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?
...he didn't ask for Milliways when he was stepping out of his shower stall and yet Milliways is happening anyway. This must be plot!
So, from Eiðemann's P.O.V., this sparkly pink-haired teenager walks into a bar entirely naked and still wet as if he was literally just showering, because he was.
...but from the pink-haired teenager's P.O.V. his boyfriend is just. Sitting there. In Milliways. "Ed?"
"Well, you're not the one person in all of Creation who usually calls me that," the twink comments, turning to face him.
He's not Ed. Well, he looks a great deal like him – but he's... perfected. His hair is frozen in place, not a strand moving against the whole. His skin is pale and unblemished, with a precise rose-petal blush spotting his cheeks. Every feature in local maximum.
Also, he's in a medieval prince's courtly regalia. Silver crown, black satin, breeches around-
Hm.
That is a considerably larger codpiece than is typical for this era of fashion.
You say that as if Pete has literally any idea what size codpieces are meant to be or, actually, that codpieces exist at all. Pete is many kinds of nerd but "aware of medieval men's preoccupations with their cocks" is not one of them.
"I heard that capital-C there but I'm not sure it makes sense for there to be one of those," he says, walking over to the counter. "You're... not Edmund Pevensie?"
"There did once exist someone named Edmund Pevensie, and I was, at that point in time, that person. There's lots of worlds but one Creation – Creation the tree, every leaf and fruit and twig a world."
His gaze falls to Pete's crotch, at tree, then returns to eye-level.
It would be inconvenient for Pete's tree to sprout any larger right now (though that's admittedly mostly because he finds it really hot to have a big floppy and he's indulging in that around an AU version of his boyfriend) so it doesn't.
Anyway, he thinks that tree thing is probably not true! ...it might be locally true. Like, for a certain value of local. "Does the word 'Narnia' ring a bell?"
"No. Does the – oh fuck off... hang on."
He darts his eyes over some kind of text in front of him, which is definitely not in front of Pete. Snorts and pokes the air.
"As I was saying. Does the word 'Erogame' ring yours? While we're asking."
"...not as an individual title but yes as a genre? Kind of?" At the counter: "Bar, it's always lovely to see you. May I have a towel? Thank you kindly." He starts towelling himself off. "So there's like a lot that's gonna go on here but the thing you said just now was kind of concerning, do you need a hug about whatever caused you to no longer identify as Edmund Pevensie and make those faces about it?"
"N-"
Pause. Squint.
"If I want a hug I'll let you know," the Ed-alike grumbles, poking the air again. (Harder, this time.)
Oh he is so lying. And if he's an Ed he's gonna figure out that Pete is thinking this from looking at him. Pete isn't even trying to hide it he's actually thinking it very loudly and hoping Ed will hear it.
"Is it like a gamer fic?" he asks, laying the towel on a stool and hopping onto it. "Maybe a bit more physical in its interface, only you can see it, but with stats and EXP and skills and whatnot, and... ero?"
"A... gamer..."
Sigh.
"Yes, apparently. Will you please be mutually visible? This is embarrassing us both."
You and we do not constitute a pair. We are significantly more and also less than that.
"You are embarrassing every entity whether they exist or have the common dignity not to."
"...I mean, if you can find her? I'm not sure how many levels of meta we're playing with right now but if you know about her—well, I guess you are a gamer fic. And nice to meet you."
She's glad you're doing alright. And something that isn't her but is her regrets the scheduling conflict, but this took enough negotiation as it is.
"I assume if you meant the Spirit you'd have said it so I guess you mean instead the thing that's, like, above the Spirit and who may or may not be—fuck I wish I had thought to memorize Vivian's words—a femme adjacent, uhh, something from California, but like, one level up? Or something along those lines?"
I don't know why you people keep thinking he's from California. I mean, obviously I do know and it's hilarious. But yes, her. We need to drop down about fifteen metalevels before this gets unreadable, though. Remember how you're an actual person with real preferences? So's this chump! Have preferences at each other, he hates that.
"I would hate to interrupt this incredibly stupid conversation," the twink demurs.
"I'm going to need a disambiguating nickname for you. Before I figure out how much to explain, are you from a late twentieth or early twenty-first century Earth or close enough and sufficiently online that if I talk about AU fanfic you'll know that I mean?"
"...I have memories from a late twentieth century Earth. Edmund was born in the seventies. AU fanfic is still word salad. And my name's Eiðemann, you can call me Eiðin if you really must, that should disambiguate."
"Okay so moderate amounts of explaining. I'm Peter Tarleton, Pete for short, because the world I just came from has—well, lots of Peters, obviously, but most relevantly to my immediate social circle is Peter Pevensie, my boyfriend Edmund Pevensie's brother. It's 2023, but that means less than it could because it's not a standard Earth. Which part of everything I just said needs the most explaining?"
"...hm. None of it strictly speaking but it's sort of alarming there's a me, since that would imply he exists."
"You are the third you I am aware of! Admittedly I haven't met the first you, because he's fictional, but that hasn't ever stopped anyone, as far as I know."
"Generally not, no. Someone wrote a book about the poor idiot? Were they trying to empirically learn the Dewey Decimal number for pornography, snuff?"
"...we're talking alternate histories, here, it's almost certainly not whatever happened to you.
"The first you I'm aware of is from the 20s—wait, no, 40s—and when he was a child he and his siblings found a magical wardrobe in their uncle's house that took them to a fantasy land written by a devoutly Christian author. Shenanigans happen, they kill an evil witch, they become the four reigning monarchs for a while, there are talking animals, decades later they find the way out of the wardrobe again and find themselves in the bodies of—themselves—as children, again, in their uncle's house. There's more books and also movies but I haven't actually read the books and I haven't watched the movies in forever because I felt like it'd be rude to my version of you to try to do a character study of who he is based on the fictional materials he features most heavily on.
"And, well, my version of you is a boarding school student from an Earth that tends to attract interdimensional visitors for one reason or another, and I'm one such visitor that was attracted. He is as far as I can tell a perfectly normal teenager."
"I am absolutely thrilled."
There is literally ice crystallizing on his skin.
We've looked over the numbers, and there is nothing you could have said in any universe that would both make Eiðely aware that he is one of a single-digit number of instances of himself who had to experience his tragic backstory, and not make him simultaneously outraged with them and disgusted with himself for feeling anything other than the most profound relief.
A sphere of sea-green marble exists where there was not one before.
Eiðemann is no longer in the location he was in.
The sphere of sea-green marble is no longer in the location it was temporarily in.
There sure is. "Did he get dealt with by Security?" Pete wonders aloud, taking a look at the napkin.
While the Erogame cannot be meaningfully harmed, that does not actually make it acceptable to take hostile action towards it and its manifestations in the bar.
New napkin.
Would you like a drink? I can also provide one to bring to Eiðemann's holding cell, if you do not wish to wait for his release.
Oh that looks fun, he wonders what it is. He tries it as he hops off the stool and makes his way to the holding cell.
The blue stripes taste somewhat (but not very much) like banana; the yellow stripes taste a little (hardly at all, really) like blueberry. You know, if he thinks to try them separately. The texture is thicker than milk but thinner than a proper smoothie. It's unsurprisingly pleasant.
Eiðemann is in his cell. The marble sphere is... rolling gently back and forth across a small bed of what looks like Hawaiian black sand.
"Hullo."
Bar is great.
He walks over to the cell and offers Eiðemann his own drink. "Sorry for, um. I was kind of insensitive."
"And I'm a living landmine. You weren't that insensitive."
He accepts the drink and takes a sip. "...this is extremely good," he says, mildly annoyed.
"Bar is amazing at drink recs." He sits cross-legged on the floor—and winces a bit when he carelessly squeezes his dick. He adjusts it so that the tip is resting on his shin.
(Pete wonders for a moment why this happened; it's the kind of situation where this would be inconvenient, and his power ought to have suspended physics momentarily to avoid it. He doesn't have to think very hard to guess why it wasn't actually considered on the whole inconvenient, though. He knows Ed finds him hot. He knows Ed thinks his dick in particular is unreasonable. If Eiðemann is anything like that, he's not going to regret accidentally drawing attention like this. He's probably not going to regret it anyway.)
"I kinda jumped the gun a bit and entered shitposting mode—you won't know what that means. I was saying things because they were entertaining to say, not because I thought it was a good idea. So I'm sorry for that."
"I'd be a filthy liar if I said I'd never done that. Or worse."
Eiðin glances over – not at the rearrangement, but when Pete reasons out why it happened. Then he snorts and goes back to staring at his drink.
"—can you actually read minds or are you just doing the Pevensie thing that's indistinguishable from that for all intents and purposes? Not that that's going to change much of what I do but it might change some of the framings I use in my brain for things."
"I definitely do the formerly-known-as-Pevensie thing, but no, neither of those is what just happened. As of... fairly recently... my primary sense is for desire, and I wasn't surprised that you desire me but then you formed the firm impression that I desired you back, while I wasn't looking at you or thinking particularly about you at all. Or, well, you formed the impression that I thought your cock was pretty. And I decided that if you were going to go around doing things like that I might as well actually get a look."
"I did mention I was dating an AU version of you," he points out. "And the way AU fanfic works is that for all intents and purposes you're the same person, just in different circumstances and contexts. But it's the whole point.
"...sec, lemme review that for shitposting... No, I think that's still legit. —does the translation effect work across non-contemporal versions of the same language such that when I say words like 'legit' you immediately get the connotations or do you have to work those out from context and first principles?"
"I don't get free extra context, but connotations are part of the package. Sometimes I actually get more of them than the people talking to me intended, it's funny even though it's usually also inconvenient to have information I'm not supposed to and not know it."
"Alright. Well, you've got a gamer fic-inspired dealio that has 'ero' in the name, I was kidnapped from the locker room shower stall right after going swimming despite Bar usually having preferences against patron nudity, it's clear that the PTB want us to fuck, and while I am obviously not opposed to the idea I feel like there's—" More character interaction that ought to be onscreened before they get there. That's shitposting. "Probably more stuff we should talk about before we do that. Fucked if I know what, though."
"I have in fact found that since the game's intervention it is safer to assume the Powers that Be want me to fuck than otherwise."
He doesn't sound thrilled about it, frankly.
"—we don't have to if you don't want to. I mean, obviously, right, consent is important, but, just—to be clear. I don't have an angle, here, I may plausibly know more than you do about Bar but I don't particularly have any insight into these things." Other than what's obviously derivable from the fact that they're both closer to fictional than not.
"...ta, then. It's been a pretty intense few days, and I can't get physically exhausted but honestly it might be nice to just have a legitimate interaction with another person that isn't about sex or trauma."
"I'm very curious about your whole schtick—when you said 'erogame' I had been thinking, like, visual novels, not whatever seems to be going on instead—but that might be too close to trauma. I could tell you about my schtick?"
"We could start with yours, I'm not traumatized about the little bastard yet but it feels like I've been monopolizing terribly."
We are only a little bastard compared to the uncountably infinite number of extremely large bastards elsewhere that we are currently not.
He was about to launch an explanation but that stops him short. "Uncountably infinite? No, wait, I actually don't buy that one, there are not uncountably infinitely many ways for extremely large bastards to be, everything beyond the countable is, like, literally just random noise. I do mean that literally, that's what the uncountability comes from, is, is—say you did not mean that the way I'm interpreting you to have said that."
"Nuh uh, hang on, I'm going to need you to elaborate on that, are you just messing with me? Is it just messing with me?" he asks Eiðemann. "Okay, I know the answer is yes but there are—uncountable infinities have implications! Which I'm not sure it is possible to ever think about because only countable infinities make sense! I should shut up."
"I have no wish to step into an argument with this much associated maths. Ask Ionya Callahan, whose deaths are aleph-Graham."
"There is actually no amount of evidence I could observe that would—wait, that's not true, Cantor's argument—" He literally throws his hands up. "Fuck it. I hope the audience was entertained by this short interlude."
"I'll take it, can't have all of my onscreened moments be perfect however much the Spirit might want that. It's exposition time.
"So I'm—actually were CYOAs invented back then—no, almost certainly not—getting ahead of myself. Again.
"I'm from a standard Earth, which is to say an Earth that doesn't natively have any kinds of supernatural elements and just follows the laws of physics. Then one day I ran across a sentient magic notebook who wanted me to be special and powerful in a feminine way. I was not very feminine back then, and arguably am still mostly not. Uh, close your eyes for a second? And I expect you don't count, Erogame, but in case you do, can you do the equivalent of closing your eyes?"
"Closing my eyes is the least effective out of a wide variety of ways that would not stop me from seeing you."
"Okay but I need a moment offscreen to do this," he says, standing up and dusting himself. "I assume Bar can trump your thing so probably if I step out the door that'll be sufficiently offscreen?"
"I—kinda figured she might have introduced herself if she wanted to participate in this conversation. ...I ought to have, too. Um, it's nice to meet you, 𓊗, I'm Peter Tarleton, Pete for short."
...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."
"Admittedly not very frilly. Could see him in a dress, but it'd take some work."
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."
"It described itselves as a temporarily embarrassed omnipotent engine of erotic fantasy."
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."
"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."
"...we're talking past each other. The things I hear you saying are that my world isn't more real than yours, which I have conceded; that the Erogame and your Femininity are entities from outside my world's paradigm, which I had already accepted; and that your metanarrative is qualitatively different from the sort found in my world, which I have heard nothing in particular to support. How about you?"
"Oh. Uh. The thing I want to say is that I don't have enough information to decide whether my metanarrative as expressed by my—powers, so to speak—is qualitatively different than yours, but that I don't have any reason to believe there is any limit to how meta you can get and the relationship between my metanarrative and yours is gonna be defined by whoever's writing our story." Though Pete's starting to think this might be a Backchannel situation.
"I think whoever's writing our story should be shot in the street like a dog. Anyway, how did this conversation start, explaining my deal? I can cut anything, including abstract concepts, into two equal halves or, with effort, two arbitrary pieces. Also I can perform many though not all actions with thoughtless perfection, in the manner of a true King. Also I can instantiate my regalia, the garb and the sword and the crown, though the Erogame very considerately burdened me with an erotic magical-girl transformation sequence to do so."
Erogame 🤝 Me
magical girl transformations should be sexy
Oh sick he managed to actually say that, his confidence that this is a side fanfic has increased to 80%.
"—I wonder if you're already considered to be safe enough to be let out of baby jail, I wanna go back to the main bar and see if I can find a book or something with your world's whole entire everything in it."
"...you know, I can tell you did something utterly fucked there, but what I heard was The Erogame is just like me, magical girl transformations should be sexy. Which is a perfectly respectable assortment of noises to make with your mouth, unlike whatever you actually said. Oi, 𓊗, am I good?"
