METAFICTION

Chapter 6. THE REALM BETWEEN REALMS

"I've aged fifteen years since I last saw the three of you. The dimension of Time does this to humans in my universe. We have no control over our appearance. We age, and then we die."

"I can sense someone else arriving!" exclaimed Susan. "Yes, it must be the female, Maddie Sharpe."

"Really?" queried Eddie. "Thank goodness, now she'll have to believe me."

Maddie materialised beside Eddie.

"Gosh, it's a child," exclaimed Charlie. "I suggested to Susan earlier that Maddie Sharpe might be a child, but I wasn't being serious."

"Oh my god! What sort of dream is this?" blurted Maddie, looking bewildered at the others sitting about her.

"Now, do you believe me, Madds?" asked Eddie.

"Huh? You're not referring to...I mean you're not really here independently, Gramps...?"

"This is not simply a normal dream, Maddie. Surely you can tell?" Eddie turned to the three characters. "This is my granddaughter, Maddie Sharpe. She's twelve years old. She didn't even exist the last time we met." He turned back to Maddie. "Meet Julia Strauss, Charlie and Susan." Eddie gestured for the three characters to introduce themselves to Maddie.

"It seems strange," said Maddie, gathering her thoughts after the three characters had introduced themselves. "But after an initial surprise, I'm not as shocked as I would expect to be."

"Ah, that's a property of the Realm between Realms, the place we are in," explained Eddie. "It fills your mind with knowledge necessary to act within it and enforces acceptance, somehow. It's all done with pulses of hard-light awareness."

"Exactly what is this room we are in?" asked Maddie. "I can't see any windows or doors. Just four grey concrete walls and a floor and ceiling to match."

"We're in a starting room in the Realm between Realms," said Charlie. "Give it a moment of your time. The knowledge will soon pulse into your mind."

Just then, a single slightest of slight tremors pulsed through the room. Eddie and the three characters looked at Maddie expectantly...

"Oh yes," muttered Maddie with wide-open eyes. "My mind seems to have filled up with new knowledge. Wow, that was quite an energy boost! Sort of like a mental sugar rush. I understand more deeply the different Realms. The difference between soft-light and hard-light and atomic materials. Also the happy news that Charlie and Susan are here to hopefully join Julia in a sequel world which my granddad must oversee to publication. The Novel Realm will fully exist the moment my granddad publishes the book. Gosh, how strange...?"

"You know about our Realms," said Julia, "but we characters don't know much about yours. We know it's in another universe and that it only has atomic materials. And there's something that's really been bothering us. I believe Charlie would like to ask Eddie a question on behalf of us characters."

"Eddie?" asked Charlie, hesitantly.

"Go on, Charlie. Spit it out, man," encouraged Eddie.

"Are you a god?"

This caused Maddie to burst into raucous laughter to the point of covering her face with one hand and thumping the table with her other.

"Erm...definitely not," admitted Eddie quickly, his cheeks flushing with embarrassment. "I'm just an ordinary man. Pretty average, I'd say. Maddie's exceptionally intelligent for her age, but even she wouldn't profess to being a deity. Why little old I ended up having access to you characters, is a mystery to me. Why did you three ask me that?"

Julia said, "It's just I suspected, as did Neil Barrington, that you could not be a god, and I wondered why us characters were born with a belief system, a religion, that is evidently false—at least in your case. Is it the case that all authors are not gods?"