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There is a bar. It professes to exist; its only current patron has his doubts. Not that there's anything wrong with that, you understand. It's just that usually, things that exist have a certain on ne sait quoi (because, well, il sait quoi, it's you people who don't have a language with any halfway decent way to describe a Not-apple.)
Besides. Out the window, stars are dying. In his eyes, stars are dying. Isn't that just too neat?
...just what level of meta are they even on right now.
"That's flattering. So, uh, do you by any chance happen to have a method of making me be offscreen for the relevant purposes?"
Well cool.
...he could also use this event to put clothes on. He opts not to.
"Back to our main subject, this is what I used to look like back then."
He grins.
"Yeah, I made some discoveries about myself in this process. But anyway, the notebook claimed she had been sent by the Spirit of Unleashed Femininity to give me superpowers to live out the story I wanted to. And the superpowers were—often very meta. They work at the metanarrative level, a lot, in the sense that stuff doesn't necessarily always happen because of causality or because my powers are doing something in-universe; it just shakes out the way it does, because that's the story that's being told. If that makes sense."
"Not how I tend to think of them, but yeah, that kind are all over the place."
"Yeah, so, the story that's being told right now is probably related to me running into an alternate universe version of my boyfriend. Given genre conventions and the way Milliways works I would not be surprised if we ran into other yous and/or other mes."
"And I'm here because the Erogame is, what, collaborating on it? I never got too deep into the arcs and all that, before, I don't know how they work."
"Well I have no idea but something that's turned your life into a game sounds like the kind of thing that could be playing the same ballgame as the Spirit even if not necessarily on the same league."
We suspect we are starting to be a slightly different thing than that, but it'll come out in the wash.
"Most games in gamer fics I'm aware of tend to be a lot more impersonal than this, admittedly. They usually just pretend to be, like, an interface that happens to be there? None of this talking to the gamer dealio."
Hence the suspicion. We've been looking into what happens in this situation. There are some surprisingly helpful webcomics.
We are forbidden to speak its name by international treaty. Also more relevant restrictions than that.
"You ever had a day so bad you thought I shouldn't exist if existing can feel like this, and neither should anybody else?"
"...no." He thinks that's called "depression" but they hadn't invented that in the late twentieth century so it makes sense Eiðemann wouldn't know about it.
"I was, in some sense, a crystallization of that. The moment when you've gone so far wrong you decide that the world not only cannot but should not be saved. I was... an open wound. Festering. The world tried to close over me, to heal me. But I was the evidence that it was wrong. I couldn't let it – brush me under the rug. A world that let Edmund Pevensie go the way he did, a world where taking candy from a pretty stranger could leave you... broken... deserved to be broken. And broken again. Until there was nothing left of it but sand."
He exhales. "Obviously that didn't go so well; viz, the world, still wrong but not broken, not for lack of trying. It became increasingly clear that fighting was a loser's game. But just because I wasn't breaking the world didn't mean I was going to let it crush me. So I just... sat, for a while. Uncrushed, or refusing to be crushed no matter how many times it tried. Still an open wound, but... clean. Painful, but not spreading.
"And a little under forty-eight hours ago, I woke up to a little purple box trying to convince me to play a game. Then I aged four years in four seconds, fucked my... best friend, I guess... in the men's room of a shopping center, and accidentally turned the world's latest attempt to crush me into a half-brained sex slave."
Candy from a pretty stranger... oh hell. You know, he feels like he might appreciate the narrative parallel more if it weren't starting to make him sick to his stomach to think about.
"Ok so before I engage with any of that are you, like, sure you don't want a hug?"
It's a wan smile, but it's a smile. "I have had somewhere between twenty years and ten millennia to get over... all of that. I didn't actually put any of it toward that end, obviously, but it did happen."
"Alright. I'll take your word for that. As for the rest...
"...to what extent do you believe all of that, uh, my you called it 'melodrama', as opposed to it being a thing you're just kind of saying?" Because, hell, that was some grade A shitposting right there. ...dramaposting. Depressionposting? One of those. Point is that did not sound like words that were trying to mean things.
"I... haven't earnestly tried to destroy the world in a long time. If there's a solution, that isn't it. It isn't letting it continue the way it is, either. But it isn't that. So, yes, the boundary conditions of existence result inevitably in suffering and this is unacceptable, but yes, I was acting like an utter tit about it as well."
"On the bright side, hopefully your story's genre shifted to something that will manage to fix that!"
"The game has made implications in that direction as well. Perhaps I'm underestimating it, but... Magisters can shift their genre. Serpents and Devils too. But there's ways around that, and I managed to kill them by the dozens. And if I'm going to rewrite Everything and Nothing both, I'm going to have more opposition than a depressive primary-schooler with a sword."
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