They all shook their heads. But then, how would they know?
"Look, you don't need to dazzle us with your metababble," said RaoulDuke. "We're authors. We know all about this stuff."
"If you're authors," pointed out Sid, quite reasonably, "what are you doing in the AddVenture? Authors write it. If they're in it, they are, by definition, characters."
"We wrote ourselves in," said Duke.
Sid gave him a hard look. "All of you, or just you? Don't mess with this stuff, son -- start off on that track and there's no telling where it may get you. If may start with you writing yourself, but before long someone else could be writing you -- why, you're being written by someone else right now, in fact!"
Duke looked disconcerted. "How could you know that?"
"Looked down at the signature line, son. Another risk you might run is that of offending the real-life counterparts of the 'authors' you've dragged into the AddVenture with you -- like the Cat of Justice, who just deep-sixed hir phony counterpart that you created. Do you have any idea where that could go, if it gets out of hand? You could start a complete flamewar, forcing MarkT, the Lord High Mucky-Muck of the AddVenture, to shut it down and clean it out, leaving it unavailable for you to play in for God knows how long!"
Duke hung his head. "I hadn't thought of that," he said.
"Thought not. You know, on second thought, it's too risky letting you people hang around here until some other author decides to use you. You've already been kicked backstage, which ought to be some sort of warning. I think, all things considered, I'd better kick you out of the AddVenture entirely."
"What?" cried the AddVenturers, all together. "You can't do that! We're authors, dammit!"
"Shoulda thought of that before you characterized yourselves and permitted someone else to write you," said Sid. "And I can too do that. See?" He held up a stamped and sealed certificate, which read:
"I'll get you for this!" Duke warned. "I'll write you into something horrible, like Elvira, Mistress of the Dark!"
Sid looked bored. "Been there, done that. More times than I like to think, in fact. All part of existence in the AddVenture. I'm sure it's not the worst that could happen to me. Or that will. There'll always be plenty of versions of the real me floating around, though. You'll have to do better than that if you want to scare me."
"This won't solve anything," F-Cup Fitzgerald pointed out. "There are plenty of other versions of us running around the AddVenture, too, so what good will it do to take us out?"
"Don't know, don't care. You're the only ones in my balliwick, and (so far) the only ones who've gotten shelved. I can't police the whole damn AddVenture, but I do my part."
"But that's all we've been doing," protested Dr. Hook. "We neutralized the highly dangerous Ultimate Remote by folding it back into a more innocuous early version of itself! All we were doing was cleaning things up!"
Sid laughed. "Clean up the AddVenture? What a thought! True, I've been written that way myself from time to time, but you boys should know better! It's in its intrinsic nature to be messy, and no one can fix it! 'Cleaning things up!' Good one, boys. And while you were 'cleaning up,' just how many other choices did your actions generate? You haven't been neutralizing the remote, fools -- you've been spreading it!"
The AddVenturers looked at each other in horrow. Then a doorway seemed to open in the air behind Uncle Sid. He stepped aside. "Have fun back in reality, boys," he said. "Don't do anything I wouldn't do."
The AddVenturers felt themselves drawn to the doorway. One by one they were sucked out, falling back into their own humdrum, real lives. And Dr. Sidney James Russell was left to play host to the next character (or characters) to get shelved.
Wed Feb 21 15:08:31 2001
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