Author's Note:

This took a long time for a lot of reasons. First and foremost, I'd like to share some semblance of joy for the people who are still on this ride: I found a group of friends that I finally, actually like, and became somewhat of a socialite, if being a socialite includes playing Smash Bros with everyone every damn night. I also slept a lot more, attempted to sort out my poor boyfriend's visa, dealt with a restructuring of my department of work, and attempted not to succumb to my wonderful mental illness.

And then finally, after sleeping continually for eighteen hours straight last night, I finished and fixed this chapter.

Finally.

Layman Scripts
A fanfic by Pseudinymous

~ 31 ~
- I̴̛̺̞̼͔̿̍̆̈́n̴̜̓̆̀̕͜t̶͍̩̤̜͚̓͐͒̈́̐ė̴͚͗̏ṟ̷̹̳͒̉̒͝l̷̳̲̫̙̗̐͒̕ǔ̶͓͇͔̳̓̅d̷̻̓̌͝ĕ̸̪̯̬̗̗͌̋̚ ̴̡̖͒́͑͝(̶̡̻̓̃̈V̷̥͛͗)̷̗̽̾ -

Thirty-three years ago:

Two laser-green eyes peeled themselves open.

They saw, but they didn't absorb. The floor was made of wood. The walls… were all bookshelves here, stacked tightly against one another. There was a table in the corner of his eye. But none of this seemed to enter the logical parts of his mind, and it couldn't combine to form a tangible picture. Instead, he felt a mild but unpleasant tickling confusion, served up alongside this inevitable knowledge that something was wrong.

He blinked, trying to remember.

His hand was stretched limply out in front. Grey, he realised, though for some reason he couldn't bring himself to see this as unnatural. Will to move was nonexistent — all he wanted was to remain quiet and still, to… absorb everything. The room around him, the strange information creeping into his senses… so many things that didn't make any sense.

… Except they did make sense. That weightless feeling teased at his memories, he just couldn't place why. He didn't know where he was nor could he give any explanation for being here. In a vague way he understood waking from unconsciousness tended to produce such hazed cognition, but even knowledge like that seemed hidden beyond a silhouetted veil, as if playing a childish game of shadows. When he tried to move his fingers he was vaguely mystified to see them flex, gradually forming a fist, and then relaxing. Some might say he was surprised he even owned them, yet it was still obvious they were his.

Where am I? He thought, with oddly little emotion. His brow crinkled together as he turned this question over in his head and refocused his eyes, looking around the room.

Books. So many books. Hundreds, thousands. Uncountable. Never-ending. How tall was the ceiling? Ten metres? Twenty? A hundred? He could almost hear their voices, as if they were all trying to tell him something he didn't know.

… The floor was hard, and that brought him back to reality. He blinked, trying his best to think backwards to any past events that might have gotten him there. The fact was, however, that apart from wherever he'd come from he'd seemed to have left the important parts of his memory behind. The last thing he remembered was lying in his bed and staring up at the ceiling, letting his mind drift to something-or-other…

… Strange. A place with this many books was a library, wasn't it?

Writer began to sit up, slowly. The movement felt foreign, strange, and—

The memories slammed back into his head.

He sat through them all, stunned to silence as they shot through his mind like little individualised jolts of electricity. It was as if he were about to die all over again — whatever breath had been held within his lungs was swiftly stolen from both of them, and the library that surrounded him, well, it may as well not have even existed. His chest hurt and yet he knew indistinctly that he had no functioning heart. It didn't seem to matter.

… That's what'd happened.

Smoke. Flames. Fire. Someone screaming from inside the house. Breathless. Noiseless. But so loud. So loud. Dead. She was dead. He was… he was…

… No he wasn't?

The memories vanished like a mist.

What on earth was going on here, exactly? He pulled himself up off the floor and stared around. This was his library and he damnwell knew it, but only a few seconds ago it'd seemed like a place he'd never seen before. He hadn't forgotten who he was, not even for a second, so that wasn't it, but…

The Ghostwriter's eyes grew wide as he looked back down at his feet. That spot right there, that's where he'd been when he'd… first woken up. Not from unconsciousness, nay, something far more severe — his first foray into the Ghost Zone, hardly by choice, an event that had stayed with him for decades. He'd lost control of himself there, and freaked out, and, and…

Oh god.

The last thing he actually remembered in what was supposed to be the present time was getting shot. That didn't bode well for the reasons he might have found himself here — if that resulted in unconsciousness, then the Sorceress could have had her way with him, could've… done anything. So what was he doing here? Was it real? A dream world?

… Or was he back in time?

He glanced around, eyes catching the placement of the furniture and the chaotic way the books in his main living room were organised. Things had changed after three decades — what he had now was the state of the library before it'd been touched, before he'd really resided there and shifted around the chairs and reorganised the books. But just as he began to raise himself into the air to investigate this further, something pulled around his core.

Something tight.

Truly, if there's a problem with ghosts, it's that they're far too light. It doesn't take much to send one flying, particularly if it's not expecting the surprise, and as such the Ghostwriter didn't have much hope when the bounds around his centre pulled him violently towards the ground. Part of his mind stuck firmly in hyperdrive squirmed at the idea of slamming into the floor and distorting, but the unsettling feeling of having one's form liberate itself of solid structure never came. He fell straight through the floorboards instead, watched them tip and spin above him, then slammed heavily into a different floor.

That one did distort him.

The Ghostwriter pulled himself back together with a disconcerted shudder and then stood slowly, trying to abuse his center of gravity to add some weight to himself. By the time he was standing straight he felt as if filled with rocks, but good enough if it stopped something like that from happening again. His long-forgotten human self would have heaved at the thought.

… He was in the library again. The very same. And then he turned around.

It was really quite peculiar to see what is, for all intents and purposes, an exact copy of yourself. At first the Ghostwriter had blanched staring at this other ghost, itself staring back at him with its lanky form curled on its knees and its hands stretched through its hair. A soft white glow surrounded that unnatural ectoplasmic body and otherwise the entity seemed like it didn't know what to do. Like he didn't know what to do.

The furniture was still in all the wrong positions. The books still lacked order. That ghost whimpering on the floor was him.

"Shit," was all the Ghostwriter said, because he couldn't stop himself.

The other Ghostwriter's eyes were green and bright and terrified. The two of them stared at each other as if watching the end of the world itself but the Ghostwriter knew better than to engage — if this was real, he was now face-to-face with his own history. This was a recursive loop, something theoretically dangerous, a kind of logical time paradox.

"What's happening?" said the other Ghostwriter, his voice barely present as the hand he rested on the floor shook unsteadily beneath him. His breathing was quick, laboured, desperate, but ultimately useless. "You look exactly like me."

The Ghostwriter tried to jump away from this place, zap out of the dimension and leave this cursed period of time for scrap, but his core was just too compromised to do it. He looked down at his own time paradox duplicate, and he realised now it was far too late: probably, he would have to talk to it.

… But what if he was the duplicate, in reality?

Interesting little side-thought for later, when he wasn't quite so worried about unceremoniously vanishing from existence. Didn't matter — the Ghostwriter steeled himself a little and decided Randy had lied to him quite enough in his lifetime and that maybe — just this once — his paradox double deserved a little bit of truth. "… I am you," he managed, after a moment. "But this is an accident. I didn't come to give you any sort of message or anything, I think I just… fell through time?"

The shaking was still there. The ghost's lips moved, but no sound came out, and they made the shape of his brother's name.

Oh. … He'd been wondering a lot about Randy back then, hadn't he? It'd be several years until he stumbled upon that man's ghost, and for all his duplicate knew right now, Randy was still supposed to have the mop of black hair he'd worn in life. This was the tricky part about being so frustratingly identical: stuck together in front of a mirror, they couldn't tell one from the other. Didn't seem to matter that they weren't twins, let alone the same age. Now staring into the eyes of his own exact copy, the Ghostwriter couldn't blame the counterpart for thinking the inevitable.

"Randy's here — in this dimension, I mean — but he's not me," he clarified, slowly. "God. You don't happen to have any powers yet, do you?"

"Powers?"

The Ghostwriter sighed heavily. "As expected, then. Doesn't matter — I need to figure out why I'm here and get out right now."

"Wait!" the other called. His hand was up, voice quavering in desperation. "Y-you have to tell me what this place is! I don't know why I'm here! I couldn't talk to anyone—"

"—You're here because you're a ghost, same as everyone else," said the Ghostwriter, matter-of-factly, as he turned on his heel and made a start for the door. "This library's yours. And I'm sorry, but you're just going to have to sort everything else out by yourself. I don't have time."

Even as he searched for the door handle, though, the Ghostwriter found himself looking back over his shoulder. The Other was staring at him as if broken inside beyond repair, and the Ghostwriter remembered that feeling so intimately that it ran back up through his mind and rattled down his spine. The wave of apprehension hit so hard it frightened him, and he had to admit, it was strange, having empathy for an entity that was literally yourself. But in his mind the Ghostwriter could only process this other Ghostwriter as another person entirely, and though he could logically understand what was happening, that didn't make it any easier to swallow.

… What he didn't understand was how he'd gotten here.

Let's say he wasn't experiencing some kind of terrifyingly vivid hallucination, what was left? Definitely time travel. He'd somehow fallen through the fourth dimension and finished up mixed into his own history. Except, if Clockwork had Jurisdiction over time, shouldn't that have been impossible? Shouldn't it have been stopped? The gaps in his memory where he'd lost consciousness were dangerous — he had no idea what the Sorceress had done to him. It was possible she'd trapped him here, like a helpless beetle caught within a spider's web, a mess of tangled crosslinks spun through his core and acting as the string.

Every so often he swore he felt one twinge.

He made another mental attempt at jumping back to the present day real world, but it was useless — the crosslinks pulled and stretched but gave no ground, and when he tried to magic them away with the power of his thoughts they just pulled all the more. Examining them was its own kind of frightening — their numbers had increased significantly since the last time he'd checked, now making up what must have been in the hundreds. He had no idea what any of them meant or did. Every Disapproved action he tried activated something different. Not good.

And then he opened the front door to nothing.

The Ghostwriter had been expecting to see the Ghost Zone. Green, pretty awful to look at, and glowing like an enormous virescent lamp straight through the library doors. That was not what was actually there — instead he was greeted by darkness, The End. It was not a wall but one was no more capable of passing through. Even the library steps seemed not to exist. He put his fingers up against the nothingness, gracing the impenetrable, and suddenly understood this was supposed to be a cage.

"What is it?" the Other asked, hesitation clear within the depths of his throat. "… Just nothing?"

"It's not supposed to be nothing."

"Then what's it supposed to be?!"

The Ghostwriter closed the door and rested his poor tired head against its ornate wooden frame. "You probably wouldn't believe me unless you saw it."

"After all this?"

The Other's voice was incredulous. He even managed to pull himself together enough to stand, albeit unsteadily, and shuffle forwards. Impressive considering the Ghostwriter remembered this day in vivid detail, and recalled quite accurately that left to his own devices he had not managed to walk properly for hours. He'd been terrified too, though, and when he looked into the eyes of his past self he could still clearly see the quavers of fear from within his pupils.

"How can you just say I probably wouldn't believe it after everything that's happened to me?!" the Other sputtered, gesturing shakily at himself. "You're some sort of me from the future, right? You already know what I've been through!"

The Ghostwriter stopped and stared at him, honestly a little shocked.

"I'd believe in anything!"

… Had he really been this close to hysteria?

The Ghostwriter thought about it long and hard. If he really was back in time, did that mean time was relative everywhere? Did the time he spent here cost him time where he was supposed to be? Or was it something different? He couldn't just reach in and pull the crosslinks out, and leaving the library didn't seem a possible avenue either. The only option available seemed to be to deal with his duplicate — get it to calm down or something so he could have a moment to think his way to a solution.

… It was odd, how he thought of this person who was exactly him as an it.

"The outside is supposed to be like a kind of purgatory," said the Ghostwriter, giving in. "It looks terrible, but there's other ghosts out there. Plenty of them. Tell you what, though — if you promise to hold it together long enough for me to figure out this mess, I'll give you some information you're not supposed to know yet."

Two shocked electric green eyes barely moved, but somehow agreed.

Of course hidden knowledge would be the hook. The Ghostwriter knew his own triggers if nothing else. He started to back away from the door carefully, looking for inconsistencies just to make sure this world wasn't fabricated. But was his memory good enough for a task like that? "It begins something like this — all ghosts have power," he began, carefully, as he looked. "It's like… like some kind of immutable rule of this place. That power needs ectoplasm to run but there's no shortage of that here." Maybe the corridors? He should look down the corridors. "But my power — I guess our power? — really isn't normal."

The Other was staring at him, hesitantly following in his footsteps as he slipped into the library's maze of hallways. He'd almost caught up, was reaching for the Ghostwriter's shoulder. "What are you talking about, power? I—"

A crashing sound. The whole library shifted violently to the left as if trapped within a violent earthquake, books once stored upon shelves thrown mercilessly out of place all at once. In a horror moment of existential dread the Ghostwriter pinwheeled around and dived on top of his duplicate, pulling them both so far out of phase in the process that it flew in the face of what a regular ghost was supposed to be capable of. No crosslinks stopped it — it wasn't as if he'd thought about this and crafted it as some kind of perfect plan to protect them from being pummelled, it was simply that he'd moved on instinct and screamed into his mind for anything that seemed like it might even slightly work.

Of course, the unfortunate fact of the matter was that they hadn't really been in any danger at all. They were both ghosts in the end, so getting hit with a barrage of ectoplasmic books, regardless of the unpleasantness of the experience, wasn't going to erase them from existence. The Ghostwriter felt particularly stupid when he realised this and stepped up and away from the enormous mess of paper and binding, but gave no indication of his embarrassment even as he still held the clone tightly by the arm. Couldn't show that in front of a subordinate, now could he?

More to the point though, it didn't matter what timeline they were in — it wasn't stable.

The Other shuddered and held itself tight, still favouring the floor as much as possible. "What was that?"

"No idea," said the Ghostwriter, truthfully. "But if I had to guess—"

Yes, he would have to guess, because the same crosslink that had yanked him into this piece of his own timeline was now about to force him backwards through the wall. Still very much intangible and unwisely holding on to a time paradox duplicate were just the unfortunate circumstances of the day: the duplicate definitely shouldn't have been coming with him, but man is rarely given opportunity to choose his own fate. Both of them were forced out of phase with Everything, even the dimension in and of itself, and then thrown through thousands of overlapping libraries for not more than a second before being spat out of hyperspace and back into the same library.

Another Ghostwriter, who'd been carrying that strange clock Mira had given him at the time, promptly dropped and smashed it on the floor. Little pieces of glass skittered towards the Ghostwriter's head.

"Jesus Christ," Time Paradox Duplicate Number 2 started to shout. "What in God's name—"

That clock dated him. The Ghostwriter had been in his late thirties when Mira eventually decided to hand it over as a keepsake, and since the keyboard had finally materialised in its entirety when he was 34, this time paradox duplicate was at least a few years into testing out his own signature ability. Good. Finally! The Ghostwriter pulled himself quickly to a standing position and grabbed the other Ghostwriter by his shoulders, leaving Time Paradox Duplicate Number 1 half stupefied on the ground. "Help me!" he requested.

Duplicate Number 2 blinked back. "What?"

The Ghostwriter had hoped he'd be smarter than this, but obviously not. "I'm stuck falling through time!" he eventually sputtered. "You know hyperdimensions? String theory? Any of that? Well there's a bunch of wires strung through my core right now and they're stopping me from using my power and pulling me through dimensions like they're made of out of tissue paper! I need you to use your keyboard to—"

"String theory?"

The Ghostwriter had a sudden appreciation for the exasperated rage Randy felt every single day of his entire existence.

"The keyboard!" he stressed. "Don't worry about the string theory! You've got to do this now before I get dragged out somewhere else!"

Time Paradox Duplicate Number 2 hesitated. He'd had many things on his list of Things to Do, and most of them didn't involve going on a dangerous hyperdimensional wonderland adventure with Time Paradox Duplicate Number 1, but when your own future stares you in the face and says Help me you'd probably do well not to ignore it.

"… You need me to rewrite wires strung through — did you say your core?" he said, after a moment. "What kind of wires?"

"Crosslinks!"

He pretended to know what crosslinks were and hoped to God his power might make the distinction for him. "—Fine, okay, let's do that then," said Duplicate Number 2. He lifted his hand in dramatic fashion and let the energy flow freely through his arm, then swept it down and across to reveal but a small subsection of the quantum keyboard itself. "Anything else I should know about beforehand?"

The Ghostwriter violently shot a concentrated injection of knowledge straight into the other Ghostwriter's head. He looked dumbfounded for a moment, gazed up at his duplicate with a horrified stare, then let his eyes fall back down to the keys. "You can think changes into reality?"

"I won't be thinking very much into anything if you don't fix me very quickly," the Ghostwriter warned, stressing every word. "Please!"

"Alright, alright! So… remove the crosslinks first, yes?"

"Yes!"

Time Paradox Duplicate Number 2 gave a solemn not of acknowledgement, then brought his hands down to the keys.

There was something that had to be said about the power to warp reality — indeed there were problems and loopholes every so often, but the truth of the matter is that you never quite expect it to be thwarted. That was especially true for 2, who had never yet seen anything even slightly resist him, and was about to get his first taste of what it was like to have an opponent. The Ghostwriter felt the crosslinks pull under the keyboard's influence but also willed them to dissolve then and there as well, and to his credit some of them actually did. Just not enough. And that's when the rebound happened.

The keyboard gave a great creaking groan, before something that sounded like a gunshot, and no sooner did this happen did Time Paradox Duplicate Number 2 find himself hanging on for his own dear life. Time Paradox Duplicate Number 1, all but forgotten in this scene of chaos, found himself only useful for watching on in horror. The Ghostwriter had been thrown forwards — this time he did not in fact lurch through time and space — but instead hit the ground full force, leading to his second miserable disfigurement of form for the evening. His own scream of fright was cut short by his vocal chords getting bent out of shape, and by the time he sought to correct himself the yell was nearly over. He looked up at Duplicate Number 2 as if begging for assistance, until finally he was dragged sideways again and straight through the folds between dimensions, leaving the room for good.

He was being pulled somewhere.

The dimensions split upon in front of his eyes once more. In the confusion he felt a sizeable piece of glass from that broken mirror knock the back of his hand, and as he tumbled blindly through the otherworld he made some kind of distorted grab for it. It should've cut him, really. Sliced his hand right open. But it didn't seem to matter and he closed his palm around the shard regardless, knowing that since the mirror was from Clockwork it had to be important.

The Ghostwriter didn't know where he was going, but he knew he was far away from the library by now. Objects spiralled and mashed themselves together out in front as the remaining crosslinks pulled him through. And then he pulled back.

Some kind of scream — a woman's scream. It sounded like the Sorceress if one imagined her voice as sectioned out over a hundred different ways and then reconstructed by someone without a medical license. It was followed by something else. Masculine.

我̧͏͙͙̜͎͟不̢͈͖͔̤͖敢̢͍̰͚̖̠̭͉̖相̨͍͘信̯̹̣̞͎̲我̷͜҉̱͕̰̪͔̼̱ͅ们̸̻͇͔̩这̶̨̧̗͇̳͇样͖̭̘̰͜͡做̴̵̼͞。̷̠̣̥̺̼͡

Chinese.

The Ghostwriter knew instinctively what it meant. And then, desperate to get out of this situation by any means possible, pulled back against the crosslinks and reached out to grasp the very sounds of the syllables that made these words up. It was a feat so obviously impossible that even he would have stopped for pause has he had the time, and he used this tangible speech to drag himself violently towards wherever it had come from. Finally he could stop flying through uninterpretable oblivion, and slid back through to the three dimensional world.

His first contact with the floor was a bit gentler than expected. He looked up. Three scientists looked down. Two of them were indeed — as expected — Chinese women. The other one, though, his skin was a touch darker but his face more obviously western.

"那是鬼吗？" said the man. "这怎么发生的？"

It was weird, understanding a language you didn't even know. The Ghostwriter could make out that he was being asked if he was a ghost, and whether or not this was actually happening — not as if he knew that implicitly, but more as if the meaning of the words soaked in in other ways. He blinked, still a little stunned. "抱歉？" he said, the words unnatural on his tongue and almost certainly improperly intoned. "你会说英语吗？"

"Yes, I do speak English. How did this happen?" asked the scientist, accentlessly. He held his clipboard tensely but offered an almost frightening stare behind his own safety glasses. In his shadow a complicated array of machinery lay dormant, like a tiger awaiting its prey. "Why are you here?"

Damn good question. As if he'd be able to explain that — instead, he looked around for anything that seemed strange. "… You're all familiar with ghosts?" he asked, carefully.

"A little," said one of the female scientists. Her accent was heavy but she seemed confident enough in her speech. "Sometimes, there are ghosts we can see. It isn't normal?"

Well, it wasn't that it wasn't normal. It was more that it wasn't normal for his day and age anywhere outside of Amity Park, and if there was a non-Chinese person speaking Chinese, odds were nicely high that he was currently in China. But he'd never heard of China suffering much in the way of ghost activity, either.

A thought struck him. "What year is this?" asked the Ghostwriter, innocently.

The male scientist's brow knitted together. "2152. You're asking an interesting question — and you're going to tell me why."

Upfront. "… Not scared at all, are you?" he noted. "None of you, actually. I wouldn't mind knowing who you are, at least. Might give me some insight into why on earth I'm here or whether it was just random."

"You want to know about Mr. Azubuike?" the woman piped up, with a sudden enthusiasm that said more than she probably intended. "He's an engineer, like magic man. You know? Like magician."

The knowledge slapped him in the face with the force of a runaway train. Magician. Like magic. Male.

… It couldn't be.

The Ghostwriter pulled at reality to have a logic check ping into his mind — and no, he wasn't wrong at all. Standing before him was indeed the one and only Sorcerer of legend, or at least the human who preceded him, dwelling in both the future and possibly the past. The Sorceress had time travelled before. Not only that, this man was an engineer, a practical scientist who dealt primarily with… the laws of physics.

It all clicked to together like the universe's most annoying and ridiculous puzzle, and there was one extremely disturbing caveat: the Ghostwriter couldn't have fallen here by chance. Not after he'd felt that pull, not after his fate had been so inexorably tied to the Sorceress's own. He didn't know where her present-self was, but she obviously wanted him here.

… And yet her human counterpart looked amiable. In the same way she'd presented with a face deceptively caring, even his task-oriented eyes seemed kind. Unlike her, though, he indulged in an unmistakable aura of curiosity. More than anything he didn't seem dangerous.

The Ghostwriter didn't trust this assessment of the situation at all.

"Something wrong?" said Azubuike, staring at the Ghostwriter's face, and then he didn't do anything ever again for the simple fact he had died.

The Ghostwriter would later describe it as happening in between the very frames of causality itself, perhaps even the split seconds that made them up. There was only a flash of her movement: first the hand that struck down, then, if you were particularly observant, part of her knee trailing behind, followed finally by an aura-filled shockwave that lurched violently towards its target and and could have split an atom.

Simply put, Azubuike existed one moment and ceased the next.

The Sorceress's dark hair sailed past her face as she halted, carried by the inertia. Such a vicious attack should've blown the Ghostwriter just as far backwards as it had carried Azubuike's two coworkers, but he hadn't felt anything except the breeze in his hair and that terrible shrivelling feeling from within his core. Half the room destroyed, the Sorceress gazed back at him.

"I always knew it wasn't my machinese that failed me," she said, slowly, voice and soul unusually hollow. The Ghostwriter commanded the very space she occupied to tear itself apart, fuelled by power and adrenaline and the fact that his core was no longer so tied up with crosslinks that he was disabled, but it didn't work. She seemed to deflect it elsewhere, ripping a hole in causality right next to that terrified girl's face. It didn't even seem to take effort. "Something doesn't want me to get at you, and it's pulling you through the dimensions. Perhaps my research does not extend to this something, but nonetheless I might be so bold to suggest you probably wouldn't like to find out."

He didn't know how to talk. His mind was still running the horrific scene that had just unfolded in front of him on loop, watching in horror as a man perished at the very hand of the ghost he was due to become. His jaw wobbled uncertainly trying to just even process that.

"If I don't perish here, I don't become what I am today," said the Sorceress, evenly. "This future is imperative. Everything that takes place before it is just a brick in the structure of necessity."

"… You did this out of utility?" the Ghostwriter spat.

"It was a split-second decision necessary to maintain the order of things."

"You made a closed loop!"

"And?" she said. "The universe doesn't seem to care."

… If he didn't escape this situation now, she would surely drag him along for her own purposes. And so — goodness knows what possessed him to actually do it — the Ghostwriter opened up a second hole in reality, similarly deflected, and had the shockingly horrible wisdom to toss that shard of mirror through the first one. The Sorceress seemed to have missed it.

The glass disappeared beyond the veil. For a second it was gone, apparently having disappeared into oblivion. But then it hurtled out of the other tear, making for a surprisingly clean shot straight through the Sorceress's abdomen. Ectoplasm burst out messily from the unfortunate exit point — something that would've killed her had she been human, but in the world of ghosts this was merely a warning and a distraction — good enough, of course, for the mysterious thing pulling the Ghostwriter through this place to finally get a clean hold onto his core and tear his body through the floor.

The Sorceress before him disappeared in a whirl of black.

With the small exception of Technus, Jazz had never imagined ghosts building machines.

It was… just such a foreign concept. One never associated these creatures with constructing machinery, it always seemed far more convenient for them to use their powers to get things done. And, admittedly, what she was looking at had to be partly that — the portal inside the Boundary House was undoubtedly a magic of the Sorceress's own, but the more Jazz stared in the more she could make out strange cubic shapes in amongst the light, connected and moving as if they were there to serve some sort of purpose. There was no rule in the world that machines had to be made out of metal, but there was a precedent, and this was fighting against that idea valiantly.

There was something strange about the portal too, actually, something she could only pick out after being forced to gaze into its own endless depths; thinking about looking at it different ways produced different results. She could think her mind around in a very detached sort of way and see oddly to the left, and then keep forcing it through. Turning to the right didn't seem to work, so she kept moving left until she could create a right from the various lefts, as if the whole thing was on a strange kind of rail.

And if she went far enough, she could see Danny.

Telepathy didn't reach through dimensions. Jazz knew that because she'd tried. At first she'd thought it might have been because her brother was essentially unconscious, but trying to reach the Ghostwriter was impossible too. Heck, she'd never really managed it in excess of thirty metres, so a jump like this was a bit much to expect.

She'd have gone in, of course, but even aside from the small problem of not knowing how much ground or gravity might be on the other side, the Sorceress had conveniently attached her to the wall. It didn't feel like she'd been bound at all, but nonetheless she was powerless to move away or escape.

Jazz had done a lot of waiting in the past two years. And now, she was less okay with it than ever.

It was about time she stopped being useless.

An inky nothingscape trailed around him. He could not see, for there was no light.

Honestly, he thought he might stop existing right there and then, was almost ready for it, before the lights blared in with a great dazzling flash. He felt himself being wrenched forwards for the umpteenth time that night, blinking his poor startled eyes upwards into the glare as if being abducted by aliens. How one could be a ghost and yet feel so blinded was beyond him. And then—

"Welcome back," said the Witch Doctor.

The man's mask-covered face reeked of the aura of self-satisfaction. The Ghostwriter stared into that beak as if it might be the second coming of Jesus or something far worse, but the Witch Doctor didn't even flinch. "What's happening?" he stammered. "I was—"

"Calm down."

"F-fuck!" said the Ghostwriter, finally, the rage and adrenaline whiplashing him into sitting straight up from the physician's chair. The Witch Doctor seemed to see it coming and leaned out of the way. "I'm not going to calm down after all of that! It was you! What do you want with—"

"Oh, be quiet," said the Witch Doctor, who put his hand straight out and before the Ghostwriter even knew it, his back had been slammed straight into the chair by force. "You're either going to calm down or I'm going to make you calm down. Don't think I haven't dealt with aggressive patients before."

"I'm not your patient!"

"You owe a debt," the ghost shot back bluntly, voice harsh. His hand was extended out in front — the source of his power leaking through and keeping the Ghostwriter immobile. "A significant debt. Humans aren't easy to fix, and I believe you volunteered to pay."

The Ghostwriter found himself filled with the kind of indescribable rage one gets when one is forced to do the worst possible thing at the worst possible time for the worst possible reason in existence. "How—"

"Silence."

There was a quick pink flash, and from then on in he found himself unable to speak. The Witch Doctor walked slowly but purposefully around the chair, eyeing the ghost under his own subjugation carefully through the mask. The Ghostwriter found himself once again unable to fight back, and being at the mercy of a doctor was at this point almost worse than being at the mercy of the Sorceress herself. This wasn't how things were supposed to go, not even slightly.

"You wouldn't believe how long it took for me to find you. Normally I can call upon a debtor in an instant, but in this case it took me hours. Had I not had some interesting insider information, you might have disappeared into the cosmos."

… Insider information?

"It's fortunate," the Witch Doctor added, waving his hand almost nonchalantly as he spoke, "That everything fell together like this, really. For you, actually."

The Ghostwriter, with all his effort and might even against the crosslinks that limited his power, finally managed to tear through the Witch Doctor's hold and sit straight back up. "Are you joking?!" he spat. "I've no idea from where you get your information, but you just pulled me out of a fight I actually very much need to be in the middle of, and if you don't—"

"Do the errand," said the Witch Doctor, his voice almost shuddering the non-existent foundations of his hollow, and the Ghostwriter found himself suddenly compelled to listen. The eyes behind that mask glowed. "Get up."

His legs moved for him. Surely this ghost wasn't powerful enough to make an attempt on his own autonomy? But at the moment, he was, and the Ghostwriter had little choice but to do as he said.

"I can appreciate that you do not understand but the errand is critical," the Witch Doctor continued, harshly. "Go over to that bench. The one with the tools."

And he did. Surgical instruments covered the table from side to side, organised in neurotically even fashion. Knives and scalpels to nails and screws adorned the silver top, and he managed a confused, almost daunted look back at the other ghost. It was something one might expect from a horror movie, though as this ghost was a surgeon there was at least an element of expectation there, too. The Witch Doctor walked carefully over to the table, then pointed purposefully at one instrument in particular.

"Pick up the spoon."

The Ghostwriter stared madly from the spoon to the Witch Doctor himself, his eyes going back and forth between them so quickly he wasn't sure if he could possibly see anything in between. "Why?" he managed, but found his hand reaching for it anyways. "Isn't—"

"I said, pick up the spoon," the Witch Doctor repeated. The Ghostwriter felt his fingers snap around the silver handle. "Now, you see that table over there, on the other side of the room? Go over there."

He did.

"Now put it down."

Such a strange sequence of events had destroyed the previous buffer of his memories and as such, in that moment of time, the Ghostwriter found himself almost not caring if the Sorceress crashed in and killed both of them that very moment. He reached out slowly, carefully, but nonetheless inevitably towards that other table, and put the spoon down with utter trepidation in his core.

Any control the Witch Doctor had upon him released in a shimmering pink glow, which faded to nothing.

"… You dragged me here, all the way here, just to move a fucking spoon?" the Ghostwriter muttered. "What, is that it? Is that your great errand?"

"Surely you must understand that I cannot continue my work in good faith until the debtor has paid their due," said the Witch Doctor, and somewhere under that mask one could almost detect a very careful growing smile. "Those anomalies that run through the heart of your core, don't you want them removed?"

Author's Note:

The next chapter is the final normal one. And it's going to be very, very long.