"Right, I'm a vampire."

"...that's. Unexpected."

"So," she turns to Adelene to ask, "what's your name, and if what you're saying is true, can you kindly ask our author to bring my mother back? And maybe bring everyone who's ever died in my world back, too, and get rid of malaria, and make everyone immortal—are you human-looking out of convenience? Are you author-types actually five-dimensional superbeings or something?"

His brain catches up to him. "There's an author. My world is horrible because someone's writing fiction. That explains so, so much."

"Oh, sorry. Adelene, and this is Lurker, and my characters in general are brown moiety - your author is Pedro and your moiety is salmon; Bells' is Alicorn and green, but Alicorn isn't here right now. Bringing your moms back... yeah, I suppose we can probably do that, though in that case I'm going to skip ahead a bit while you do the reunion thing. Malaria and immortality, less so, we're not actually instantiating any malaria-infected people in the first place, and most people are NPCs and not really alive to us in such a way that saying they're immortal would really be meaningful - I mean, we could say that anyway, but then the wold gets a lot less interesting to write in, and I'm not entirely sure you still exist if nobody is writing you or reading about you - that's Lurker's take, anyway. And we're just human, that's why you're basically human - you actually get niftier powers than we do, vampires and parahumans don't actually exist for us at all."

"Just what is a moiety? And what do you mean by skip ahead?"

"I'm pretty certain as far as powers go instantiating worlds and people breaks everything. By the way, me, you haven't told me what 'Glam with a Bell' means, and you apparently know."

"Oh, uh, right. In my world some people have superpowers and go around in costume to fight supervillains and I'm one of those and my cape name is Glam. And my girlfriend is called Bella so I assume that's what Adelene is talking about?"

"We can instantiate worlds but we can't actually visit them; you can write stories, too, it works the same way for you as it does for us. Moieties are how we talk about which characters belong to which authors - Addy was also a green, 'the Glam with the Bell' was to differentiate from the Glam with the Miles who is a purple, Echo and Rewind are also salmon, that kind of thing. And, yeah, Bella is the Bell I meant - you always have the same name; she doesn't, but her name always has 'bell' in it someplace. And by 'skip ahead' I mostly mean I'd take Lurker and go sit over there and come back when you were done - time doesn't work the same way for me as it does for you, here; so long as me and my characters are out of the scene you can take as long as you like and it won't necessarily take any time for me at all."

"...will we actually exist while that happens? Why won't time pass for you? Is the author just gonna say that we discussed these things and then you'll come back and we'll have all the memories of having discussed these things?"

"The author's writing our words right now, isn't he. We don't need to ask you to tell him anything, we can just—tell him. And he knows what we'll tell him, and how we'll react to all of it, and he's still not actually doing anything other than just have us here."

Ceiling examination occurs.

"He says, and I quote, 'tell them I said I don't have nearly as much control over all of this as they may think I do and they have very often surprised me by coming up with ideas I hadn't anticipated or acting in ways I didn't expect, and tell Glam the Siberian was entirely his idea, I didn't see it coming at all.' I did mention you do have a degree of free will? You might not have a meta instance yet, though, if you can pull that off it might help - that's the version of you that lives in your author's head rather than living in any particular world, and knows everything he knows and can talk to him more directly about things." (The kobold grins slightly and nods at this last bit.)

"Um. I'm not sure if the Siberian idea being mine is reassuring or not. Was it even mine? I don't remember if Lorica—Bella or I came up with it. Anwyay, did I derail the plot? Am I actually going to be able to kill Endbringers with it? Shit if I'm fictional I bet that'll fail in some really horrible way."

"How are we supposed to pull off a meta instance? And his question was interesting, do we still exist while we're not talking to you?"

"Siberian might not've been your idea in-world, but there's a sense in which it was your idea that it was a thing you could do? Like, you could have had the idea and then not been able to, if it was something that didn't fit with who you are, but it did fit with who you are and that's not actually something we can just arbitrarily decide. But, no, you didn't derail the plot - things like that happen all the time, we leave things loose enough to accommodate it. As to the Endbringers, I'm not sure if you... no, what am I thinking, of course you want spoilers. The Endbringers aren't your biggest problem and if your authors are sticking to the original details of that setting killing one will actually make things worse, it gets replaced by a worse one. What you actually need to worry about is Scion, he's some kind of freaky alien and in... well, actually the timeline's probably different, but at some point probably within your lifetime, he's going to flip his shit and try to kill everyone."

Sparkles gets a 'wait' gesture, this is presumably going to take a minute.

"What."

"Yeah. The endbringer thing might not be the case in your particular world - the setting is taken from another author again, who isn't actually someone we write with; your author is much nicer and that's not really Alicorn's style - but the Scion part basically has to be, the only question is whether you're going to be involved with it. It could just be that you get to successfully take out an Endbringer or three and leave the omnicidal near-deity for someone else."

Sadde rests his head on his hands, propping it up on the counter.

She pats him on the back.

"And of course there's no way to convince him to maybe not have Scion go rogue? Author, you're writing these words somewhere, can you make that not be a thing?"

"However sentient we may be, I'm pretty sure a fiction author isn't going to convince themself to stop writing by having a character they created ask them to via whatever medium they're using to actually instantiate that character."

Sadde groans.

The kobold goes to hug a Sadde.

"That, and a world where that wasn't already set up to happen wouldn't look like yours. It's definitely winnable, though, the original story had a basically-happy ending and I fully expect yours to have a better one if it goes that far."

"Thanks. I'm so reassured," he mumbles dryly, and accepts the kobold's hug.

Think think think. "I mean, there's also the part where you've got a Bell - this won't be the first deity-grade entity they've taken down, by a long shot. It's kind of a thing, with them, that and overthrowing governments that don't meet their standards."