Interlude: Chosen for the Grave, Part 26: The Clown, the Self-Aggrandizement, and the Metawankery
- Location
- USA
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Interlude: Chosen for the Grave, Part 26: The Clown, the Self-Aggrandizement, and the Metawankery
"Hello, Earl."
I turned to find him leaning on the side of the nearest barrier, wearing the purple suit and clown makeup that Valerian had warned me of. His lips were stretched even wider than his slopped-on whiteface and crimson-smeared clown mouth and he was cleaning his nails with a scalpel. Without looking. And without slicing his fingers open, which suggested some disturbing things.
"Hello, Flufflec," I said as calmly as I could. I stood and turned to face him. "It's good to see you."
"Why, Earl," he said, pushing himself upright with his shoulder and sauntering closer to where I sat at the center of the Eagle's Nest. (Yes, okay, it was a crap name for a sealing research facility that was planted firmly on terra firma. Whatever, I thought it sounded cool when I first named it and the fact that Oli and Val went to such efforts to convince me that it was not cool doesn't need to be discussed.)
"You never call, you never write," he continued, ignoring my parenthetical mental ramble despite my sense of certainty that he knew exactly what it had been. "And I do mean never. Write."
I smiled slightly and shrugged one shoulder. "The internet connection from this world is garbage and the roaming charges for transdimensional phone calls are off the hook. What brings you here?"
"My essential nature, bird duke. I've never concealed my goal."
"Still pushing the Armageddon Initiative, huh?"
"Someone has to."
"Out of curiosity, are you voting that as a joke or are you serious?" My eyes twinkled, lips quirking as I handed him the opening.
His head tipped, getting it. "What else can I say but..."
"Flufflec.response," we said together.
He stopped about ten feet away, eyeing me and cleaning his nails again.
I gestured to the scalpel. "Is that practice xor are you actually omniscient like Val thought?"
"Ah ah," he said, wagging a finger. "No cheating."
"Fine. Which of the following options are you using in order to clean your nails like that without hurting yourself: total omniscience, limited omniscience, a bloodline ability or other physical boost, extensive yet mundane practice, or something else?" I asked. "Please specify all that apply."
"My, my, my," the evil clown said. "So serious...why? Whyever would I share that key piece of information, bird duke? I'm not a comic book villain."
"Sure, but you also didn't put your plan into play thirty-five minutes ago," I said. "On account of we're still here. I figured it was worth a shot. Seriously though, why are you here?"
"I considered the best way to motivate you to resume writing."
"Wait...you want me to continue writing? Like, writing Chosen for the Grave back on EnoughSpeed?"
"I am not so self-referential, dear bird duke. No, I wish you to finish all the tales you have left incomplete over the years. The Tinker's Daughter, Dungeon Crawler You!, The Patchwork Realms, that tale about the corpsicle who was forcibly uploaded, dropped into a half-ogre death knight character on an MMO, and used as gold farmer on pain of deletion. A more satisfying conclusion to Team Anko instead of that drivel you forced upon us. All of it."
...
...What.
Were we about to have a Misery situation here?
"Uh, well, sure. I mean, they aren't all dead-dead. I plan on continuing DCY, definitely. And I wouldn't mind getting back to Patchwork Realms. I even went back and re-read it to get the groove back." I winced. "Holy crap it was shit. It had—"
"Tch." He snapped his fingers together in a 'close your mouth' gesture. The other hand was holding a scalpel at the ready so I shut my mouth.
"Readers have disagreed. Regardless, intentions are lovely, updates are what matters," he said, gesturing with the scalpel.
"I'd love to get back to those but I didn't stop by choice. I ran into a wall on all of them. They were either too derivative or just didn't go anywhere. I couldn't keep going."
"I suspect you will reacquire the ability if given...sufficient motivation."
That wasn't ominous at all.
"I considered what might constitute proper motivation," Flufflec continued. "It took some time, but I have finally acquired inspiration."
This was very not good. What would someone who used a psychotic murderclown as their avatar consider good motivation? Torture? No, I couldn't write if I was too busy screaming in pain.
Blackmail? My mind flashed through all the things that would make valid blackmail information on me. There wasn't much...some intrusive thoughts that I had never acted on or shared with anyone and would never act on because they were repellant to my conscious self. Besides, those were deniable. Various personal failings that would be cringe-inducing if put in front of others but they wouldn't be disastrous.
Bribery? An offer to bring me home would honestly need consideration instead of being an immediate yes the way it would have a decade ago when we first got here. A way to communicate with our former world would be good but it was integral to the thing he was bribing me to do, so it wouldn't count as the bribe. Money? Riches? I was doing pretty well for myself in this world... I didn't need money and the people I cared about were well taken care of. Helping people I cared about back in the real...back in the other world, that might be a good line.
"What did you have in mind?" I asked carefully.
The murderclown grinned at me, a fully psychotic Heath-Ledger-esque expression that chilled me to the bones. "Allow me to introduce a new friend." He gestured widely and space and time were slit open.
A man stepped through. At least, he looked like a man. Sort of. Parts of his face kept unattaching, drifting out a bit, and then being sucked back into place. He had dark hair and chestnut brown eyes. Three eyes, not two, arranged in a downward-pointing triangle. His hands were vague and fuzzy, as though I were suffering double vision several times over. I couldn't tell how many fingers there were and I think the number might have been changing.
He was wearing a bright yellow poncho, made of no material that I recognized, with edges and folds that didn't quite fit into this reality. They cut at spacetime with every movement, leaving tiny screams and bleeding papercuts in the tapestry of the world every time the 'man' shifted. Which, fortunately, he didn't do very much. He was statue still, face blank, like a doll.
His head turned. Well, no, it didn't turn. It did a jump-cut; one moment he was facing me, then he had turned his head a hundred degrees to look at Flufflec. The rest of his body hadn't moved at all, making it look as though his neck had broken.
"Meet Josh," the clown said.
"5CrEEeec<h|-|HH—" The man stopped when I collapsed to the ground, clutching my bleeding ears and vomiting.
He coughed and tried again. "Testing, testing, one, e, pi...is this better?" The voice was angles and screwdrivers stabbed through eyes.
I was too busy dry heaving to respond.
"Some," Flufflec said. "Less eldritch reverb, if you please." His ears were also bleeding, as were his eyes, but he didn't seem to care.
"Hmmmm... red muscle fiber, yellow eyeballs, red muscle fiber, yellow eyeballs, red muscle fiber, yellow eyeballs. Yes, that seems better."
I retched out the last little bit of my spleen, used a quick water jutsu to clear my mouth, and pushed myself up to a seated position, leaning hard on one arm.
"Josh?" I asked.
His face split into the wrong smile. "Yes! That's me. Josh In Time." He frowned. "Wait. In or Out? I'm In right now, so I'm Josh In Time, but if I go Out then I would be Josh Out of Time. Would I still be me?" He pondered for a moment, then shrugged and smiled brightly. "Oh well! Anyway, just call me Josh!"
"Riiight. Okay, what can I do for you, Josh?"
"Well, see, Flufflec here summoned me and we got to talking and I'll be goshdarned if he didn't start making a whole lot of sense! He told me about all of you and your stories and they just sounded so gosh-darned wonderful that I needed to see them for myself. And I checked and they gosh golly whillikers sure were great! Hey, can I take your name away from you?"
"What?"
"You don't take the name itself, Josh," Flufflec corrected. "You ask him to write it on something and you take that instance of the name. He keeps the name afterwards, you only get the one instance of it."
"Oh, really? Huh." Ponder. "What do you do with the instance?"
"Put it on a wall, or in a drawer. Obviously, you would need to make a wall or a drawer, first."
"Hm. I suppose that could be fun. Interesting challenge, keeping a thing from dissolving. That would give it some real bragging rights, you know? Okay, what do I have him write it on?"
"Paper is typical. Or a book, or sometimes a body part." He paused and then added. "Preferably your own." Another pause. "While still attached."
"OOOH!" He was suddenly right in my face, leaning in so close that 'eye contact' was about to take on a whole new meaning. "Can you sign my throat?"
The top of his head flipped back to reveal that he did not mean sign the outside of his throat.
"Uhhh—" I was cut off by Flufflec's pen dropping right into my hand, thrown with omniscient precision.
"We'?" Josh demanded, pointing at his throat with both hands. "Si' i'!"
I took the pen and signed the not-a-man's throat. What else was I to do?
Signing squishy throat flesh shouldn't have worked, but Flufflec's pen wrote perfectly. I carefully did not think about that. Instead, I handed the pen back, holding it with the tips of my fingers so as not to risk getting any Josh-goop on me.
Josh zipped back a few feet, stood erect, and his head flipped around into normal human position again. He worked his jaw back and forth, licked both ears (really got inside them too, like he was checking for ear gold, ew), and smiled.
"Thanks! That'll be fun to show around."
"Welcome?" I said, somewhat weakly. Honestly, what did you say to this? "So...where are we?"
"Josh got his autograph and now is going to help motivate you to resume writing."
"Okay, look, I don't want—"
Josh spun in a circle, pinched his nose, blew out his cheeks, and crossed his eyes. A window opened in front of me and I looked through into a Starbucks cafe, logo visible and everything.
I looked through the window at one specific person. One very familiar person.
The window had opened directly in front of him, less than arm's reach away. He was looking down, probably at a laptop, but it was below the bottom of the window.
"Josh, as you must know, is able to manipulate probabilities and causation," Flufflec said. "Here's the deal: you write one hundred words for one of your unfinished stories, he steps on a Lego." He gestured towards the person in the window.
I looked at Flufflec in disbelief. Then at Josh. Then at the window. Then back at Flufflec. I asked the only thing that mattered.
"Barefoot?"
"As the day he was born. He will—"
"Shut up and give me that pen back."
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