I trudged through the hallway, my head spinning. In fact, my mind was so preoccupied that if Zac hadn't found me, I wouldn't have remembered to head to the library, let alone find my way there.
"Where were you?" he asked. "We've been waiting for ages!"
"Oh. Right." I momentarily shook the morning's events out of my head. "Uh, yeah, Wen kept me back after class a bit."
Zac frowned. "What? Who? Wen?"
Come to think of it, it would have been a lot more convenient if he had said that in the previous chapter. Or if the Author had made that chapter just a little bit longer.
(A/N: Nah, then the ending wouldn't have been right.)
Excuses, excuses.
I gave him a look that meant that some really interesting shizz had just gone down, and he understood.
"Let's talk at the library, then," he said, his frown not fading in the slightest.
***
"That old dude's name is Wen?" Zac asked, raising one eyebrow. "What kind of a name is that?"
"Come on, man," shrugged Mac, "Who knows what names were considered normal in the 18th century."
Zac laughed. Jack furrowed his brow.
"Uh, Mac?" he asked, "Have you ever seen the guy?"
Mac stopped scanning rows of books in the Teen Fiction corner of the second floor library they had gathered in and looked at him, puzzled. "No. Why?"
Jack avoided her gaze. "It's nothing. Never mind."
Someone snorted.
Our main characters wheeled around to find the only other person in the library, who wasn't even the librarian.
"Who are you supposed to be?" asked Zac, because he was used to random characters appearing from nowhere at this point. He looked the kid up and down. "Is your name, like, Emo or something?"
It wasn't hard to see why he'd asked- this guy looked so emo he could have given Negasonic Teenage Warhead and Eeyore combined a run for their money. His black bangs barely revealed his dark eyes and what appeared to be eyeliner, and he wore skinny jeans that seemed way too tight for any creature that required limbs to locomote. He was wearing a black hoodie as well, but the cynosure of his get-up was the fact that he was wearing the hood on too. Of course, it was hard to tell, because he was sitting in the darkest corner in the universe.
"Yeah", chimed in Mac, "Haven't you heard of this magical thing called a haircut?"
"And are you colour blind, or do you actually not know that you can buy clothes that aren't the colour black?" Zac continued.
"Or that normal people sometimes don't feel like wearing hoodies indoors?"
"And do you mind shifting to an even shadier spot? Unfortunately, we can see you way too clearly."
The boy was silent for a few seconds, eventually dragging his chair to an acceptably bright area. He looked up at Zac.
"Nice to meet you too."
It didn't help that his voice reeked of condescendence.
"The name's Draco. But please just call me Drac."
Before Zac could come up with some Potternut comeback, Lilac was already talking and gesturing at the four of them. "Zac, Mac, Jack and Lilac. Let's ignore the fact that all of us have rhyming names- for now-", she looked Drac straight in what she hoped was the eye, and asked a single monotonous question, "Why do you think Jack is hiding something?"
Jack blinked. "Um, what?"
Drac laughed. "So you're the perceptive one?", he half-asked, half-stated. "Nice to see there's someone else out there who bothers to pay attention. He looked at Zac. "And you're supposed to be the funny one, aren't you?"
"Is that sarcas-"
"And you", he said, turning to Mac, "you must be the sidekick."
"The what?" Mac spat.
"Never mind, scratch that. You're the one with anger management issues. You might want to see someone about that."
"I HAVE ANGER MANAGEMENT ISSUES?"
"Yep. And CDS."
"What?"
"Constant Denial Syndrome."
"I do NOT!"
"Which only leaves you, Jack", said Drac, ignoring her completely.
Jack gulped. Had he really been unmasked as the Paladin? Wait, no, that phrase made no sense. Had he already been found to be the true identity of the crime-fighting hero known to the common people as the Paladin? Where had he gone wrong? What had he done to give it away? Why was he questioning himself so much when he hadn't even been the Paladin all day on the first day of a new school where barely anyone knew him?
"You noticed it too, didn't you?" asked Drac.
Jack blinked. The whole morning had had him feeling pretty stupid, so he wasn't even sure if asking Drac just what the heck he was talking about would bring about another wave of um-just-how-stupid-are-you faces.
Remembering that the three other people in the room with him happened to be the only three other people who hadn't heard about Demon Lady before, which meant that the probability of him making a fool out of himself wasn't a full hundred percent- pretty darn good in his opinion- Jack decided to take his chances.
"Noticed what exactly?" he asked.
"Don't play dumb," Drac laughed. "You have a fairly decent understanding of human behaviour and psychology, I presume?"
Before Jack could even shrug, Drac was speaking again. "Then it would not be ill-founded for me to conclude that you too are beginning to question the validity of some of the things you sense around you?"
Jack blinked again. "What?"
"Playing the fool, I see." Drac paced across the room, and for the first time, all eyes were on him out of piqued interest rather than excuse-me-who-are-you-again-ness.
"Come on," he said, "surely at least one of you peasants noticed something out of the ordinary?"
"No."
"Nope."
"Nuh-uh."
"I did," said Lilac. Everyone looked at her.
Drac smirked at her- or rather, continued to smirk, just in her general direction. "You first."
Lilac cleared her throat and tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear. "Well- I it's sort of like- I don't know how to explain it, really, but-"
"Go on," prompted Drac. "The sooner we enlighten these idiots the better." It may have been an insult, but if Jack wasn't mistaken, he thought he heard actual emotion in his voice.
"Well... you know that feeling you read about in books, or see in movies? You know, that moment when one of the characters says they're 'really living' or something?" Lilac waved her arms around like she wasn't really convinced about what she was saying herself.
Zac opened his mouth to say something but Drac held up a hand and cut him off.
Lilac sighed. "I don't feel it. That feeling... I just-" she ran a hand through her hair. "It's not something that can be easily explained-- nor something that I expect you to understand, but-"
"I understand," said Drac softly. "I understand fully well that life is ultimately meaningless and nothing we do is of any consequence whatsoever."
"Ack-- no!" said everyone together, unable to think of anything but Drac's emoness, and what it could mean if he didn't care about his own life.
"I meant," Lilac added hastily, "that something feels completely off here... I just can't place my finger on it."
"Yes, I know," Drac concurred. "What did you think I meant?"
Jack and Mac exchanged glances. Zac looked away and started whistling tunelessly.
Drac deadpanned. "Look, I've noticed a few things out of the ordinary too. I thought Jack had noticed something, but he clearly isn't as perceptive as I thought he was-"
'Fine!' Jack admitted, 'I thought it was pretty weird, But that's all it was- weird! There's nothing else going on here! Nothing at all! Zilch, zero, nothing."
"That's exactly what every main character ever says before something drastic immediately occurs!" Drac said triumphantly. "Wait, I thought I would be the main character-"
Zac swivelled his head around like an owl to look at the girls. "I have literally no clue what's happening."
"Same."
"I know that feel, bro."
Jack sighed. "Remember how Mac made that joke about how Wen was from the 18th century?"
"Yup," said Zac. "Classic, by the way." He and Mac bumped fists.
"Yeah, except I haven't told you about Wen at all- thanks to our friend Drac showing up in all his emo glory- and the only person who's met him other than me is Zac. So how did Mac crack a joke about a person she doesn't even know?"
Silence.
'I'm just gifted, I guess?" Mac laughed weakly. Nobody else did. "Okay, I agree that's freaky. What are you implying?"
"I have a theory," said Drac, "but I require proof."
"That is the second most cliche line I've heard in my life," Zac said.
Before Jack could ask what the first was, Drac said something that would change the plot from a dazed, meandering chain of events strung together by some random person with an overactive imagination into a well-structured, interesting storyline with a decent-sized appreciative audience- or so said random person with the overactive imagination would like to hope.
"I don't think we're real."
If someone had dropped a pin, nobody would have noticed (or cared for that matter), because the noise would've been drowned out by the deafening silence.
"Um, Drac?" Lilac asked, "Could you repeat that statement? I think I misheard you or something."
"Nope," said Drac, "and now that you mention it, everyone hear who's actually misheard stuff before, raise your hand." Before anyone could exclaim how surprised they were that they couldn't remember a time when they had misheard something, coughed or even sneezed, Zac was saying something that didn't even seem remotely related.
"Here," he corrected him.
"What?"
"Here. You said hear."
"Haha, I must confess that at first I found your sense of humour quite demeaning, but now... oh, you're being serious." Drac promptly changed the look on his face back to his signature life-is-just-so-intensely-boring expression. "Please, Zac. Please tell me how you came to that conclusion."
"Well I just heard you say-- oh."
"Yes, 'oh'. Homophones, Zac. They can't be distinguished by speech-"
"Zip it, mate." Zac's voice wasn't jovial for once. "I just realised something. Does anyone know the name of this school?"
"TSP, right?" said Jack. "What about it?"
"Not just the initials. The full form."
"Yeah, it said in some pamphlet," Mac said, "The Public School or something, I think?"
"That's what I remember reading too. So why isn't it TPS?" Everyone shrugged. 'Crappy editors' would have been a bad joke, even by Zac's standards.
"And remember that weird moment where all the other kids in class rewound themselves or something?" Lilac started. "That sounds like something totally out of a simulation!"
"Precisely what I was thinking!" Drac agreed, even though he had no idea what she was talking about. "This world we're in seems far too two-dimensional to be real."
"Woah, woah, woah!" Jack held out his hands in an attempt to keep the situation in check. "What are you guys saying? That this is The Matrix or something?"
"Well, quite possibly. Just don't expect to be able to dodge bullets like Quicksilver."
"Um, Quicksilver was killed by bullets, so..."
"Not that Quicksilver!" Drac snapped at Zac. "The cooler one in the more underrated series."
"Hold up!" Mac was the one intervening this time. "The Matrix, The X-Men series... do any of you remember watching any of them?"
Nobody said anything.
"I see."
"Okay..." Drac paced around the room. Every word he said next was cautious, composed. "I think we can all agree that something is very wrong, at the very least. I had originally thought that we were in a simulation, and that does seem to be the most plausible theory- considering we have retained memories from some other realm- but what doesn't make sense is the fact that we were able to perceive these defects so easily- it's so suspicious, I almost don't want to believe any of it."
Zac spun a book around on one finger and leaned against a bookshelf. "Yeah, it's almost like some badly written plot of some C-movie."
Drac blinked. "That's... actually not a half-bad theory."
Mac snorted. "Nobody out there would watch something so brain-dead. And believe me when I say that there's some pretty stupid idiots roaming the face of the pla- ouch!' A book that looked large enough to be used as a tent decided to drop off the highest shelf of its own free will and landed elegantly on Mac's foot.
"Hm." Drac peered over the book while Mac hopped around on one foot, cursing. "What's this? 'A Brief Introduction To The World Of Fan Fiction'?" He flipped through its pages. "Blank."
"Sums up fanfics pretty darn well if you ask me," Mac snarled through gritted teeth.
Lilac cocked her head. "Are you thinking what I'm thinking, Drac?"
Drac shook his head slowly, as if in a daze. "No. Not happening. I refuse to believe it. We're in a book, maybe. Haha, yep. That makes complete sense. A book that just doesn't have a semi-decent plot, that's all. Haha."
If looks could kill, the look Mac shot Drac would've crushed his very soul. "Your fake laughter is more unbearable than the rest of you." She tentatively placed her foot back on the floor.
Lilac looked vaguely flustered, which was actually more alarming than the fact that Drac was swooning around the room. "Drac, don't worry. The simulation thing makes the most sense. It can't possibly be the other thing-- I mean, who in their right mind would-"
"Hello," waved the matador.
"AaAaRgHh!" Everyone else in the room reeled backwards in a mishmash of chaos and readers' and protagonists' confusion alike.
(A/N: Yeah, I dunno why he's in this chapter either. I just like the word 'matador'.)
"What was that?" shouted Mac. "What the heck was that?"
Zac shoved Jack off him and dusted himself off. "Do you mean the teleporting matador- who is now not even in the room anymore and is freaking me out- or that booming noise we just heard?"
Mac's eyes bulged out of their sockets in an attempt to strangle someone and vent a bit. "Both!"
Jack surveyed the area. "It sounded as if someone was speaking in the distance or something."
(A/N: Wait, I don't remember this being part of the plot...)
"There!" he shouted. "I heard it. It definitely said 'A-N'. What is that supposed to mean though?"
Lilac and Drac stared at each other in alarm.
"You mean A/N," said Mac. "It stands for Author's Note. The only place it's ever used is..." She stopped to gag for a second before finishing. "F--fan fictions."
(...)
"What?!" Jack stared at his hands, wondering what he did to deserve something this cruel. Zac leapt behind a shelf and curled up into a ball, expecting One Direction to pop up from somewhere and either serenade him to death or switch his sexuality.
"I'm afraid our predicament is worse than you imagine."
Everyone stared at Drac, except Zac, because he expected Drac to have turned into Zayn Malik by then, and would rather stare at the dirt between the bottom shelf and the floor for the rest of his life than have 'KILLED BY SUDDEN PILLOWTALK' engraved on his tombstone.
"An entire day of school is over, and we haven't met any outrageously famous celebrities. Not to mention the fact that there are five of us, and we're not even all the same gender. But we do have some plotless plot and author's notes littered throughout the middle of the story to piss off everybody. So guess what we've managed to land ourselves in."
The grim faces fixed on him showed that the others had already accepted what Drac was going to say next.
"That's right. A Wattpad novel."
___
Okay, just what in $#!%'s name is going on here?
Jack: That's what I'm trying to ask you too but you have to stop cutting me off-
___
*We interrupt the ending of this chapter to bring you an excerpt from "A Brief Introduction to the World of Fan Fiction"!*
*Yup, that was it!*
___
Soooo... that happened. See you guys next week!