fiction. You’ve mired yourself, and us, in it enough. Give yourself permission to change.”
“I’ve been trying,” said SalRob, looking back up at the blank sky again.
“Then keep at it.” Salamando stood, and another portal whirled open next to him. He beckoned Sharkerbob to follow him. “Come on, brother. Let’s go get you laid.”
Sharkerbob stood and gave the portal a wary look. “Um… so this Omnyverse…”
“Look, I know you’ve got a lot of shit to process. We’ll work through it. We have all the time in the world to do so. And trust me, you’ll get along just fine with this cast of weirdos.” Salamando paused. “Well. They may take a little getting used to. But I think you’ll manage.”
Sharkerbob offered a slightly hesitant smile. “Alright. Thank you.” He looked back to SalRob before stepping through.
Their author lingered his gaze upwards for a few moments, before looking back to his avatar and giving him a smile. “Go on. You deserve it. I’ll clean up here. Fix the Endless Frontier and all that.”
Sharkerbob frowned a bit. “Does feel pretty anti-climactic.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty much how everything pans out with my work these days.”
“You going to be okay?”
“No. I don’t think I ever will. But it’s not your problem anymore.”
Sharkerbob opened his mouth to say something, but Salamando cut him off with a scowl. “We’re not him anymore. He’s got his own life to live, and he’s got to deal with it himself. We can only leave him to it.”
Sharkerbob nodded. “Yeah. Alright.” And with that, he stepped through Salamando’s portal. Salamando paused before entering, looking back at his author with a cool expression. Then, without saying anything, he turned and stepped through, and the portal winked out of existence.
Salvador Roberts leaned back from his seat, taking his hands off the keyboard. Glancing back over the passage, he couldn’t help but cringe a little, ending this whole story in its beginning stages, and with a self-deprecating conversation with himself to boot. But in the end, that’s what all this had really been. A therapy session. But eventually, the session ends, and you have to actually do something with the lessons learned.
He wasn’t sure what he’d do next. But he knew he’d do something. Author, artist, game designer, whatever the form, he was a creator by nature. He’d find some way or another to vent more ideas out into the world. He had to. It was, after all, how he was written.
END
ARC TWO: MOVE IT ALONG
I turned and pulled off my shirt, going to bed in my shorts and boxers, as was my custom. I closed my eyes and tried to let myself just sink into the tiredness, instead of letting my thoughts start whirling again. I don’t know if I actually managed it on my own, or if Esper did me the favor of lightly nudging me to sleep, but I found myself dropping under easier than expected.
It actually took some cajoling on the Weaponeer’s part to let me do it. Without being able to monitor me telepathically, they really were paranoid about letting me do anything. Max almost refused to let me leave the suite until I came forth with everything on my mind.
Jennifer’s comment lingered a bit as I strode back to my part of the base. All my actual close friends were men, but most of my day to day social interactions had been with women, if only by way of most of my jobs having majority female co-workers and customers. My friends, just due to being scattered across
The Animal pulled back his panther mask as he stepped inside, revealing a stern faced young man with sandy-brown hair. Despite being in his early thirties by now, he looked barely older than 19 without the mask. His healing factor kept him in peak health, and slowed his aging by quite a bit, but the look in his eyes, and the way he carried himself betrayed any notion that he was “young”.
I looked up to the Amazing Animal, just one of the thousands of fellow figments flickering through my psyche. I’m not sure what expression I was giving off, but his own face became a mask of concern.
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