Usual disclaimers apply.

A line in this is taken from Alyx Bradford (known to the Phandom as "Susette").

Review. Leave an illiterate flame, if you like. I don't really mind. If you're angry, review. If you're happy, review. If you just plain don't care, you can tell me that.

If you report me, you will be ridiculed. I'm not stupid; FFN simply doesn't catch things like these on their own. People report other people. Whether out of jealousy, or sheer stupidity and barbarism, they do, and I can't really do anything about it but repost. And I'm willing to do that.

Thanks, Christine, Cass. I heart you both and you deserve muffins. (SarahLynn too!) And to anyone else who saw this on LiveJournal and didn't leave a comment.

This is satiric and funky. And it might get a wee bit cruel. So I've given you fair warning, I've told you this might get ugly. Without further ado...

The Scandinavian Guild for Phantasmal Fanfiction Regulation (Or Not)




Erik smoothed a wrinkle in the sleeve of his finely-tailored coat and comfortably slid into his seat at the head of the table. Christine was at his right hand side, and Nadir at his left. Next to Christine was Raoul, who was glancing at Erik nervously as though Erik might harm him. The Council Rules specified that a Council Member could not bodily harm another Council Member without signed permission from Christine, who was known to be peaceful and therefore wouldn't sign any permission for that at all. Erik hadn't requested any permission for bodily harm because he knew that wouldn't exactly score points for his way to earning love. Raoul shifted uncomfortably. Carolus Fonta, Sorelli, the managers, La Carlotta, Philippe, Joseph Buquet, Meg, Madame Giry, and an assorted number of ballet rats, sat around the table as well; some with their feet kicked up, some fast asleep, and some looking as though they had just been resurrected from the dead (which they probably had).

Christine fidgeted with the simple, golden ring hanging on a silver chain around her neck and heaved a great sigh. Erik flexed his elegant gloved fingers and leaned forward in his chair. Some random ballet rats were still popping in from the story, but as they appeared, the spaces around the table seemed to fill in comfortably. The last man to appear was a stout man, clad in the clothing of the French gentlemen of the early 1900s. He was looking through everyone through a pair of spectacles very curiously.

He was, for the most part ignored.

Erik shuffled the papers on the polished wooden table in front of him. He could almost catch his reflection in the wood... he shuddered and abruptly stood up, cloak sweeping behind him. "Ahem!"

Everyone sat up a bit straighter in their chairs, and all eyes fixed on him. "Welcome to the first official meeting of the Scandinavian Guild of Phantasmal Fanfiction Regulation."

"Who thought up that title?" Nadir muttered to himself, probably too loudly.

"I did!" Monsieur Leroux countered, furrowing his brow and giving Nadir a hard look. He also glanced at Erik.

"It doesn't roll off the tongue... how about 'Canonical Elisists' Search and Rescue' (for canon that's somehow muddled in with the trash, but people will realise that on their own, anyhow...)," Raoul interjected. "See? It spells 'C-E-S-A-R'!" He beamed.

There were murmurs of agreement around the table. "It does!"

"The Scandinavian Guild of Phantasmal Fanfiction Regulation stays," Leroux said, standing up and trying in vain to glare at both Nadir and Raoul at once, and succeeding in crossing his eyes most painfully.

"But that only spells 'SGOPFR.' That's not anything! We need a good acronym!" He pronounced 'sgoprf' painfully slowly, taking his time to accentuate each word, stood up, and prodded Leroux's chest, glaring. Leroux grabbed his pocketwatch and was about to dash Raoul's brains out, before Erik stopped them. Nadir had since sat down meekly and began to twiddle his thumbs idly, avoiding the quarrel.

"Gentlemen, please. Ask Christine if you want permission for that. And do it later, not now." He coughed politely. "Now, as I was saying... If you have been summoned here, you know that something is going totally wrong. Levels of tributes to us are soaring sky-high, but the quality is going so low that we had to get another piece of paper to graph it, and then we just let a red ribbon about a mile long, stretching in the negative section, go down the hallways of this building." He indicated a chart showing these awful numbers, and a red ribbon was indeed stretching out the door and down the corridor.

He turned to the projection screen behind him, and cleared his throat again. Little Jammes scrambled to the projector and switched to slide one, which was a picture of FanFiction.Net's "Phantom" Just In section, spammed with bad grammar and teenybopper writing.

"As you, fellow residents of Monsieur Leroux's—" here he gestured to Leroux, who was inching toward Sorelli and being glared at by Philippe "—story, might know, the state of the tales in...honour...of us has been severely deteriorating over the past few months." Everyone nodded in agreement and Erik nodded at Jammes, who switched to the next slide, which was a picture of an ordinary mid-twenties woman of 2004, fainted, lying on a floor, surrounded by spilled coffee and Sour Skittles. "This is the result of the reading of the first one-hundred words — give or take a few dozen — of one of those stories."

Some gasped, but most already knew the horrors that these stories were capable of.

"Are we supposed to stand, idle, while our story's legacy is defaced? Are we supposed to ignore the heinous acts committed in the name of misguided and deluded adoration for our tale? Are we supposed to ignore the innocent minds and lives that are being scarred by poor grammar and poor vocabulary? NO! I say we take action!"

They nodded happily, exchanging looks and admiring Erik's fervent vigour and enthusiasm. Christine gazed at Erik, eyes sparkling. Everyone seemed to smile, knowing that he was right.

"Jammes, next slide, please." Slide number three showed two teenage girls, each clutching bottles of Diet Cherry Coke, apparently in peals of laughter. They wore gaudy, dark makeup, and ratty, faded black clothing. Everyone present winced at exactly the same moment, causing the whole room to seem as though it were wincing too: it contracted and then moved back its normal size. It was a very strange effect. "These are two teenage girls who are disillusioned. They think they are entitled to part of our legend. They are wrong. We need to protect our story!"

"But what are we going to do?" they replied.

"Simple. We're fictional, right? Technically that means we aren't real. But only technically. Through their minds we're real. As little splotches of ink on paper we are real. So we can bend the laws of reality, because we aren't like real people. We're much more than that. They slip from their desks and envision a story. The story comes to them, really. Why can't the characters, in physical form, come to them? There's no reason why not, of course."

"Well, they use computers, so... we'd be coming out of the pixels," Raoul interjected nervously, half-raising his hand like a nervous schoolboy afraid of getting a question incorrect.

"Pixels, ink. It's all words, isn't it? As 'fiction', we can rip their 'laws' and 'restrictions' like hands rip tissue paper. We'll wrinkle and crinkle them. After all, not even being real to begin with, we have no laws of our own... simply the laws of imagination."

"You certainly did think this through, Monsieur le Fantôme!" the ballet girls said, half-giggling, for it was their nature to be giggling for forty-nine per cent of all available time. The other fifty-one per cent was, as an unwritten law dictated firmly, to be occupied with screaming and fainting and swooning. If nothing else in the story was set in stone, and all was a variable in this great mix-up of a tale, that was the set-in-stone constant.

"Are you with me?"

Shouts and yells of "aye!" and "of course!" and "anywhere you go, let me go too!" filled the small room.

"Jammes, lights." The lights came on and Jammes skipped back to the table, taking her seat next to Meg and Sorelli.

"Then what are we waiting for? It's time to save our story!"