"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."

"It described itselves as a temporarily embarrassed omnipotent engine of erotic fantasy."

"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."

"Got any recs? Also I'm once again curious about the whole everything here."

"How about your whole everything?" he asks Eiðemann.

"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."

"...you mentioned that 'Creation' is a tree, right? What'd you mean by that?"

"Mm. The cosmology of Creation is deeply and profoundly impossible to accurately describe to mortals. But if you look at it from the proper angle, it is strongly reminiscent of a tree. In an infinite expanse of nothing, which of course contains all of the things that don't exist. And the World Ash, that being the tree, is surrounded by a great and terrible flame, so as to keep all of those things that exist from being destroyed by the things that don't exist and would rather nothing else did either. Of which I was technically one."

"Okay, so, like, the description of the universe—uh, in the broader sense—that I tend to think of could not be summarised as anything like that? That sounds like... a way that things could be, but not the way that they definitely are? Put another way, I think your Creation is a subset of things that are and my thing and I think the Erogame are both from outside that paradigm.

"I feel like I should be adding a bunch of caveats and hedging to all of that but I'm not sure how to do so usefully in a way that doesn't sound, like, condescending or patronising or whatever. My version of you is, I think, better at this than I am, so probably you also are?"

Eiðin... thinks about this.

"So, I'm not saying you're wrong," he says, in the way that people say when they think someone else is only mostly wrong. "Milliways has been pretty insistent she isn't a Not-thing, and if I accept that, then she's certainly not from inside my paradigm. More things outside Heaven and Earth, all that. Your broader universe, I can accept.

"That being said, Creation... you talked about your metanarrative, that things happen or don't, not because the powers are acting on the universe, but because they're acting on the story taking place. If you tried to pick a fight with Lord Entropy, I think the thing that would happen by your metanarrative is that you wouldn't. Because winning that way... it's impossible like cutting sunlight, it's impossible like two-plus-two-is-three, it's the kind of impossible that you can't negotiate unless you're – specifically, not generally, able to. You might defeat him by some other means, that's an old standby. Reunite him with his long-lost soul, find a way to give him true love's kiss. But it wouldn't be straightforward. And he can do the same thing to you."

"...okay, so, picture reality from the perspective of someone who didn't know about all the everything you now know, Creation and whatever powers you have. It follows just simple mathematical laws, exceptionlessly. And in that reality, someone reads a fictional book about your life. From that person's perspective, everything, including Lord Entropy, is fake. If the book decides to come up with a way to defeat Lord Entropy, then—that may or may not fit within the story, it may be good or bad writing, it may break established worldbuilding, but the reader has no reason to disbelieve that that's what happened in the story.

"It's from that reader's perspective that I'm looking at your Creation, and at Milliways, and at myself, and it's from that reader's perspective that I'm talking about metanarrative. Maybe the book includes things it calls metanarratives, but from the reader's perspective the book's metanarratives are still contained within the narrative."

"Okay. I see what you meant about condescending, and I'm going to try not to condescend to you either, but. What in the world makes you think you're the only one who's operating on that level?"

"Oh I don't. The Spirit explicitly told me there are lots of other people like me," not that he wouldn't have concluded as much with five minutes' thinking, "and I don't even particularly expect that that reader's reality is the fundamental one, or that it even bottoms out somewhere? I just—really don't think any of the four realities presented here is it, if there is an it, and I expect that when something like—no I don't know if I'm saying this right.

"Back to the reader's perspective, let's think about some other shared imaginarium, like—the Bible. Why not. There's the Bible, and there's—fanfiction of the Bible, there's movies about it and stories that take inspiration from it and—the story I originally know a you from is actually kind of Bible fanfic—there's Lord of the Rings, I don't know if that'll exist on your Earth since its author was super close friends with the author of that other series and—

"I am once again talking too much. Point is, there may be several different books that borrow from or exist in the same meta universe, and someone may write a story in that meta universe that has a me in it, and someone may write a different story that has a different person with the same bullshit going on that I do, and someone or both of those someone's may write stories where those people meet, and—they're all just as fake, or equivalently just as real, as each other."