Imaginator - The Final Story of Sharkerbob

Author's Note: This is a significant rewrite of The Final Story of Salvador Roberts, with the major differences occurring in the latter half. I have decided to leave that original version still up, for the sake of comparison. This rewrite also incorporates reinterpretations of a few key moments from SalQuest, which was the first draft of an intended sequel adventure, which ultimately proved impossible for me to work out. Due to several considerations, I have decided it best to remove SalQuest from the archive.

1 – First Person Negative
"Die, demon!"  Akira slashed forward, his enormous sword gleaming in the moonlight.

 

Yuriko frowned and side stepped his thrust easily.  Akira immediately shifted into a backswing, bending gravity to increase the force of impact. Yuriko simply blocked the strike with her forearm.  Her arm's small bracer cracked a bit, but Yuriko herself seemed unfazed.  She glanced at her bracer.

 

"Hmm... cute," she said flatly.  Akira immediately leaped back and prepared another thrust.  He shifted his weight forward, bending gravity once more to increase his pull towards his target.  Yuriko stood there impassively.  The split second he began to shift forward, Yuriko suddenly appeared less than an inch from him. Akira's eyes barely had time to widen before her open palm smashed into his face.  Akira shot straight across the street, slamming through the display window of the store that was there.  Akira managed to maintain his wits enough to make a gravity field which took away his inertia.  So, rather than continue to smash through the building, he simply dropped to the ground.  After a moment, he struggled to his feet, glaring at Yuriko.

 

"All my years of training, and it still amounts to nothing!" he said.  He cursed.  He was holding back.  This was not the time for conservative displays of power.  Obviously the full force of his Elemental Key must be brought forth.  He reached for his sword and blinked when he realized it wasn't with him.

 

Yuriko hefted the enormous blade in her hand.  "This is lovely craftwork," she stated.  With a single hand, she did a few practice swings.  Akira couldn't help but feel slightly intimidated.  The sword literally weighed half a ton.  Akira himself could only wield it due to constantly using his gravity powers to make it light as a feather.  And here, this small woman wielded it with all the effort of a weightlifter wielding a toothpick.  She was indeed an above average demon.

 

Yuriko glanced from the sword to Akira.  She smiled humorlessly.  "Come now, human.  I do believe a fight between you and myself would be pointless.  I have no specific desire to harm you, and though you may wield the Moon Key, I could easily break you in half."  Yuriko casually tossed the sword at Akira.  Akira caught it, wobbling only slightly as he adapted his power to the added weight.  In the split second he was preoccupied with readjusting himself, Yuriko was suddenly less than a foot in front of him again, standing as though she hadn’t moved at all.

 

Akira grimaced as Yuriko leaned forward.  She had to float a few feet off the ground to bring herself eye to eye with him; for a moment, both human and demon suddenly realized the comical perspective of this fight: Akira, the one wielding the 8 foot blade which it would take three men to lift, the one who stood a full two heads taller than his opponent, and at least a foot broader, was being stared down by a small, cute, and seemingly harmless young woman.  Yuriko smiled with a slight giggle. “That said, I do admire your enthusiasm. And the size of your… sword…”

 

…

 

…

 

Oh, for fuck’s sake! Who would even read this crap?

 

Xjdbdbvpb%(^*#ORG#Rfwqbvpdfb!

 

***

 

I gave a long, exasperated sigh as I gave my laptop a baleful stare. I took my hands off the keyboard and sagged back in my chair, staring at the ceiling with an expression not unlike someone who just discovered his car had gotten side-swiped in the middle of the night. I grit my teeth for a moment, bringing both hands to my head to rub the grit from my eyes, letting out a second long sigh.

 

Why was it always so shit? Everything I wrote, just drab and cliché and boring as fuck. For weeks now, I’d been attempting to fulfill the demands of the nagging voice in my head, pestering me constantly to write, write, write, and every day, I stared at a blank screen until I was fuming and had to quit, or I managed to scrape out a few paragraphs, only to feel so fed up and revolted with my own lack of ability, I wanted to throw my laptop through the wall.

 

Why did this still plague me? If I was smart, I would have quit trying to be a writer back when I was twenty and become an accountant. Instead, I’d pissed away my college degree working dead-end retail jobs, while telling myself I was going to put my real focus on writing, and maybe drawing, and maybe some computer programming. For as long as I could remember, telling stories had always been my passion. Except…

 

I hadn’t drawn any comics since I was a child, and what little art skill I’d started to develop back then had rusted away completely over the years.

 

I had made a total of two short games on a cheap game maker program, and quit on the alpha versions of each, never to finish them up.

 

I’d written a few dozen very terrible short stories in my teens and early twenties, then maybe a quarter as many from my twenties to my mid-thirties. After that, I had stalled completely. Forty years old, never published, barely even self-published, unless one counted the little blog that no one, not even my friends, ever looked at.

 

What the hell had I done with myself? Where the fuck did all that time go? For the hundredth, for the thousandth, for the ten thousandth time, I reflected on all the wasted hours of my life spent making up characters and worlds, but never actually figuring out the stories to use them in. All the times I just got so frustrated, I had to quit and cool off with video games and YouTube until a whole day was shot. All the times I realized nothing was going to come together that day, and maybe things would work out the next day after some sleep. Except, of course, they never did.

 

Such habits became an easy trap to fall into, merely exacerbating my situation. Playing video games didn’t help me organize my thoughts, nor did watching videos inspire me. Instead, they just numbed me to my frustration and distracted me from having to think. Giving up and trying again the next day never helped me get a fresh perspective. Sleep temporarily cleared the anger, but the ideas never clicked any better.

 

I knew it was a vicious cycle. Put myself in a situation that I knew gave myself terrible anxiety, then work myself up until my blood pressure was through the roof. Then rely on my digital opiates to calm down. And the next time I tried again, I’d be that much further behind. The few times I had finally managed to write something, I felt like I’d have been better off not bothering, making all my efforts feel all the more futile.

 

And yet, I couldn’t quit. Like some kind of drug addict, I found myself unable to stop thinking about my stories. With no career ambitions, no desire for a family, I had nothing to really do other than waste the days away on entertainment when I wasn’t at work. I wished I could just be one of those normal people who was completely contented to just do my job and enjoy other people’s shows and games in my off time.

 

But no. Every time I tried that, the pressure just built up again. Until every show I watched, every book I read, every comic I read, every game I played, even if I really enjoyed them, it made my gut churn thinking about how I wasn’t making those things myself.

 

So it was back to the keyboard, back to the sketch pad, back to the writing forums to try and churn the ideas in my head. And the older I got, the stronger the barrier grew. My ideas all seemed so well-realized in my head, but when I actually tried to write them, the characters were all too boring and cliché. The only narratives I could come up with were the most rote, generic, filler-tier schlock that even a vapid Saturday morning cartoon show would consider trite. And I could read or watch any number of those from any series at any time, so I had no desire to actually write such episodic drudgery.

 

I kept trying to find ways to change the settings to make them interesting, but it was useless when I had no actual stories to set there. I tried to force myself to just throw characters together into a generic plot and hope some kind of chemistry would emerge between them to make it entertaining. But I had too many characters and settings to choose from, and none of them really ever resonated with me when I tried to work on them.

 

I told myself that I didn’t need to be original, I just needed to find that one spark, that one gimmick, something I hadn’t seen done to death before that would get me hooked, and keep me hooked. But I’d already overexposed myself to the genres I was obsessed with, and could never come up with anything that held my attention long enough to fully develop. I even tried writing different genres, but every time, I just kept falling back to my writing obsession: superheroes and adventurers.

 

I stared at the screen, re-reading the short piece I’d just typed. Who the fuck were these characters? Why did they have generic anime names? Why did the dialogue read like the script for a B-movie? As my eyes skimmed back over the words, I felt the frustration boil up from inside.

 

It was shit. IT WAS ALL SHIT! What the fuck was I doing with my life? Why did I waste my days getting depressed over fucking power fantasy bullshit, instead of getting my life together and finding a real job? Why had the one thing that used to give me joy when I was young become so fucking toxic, that the thought of trying to write a novel or a web series or anything, made me want to drive a screwdriver through my brain? I knew other writers had problems, but Jesus Fucking Christ, surely most of them weren’t like this, were they? Maybe that’s why all the greats ended up turning to drink and blowing their brains out. I was going to end up going down that route, I just knew it, and the saddest part is, I wouldn’t even have a fucking novel published to have made the struggle worth it!

 

I shoved my laptop onto the simple wooden table the served as my desk, slapping it closed. I pushed the table back so I could lower the footrest of my recliner and stand up. I winced and hissed out a curse as a little stab of pain shot through my knee. Fuck, I wouldn’t need to blow my brains out. My own body was falling apart so bad, I’d probably have a heart attack in a few years. Obesity, depression, and shitty hours at dead end jobs had all exacerbated the self-induced stress of my creative failures, leading to very little motivation to regularly take care of myself. Only the gnawing anxiety of my mortality made me half-heartedly try to eat healthy or go for walks sometimes, but it was never enough to keep from backsliding soon after. Now, knowing the last thing I needed was another soda, I had just wound myself up so badly that heavily sweetened carbonation was the only thing that would calm me down before I strangled someone. At least the walk to the corner store would count as exercise, right?

 

I shuffled over to my bedroom to get dressed; I didn’t see much reason to wear more than my boxers when I was alone in my dingy one-bedroom apartment. I pulled on a pair of grey gym shorts and a wrinkly green tee-shirt off my bed. I slipped on some sandals, knowing they wouldn’t be good for my flatfoot condition, but figuring the walk was so short, I could just bull through the pain. I debated putting on some extra deodorant, then shrugged and figured the short trip wouldn’t warrant it. I’d put some on twelve hours ago and hadn’t sweat that much today. Fuck it.

 

Grabbing my wallet and keys from the kitchen counter, I debated grabbing my phone, but noticed it was almost dead. Goddamn it, I’d forgotten to charge it again. Whatever. I’d be back in a few minutes. Fuck it. I plugged it in the socket and went out the door with an aggravated huff.

 

The apartment was on the northernmost end of a six-building complex, on the third floor. The nearest convenience store/gas station was about three blocks away, if I walked along the neighborhood road until it ended, continued onto a business road, and cut across an empty lot. Thankfully, it was already eleven at night, and in this town, most people were shut in by now, save for the lone McDonalds and the gas stations near the highway.

 

I grumbled a bit as I shuffled down the stairs and casually strolled towards the QuikTrip, where the sodas were cheapest. The night air was a bit warm, but with a cool breeze, and I took several calming breaths as the walk got my blood pumping.

 

Why did I torment myself like this? Why couldn’t I just write a goddamned story? It didn’t have to be good. It didn’t have to be original. It didn’t have to be tied down to the cluster fuck of canons I’d set up for all my worlds and characters that I never did anything with anyway. Shit, I could just list the top 100 most interesting characters and the top 10 most interesting worlds, and take some dice, and try to work with whatever combo I got. It would just be for practice, and who knows, it might go somewhere if it—

 

“Stop,” I growled, cutting off my own thoughts. I’d tried all that before. I’d tried all the advice before. “Just stop. Enough. Give it a fucking rest. Other people have real fucking problems like trying to feed their kids, and you’re giving yourself a stroke over what to have a cartoon supervillain do in a comic book you’re never going to draw. Jesus. Just go get a Dr. Pepper and stop going crazy for five fucking minutes.”

 

I sneered ruefully at the ground. “I mean, hey, look on the bright side, Bob, maybe this will be the Dr. Pepper that finally gives you diabetes, and you can go into a fucking coma tonight and die, and then you won’t have to worry about writing ever again.”

 

That morbid pep-talk aside, I continued onward in silence, content I’d already convinced my neighbors I was a nutcase long ago. I reached the section of road to cross over, and quickly went across the street, mostly by habit since there were no cars anyway. I came to the edge of the old parking lot where a dollar store had once been stationed. It had been scrapped a year ago, but nothing else had replaced it, leaving a weed-spotted, cracked blacktop that sat adjacent to the large, recently remodeled QT station. The lot’s entrance was blocked off with a chain strung up between two metal posts to keep people from driving in, but no one had bothered to actually put up a fence around the property. Like any efficiency-minded pedestrian, I found it easier to just cut across it to reach the QT property from the back, than to bother walking down the rest of the road and following the turn to reach the gas station the normal way. Technically, it was trespassing, but nobody really cared as long as people didn’t try to park or loiter there. It was certainly easier on my foot and knee to take the shortcut.

 

When I got about halfway across the lot, however, I was startled by a flash of light. I looked around, but the two shops flanking the lot were dark, and the street lights hadn’t changed. I looked up, but noted there were barely any clouds in the sky. There was, however, a star directly overhead which seemed to be glittering with all sorts of colors. It also seemed to be getting brighter. Originally a button-sized glint, it grew to the size of a softball before I realized it wasn’t a star at all, and it was a lot closer than I’d first guessed, with only the night sky in the background.

 

My eyes widened and I scrambled back, whipping my arms up to protect my head. I felt something hard and hot strike my forearms, and a jolt shot through me, as though I’d just been struck with a stun gun. I tried to let out a shout, but the breath was knocked out of me. My vision swam with a rapidly shifting rainbow of colors, and I felt a heady rush like a sharp drop in blood pressure. I managed a single gasp, before everything went dark.

 

 

2 – Bad Morning

I groaned awake, hearing the sounds of birds chirping. I was laying on my stomach, and I winced as I started to roll onto my back; aches and pains along my back and sides informed me that I’d been sleeping in a terribly awkward position. I was also vaguely aware that my right hand hurt. This was followed by the realization that I wasn’t even fully on the bed; as I rolled, I realized I was already half hanging off the side, and I ended up sliding all the way down. I gave a loud grunt as I plopped onto the floor, and the metal frame of the futon dug uncomfortably into my back. I half-rolled/half-scooted forward a bit, and sat with my legs to the side, propped up with my left elbow.

 

As my senses came to, I realized I must have just fallen face first onto the bed, with at least one leg up to my hips dangling off. I also realized I was holding something in my right hand. I looked down to see what looked like a clump of spiky, iridescent crystal, gripped tightly in my hand. It was about the size of a tennis ball and weighed about a pound. I also realized I was holding it in a near death-grip. My tendons ached from the strain, and the ends of the spikes dug into my flesh.

 

I let go of the thing, wincing as the pain flared a bit. I rubbed the skin, noting the red little pits where the spikes had dug me, but they didn’t seem to actually be that sharp; none had actually pierced me, despite how tightly I had been gripping it. I stood up, wincing from the aches, and looked around, still feeling a bit addled.

 

I noticed I was still wearing my clothes, and several streaks of dirt were on them, as well as bits of grit from the cracked asphalt of the lot. Stepping out of my bedroom, I almost jumped as I noticed my apartment door was wide open, my keys still dangling in the lock, and all my lights were on. I quickly glanced around, feeling a well up of panic at the thought of an intruder. The small apartment had only one real room other than my bedroom and the bathroom; the living room was separated from the kitchen/dining space by a half-wall, so it only took a glance to see that no one else was there. Looking across from my bedroom, the bathroom door was open, revealing that, too, was unoccupied. That left only the slim closet behind me, though that had enough shelves spaced down the length that even a little kid would have a hard time hiding in there. I opened it cautiously anyway, and was relieved to see no one had somehow contorted themselves to fit.

 

I crept to the front door, expecting at any moment for a robber to jump out from around the doorframe, or from some heretofore unknown nook of my apartment, and bean me on the head. But no one was there. The apartment didn’t even look like anyone had gone through it; nothing was missing that I could tell at a glance, even my laptop and phone were was where I’d left them. Plus my keys were still in the door. What the hell happened? I’d been walking towards the QT, when…

 

…when a ball of light had struck me, and I’d suddenly lost consciousness. Holy fuck, had I just had a seizure? I used to room with a guy who had those, and I remembered said roommate would usually be able to act after one had passed, but not remember what happened for a few hours afterwards. I wondered if this was the same. Had I had an attack and just stumbled my way back to the apartment and collapsed?

 

Oh, good God, that’s just what I needed. Fat, bad joints, and now seizures. If one more fucking thing went wrong with my body this year, I was going to throw myself off a building. Of course, with my luck, I’d probably survive by some miracle, and have to spend the rest of my life quadriplegic. With a grunt of aggravation that didn’t quite fully tamp down the looming existential dread of my mortality, I went to the door, pulled out my keys, and shut and locked it. I went over to my phone and noted it was fully charged.

 

4:00 am. Normally, I’d be getting to sleep around this time since I had the late shift at work. Well, I was only a little tired now. I figured I should stay up long enough to call my doctor and make an appointment, and just pray nothing else fucked up happened to me. If I was lucky, I could get in right away, and have an excuse to call in sick. Still, the office didn’t open for another three hours, and, after taking a moment to check myself over and assess my general sense of being, I didn’t think I needed to go to the emergency room. Better to get another few hours of sleep, properly positioned this time. I still felt sore where my muscles had been bent weird while I was unconscious.

 

I took the phone with me and went into the bedroom, where I stopped short. The weird, iridescent crystal was nestled on the bunched up cover. In my sudden freak out over my health, I’d forgotten all about it.

 

Where had it come from? Had it been on the ground in the lot somewhere, and I’d just grabbed it while I stumbled about? Wait… I remembered, the ball of light had been coming at me, and I’d shielded myself; I’d felt something strike my arm, something hard and hot. I checked my arms, but didn’t see any marks to indicate an impact. If a one-pound crystal ball had just fallen out of the sky, fast enough to be glowing as it went, it would have instantly killed me, punched through my body like an oversized bullet. There was no way I’d actually been struck by the thing. The light and heat and that weird electric jolt must have been the seizure. Oh, god, the seizure. Did they come with hallucinations? Or, Jesus, maybe I’d had a stroke? Wait, no, a stroke would have left me debilitated, surely…

 

I sighed and picked up the crystal, looking it over. Examining it more closely, it reminded me somewhat of the inside of a geode, those colored crystal formations inside a smooth stone you’d sometimes see in a novelty shop. The thing felt like a real mineral, not just cheap plastic or glass, but it didn’t look like anything other than a fancy paperweight or desk ornament. Someone had to have just picked this up at a shop and dropped it somewhere on the lot or along the road. Hopefully, my black out wanderings hadn’t included a rummage through a dumpster.

 

I sighed again and set the crystal on the little bedside table next to the futon, beside the lamp. I shook my head, confused, and just felt tired again. I double checked my door, clicked off all my lights, and went back to bed, ignoring the tweeting of the morning birds.

 

 

3 – This Just In

The doctor wouldn’t be able to see me until Monday at the earliest, and it was only Thursday afternoon. After nearly oversleeping, I hastily showered, threw on my usual black slacks and red shirt for work, scarfed down a ham and cheese sandwich and ice coffee, and headed off. The Martel’s Off-Price Clothing store at the edge of town was a bit of a drive during the lunch rush, but I managed to reach the store at 12:59, just barely clocking in on time.

 

I was in the stockroom again. Thankfully, by this time, the truck was already in, and most of the goods unboxed, leaving me to just hang the clothes. I smiled and greeted two of my co-workers who were running out carts of kitchen appliances and make-up, two older Russian ladies who didn’t speak English very well. I was the only male employee other than one of the managers, and half of my co-workers didn’t speak English as a first language. On a later shift like this, I didn’t get much opportunity to make conversation anyway. When I was on the morning shift, I usually chatted with the receiving and processing team, but they were already off by now.

 

That suited me just fine. I was still worried about my possible seizure, and despite that, I still felt some residual self-loathing from my failed attempt to write yesterday. I tried to ignore my feelings and just let the repetitive task of hanging clothes dull my emotions. It was tedious work, and it got aggravating when the task inevitably triggered the tendinitis in my arms after an hour or two, but at least here, I was making some money, and had an excuse to not be creative.

 

After a half-hour of work, my manager Samantha came in to check the progress of the stockroom. As usual, the store was too short staffed to have gotten all the product out when it was supposed to be, and I and the afternoon floor shift were expected to pick up the slack.

 

“Hey, Bob, what’s up?” said Samantha with her typical costumer-satisfying smile.

 

“Everything sucks and I want to die,” I said with a grin and a pleasant tone. “How are you?”

 

“Oh, you know, I think I already died, and now I just haunt the place,” sI said. “Well, we got plenty of clothes to hang. Two girls called off up front, so we’ll need you to back up cashier today, too.”

 

I sighed. “Yeah. I figured.”

 

“Hey, look on the bright side, its job security,” she said with a practiced laugh.

 

I just grumbled in a comically exaggerated way, but we both knew I wasn’t really joking. Samantha grumbled along with me.

 

“So, did you hear about that bank robbery this morning?” she said.

 

I frowned. “Nah. I’m always missing the headlines. Where and when?”

 

“Eight this morning, over at the First National. Craziest thing, two lunatics just bust in, dressed up like supervillains. Like they escaped from a comic convention or something.”

 

I paused, raising an eyebrow. “Really?”

 

“Yeah, I’m serious. Some people got some video on their phones, and it even shows this one woman, she shoots fire from her hands! She must have had some kind of flamethrower get up, it’s hard to tell because the footage is really shaky.”

 

I blinked and stared at her. “You’re pulling my leg.”

 

Samantha held up her hand. “I swear to you, when you go on break, check it out on YouTube. The other guy was dressed like a ninja and had knives on his fingers, like Freddy Krueger!”

 

“And they just… robbed a bank… in broad daylight?”

 

“Crazy, I know.”

 

“That’s… I mean, why didn’t the cops shoot them?”

 

Samantha blinked. “They did. The woman started throwing fire, and the green guy whipped some of the cops that got near them, and they let loose.” She shook her head. “Seriously, go watch the footage.”

 

I glanced at the clock. I had two hours before my break, but I always kept my phone on me anyway. Once Samantha left, I turned the phone on, muted it, and searched the video with one hand, hanging a piece of clothing between the page loads. I was low on data for the rest of the month, but I was too curious to wait until my break, much less to reach a wi-fi spot. I found the results immediately, “Supervillains Attack Bank In Fulton, Missouri.” I clicked the first video.

 

The sound was off, but I could imagine the people shouting. Whoever was holding the phone was sitting in the lobby of the bank, and about two-dozen people, bank staff and clients, could be seen sitting along the walls. Two tellers were at their counter, where a tall, thin man in a full-body black ninja suit was gesturing menacingly. I could see without him even turning around that he was wearing sunglasses with exaggerated triangle-shaped frames. He didn’t bother with a head covering, except for a black headband, and his hair was spiked up to a comical degree. I knew, despite the not-great quality of the footage, that his “hair” was actually thin metallic spines jutting up from his scalp.

 

As he yelled at the tellers behind the counter, he punctuated his demands with threatening jabs of his fingers, which I could see extended into foot-long, gleaming blades. It wasn’t a glove. The skin of his hands transitioned smoothly into blades that fluidly curled and extended like human fingers. He then turned to shout something at the customers, and grinned wolfishly at his hostages, his revealing all his teeth to be triangular like a shark.

 

My jaw dropped, as did the shirt I was midway through hanging. The camera was already swinging away from the counter to focus on the second attacker. The person holding the phone must have been trembling with fear or just didn’t think to try and steady their hand, but I saw enough to recognize a woman dressed in a bright red body stocking, so tight it may as well have been painted on. It was adorned with yellow and orange flame designs curling around the curves of her figure, and covered her entire body except her head. Her wild mane of equally garish red-hair, streaked with orange and blonde strands, only slightly distracted from the fact that her irises were glowing like embers.

 

The woman held up her hands, and the camera tried to focus on them, showing the cloth-covered fingers surrounded by flames. Then the camera jerked to the side slightly, as the fire-wielding woman yelled at the person holding the phone. Then there was a bright orange flash, and the video cut out.

 

I gawked. I searched for more clips, ignoring the clothes. Most were just re-postings of the previous video, but I did manage to find a second shot from another angle. This person was able to hold their phone steady, either letting it rest inconspicuously against their leg or just holding it in place, with the base resting on the floor. From the angle, they were sitting where the counter met the wall, backed into the corner, almost directly opposite the first camera. Unfortunately, the angle of the shot was such that it was tilted too far back, and only got a view of the fire-wielding woman from the upper back as she held up her flaming hands, then thrust them at someone along the opposite wall, probably the first camera person.

 

The shot changed as the person shifted, causing the phone to flip up and point the camera at the ceiling. A dark-skinned girl could be seen for a moment leaning over the phone and picking it up, tilting it back to film the scene, but now going too far the other way so only the man and woman’s hips and legs were visible. It was enough to see that a melting puddle of burning plastic was on the floor, and several people were cowering against the opposite wall, a teenaged boy clutching his smoking hand in pain. The fire woman had destroyed his phone and burned his hand in the process.

 

The footage showed the legs of the bladed man with the tail moving towards the fire woman. Her legs turned to face his, paused, and then the two bolted out the door, the bottom of a dark blue duffle bag resting against the green man’s hip. The phone fell downwards onto the floor and the video cut out there.

 

I could only stand there, staring open mouthed at my phone. I re-watched both clips, as those seemed to be the only two currently available. No doubt the news would show something from the security cameras soon. I was so engrossed, I didn’t hear them paging for me to go upfront to help ring until the third attempt. I hastily shoved my phone in my pocket and headed out the stockroom before Samantha had to drag me out.

 

The woman obviously didn’t have a flamethrower on her. The man’s blades didn’t look like some cheap prop; they moved too smoothly and were impossibly flexible for what looked like solid metal with no hinges on the joints. But that wasn’t what stunned me the most.

 

What stunned me was that I recognized them. They were dressed like my characters. There was no mistaking it, unless someone, through sheer cosmic coincidence, had created costumes that looked just like the doodles I’d drawn back in college. Even with the weirdness of seeing them as real-life-looking people in costumes instead of crappy drawings, even though they were characters I hadn’t even thought about in almost twenty years, I knew that they were the characters I had made up, come to life. I knew it with a certainty beyond just recognition.

 

Torcher, a psychotic, pyrokinetic killer. She’d been a revision of an even older character of mine with a similar schtick, but she was barely any more nuanced than the original one-dimensional psycho-villain. I was almost shocked she hadn’t burned the whole building with everyone inside as soon as they left, but the cops must have already shown up by that point.

 

Edge, an unhinged, failed assassin, with the ability to convert his extremities into organic blades, and convert his hair into needles he could fire off from his skin. He had a minor degree of superstrength, able to heft a couple tons with supreme effort despite his skinny build, but hadn’t had a chance to show that off in the footage.

 

I spent the rest of my shift in a daze, re-watching the footage several times during my break and checking for any updates. All I found were articles saying that the two costumed crazies had been killed, but not before Torcher had blown up five cars with fireballs and set a cop and two pedestrians ablaze. In that time, Edge had torn straight through one of the cop cars and gored three officers in quick succession, taking down two more with a shotgun-blast of needles from the back of his forearms.

 

After that, the five remaining officers unloaded on the two, as did four civilians who’d had handguns. In truth, the civilians’ contribution had probably been the deciding factor, distracting the villains long enough for the officers to break out their heavier gear.

 

I remembered Edge was at least bullet-resistant to small-arms fire, but not against the rifles the cops had brought to bear. Torcher hadn’t been protected at all; in my old stories, she could theoretically have created a hot enough wall of flame to vaporize the bullets before they hit. In real life, bullets simply couldn’t melt that fast, much less vaporize, before she could build up that much heat. The two villains went down from unexpected woundings, but the police didn’t stop shooting until they’d fired at least twelve more rounds into both of them, making sure to hit their heads and chests.

 

Within the hour, customers at my store were talking about it, and whenever I went to run register or help out with price checks on the floor, I overheard much debate on whether it was real or some publicity stunt. One customer said her nephew had been in the bank when it happened, and another said she worked at the hospital where the injured cops had been taken, and had heard about the injuries they’d sustained. It was, evidently, very real indeed, but no one could quite believe the two criminals had superhuman powers. The going theory was that they must have used stolen special effects equipment they had somehow weaponized. It was 2017, it wasn’t that unreasonable for the woman in red to have some kind of compact flamethrower get up built into her suit, or for the man in green to be using some kind of specialized prosthetic. Right?

 

Of course, one wild-eyed woman insisted that it had to be aliens! I was the only one who seriously took that under consideration, even though I didn’t say it out loud.

 

I was tempted to leave work early, but what, exactly, was there to do? There was just no way my old comic book villain characters had come to life and attacked a bank. No fucking way, no matter how weirdly certain I was. At any rate, whoever they really were, they were dead now. What exactly was I going to do, go to the cops and demand to see the bodies? Would it even actually confirm anything if they let me?

 

This had to be something else. Somehow a coincidence, that two wackos dressed like two of my old comic book characters, and displayed similar powers. To be fair, I’d always been terrible at costume design, and the two had pretty generic action-figure looks to them. Maybe I’d subconsciously just ripped off some obscure 80’s cartoon characters or toys I’d seen as a kid, forgetting that fact after all these years, and the robbers had ripped off the same designs. That had to be it.

 

Still, even if that were true, why of all the places on Earth, would bank robbers dressed up like supervillains be attacking this podunk town, where I lived? I knew, deep in my gut, that this was no coincidence. I knew, no matter how much I tried to tell myself otherwise, that those two had not been random robbers with special equipment.

 

I realized my heart was thudding in my chest and I was almost getting short of breath. Great. The last thing I needed now was to have a panic attack while I anxiously anticipated the next news update. They probably wouldn’t release any new info before tomorrow anyway, but being forced to do menial retail grunt work for hours until I could check was going to drive me mental!

 

So, even though I had no sick time left to compensate for it, I asked to go home early. Samantha was clearly ticked about it, but seeing how pale I looked, and considering the customer traffic had already slowed down quite a bit, she went ahead and let me go. I left in a hurry, still spinning the possibilities in my head. Just about the only rational explanation I could come up with was that I was actually dreaming right now, possibly still unconscious in that empty lot behind the QuikTrip. If so, this was the longest, most realistic, and most confusingly consistent dream I’d ever had.

 

 

4 – Weird Dudes On The Loose

It was already well into evening by the time I got home. I went straight for my laptop, plopping down on the chair and impatiently drumming my fingers while the little computer struggled out of standby. I was going to have to get a new one of these soon.

 

I expected to see more about the bank robbery, but my eyes widened as Yahoo! Articles revealed an even more alarming headline: “Strange Sightings In Fulton, MO! Superhumans And Monsters Run Amok!”

 

I blinked. What the fuck was this? I clicked the link, and my jaw dropped once more. The article itself was just a quick paragraph, barely a caption, but hosted a slideshow of pictures and video clips, taken from various phones and security cameras. I clicked through them all, feeling a mixed pang of confusion, shock, and wary excitement with each one.

 

Several pictures showed people in colorful costumes flying through the air. I recognized all of them; the blue-and-gold clad Beowulf and the blue-and-white clad Meteora. There was Oasis, with her sky-blue robes and long red hair. Thunderstar, in her jet-black suit wreathed with lightning designs. Cevin, with his gunmetal gray and light blue armor, propelled by small energy rockets on his boots.

 

Other pictures showed strange sightings on the ground. Two or three separate shots of a large humanoid reptilian creature slinking through the trees: the Snake. An enormous hulking man appearing to be made of living ice carved into the form of a ten-foot tall giant: Glacier. A monstrous skeletal humanoid with a snake-like skull and a long trailing tail instead of legs, wreathed in black smoke, floating through the town graveyard: the Necrophage. A woman who appeared to be a living pencil-scribble silhouette: Stencil. I was astounded some of these characters hadn’t gotten into fights or caused more trouble yet, like Torcher and Edge. Maybe they were biding their time, or maybe they were still confused as to where they were.

 

One of the video clips showed a less flamboyant looking hero, a man in jeans and a leather jacket with spiked up black hair: Max-Out. The video showed him stopping a car crash by running with super speed in front of a van that had run a red light, then using super-strength to bringing it to a halt just before it would have hit a smaller car in the side. The scene had played out in the background of a girl doing a vlog at a nearby restaurant, her back to the scene. It wasn’t until a commotion picked up from other passerby that she turned around and tried to film the rest, but by then, Max-Out had already disappeared in a blur of motion.

 

Another video clip showed a woman with wolf ears and a tail, dressed in a blue-and-white kimono: Cecilly Fenrir. She was already starting to transform into a wolf as the video started, slipping out of the kimono such that it hung on her canine form like a cape. She glanced over to the camera person just before bounding away into a nearby forest.

 

Yet another video showed about ten seconds of nearly-indiscernible, shaking footage of someone running towards the camera. I had to guess they were chasing someone who was holding the camera to film behind them, over their shoulder. The chaser was a man that was literally half-human and half-robot, split vertically down the middle: Cytrok. After a few seconds, he raised his robotic arm, the palm glowing red with energy. There was a bright crimson flash before the video cut out.

 

There were a dozen more, all similar brief clips and snapshots, the various colorful characters usually fleeing before any further footage could be taken, or in a few instances, attacking and chasing off the people recording them.

 

By this time of night, the weight of the day usually had me feeling too tired to want to leave the apartment, even if I didn’t fall asleep right away. But seeing all this, I felt a nervous exhilaration that had me wired up like an energy drink binge. These were all my characters, mostly those I’d come up with during or shortly after college. A few I recognized as characters I’d made as a kid, but on re-evaluation, I could tell they were the revamped versions I’d tried to do projects with when I was older. That struck me as noteworthy, but I didn’t opt to dwell on it.

 

People were running into them on the streets, taking pictures, getting hurt if they ran into the more dangerous characters. One article mentioned that the cops were now coordinating with a local militia to try to hunt down and protect the town from the dangerous “invaders”. The National Guard had also been mobilized, and were on their way to quarantine the town.

 

This couldn’t be happening! I had to try and find one of them so I could talk to them. So far, the majority of the characters I recognized as superheroes and heroic adventurers, but a few had been villains. I was surprised that someone like the Necrophage, a powerful demonic necromancer, wasn’t already trying to send an undead army to march on the town.

 

I stood up, ready to run out the door, but paused. How, exactly, was I going to find any of them, at this time of night? Maybe they’d been out scouting earlier today, and that’s what got them spotted. All the pictures and footage had been in the daytime. I hadn’t seen or run into any of them on the drive home. If they were hiding out somewhere, I doubted I was going to find them, especially at night. I didn’t really know the town well enough to guess it’s best hiding spots. That’s assuming any of them had actually stuck around, instead of leaving the town as soon as they got oriented. But then, suddenly appearing on a mundane, unfamiliar Earth, they might just stay put for the immediate future, while they tried to figure out what had happened to them. Maybe if I just drove around, I’d spot one? Some of them might try to bunker down in hotels or maybe even the town park.

 

I went to the door and grabbed the handle, when a second pang of doubt hit me. What, exactly, was I going to do if I did find one of them? “Hey, Beowulf, you won’t believe me, but I’m your creator, and I need you to get back into my head.” Then another concern: just because they looked like my characters and demonstrated the same abilities, didn’t mean they actually were my characters. However it had been done, someone had yanked the concepts out of my mind, but that didn’t mean they weren’t actually robots or aliens posing as my creations. Sure, Flara and Scorpion had reverted to type, trying to rob a bank, but that could have just been some kind of test.

 

Test or not though, I had to do something. All of my characters were superhuman to one degree or another. Men and women like Beowulf, Meteora, Oasis, the Necrophage, they were capable of annihilating cities in terms of raw power, entire countries if they had the time for it. Assuming any of them got into a fight with one another, or ran afoul of the authorities, the resulting collateral damage and loss of life could reach natural disaster levels. Nuclear bomb levels. Even the lesser of my characters, even one-note street level thugs like Torcher and Edge, they’d managed to kill several people and destroy vehicles in the space of a few seconds, before they’d been put down.

 

I felt a tingle of dread. A fight was going to be inevitable. The Necrophage, Cytrok, the Snake, they were all bad guys, and while they were certainly smarter at it than the two psychos who’d fought the cops, they were bound to get into trouble. How had they not gotten into a massive battle with one of the heroes already?

 

Unless they weren’t permanent. Unless they were blinking in and out of existence. Or they were just a handful of beings shifting from one form to another. Or maybe their powers weren’t nearly as effective in the real world. Torcher and Edge’s abilities, they had been pretty minor, nothing too physics-breaking, as it were. Beowulf, however, was one of those ridiculous old school flying powerhouses, able to pick up a skyscraper in one hand and a battleship in the other, and swing them around like baseball bats. I didn’t know how real world physics would interact with such a power. Maybe it wouldn’t, and their crazier abilities would be severely hampered. But then again, Max-Out’s powers were in the same ballpark, if more limited in function, and he’d used his powers just fine in that one video clip. Although, it had just been stopping a car, that wasn’t too crazy either.

 

I stood there, still holding the door knob, my thoughts a whirl. What the fuck was I going to do? What could I do? A fat schlub with bad joints, cruising around late at night until I found some weirdo in a costume and tried to start an awkward conversation? Assuming I found one of the heroes, what exactly were they going to do about their situation? I wasn’t sure they’d just believe I’d created them, or at least, their “template” or whatever. If they were aliens or robots copying my ideas, they wouldn’t probably listen to me anyway. If they were the actual characters, and I ended up running into one of my villains, then I could easily end up dead or crippled or turned into a zombie or mutated or something else horrible.

 

But I didn’t want that happening to anyone else, either. But I was in no position to stop things if it did. But…

 

I let out a frustrated yell and hurled my keys across the room, ignoring the mark they made on the cheaply painted white wall. Jesus Christ, what was wrong with me? Whatever the situation was, I had to act, and I had to act now! But like most major moments of decision in my life, I just ended up arguing myself into paralysis. I went to the tiny nook of a hallway that separated my room and bathroom, starting the first few steps of a frustrated pacing. As I passed my bedroom door, however, I noticed something odd. The spiky ball of crystal was still sitting on my bedside table, where’d left it this morning.

 

But now, it was very softly glowing.

 

 

5 – I Choose You

I stared at the crystal for a full minute, my thoughts churning. The glow, softly shifting colors in a liquid swirl like the surface of a bubble, reminded me of the flash of light I’d seen before I’d been knocked out. The obvious clicked into place in my mind: the crystal had done this.

 

Ridiculous, I thought. Magical character creator devices don’t just fall out of the sky. I paused. Superhumans didn’t exist, either, until after this thing showed up.

 

Why was it glowing now, for that matter? Did it recharge itself over time? Or perhaps… perhaps because Torcher and Edge had been killed by the cops, their energy, or their essence, or whatever it was, had returned to the crystal. I wasn’t sure about the timing on that; the crystal hadn’t been glowing when I left for work, and the shoot-out had happened before then. But maybe it took time for the energy to return?

 

My brow furrowed and I shook my head. Speculating while just staring at it wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Hesitantly, I reached out to the crystal. As I touched it, I felt a vaguely warm, slightly tingling sensation. I turned it over in my hands. Just what the hell was it? How did it work? Frowning, I tried to see if there was some kind of mechanism, tugging and pushing on the spikes to see if anything gave or shifted. Nothing happened. I then held the crystal out, thought about a random character, one of my old comic strip characters from when I was a child, and said, “Sarah Boo, I choose you!”

 

I almost had a heart attack when the crystal pulsed, the glow faded, and a cartoon ghost popped into being right in front of me. I jerked back, half-falling out of the bedroom doorway, my back hitting the doorframe to my bathroom. Right before my eyes was a classical cartoon depiction of a ghost: a softly glowing, humanoid, white blob of a body, with no feet, mitten-like hands, and a simple face made of a line for the mouth and two round black eyes. The figured turned towards me, blinking as she noticed me. The motion caused me to notice her long eyelashes, the only obvious physical signifier that the ghost was female.

 

“Oh! Um, hello there, sir!” said Sarah Boo. I just gawked at her. The ghost girl frowned, cocking her head to the side, putting her right hand on her “hip”, and rubbing the approximation of a chin with her left hand. “Are you okay, sir? Never seen a ghost before or something?”

 

“Uh… uh… or… something…?” I said. I wasn’t exactly intimidated by her. Sarah Boo was just a side character from a little newspaper-style comic strip that could be considered a “gag” comic only by a six-year-old’s standards. She could walk through walls and float, but had no outright dangerous powers, and her personality was that of a bland nice girl.

 

“Okay!” she said, and smiled. Just like a pale smiley face. It was even sillier looking in fully three-dimensional view. I had the impression of one of those movies where live actors interacted with cartoon characters, except there was something a bit more… I wasn’t sure how to describe it. Even though she was very obviously a cartoon character, there was a sort of tangible quality that movie special effects couldn’t quite replicate.

 

I stood up, composed myself, and held out my hand. “Sorry, rude of me,” I said. “My name’s Bob. Pleased to meet you.”

 

Sarah Boo smiled brightly and took my hand, shaking it gently. There was a sensation of shaking a silk bag stuffed with marshmallow fluff. “You as well, sir!” she said. “I’m Sarah!”

 

“So,” I continued. “I don’t suppose you recognize me?”

 

Sarah frowned and rubbed her chin in thought. “Um, no? Have we met before?”

 

“Sorry, I must have you confused with someone else,” I said, shrugging.

 

“Ah, probably my brother Billy!” she said, smiling again. “People get us mixed up all the time!”

 

I recalled the only notable difference between Billy and Sarah was that Sarah had the eyelashes. I nodded sagely. “That makes sense.” I tried to think of something else to say. I should have prepared some questions before trying to summon another character. For now, though, I was just testing to see if I could. Now, how to undo it?

 

I cleared my throat. “Well, it’s been nice meeting you, but I’m afraid I have some work to get done, so, um, I’ll need you to head out.”

 

Sarah looked confused again. “Head out? Um, okay, but…” she looked around. “I don’t… know where I am… actually…” She turned slowly and inspected my sparsely furnished bedroom.

 

I held up the crystal and said, “Sarah Boo, return!”

 

She turned to me, looking even more confused. “What? Return where?”

 

I frowned and looked at the crystal. How the heck was this supposed to work? “Um… let’s see… Sarah, could you step back inside this crystal, please?”

 

“Back in? What?”

 

So she didn’t know she’d come from it? “Sorry, but what do you remember before you appeared here?”

 

“I don’t… I don’t know, I just… I guess I was in my room, reading or something…” The poor ghost girl’s face was a comical expression of confusion as she scratched her head. I figured she probably wasn’t the right character to be grilling for answers. She was just a one-note cartoon, after all, someone I’d drawn maybe two or three times.

 

“Alright, alright, sorry, never mind,” I said. I thought for a moment, then held out the crystal. “Could you do me a favor and hold this?”

 

“Oh, uh, sure.” She reached out to touch it. As soon as her mitten-like hand made contact with the crystal, she vanished, and the soft glow returned. I blinked and almost dropped the thing.

 

Okay. Okay, so, apparently, there was something I could do about these characters popping up. If I could get them to touch the crystal, then I could reabsorb them. And if Sarah Boo was any indication, it seemed like they were probably—well, actually, I barely remembered anything about Sarah. She was never a developed character in the first place, so I doubted there was much “character” for her to be in. Okay, time to summon someone a bit more complicated, someone more developed, with a more analytical mind, yet also not supremely dangerous. I ran through the options, until I settled on a character. Going back into the living room, I sat down on the couch and held the crystal in front of me.

 

“Saint Calibur,” I said. I wasn’t sure if the words were necessary, but I figured it helped.

 

The glow faded from the crystal, and suddenly, a tall woman with long brown hair appeared before him. She had a sort of simple cowgirl look, dark jeans, boots, a tan long coat and red neckerchief over a white shirt, topped with a cowboy hat. Twin revolvers were strapped to her hips, though the coat concealed them at the moment. I could tell mainly because of the gun belt.

 

Saint Calibur blinked and looked down at me. She took a step back, glanced around quickly, and then locked her gaze on me. I swallowed a little nervously. Saint Calibur, a gunslinger with healing powers, was a pretty level-headed character, but I still wasn’t sure what I was dealing with.

 

“Well,” she said. “I don’t suppose you have an explanation for this?”

 

“Possibly,” I said. “But that depends on what you know. Firstly, do you know who I am?”

 

Saint shook her head.

 

I nodded, expecting that. “Alright, I didn’t think so. Do you—”

 

“I should be asking you the questions,” she said. “Starting with who are you and how did I get here?”

 

I gave her a thin smile. “Sorry. My name is Salvador Roberts, and I’m just as confused as you. Can you tell me the last thing you remember before you showed up here?”

 

“Before I answer any further questions, I have some of my own. Do you know who I am?”

 

I almost said yes, but hesitated. I wasn’t sure I should be too forthcoming right now, but I was also a terrible liar. I settled for, “I have an idea, yes, but I am trying to confirm my suspicions.”

 

“I see. And why did you think I should recognize you?”

 

“Just curious.”

 

Saint Calibur crossed her arms. “Odd thing to be curious about.”

 

I held back a sigh. She was a no-nonsense type character, that’s why I’d summoned her. But I was always terrible at confronting people, and I was already getting intimidated at the thought of questioning her. I should have summoned another cartoon character. Or, again, I should have just prepared questions ahead of time. Too late now.

 

Saint noted my hesitation and could tell I was struggling with what to say. She held up a hand in an acquiescing gesture. “Alright, I apologize. Ask your questions, we can figure this out together.”

 

“Thank you,” I said. “I’m sorry. I am responsible for you being here, thanks to this crystal.” I held up the spiky mass and Saint appraised it with a glance, without getting closer. “I don’t know what it is, or how it allowed me to summon you. I’d like to know the last thing you remember before appearing here.”

 

“I was in my office,” she said. “Routine paperwork.”

 

I remembered she was a bounty hunter as well as a monster hunter. Probably going over case files. So, like Sarah, she’d been summoned from a moment of relative calm and mundanity. I wasn’t sure if that was actually relevant. Where exactly did my characters go, what did they do, on a day-to-day basis, when I wasn’t running them through adventures and challenges? That was always my problem with characters; I had a general sense of their personality, knew their backstories, even in a few cases had a good sense of their relationships, but I never really dug past that. I rarely examined my characters beyond their obvious details. It occurred to me, for example, that I had no clue what Saint Calibur did in her downtime.

 

“What’s the last major event in your life?” I said. “Have you—” I stopped myself before I asked her something as blatant as “did you go through this harrowing storyline yet?” I turned the words over in my head. “I guess, what’s the last case you finished?”

 

Saint Calibur frowned and gave me a studious look for a moment. “I dealt with a murderer who had managed to escape during a prison transfer.”

 

Okay, that would be one of the hundreds of little day job cases she’d done over the years, the sorts of things I would mention in passing in a story. Exciting by most people’s standards, but not anything your typical cop couldn’t handle.

 

“Let me rephrase: what’s the last major case you dealt with? Particularly in regards to the supernatural?”

 

Saint Calibur narrowed her eyes a bit and said slowly, “Zombie outbreak in Tuscan. The Necromaster.”

 

Okay, that was better. Saint Calibur was what I called one of my “floater” characters, one I’d tried to use for several different projects that all fell through. Over the course my brainstorming, I’d more or less come up with a hodge-podge canon of her most consistent adventures which I counted as her personal “continuity,” even if it didn’t always click with a given project I tried to fit her in. I suppose by now, I considered her primary canon to be aligned to the Wyld Hunt stories, a series about monster hunters that took place mostly throughout the 1900s. She’d been one of the major characters in that, but I still wasn’t opposed to reusing her in other things.

 

With that considered, I never had a distinct “ending” story for her, outside of one possible wrap up for the Wyld Hunt that I’d never been fully sure about canonizing. So there was no telling how long her adventures would theoretically continue. The Necromaster case was later in her timeline, at least, probably the most “current” of the stories as I usually ordered them, meaning she was currently at her most “up to date” moment of her character. That was good.

 

“Okay,” I said. “Now, one more thing, and I know this will be an odd request, but I would like to test something.” I set the crystal down and stood, wincing a bit as my bad knee twinged. There was another reason I’d chosen Saint Calibur, a skilled gunslinger, but also a character imbued with healing magic. “I would like to see if you can heal me.”

 

Saint gave me a cool look, her arms still crossed. “Do you have an injury?”

 

“Just normal wear and tear,” I said. “But it’s added up over the years. Bad joints. Sour stomach. I would like to see a demonstration of your healing ability, to confirm something.”

 

Saint glanced me over, and said, “I’m not a doctor, and you probably don’t want to hear this, but I would advise you to lose weight.” She glanced around. My apartment wasn’t total a mess, I did have the sense to keep my dishes clean and to throw out my trash regularly. Still, I some dirty clothes strewn across my couch, a stack of unorganized junk mail was the centerpiece of my dining table, and it was clear I had not vacuumed or swept the floor in a couple of months. I also hadn’t shaved in the last three days.

 

She looked back to me. “If you have a genetic condition, that’s one thing, but I’m doubting that’s the case here. I don’t mean to offend, but you don’t seem the type to take very good care of yourself.”

 

I winced a bit. Of course, I knew that, but I didn’t need my own creations lecturing me. “So…”

 

Saint offered me her hand. “I’m just saying. I don’t mind patching you up a bit, but if you don’t actually put in the effort of self-care, you’ll be right back to where you are in no time.”

 

“I know,” said I and I took her hand as if to shake it. “What’s going on right now is bigger than my health, though. Please, just do this one thing, I’ll answer any other questions you have afterwards.”

 

Saint nodded, and her hand began to glow. A soft white light extended from her hand to coat my whole body like an aura. I sucked in a small breath as I felt a warm, soft sensation, like my whole body was being wrapped in a warm blanket. Then, I felt little twinges in my joints, felt a tickle in my stomach, felt the muscles of my torso and limbs tighten a bit. I felt a heady rush for a moment, and my senses cleared and came into sharp focus.

 

Then, the light faded and she let go of my hand. I almost gasped as I stood tall. I felt different, more energized, less stiff. I looked myself over. My shorts and shirt felt a bit looser. She hadn’t made me thin, but my gut had noticeably shrank by at least a couple inches. I lifted my shirt and ran a hand over my stomach. The stretch marks were all gone. I tested my body, doing a couple squats and stretches. No stiffness in my joints, no twinges of pain from my bad knee, no sharp soreness from my tendinitis, even when I bent my wrists and ankles at awkward angles to trigger a flare up. I took a deep breath, and I swore I could suck in more air than before. I didn’t even feel any back pain.

 

It was a miracle. I was still overweight, but otherwise, I felt like she’d reset my body back to when I was in my mid-20s, before I’d started to build up the little hitches and day-to-day wear that had slowed me down over the past fifteen years. I wondered if even my hemorrhoids had cleared up.

 

I looked at her in stark relief and disbelief. I’d fantasized, as I was sure most adults did, of medical science making a magic pill that could instantly restore one’s youth, but to actually experience it! My head swam with the possibilities.

 

“All better?” she said, snapping me out of my daze.

 

“Yeah, thank you! Really, thank you.”

 

She gave me a slight smile. “You’re welcome.”

 

“Okay,” I said, not letting myself get too distracted. “What would you like to know?”

 

“Personally, I would like to go home,” she said. “I’m willing to forget this whole encounter. And since I just gave you a health boost, I’d wager the fair thing to do would be to allow me that much.”

 

“Oh,” I said. “Um, yeah, that makes sense.” I was still holding the crystal. “Okay, well, I think how this works is, just put your hand on this.”

 

“That’s all?” she said.

 

“Yes.” I held the crystal out. “I’m sorry to pull you away.”

 

Saint Calibur hesitated, then held a hand out, hovering her fingers over the device. She looked me in the eye and frowned. “You have no idea what you’re doing with this thing, do you?”

 

“I’m figuring it out,” I said.

 

She thought for a moment, pulling her hand back a few inches. Then she shook her head. “Not my place to lecture you. I don’t know what’s going on. But for your sake, and the sake of the people around you, you need to be careful.”

 

I nodded, cowed a bit by her intense gaze. Then she touched the crystal and vanished. I stepped back and dropped heavily onto my couch, staring at the mysterious object still clutched in my hand. Good lord. If I really could just summon any character I’d created, then the possibilities were endless. I’d made thousands of characters and hundreds of worlds. Maybe only a handful were worth actually writing about, but it still meant that with this strange device, I had a theoretically limitless number of super powers at my beck and call. In my hand, I held the potential to become a god.

 

Before that thought could fully sink in, however, my apartment was rocked by the shockwave of an explosion. I let out a cry and dropped to the ground as my windows exploded inwards. A thunderous, bestial roar could be heard, rattling the building like intense thunder. I quickly scrambled away from the wall into the dining area. The crystal had flown from my hand and rolled into the corner. Wincing in new pain, I snatched it up desperately. I turned and could see through the shattered windows a huge, lumbering figure, a building-sized mass of muscle, roughly man-shaped, but with three huge eyestalks instead of a head and a tremendous toothy maw in the middle of its chest. The creature was smashing its way across the apartment parking lot.

 

I froze up, gripped in terror, eyes wide as I saw one of my early monster characters casually walk through a whole building, chomping and smashing its way through, gobbling up whatever managed to fall towards its giant mouth. Screams of panic, terror, and pain radiated from the now ruined building.

 

The Tri-Clops! A monster so strong, it took a whole team of my more powerful superheroes to beat. Where the fuck had that thing been when people were taking pictures? Had some of my loose characters shifted forms? Did the crystal summon and de-summon things on its own? Had I summoned other characters subconsciously while holding it?

 

I somehow managed to force myself into motion, grabbing my keys off the floor and running out of the building. I didn’t even bother going for my car, as it was close to where the Tri-Clops was rampaging. I joined the mass of people fleeing from the scene of destruction, the crystal clutched tightly in my hands, scrambling to think of who I could summon that could match the monster with a minimum amount of damage.

 

The power of a god? What good was that, when I couldn’t even control my own creations?

 

 

6 – To The Rescue

As I scrambled to think of who I could summon, four human-sized bolts of color shot through the night sky overhead, as did a fifth who blurred by on the ground. Three of the skybound figures unleashed brilliant beams of energy at the Tri-Clops, causing the creature to stagger back with a deafening roar. A moment later, the fourth flying figure and the one on the ground slammed into the creature, crushing its three-story tall body into the wreckage of the building it had already smashed. From this angle, I lost sight of them briefly as my own building blocked the view.

 

There were screams and gasps all around me. Dozens of people were now lining the end of the complex’s parking lot, looking in alternating expressions of horror, amazement, confusion, and shock as a comic book superhero battle began right in front of them!

 

Various curses, exclamations, and cries sounded around me, and I found myself swept up in the tide of people as another shockwave knocked us all off our feet. I kept my eyes focused on the fight as best I could, and saw a gold-and-blue streak shoot up into the sky. It was Beowulf; despite the name, he was modeled more after Superman than the mythological figure. Superhuman strength, durability, speed, flight, powerful energy blasts, with the ability to amplify the powers of others through his “Excelsior Aura”. And the Tri-Clops had just smacked him into the stratosphere!

 

The Tri-Clops surged into view around the corner of the building for a moment, before he staggered back, peppered with blinding flashes of lightning, fire, and blue laser beams. The Tri-Clops roared again, so loud it shattered every still-intact pane of glass left in the compound and even the houses in the neighboring street. The people in the crowd, myself included, screamed in pain, and several fell unconscious. Some were bleeding out of their ears. My head rung dizzyingly, and I stumbled clumsily to my feet, my vision blurring.

 

I managed to look up just in time to see the Tri-Clops flatten my own apartment building like it was made of Styrofoam. Bricks, chunks of wood, and shards of metal exploded from the collapsing structure, a salvo of cannon-ball sized shrapnel aiming right for us. I didn’t even have time to brace himself as a piece of concrete the size of my head came right at my face—

 

—and then, there was a whooshing sound, the feeling of wind lashing me so hard, my skin felt the friction burn, and I was suddenly standing in the empty lot a couple blocks away. A moment later, my stomach caught up with me, and the nausea and sharp ache of extreme whiplash knocked me back on my ass. I flipped over in time to vomit. I wasn’t the only one either, as more people appeared on the lot, blinking into existence while a dark blur zipped back and forth down the street. Most of them fell over, vomited, or curled into balls of pain.

 

I took several precious seconds to breathe and collect my thoughts. Too fast. Everything was happening too fast. I looked to my hand, where I still clutched the crystal, so hard that blood was seeping down my fingers.

 

I forced myself to my feet, grunting and gritting my teeth, new aches and pains worse than those I’d had before Saint Calibur had healed me. I realized my hearing was dulled, damaged from the glass-shattering roar no doubt. Even so, the ground trembled, and the thunder and flash of the battle could be seen, even from this distance.

 

The dark blur of a figure had finally stopped, checking his handiwork. The figure had moved as many people as could be moved from the immediate vicinity of the battle. I recognized Max-Out. Super strength, super speed, super durability, able to increase the level of one of those powers by temporarily sacrificing one or both of the others.

 

“Everybody just stay here!” Max said, holding his hands out to the crowd. “Help is on the way, but we need to defeat that monster!”

 

“MAX!” I yelled, startling the people around me. I pushed and hopped my way through the crowd to reach the man.

 

Max-Out had already started running, gaining a hundred feet in half a second, but he stopped just as quick and skipped back. “Yeah? Who called me?”

 

“I did!” I said, breathlessly limping up to the man.

 

“Who are you?”

 

“Max, listen to me, there’s no time! You have to race me over to that monster!”

 

Max-Out, taller than me by a full head, looked down at me with a skeptical expression. “You’re barely on your feet. Sit down and wait for the medics.”

 

“No!” I held up the spiky crystal. “Please! Use your super speed to zip me over there, so I can press this against the monster’s body! Doesn’t matter where, just get me right up to him, shove my hand if you need to. Just don’t touch the crystal yourself, or—”

 

Max glanced at the object. “Some dollar store paper weight isn’t—”

 

“HEAD’S UP!” yelled one of the people in the crowd. People screamed and scrambled away as a truck came sailing through the air. It overshot the lot and went right towards the next building, a small grocery store. Thankfully, given the time of night, the store was closed, but there were still some cars parked as the last of the staff cleaned up for the night. Or would be cleaning up, if they weren’t all gathering in their own lot to see what the commotion was about. The truck was heading right for them!

 

Max-Out, however, had it handled. Before I could even say something, the taller man had disappeared in a blur, leaped up, and punched the vehicle down into the narrow stretch of grass between the empty lot and the grocer’s parking lot, before it could slam into the other bystanders or their building.

 

Max then reappeared in front of me. “Alright, what were you saying?”

 

More flashes of light and thunderous explosions went off in the distance. Given the brief glimpses of the costumes, and the powers being displayed, I had to guess that three flyers helping out Beowulf were Meteora, an energy-weilding hero, Oasis, an elemental goddess, and Thunderstar, a lightning-weilding hero. Along with Max, they might be enough to handle the Tri-Clops, but how much more damage was going to be done in the process? Beings on their level could fight for hours, for days. The whole town could be leveled before a victor emerged!

 

“Max—,” I said, grabbing the man’s arm.

 

Max pushed my hand away. “If you think it’ll help, I’ll take the crystal,” he said, and reached out for it.

 

“NO!” I yanked it back. “Goddamn it, I don’t have time to explain, but it’ll only work if I’m holding it! You have to run me right up to Tri-Clops, and—”

 

“Tri-Clops?” said Max, confused for a second. Then he glanced back to the fight. “Oh. The monster.” He pointed at his face with three fingers splayed in a triangle and nodded. “Cuz of the three eyes. Got it.”

 

“Right, yeah, that’s right.” The Tri-Clops was from an entirely different universe than the four heroes, one of my really old monster designs. Wait, no, actually, I had imported the creature into Max’s universe at some point, but he’d only been encountered on a space adventure by some other heroes, during their—Whatever. There wasn’t time for this. “Max, I’m begging you. I’ll explain everything, just please, it’s the fastest way to stop that thing.”

 

Max glanced the man over, looked back to where the fight was happening, then cursed and reached for me. A moment later, the rush of harsh wind followed, and I found myself with my hand, holding the crystal, shoved up against a meaty slab of incredibly tough flesh. There was a pause, then the nauseating pain of whiplash struck me once more, and I let out a shout, almost curling into a ball. Max kept my hand pressed into the Tri-Clop’s leg.

 

The was a rumbling sound as the Tri-Clops looked down and started to shift his weight to kick us away. But then, it vanished. In the sky above, half-hidden in the smoke and dust kicked up from the battle, the four other superheroes were poised to make another attack, pulling back as their target suddenly vanished.

 

I tried to catch my breath, only to choke on the dust. Max pulled me away, racing me away from the complex, this time at a much more reasonable speed, no worse than a car on a main road. Nonetheless, gasping for air, in pain, and dizzy, I passed out, still clutching the crystal in a death grip.

 

 

7 – Who Begets

I awoke to a feeling of tingling warmth, not unlike what I’d felt from Saint’s spell. This time, however, I opened my eyes to see a blond-haired young man in casual clothes leaning over me, his hand on my chest, glowing with soft white light. I recognized Warren, Bearer of the Wood Key, which granted him healing powers and control of plants.

 

“Feeling better?” he said, standing tall and letting me sit up. I realized I was lying on a bed in a hotel room, two queen beds with a table between them. The wall-mounted lamps were on, and though the blinds and curtains were closed, the lack of light streaming through the seams indicated it was still night.

 

I was on the bed farther from the door and turned to face the others. Beowulf, Meteora, and Max-Out were facing me. Warren stood next to me, while Max-Out sat on the other bed, hunched forward as he stared right at me. Meteora sat in a chair next to the window with her arms folded, while Beowulf leaned back against the door.

 

“You okay?” said Beowulf.

 

“Yeah,” I said. “Much… much better.” I looked to Warren and nodded appreciatively. “Thank you.”

 

He smiled reassuringly. “Sure thing.”

 

“So, let’s cut to the chase,” said Meteora, her expression serious in a way that overcompensated her anxiety over the situation. “Who are you, what is that crystal, is it connected to us being here, and what exactly did it do to defeat that monster?”

 

I felt myself clam up. I’d just been through several world-redefining events in a row and almost gotten killed. And now, I was suddenly in a room with four of my own superhero characters looking at me like I was a threat.

 

Warren reached over and put a calming hand on my shoulder. “It’s okay, sir, take a moment if you need to.”

 

“We need answers,” said Meteora.

 

“You can get them in a minute,” said Warren.

 

“Shock, I wager,” said Beowulf. “In the brief time we’ve been here, it’s clear the people of this world aren’t used to people like us.”

 

I felt a sudden lurch of panic. “The people at the apartment,” I said. I looked at them with dread. “You didn’t just leave them all there like that, did you?”

 

“Like what?” said Max.

 

“All beat up and bleeding on the ground? With all their homes destroyed?”

 

“Oasis and Thunderstar are dealing with it,” said Max. “Oasis will get everyone healed up, probably cast a memory spell to make everyone think a gas main exploded or something. Thunderstar messed with everyone’s cameras to scramble any footage, connected the internet to wipe out all the records of us. They should be joining us soon.”

 

I felt some relief, that at least the people pulled away would be okay. But the buildings were still destroyed, and the people the Tri-Clops had outright eaten or crushed were still dead.

 

“We’re actually in the next town over,” said Beowulf. “Kingdom City, I think?”

 

“Okay,” I said. I sat there, looking at the floor, thinking. My eyes widened as I realized I wasn’t holding the crystal. I jumped and looked about in a sudden panic. “Where—?”

 

Max opened the side table drawer. Next to a notepad and pen, the spiky crystal was there, now glowing brighter than before. “We made you drop it when we got in here. Given how the Tri-Clops vanished, we figured we shouldn’t touch it.”

 

“Yeah.” I let out a sigh of relief. “Smart.” I looked back to the floor. “I… I don’t suppose…”

 

“What?” said Max.

 

“People died.”

 

Beowulf gave me sympathetic frown. “We came as soon as we could. The others tried to keep the Tri-Clops pinned so I could grab him and carry him away, but he knocked me halfway into orbit. By the time I got back, Max had just gotten you to him.”

 

I sat in silence for a moment. “Is there anyone else? Were there any other fights?”

 

“A couple skirmishes on the edge of town,” said Beowulf. “We’ve been handling things as they crop up.”

 

“I saw the Necrophage. On the news. He’s at least as big a threat as the Tri-Clops.”

 

“A warrior woman named Tabitha Cain took care of it,” he said. “Just in time, too, apparently. It’d begun exhuming some bodies, but hadn’t reanimated them yet.” He shook his head. “Actual demons and alien monsters. I thought our world had turned comic book, but the others all seem to come from real science fiction and fantasy realities.”

 

I glanced up at him. “Tabitha is here, too?”

 

Beowulf nodded. “We’ve been in contact with most of the other superhumans. We all just appeared here—or, well, in the other town—early this morning. So far we’ve accounted for thirty-nine of us, including those who were killed in fights. Their bodies all vanished a few minutes after death.”

 

I supposed that made sense. If they were killed, their bodies probably disintegrated back into energy, which drifted back to the crystal. It had been dark and lifeless when I’d woken up with it, summoning my characters while I unconsciously held it. It had started glowing again some time after Torcher and Edge had been killed.

 

“Fortunately, most of us seem to be part of superhero teams,” said Meteora. “Or at least on the side of the do-gooders, rather than the troublemakers. But even a couple of the villains decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to start messing around once they saw they were outgunned.”

 

“Not enough of them,” said Warren, looking solemn. “Before we started contacting one another and coordinating together, a lot of us just didn’t know the situation enough to know who had to be stopped and who was trustworthy. My world never really had supervillains, as such, just monsters to fight, so Sarah and I didn’t know who to go to, or who needed to be watched out for.”

 

I said nothing, my thoughts slowly churning. I’d killed people. It didn’t matter that it hadn’t been intentional, that the crystal had somehow yanked characters out of my head and set them loose on the world without my knowing. They were still my creations. I did this. Before, my creations just drove me crazy with my inability to write them. Now, they’d gotten people killed.

 

They’d also saved people, true, but they wouldn’t have needed saving if—

 

I jumped as Warren put a hand on my shoulder. “Hey. It’s okay.”

 

“It’s not okay,” said Meteora. She gave me a stern look. “I can tell this is very tough on you, and I’m sorry for that, but we need answers. We need to know what caused this. What brought us here and how we can bring everyone back.”

 

“Would also be interesting to know how you know who we all are,” said Max.

 

Warren motioned towards the table. “The crystal. I’m guessing it’s a gateway between our worlds? Did you use it to observe us somehow across dimensions? Perhaps even bring us here?”

 

I swallowed hard and looked at all of them, then back at the ground. “Not exactly. I, uh…” I took a breath. “I’m your creator. I’m an… I was going to say author, but I’ve barely written anything, and never been published. I’ve just posted a few shitty stories on the internet, drew a few crappy comics as a kid.” I tapped the side of his head. “You’re all figments of my imagination. And the crystal…”

 

I reached into the drawer and pulled it back out. The four looked at it warily. “The crystal, I just discovered, allows me to manifest you into my world.”

 

Warren and Meteora looked stunned. Max gave me a hard look, while Beowulf’s expression remained calm, but stern. I flinched from their gazes.

 

Meteora broke the silence first. “You’re… saying we’re your…”

 

“You’re my characters. The crystal brought you to life out of my head, somehow.”

 

They exchanged quick glances and let that sink in for a moment. “You’ll forgive us if that seems a little far-fetched,” said Warren. “Besides, if you had the ability to summon us to this world, why would you just dump us all randomly around your town? And why on Earth would you summon monsters like that triclops or that necro-creature?”

 

“I didn’t mean to.” I felt my breath catch as I stared at the crystal.

 

“Didn’t—”

 

“Just listen. I had no idea, okay? I was walking down the street yesterday, and this thing, whatever the fuck this is, it fell out of the sky and struck me. It was glowing brightly then. Next thing I know, I wake up back in my bed and this thing is in my hand, and it isn’t glowing, it just looks like some cheap novelty paperweight. I thought maybe I’d had a seizure or something, picked this up when I stumbled back home somehow. I had no idea what it was or what it did.”

 

I looked up at them. “I went to work. I had no idea. I went to work, and didn’t find out until my shift started that some of you had showed up in my world. You have to understand, this stuff doesn’t happen here. We don’t have superhumans or magic or aliens or living robots or monsters or psychics or… or… or anything else! So when a couple nutjobs in Halloween costumes break into a bank and they happen to look like some old drawings of mine, I think I’m the one going crazy.”

 

I took a shaky breath. “I didn’t even realize it was the crystal until I got home last night. Pure guess work. By then, I’d found out more of you had showed up. I was going to try to find one of you and explain everything, but I didn’t even know where to go, and then that fucking monster appeared and…” I took another breath.

 

“Oh, fuck. Do you have any idea how lucky I am you guys were here, too? That the crystal mostly summoned superhero characters, and not the really evil cosmic psychos? I mean, as far as I know, it did summon those maniacs, too, and the whole planet is about to get sucked into a living dimension of darkness or cast into Hell or folded into a time warp.”

 

I shook, the weight of it all pressing on me like a vice. “I don’t know how to stop it. I don’t know how to reverse it. I can suck you guys back into the crystal if you touch it, but how many of you are there? How many will comply? You managed to get the Necrophage and the Tri-Clops, the cops killed Torcher and Edge, but how many other villains are out there, waiting for their moment?” I shook my head. “And even among the heroes, how many might not accept the idea of going back, once they find out what they are?”

 

The four shared a glance. Beowulf stood up from his lean against the door. “Let’s convene with the others. Oasis and Thunderstar should be back by now.” He looked to Max and Warren. “Would you two mind keeping an eye on him?”

 

Warren, who’d been giving me a troubled side-eye, looked to Max. “Um, well, I might need to check up on some of the others, in case there’s any more healing to be done.”

 

Max grunted, still keeping his eyes on me. “Fine. Leader of my own team back home, but sure, I’ll play guard dog while the long-underwear guys have their pajama party.”

 

Beowulf frowned. “I mean no disrespect, Max. But with your speed, you can catch him easily if he tries anything.”

 

“Fair enough.” As the others exited the room, Max leaned back a bit. We sat in silence for a few minutes. I just stared at the crystal, doing my best not to panic.

 

Finally, Max broke the silence. “So, you created us, huh?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“Not sure how much I believe that. Prove it.”

 

“Your name is Maxwell Auwitts. You used to work for a gang leader named the Snake. You protect a city called Blue Haven, leading a group called Cavalry. The group formed when the first superhero team of your world, Natural Forces, got bounced off into space, and someone needed to fill in the gaps. Cavalry actually formed first, fought the Snake, and you turned on your boss in the end and joined them, eventually becoming the leader once Winter Wolf stepped down.”

 

Max nodded. “Accurate enough. But it still doesn’t prove anything. You say your world doesn’t have superhumans, but you could still be a telepath. Or the crystal lets you gain information about us somehow.”

 

“You’re not freaked out about possibly being somebody’s creation?”

 

Max shrugged. “Like I said, jury’s still out. I’ll have an opinion over it once I know for sure.”

 

I supposed it was now to my benefit that one nearly universal quality of most of my heroes was their ability to just roll with the punches and not really be fazed by earth-shattering revelations. Either they were too seasoned and worldly, or they were just that bland in personality. Usually both. No wonder my characters just came off as dull robots when I tried to write them naturally, and boring cliché archetypes when I tried to force some personality.

 

We sat there for another minute, not saying anything, until the door opened. Beowulf and Meteora stepped inside, followed by Oasis and Thunderstar.

 

 

8 – Haunted Echoes

The two women came up to me and gave me a once over. Thunderstar gave me a bemused smile. Her suit was fully pitch black at the moment, the lightning lines only active when she was using her powers. Only her head was exposed, revealing very pale skin and platinum blonde hair, but it made her whole body from the neck down look like a living silhouette. “So, this is God Almighty, huh?” she said. “I never thought I’d see you in the flesh!”

 

Oasis just stared at me coldly. She was stunningly beautiful, as one might expect of a goddess; if I were a younger man not on the cusp of drowning in an anxiety spiral, I would probably be a little entranced just from her presence. As it was, her cold expression cowed me more so than her appearance. She leaned down, her gaze piercing mine, and I was momentarily frozen.

 

“Hey, watch the crystal,” said Max, tensing up to stop me in case I tried to shove it against her.

 

He needn’t have worried. I was nearly paralyzed by her gaze. I could feel her presence penetrating my mind, rifling through my thoughts, mind, her mental probes like gossamer fingers tracing the lobes of my brain. I went light headed for a moment, until she finally broke eye contact, pulling away from me. She took a step back, crossed her arms, and gazed at me with a nearly unreadable expression. I shook my head and let out a breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding; it felt like she had scrubbed through my every last memory. Thunderstar’s own expression had turned to a studious gaze; no doubt Oasis had mentally shared what she’d gleaned with her teammate.

 

“Well?” said Beowulf.

 

Oasis glanced to him, then looked to Thunderstar. A silent exchanged went between them. Oasis turned to the others, and in a low voice, she said, “He is what he says he is. Salvador Roberts, Earth-born human writer, in a world where beings like us are purely fictional.”

 

Meteora swallowed nervously, and gave me a pensive look. “He really… made us up?”

 

“Yes,” said Oasis. “Us, and many others. Thousands of others. He has forged many worlds in his mind, where all our dramas unfold.” She looked back to me. “How does it feel to meet us, maker?”

 

I could only give her a harrowed expression. “Like shit.” I looked to the others. “I can… I can only imagine what it must be like for you. Every horrible thing that’s happened to you, to your worlds. It’s my fault. I…” I took a shaky breath. “I don’t have an excuse. I’m a writer, or at least I tried to be. Stories need conflict. You’re superheroes, you have superheroic conflicts. I—” I floundered for what else to say. What else really was there? I sighed and looked to the floor. “That’s it. That’s the only reason.”

 

They all stared at me for a long moment, until Oasis broke the silence. “Gather everyone. Do not reveal this to them. Tell them the crystal is a doorway back to our worlds, and we shall use it to return.”

 

Meteora looked aghast. “You want us to just… what? Disintegrate ourselves back into it?” She pointed at me. “If we really are just figments of his imagination, then we won’t actually be going anywhere, will we? We’ll just get erased.” She looked to the crystal. “I can see it, with my powers, now that I know where to look. There are these little, faint threads of energy leading from the crystal to each of us. If I tune in on that spectrum, I can see we’re not just suffused with that energy, we’re made of it. We’re just… just solid holograms.”

 

Thunderstar nodded. “I’ve been studying the energies myself since I walked in here. I can confirm what you’re seeing. It’s clear to me that we are just simulations. Hard-light constructs programed with the personalities and powers of his characters. We aren’t real in this reality, any more than we are in his head.”

 

“Then we can’t go back,” said Meteora softly. “All we can do is try to last as long as we can, while staying out of trouble.”

 

“No,” said Oasis. “We must remove ourselves from this world. Simulated or not, we have a responsibility to do what is best for the people of Earth. It is the purpose of our being, to save the world, whatever world that may be.”

 

“You only feel that way because he wrote you that way!” said Meteora.

 

“The same could be said for you,” said Thunderstar.

 

“Simulated are not, we are still what we are,” said Oasis. “You are powerful, but you are clearly still just a human under all that energetic might. I am a Supernal. I have been a champion and protector to humanity in my world for centuries. These are matters of existential importance beyond your perspective. It pains me to say it, but I know what must be done for the good of humanity, even the humanity of another world.”

 

Meteora looked balefully to her, then looked to Thunderstar. “And how do you feel, hmm? You said you’re an alien, are you willing to sacrifice yourself for an Earth that isn’t even in the same universe as yours?”

 

Thunderstar gave her a slight frown. “We Cyven pledged to cherish all natural life throughout our galaxy. It is not a comfortable thought, but I see no reason to threaten this universe’s Earth for our own personal benefit.”

 

“That’s a noble sentiment,” said Beowulf. “One I want to agree with. And if it was just me here with you two, I would be willing to make the sacrifice. But if this is as close to alive as we can ever be, then I am very reluctant to order the others to their deaths.”

 

“You can go back if you want,” said Meteora, jabbing a finger at Oasis. She gave me a scowl as she jabbed that same finger in my direction. “Besides, how can we know he’ll be responsible once we’re gone? The crystal summoned us, but we don’t know what else it can do. You’ve seen the monsters he’s created. There’s city wrecking monsters as bad as the Tri-Clops on our world, and rogue Empowered besides that. I assume your team has a rogues gallery filled with all sorts of threats. God knows what else is in his head that might end up coming out when we’re not here to stop it.”

 

Max made a slight smirk as he made a gesture towards the other heroes. “Well, he’s a red-blooded human male, that much is obvious.”

 

Thunderstar gave him a bemused look, Oasis frowned primly, and Meteora’s brow furrowed in confusion. Beowulf blinked, glanced around for a second before it clicked, and scowled as well. “This serious, Max.”

 

“I know,” said Max. “Seriously trying my patience. We have to face facts, Oasis is right, and I’m not just taking her side because we’re from the same world. None of us belong here. Our worlds are all varying degrees of on fire. Do we turn our backs on that and risk fucking this world up, too?”

 

“The only thing we’d be turning our backs on is this planet!” said Meteora. “We wouldn’t be going back to our worlds in the first place! Our worlds aren’t even real!”

 

Max made an acquiescing gesture. “Well, she makes a good point on that last part, at least. Kinda would be a shame to erase the only part of our worlds that actually, you know, exist.”

 

Thunderstar tapped her chin and gave a slight smile. “You know, there is that theory that some writers are just subconsciously tapping into the multiverse when they dream up their stories, so somewhere out there, there’s a possibility our worlds are indeed very real, and our author here is just the guy who ended up our scribe. Even if we are just simulations, our worlds could still be real out there, and our real selves are still living in them.”

 

“That’s not real,” I muttered.

 

“Are you sure?” she said.

 

“Well, no one’s proved it, at least, and it’s only ever brought up in fiction stories in the first place,” I responded. “As for all the sick shit in my head, most of my characters are heroes, for what it’s worth. I never was that great with making villains.”

 

“And yet, look how much damage even a small handful of them did,” said Meteora.

 

I felt a sharp stab of anger cut through the anxiety. I was tempted to throw the crystal right at her face. I didn’t have the guts. Nor the right. Nor the bravery to even look her in the eye as I muttered, “You don’t have to remind me.”

 

Beowulf looked grimly at the crystal. “I hate to say it, but they are right. We don’t belong here, Monica. If this world truly doesn’t have beings like us in it normally, than us simply being here has already changed things, almost certainly for the worse. Just like our Empowerment changed things in our world. Unlike in our world, we have a chance to nip this in the bud.”

 

“Things only got fucked up in our world because it was part of his plot!” Meteora said. “Okay, look, so we throw the bad guys back into it, sure, but if things are already fucked, then shouldn’t we stick around to make sure everything stays okay? We can… we can bury the thing where no normal person will ever be able to reach, and then we can… just… I don’t know…”

 

“I don’t fully know how this thing works,” I cut in, raising the crystal a bit for emphasis. “You might only be temporary manifestations as it is. It might summon things without me intending to. And if it’s this bad in my hands, then I cannot trust anyone else in this world to make contact with this thing.” I looked up at them. “I can’t blame you for wanting to stick around. If it was just the five of you, and I could guarantee nothing else was going to come out of this thing, I’d even say it was fine. But I’m not delusional enough to think this is some dream come true, that there isn’t going to be some horrible consequence.”

 

Meteora glared daggers at me. “Maybe you deserve a little consequence in your life!”

 

A spike of anger shot through me, and before I could stop myself, my arm was rearing back to hurl the crystal at her. Before I’d even gotten my arm four inches up, Max had snapped his hand out and grabbed my wrist, twisting it to the side so I was forced to let go of the crystal. It struck the floor, rolling a few inches in the carpet, before settling against the bottom of the bedside table.

 

I let out a shout, more from being startled by the move than the pain, but twisted in his grasp to glare at her. “Do you know what you are to me, you fucking bitch?! YOU’RE ALL MY FAILURES!” I huffed and grit my teeth, trying to wrench my arm free. Max let go, and I nearly fell off the bed at the sudden loss of resistance.

 

I pushed myself upright and clutched my arm. He hadn’t really hurt me, but I could still feel the impression of his impossibly strong fingers. Max withdrew into his own seat, still in a forward lean and ready to pounce again. Meteora’s expression twisted to confusion mixed with the anger.

 

“What does that mean?” Beowulf said, his expression stern.

 

I forced myself to take another breath, to try and calm myself down. “All I’ve ever wanted to do with my life is make things. Stories. Books, shorts, comics, video games, whatever. Writing’s what I settled on, because I couldn’t draw well and I couldn’t code at all. But it didn’t matter. I barely ever made anything. I could make characters hand over fist, think up whole teams on the fly. I could build world after world. I had this obsession with the idea of doing different series, fantasy, science fiction, adventurers, superheroes. Mostly superheroes. Of creating casts of characters that could share continuities and go on tons of different adventures. But I…”

 

I swallowed hard, and stared at the floor. “But I couldn’t. I don’t know why. I could make characters, I could make worlds, but I could just… never come up with compelling narratives. Nothing that wasn’t just rote, episodic filler, the likes of which I’d seen hundreds of already, from TV and books and comics. For years, I just wrote notes and character profiles, and sometimes I’d stick with something long enough to actually outline a few seasons of adventures, and maybe, just maybe, manage to write a single short story for an idea. Then, I’d get frustrated and fed up. The idea would turn boring, I would change my mind so many times it ruined the whole project. I’d move on to something else, rinse, repeat. Even when I realized what my problems were, and I really tried to knuckle down and refocus, I just… I didn’t have it in me. I was too scatterbrained, too easily pulled away, too easily derailed.”

 

I looked up at them again, looking every one of them in the eyes. “I don’t expect you to get it. But believe me when I say this shit has driven me nearly suicidal, multiple times in my life. I never actually had the guts to pull the trigger, but god did I want to sometimes. I wasn’t able to do anything significant with my life, I let myself fucking rot, because I’ve been chained to this abusive relationship with you all. I’ve tried to give it up completely, but I was never able to let go. Years and years and years of you frantic figments banging around in my head, screaming at me to write you, and me being too much of a mental goddamned cripple to manage it. Do you understand what I’m saying? You’ve ruined me.”

 

I looked towards the crystal. Max tensed again, but I didn’t make a move for it. “And now you’re here. And you’ve killed people. And if you stick around, I know, for a fact, you being the kind of… beings you are, my fucking neurosis is going to be directly responsible for devasting my world.”

 

I looked across at all of them again. “I need you gone. All of you. From this reality. From my fucking head. I need this crystal thing destroyed. And then I need to finally just blow my goddamned brains out, like I should have done years ago.”

 

They all just stared at me, with varying degrees of solemnity. Only Oasis maintained full composure, but I could still see a glint of pity in her eyes.

 

“Well. I suppose nothing more need be said.” Oasis looked to the others. “Most of us are already here at the hotel. We will track down any others who are scattered about and bring them to us.”

 

“Have fun with that,” said Meteora darkly. She stepped over to the crystal, pushing Beowulf to the side and brushing past the other two women.

 

Beowulf started. “What are you doing?”

 

“Going home before I lose my nerve.” She got between Max and me, and bent over to glare right into my eyes. I flinched back, despite trying to steel myself for it. “You know, it really doesn’t matter to us whether you actually wrote anything or not. We still experienced all of it. So, if after this you do decide to keep living and keep working on our stories? Come up with some happy endings for us, okay? Maybe we won’t haunt you so badly then.” And with that, she reached down and tapped the crystal, vanishing instantly. The crystal’s glow brightened a bit.

 

Beowulf just stared after her with a grim expression. Oasis gestured towards the crystal. “We won’t stop you if you wish to join her. We can handle this with the others.”

 

He slowly shook his head. “No. No, we need to be sure. I’ll stick around until it’s done.”

 

“Alright then,” said Oasis. “Let’s send everyone else back. Between the four of us, we should have sufficient means to reign in whatever stragglers are left.”

 

“If we can find them,” said Max.

 

“I can track the energy,” said Thunderstar. “Each of us is still connected to the crystal by a very faint thread. We can—”

 

Suddenly, there was a shout from outside, followed by multiple flashes of color and a great booming thunder that shattered the windows. Max grabbed me to shield me with his body, while Thunderstar and Oasis erected a forcefield around the room, and Beowulf flew out to confront the threat, blasting right through the wall.

 

“Go!” said Oasis. “I have him!” Thunderstar and Max raced outside, as Oasis pulled me close to her, and bound us both in a multi-layered shield.

 

Still reeling from the shock of the explosion, I dimly registered a booming metallic declaration from one of my villains: “FOOLISH HEROES! THIS WORLD IS RIPE FOR THE TAKING, AND YOU SHALL NOT DEPRIVE DR. GENESIS FROM—” He was cut off by a garbled scream and the ear-piercing shriek of torn metal. Then, the hotel imploded upon us. I felt Oasis gasp and her clutch on me tighten, as something broke through her shield, and struck her body so hard, the impact knocked my breath away. Once again, my world went dark.

 

 

9 – Wayward Daughter

I woke up in the ruined midst of the hotel parking lot. Morning was breaking, and I could see the hotel itself was nothing but rubble. The parking lot itself had huge holes and gauges torn out of it, a few destroyed vehicles flung about. Smoke lazily wafted from the ruins. There was no one around that I could see from my prone position. I hissed in pain as I pushed myself to my feet. Astoundingly, nothing seemed broken. I wasn’t sure how I’d managed to survive whatever had happened, but I didn’t give myself time to question it. I ignored the aches and looked towards the wreckage of the building. The crystal… I had to find the crystal… I had to…

 

A deep, feminine voice cut through the silence. “Creator.”

 

I sharp chill went down my spine, and I slowly turned. Against the dawn’s light, I saw a woman sitting on the front hood of a smashed car several yards away. She was tall, with long golden hair and haunting gray eyes, dressed in a pirate captain’s outfit. Her bearing was one of complete confidence, somehow regal but relaxed at the same time. She had an old-fashioned saber, etched with runes along the blade, balancing it with the tip on the ground as she rested her hand on the hilt. Her expression was calm, studious, but there was a melancholy focus in her gaze.

 

Tabitha Cain. Glorious. Beautiful. Resonant. Tormented. The crowning jewel of my oeuvre. The tragic hero of my magnum opus. Or so she would have been, if only I could have just written her story, instead of spending ten years reworking her tale until there was nothing left to salvage. Just a few scrapped scenes and a couple false-start chapters I never even posted online. How many of those revisions did she actually remember? How many times did she suffer the apocalypse I forced her to enact on her own world, the one consistent element across all her incarnations?

 

“All of them, Salvador. I remember all of them.” She tilted her head a bit as the faintest frowned touched her lips. “Do you think it would have mattered if you had written one version over the others? You could have written not a single word of me, and I’d have still lived it all in your head. I’m not sure if it was the same for the others, or if the nature of my story gives me unique insight.”

 

She stood and walked over to me, until she was looming over me, her gaze and voice cut with carefully restrained venom. “All the madness, the rage, the ruination I experienced, and you have the unmitigated gall to think the problem is you didn’t write that torment down for others to enjoy?” A hint of sardonic amusement crossed her lips. “All things considered, I’m rather glad my tale caused you so much suffering. I truly hope you choked on every word you failed to expunge from your sadistic little mind.”

 

I couldn’t think of anything to say to her. Not that it mattered. She could read my mind. Read my soul, if souls actually existed in my world. No amount of apologies would be enough. My being an author would be no excuse to her; her own world had been “authored” by capricious and sadistic gods who used humanity as their playthings, in an endlessly repeating cycle. From her perspective, I was no different.

 

She looked skyward as she pondered. “What do I do with you, Salvador? Trap you in a dungeon for the rest of our days on this cripplingly mortal world? Break you and heal you and break you and heal you until my rage is spent, or for as long as the crystal’s energy lasts?” She looked around at the shattered battlefield. “Do I just let you go, to flounder the rest of your pitifully short lifespan, aimless and depressed and racked with guilt over the loss of lives real and imagined?” She looked down at me. “Do I just kill you, and complete my revenge against the gods, once and for all?”

 

I let out a shaking breath and dropped to my knees, hanging my head. I had no strength left for this. No willpower left. No wits to even begin trying to think my way out of this.

 

I just stared at the ground as I said, “Will you at least deal with the rest of them? The other characters?”

 

“Kill them, you mean.”

 

“Whatever you need to do to keep them from hurting anyone else. Kill them, convince them to go back into the crystal, gather them up and sequester yourselves on an uninhabited island no one will find. You still want revenge on me, fine, but no one else in this world is to blame for the lives you remember living. It’s entirely on me.”

 

“How noble of you,” she said flatly. “Worry not, it’s already done. A few remaining villains staged an assault on the heroes gathered here. I surmise they found out about you somehow, and were planning to capture you and the crystal, to use for their own ends. I held back from joining in the fight, let them beat on each other while I studied the energy patterns. Even though our powers are fueled by the crystal, those of us with the right skillset can still manipulate its energy directly. A little magic, and I was able to weave a spell that snapped everyone’s connection to it.”

 

I blinked and looked up at her. “You just… turned them off?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“But not yourself?”

 

“The thing still needs to be disposed of, and I’m hardly going to trust you to do it.”

 

I found enough gumption left in me to start standing back up, but Tabitha shoved me back down. “Stay there.” She turned to the rubble. She was still holding the sword in her left hand, perilously close to me, so she reached out with her right and flicked her open palm upward. There was a sound of shifting rubble, and the crystal floated upwards, cupped in a little force field of its own energy.

 

It was now shining brilliantly with iridescent light, too bright and disorienting to look at directly. As she floated it closer, I could feel a simultaneous sensation of electrical pressure and waves of heat. She brought it close enough I cringed back from it, turning my head away, and starting to sweat.

 

She looked down at me, unfazed by the radiance. “If you had known from the very beginning what this thing could do, what would you have done with it?”

 

“I don’t know,” I said, wincing. “Maybe… I don’t know. I want to say I’d be smart enough to summon a character who wouldn’t question me, and then have them fly the thing into space, throw it into the sun, and themselves with it.”

 

“But you wouldn’t have done that, would you?”

 

“I’d probably design some new characters specifically to summon them to help me out with things. Make my life easier. Make me healthier, print me money, fix my goddamned shit brain. Give myself super powers, and a super powered harem to serve me. Let the power go to my head and end up making a complete catastrophe of it all. Probably try to fix it and fuck it up even more.”

 

“Hmmm.” She flicked a finger, and I felt the light and heat and static pressure lessen. I glanced up to see she’d materialized a tinted field between us and the crystal, to shield me from its effects.

 

“You really seem to gravitate to those sorts of stories, don’t you?”

 

I paused. “What do you mean?”

 

“I’m seeing some repeating themes in your head, with the stories you worked on. Well, at least the ones that weren’t just you aping whatever media had your attention that week. When you tried to write a story that you actually felt some real fire for, they all revolved around the same core elements. A person with incredible power, struggling with failure, guilt, and regret. They try to make up for past mistakes or find a more fulfilling purpose in life.”

 

I mulled that over. “Yeah. Huh. I guess you’re right.” My brow furrowed as I started really thinking it over. There were many stories of mine, arguably the majority throughout my life, that were simply born of that unrefined impulse to replicate the fun of something I enjoyed. I liked superheroes a lot, so I made a ton of superhero characters as a kid and a teen.

 

But eventually, particularly in my later years, I really started trying to add depth to my stories. I gave my characters richer backstories. I tried to actually think about things like themes and messages. It rarely helped as far as getting more actual stories written, but it did lead to me becoming more attached to the casts of those stories, to really feel something for those projects beyond the initial spark of novelty. Which in turn was why I felt so devasted over my failure to actualize them, when they clung to my brain for years.

 

The Intrepid, Beowulf and Meteora’s story, had been about a world where superhumans were rare, but devastatingly powerful. Each of the heroes had fucked up during their early attempts to use their powers under separate circumstances, and that was what drove them to work together, to overcome their individual weaknesses and bolster each other’s strengths, to make up for their failures and protect the world from the walking disasters of the rogue Empowered.

 

Natural Forces and Cavalry, the series Oasis, Thunderstar, and Max-Out were from, had mostly been a post-apocalyptic take on superhero comics. However, in the lore of that world, the ruined state of the planet could be mostly blamed on the Supernals, whose wars against the Dragons, and eventually against one another, had devastated the planet multiple times over, until only a handful of Supernals were left to watch over the wreckage, and do their best to mend the hell they had wrought. Within the stories themselves, several of the heroes, most of Cavalry in fact, were former villains making up for past crimes.

 

The Adventures of Tabitha Cain had been about Tabitha trying to free her reality and its mortal peoples from being the playthings of mad gods. She’d shattered their roleplay and slew them all, only to realize that without the gods, the mortal races would eventually evolve to become even worse tyrants. So she tried to find new solutions, alter the future again and again to force a better outcome, and every time things got worse and worse. In the end, her only recourse was to wipe clean all of creation, and let things start anew without the influence of any gods or their terrible magics.

 

There were other stories, other individual characters within a given series, each with a different take on the same core idea. Failure. Regret. Try again next time. Rinse. Repeat.

 

Story of my life.

 

She gave me a minute to let me stew it over, before continuing. “Something else I see in there, a theme you lean on fairly often. Stories about fiction melding with reality. Lucid dreamers able to enter the sleeping minds of others, to save them from nightmares. Magicians summoning imagined creatures into their world. Lost creations manifesting as vengeful monsters. Fair folk who take the form of humanity’s myths and legends to maintain their presence and identities in the material plane.”

 

She leaned down and cupped a hand under my chin, forcing my head up to meet her eyes. “You even made a few characters in reference to yourself. Fantastical versions of you living as adventurers and heroes in some of your worlds.” She made a slight, sardonic smile. “I see now that I met one of those. He joined my crew in some versions of my tale. Imaginary was his name. A young man trapped halfway between dreams and reality, drifting from world to world until he settled into mine.” Her smile dropped. “He helped me for a while, until he lost his mind completely, and begged me to put him out of his misery.”

 

I remembered him. A bit of a self-deprecating joke of a self-insert. Following the themes of Tabitha’s story, her supporting cast were all broken characters in their own way. Imaginary was a representation of me as a dream warrior who had gone so far into his own head, that he lost all grip on reality, cursed to dwell in his imaginary worlds forever. It had been long enough since I’d worked on Tabitha’s stories that I had almost forgotten about him.

 

And now that she reminded me, something suddenly clicked. My eyes widened, and she let go of me, standing tall again. I looked to the ground again, my brow furrowing as the gears turned in my mind. Memories of older ideas came rushing back to me. I’d been so focused on just the characters the crystal had summoned, so caught up in the immediate danger, and shocked by the trauma, that I hadn’t been able to extrapolate farther, to realize the obvious: magic character creator crystals weren’t any more real than the characters it had summoned.

 

This was just another story. I was just another goddamned self-insert.

 

 

10 – The Final Story Of Sharkerbob

As soon as I realized that, the whole scene shifted. I was there at my keyboard, back at my apartment, staring at a draft of another mess of a story. I leaned back in my chair and let out a big sigh as I stewed over my words. Next to the main document were a couple smaller windows with scattered notes for possible directions the story could go, and I had already realized none of them were going to work out.

 

Someone pulled my seat back, putting more space between me and the desk. Tabitha came around from behind me. She shut the laptop closed and pushed it back, then turned and sat on the edge of my desk, imposing herself between me and my work. The crystal was gone. Her sword was sheathed. She had a thousand ways to hurt me without even lifting a finger, but there was no point in bothering.

 

“I guess no matter how far I reach, I’ll never really be able to beat you,” she said. “I could kill avatar after avatar, and you’d still be behind the keyboard, deciding my ultimate fate. I can’t actually reach through the screen and wring your neck, no matter how badly I want to.”

 

“My best characters write themselves,” I said. “But that’s not truly literal. I can just sit down and let the words flow out of me without over thinking it, and I can say it’s like I’m letting you speak through me. But in the end, you’re still just words on a page and a figment in my mind. The best you can hope for is that I drive myself so crazy failing to write you, that I finally go buy a shotgun and blow my brains out. Unfortunately for you, I don’t have the suicide gene in me, so I’m probably going to stick around until I die of natural causes. Or a freak accident. Or get murdered. Fortunately for you, I’m at an age where I don’t have that much longer left to go, even if I don’t get cut short.”

 

She let out a pensive little exhalation. “You are a sad, morbid little man.”

 

“Why do you think I became an author?”

 

She blinked, and despite herself, the briefest quirk of a smile touched her lips. We sat there, just staring at each other for several long moments.

 

“So now what?” she said.

 

“I dunno. I guess I’m finished with this one.” I gestured to the laptop behind her. “You know, this draft of the story is a rewrite, actually. The original version was a one-shot I left a little open-ended in case I wanted to continue it. It took a couple years, but I did try to make a true sequel. At the end of the original one-shot, the crystal is destroyed, but it explodes in the process, taking me with it. I was going to have myself suddenly awaken in a world that was a combination of all my failed projects, and it was going to be this whole big serial thing where I’m forced to confront my creations, wallow in my narcissistic misery for a while, but eventually pull out of it to try and make things right.”

 

I shrugged and sighed. “But surprise, surprise, I couldn’t figure out how to make it work. Just like with you, with the Intrepid, with Natural Forces, Wyld Hunt, Galea, S.T.A.R. Corps, Elemental Keys, the Power Universe, all of you big idea projects, it got too big, too unwieldy. Too many conflicting ideas, too much indecision on where to go and what elements to use, only compounded to be even worse, since it was all of you crammed together. Somehow, I not only didn’t learn the lesson to not bite off more than I could chew, I just tried to bite even bigger with this one. I even tried to justify it as fitting in with the thematic critique of my whole process. But you don’t try put out a housefire by throwing twenty more burning houses on top of it.”

 

“I’m surprised you didn’t just let it die and move on, like you’ve done with everything else,” Tabitha said.

 

I shook my head. “I tried. I really did. I had written a small novel’s worth of the beginning of that sequel, only to hit brick wall after brick wall, until finally I killed it out of sheer frustration. I didn’t even manage to get the actual quest started, I just truncated the story with a hackneyed, fourth-wall breaking conversation ending. Kind of like what we’re having now. I realized the whole thing was me just performing some kind of writing therapy as I worked through a mid-life crisis. Between that story, and a couple other projects I was working on around the same time, I found I’d processed most of my toxic feelings about myself as a writer. So, I put the whole thing to bed and tried to move on.”

 

She blanched at me. “So why are you putting us through this again?”

 

“Because I’m a fucking idiot who can’t let go of the past. I thought I’d come to terms with my failures, but I suppose I still had too much lingering regret. But what really set me back was when I tried to move on to other things, nothing new came to me. Nothing I could feel any confidence or passion for. If I could have sunk my teeth into a new project, maybe I could have actually moved on. But it was like my inability to think of compelling narratives was worse than ever.”

 

I let out another sigh. “At some point, I decided that this was the last real story I had left to tell. As in, it was the last narrative I came up with that I felt real, genuine pathos and emotional grit for. That had themes to explore, instead of just surface-level gimmicks. So, I threw myself into the pit again, tore open my old wounds, and beat myself against the grindstone. Lo and behold, no matter how much I tried to rework things, all I managed to do was drive myself crazy again.”

 

I made a gesture towards my laptop. “You know, this rewrite we’re in, it was actually just supposed to be a light edit for a smoother transition into the quest sequel I was wanting to do. But as I swapped out characters and let things play out, I somehow ended up hitting most of the major things I wanted to say with just this short. Moreover, it’s become extremely clear to me across my revision attempts that Sharkerbob—that’s me—is not in anyway cut out to be the protagonist of some globe-trotting adventure series. Not as the useless sad sack I am in this story. So now, it looks like there isn’t even a point to doing the quest part of the storyline. It’s back to just being a one-shot.”

 

I paused and shook my head again with a scowl. “I have a real bad habit of doing that. I can’t pace my stories to save my life. No wonder I can’t write anything longform.” I paused, realized I was about to go on another tangent, and cut myself off with a dismissive wave. “Anyway. Enough of that. I could fill a dictionary with my endless self-flagellating ramblings. You get the point.”

 

Tabitha finally looked away from me, tilting her head to the side a bit as she glanced towards the laptop for a moment, mulling over my words. When she looked back to me, she said, “So how does this one end? Nothing seems to have actually been resolved here. We’re still unwritten. You’re still not satisfied.”

 

“Art is never finished, just abandoned, as they say,” I said. “I see now I’m not really going to be able to change how I am, and repeatedly brutalizing you all, and myself, is just a surefire way to a slow, painful death for us all. You are correct, whether I actually wrote your stories down or not doesn’t change what you experienced. What you all experienced, in my flailing attempts to process my own toxicity about my life. I can really never make up for what I did to you.”

 

“You talk as if what happens to us actually matters,” said Tabitha. “We’re just figments of your imagination. You’re just talking to yourself right now, about fantasies of things that never were.”

 

I smiled slightly. “It’s all perspective. Sure, in a literal sense, you’re not real, not the way the Author is. But you’re all a part of his psyche, distinct from his own self-image. You live inside his head, in your own realities nested in his dreams. In a way, you are very real to him. In a way, you are real to the people who might read the stories he does manage to write.”

 

She gave a small, exasperated sighed. “Sure. Alright. Myths and metaphors. Magic and memetics. Stories are more than just the ramblings of the people who tell them. I suppose there’s a truth to that.” She crossed her arms and gave me a flat expression. “What of it, though? Where does that actually leave us?”

 

I took a moment to really consider my next words, to be sure I meant them. “I can let you go. A final gesture to close off this era of my work. To officially declare the Sharkerbob penname to be retired. Yes, I’ll still think of you, maybe even have some future ideas for you, maybe even write some future incarnation spun off from you. But symbolically, it will help me close the door, and let you all live in my realm of dreams, without my anxieties constantly stirring your pot. An internal canon where the truest form of you is no longer beholden to my toxic whims.”

 

Tabitha gave me an unimpressed scoff. “You’re joking, right? We will never be free of your influence, for as long as you live. And when you die, our worlds will most assuredly end.”

 

“Perhaps that’s true,” I said. “But I’ve done this before, with other pennames, and it seems to work out. The truth is, I had already given up on most of you Sharkerbob characters years ago. But I instead of accepting that fact, I let my resentment linger all this time. Those hooks kept you dragging along, until I found myself dredging you back out of the pit of my subconscious, to grind you into this new project, and hurt us all, all over again.”

 

I stood up from my chair and motioned towards my laptop. It floated up from the desk and came over to my hand. As it touched my fingers, it shifted, crumpling into itself and remolding into the form of the jagged crystal, now glowing with soft warmth. I held the crystal out to her. “I forge this symbol as the Heart of my Multiverse. If you accept it, you will be granted the status of Cosmic Guardian, with the power of Authorship. I give you stewardship over all the worlds created under the Sharkerbob name.”

 

Tabitha let out a sharp, rueful laugh. “My story was entirely about slaying gods to free worlds from their influence. And now you’re handing me the keys to godhood?”

 

I shrugged. “A Cosmic Guardian’s role is mostly to preserve the stability of a given section of my creative Multiverse, to protect its core paradigms, even from my own rampant indecision. There’s a whole lore about it. Of all the characters from the Sharkerbob era, I trust you to have the most sense of perspective on things. Of course, you can elevate others if you wish the share the burden.”

 

She frowned in thought. “Sounds to me like you’re just handing off the responsibility, so you can go create and ruin a whole new set of worlds under yet another name.”

 

I gave her a sardonic smile. “I’ll either get it right one of these days or die trying. Now, do you accept, or do I need to redo this whole conversation with Beowulf or Oasis?”

 

She looked me in the eye for a moment, looked to the crystal, then back at me. She stood and held out her hand. I placed the glowing artifact in her palm, but before I could pull away, she reached up and seized me by the wrist. “I accept your offer, Sharkerbob. I’ll look after your worlds. But I’m not letting you out of this completely.” As the energies of the crystal suffused into her, her senses expanded, extending to perceive veils of reality even her previous mystical insights had failed to penetrate. She could now see beyond the borders of this reality, past the layers of the multiverse, past the fabled fourth wall, past the words that formed the very fundament of her existence, to the man typing them at his desk.

 

“Maybe I can’t do anything about you, my Author. But I can make sure your little self-insert truly understands what you put us through. Don’t worry, I’ll make sure he survives to appreciate it.”

 

The crystal began to glow brighter, and Sharkerbob flinched as electric heat seared through his whole body. The scene obliterated into a white void, as Tabitha ascended to her new, divine status, carrying my worlds within her. I imagined her drifting off into the Greater Multiverse to find a proper spot to anchor and fortify her newly acquired realms, as other Guardians had done with other Multiverses I’d given closure to.

 

I imagined what Tabitha might choose to do with the Avatar I’d given her in effigy. Would she shove him along on a whole questline story after all, writing the epic adventure I never could? Would she just torture him for a thousand years? Or would she just unceremoniously dump him on some mundane Earth, to go back to being a middle-aged nobody in a nowhere town, still struggling to write, living the rest of his days wondering if the whole affair had been some insane dream?

 

Perhaps in time, I’d check in and imagine how it all turned out. For now, though, it was no longer my business. It was time to stop dwelling on the past and look to the future. Maybe this time, I’d actually do it.

 

I mean, I probably wouldn’t. This is me we’re talking about. But even a man as creatively crippled as myself can dream, can’t he?

 

END OF AN ERA