Author's Note:
Holy shit, an update!
This has been fun. But I've also done a lot of work on consolidating the ending. That's been hard. The chapters after this one will be among the most difficult I've ever written. I'm looking forward to posting them here, though.
Anyway, if you've made it this far, go find me under the same username on AO3 if you want to read the rewrite as well. There's more content, a faster release schedule, and it's better. But it's only up to Chapter 3 right now.
Doesn't matter. I'm going to finish this monster even if it kills me. Sudo out.
Layman Scripts
A fanfic by Pseudinymous
~ 28 ~
- Screaming into the Unknown -
The Ghostwriter walked slowly through the labyrinth of books.
The back of his mind brought fourth a slew of haphazard memories detailing the first few times he had done this. Wandering through the shelving, filled with wonder and awe and terror, instilled with the strange but intricate question: Was this heaven? Or was it merely an oasis that stood drifting through the midst of hell?
But that question had seemed so dull for so many years, now. He'd come to realise it didn't matter — life went on whether you wanted it to or not, whether you even considered it living or not.
Somehow, this day felt a lot like his first day in the Ghost Zone, in spite of its differences.
… When you got down to it, the ability to twist reality at will wasn't just uncommon, it was an anomaly.
Over the thirty-three years he had spent in this place, the Ghostwriter had read and read and read, but not once had he ever uncovered even a trace of a human ghost who had wielded a power like his. The only true contender had been the Sorceress, but her power had been described so differently — not so much a reality shift but something more akin to magic. Maybe… maybe that had been the pitfall all these years. Perhaps she truly was the only other who shared his core type, all the while wielding power of such a boggling magnitude.
As he kept walking he realised, with a sickening droop in his stomach, that he was capable of doing anything.
The only other ghosts that truly stood at his level were those that seemed born from concept itself; the few laws of reality that had always eluded his grasp. Time, life, death, and the strange must-be world that laid beyond the bounds of causality — these things were and always would be inaccessible to him. But the ghosts that represented them never seemed human.
Strangely, he felt again as he had the first time he'd walked this path. Stepping quietly into the unknown, struggling to understand the nature of his own being.
And yet, the entire situation was as frightening as it was intoxicating.
It was with the Ghostwriter's previous change of reality that he suddenly understood the true nature of his own core. He now knew that the limits his keyboard had placed upon him truly were limits of its own — when his power got serious, it didn't need written words to control it, nor a battery to charge it. While in the act of escaping the Sorceress's dimension he'd wondered if he might become spent trying to fight her off, but then the simple act of wanting more energy had resulted in its creation from nothing.
He'd watched — no, felt — one of the most serious laws of physics break in front of his very own eyes, and the idea rushed him to the core with an excitement he scarcely wanted to admit.
… How much of that had Jazz heard in his mind, though? It was impossible to tell how much she might know, and this particularly, the way he had felt, was something he was uncomfortable sharing.
Well, it wasn't like he could stop her from knowing if she did.
Perhaps it was even possible for him to end this little spat with the Sorceress right now, but he shuddered to think what might happen if he misjudged his advantage over her.
At the end the real question was this: In a war between the unstoppable force and the immovable object, was it ever possible to actually win?
Jazz's first real conversation with Mira was an awkward one.
The Script of Sin and Grace sat politely on a side table, exactly where the Ghostwriter had left it. There'd been some quite explicit instructions to not even think about touching it, and as a result, such contemplations had been at least 50 percent on Jazz's mind at any given time. Her attention was now split between an invisibly inked document of great power and pure misery, and a crumpled, broken ghost that had once had the displeasure of breaking both of Jazz's arms. He had left them both there alone, disappearing into the depths of his library, apparently seeking out the first swaths of books they'd need to start collectively picking through.
Naturally, she'd felt his hesitation towards leaving the room at all.
Mira was now just starting to get a feel for sitting up on the couch, but she could never quite take her eyes off the human so ill-suited and out-of-place in this environment either. Jazz tried to block the ghost's thoughts from entering her mind, but even this simple action seemed to be getting ever more difficult as time went on, as her mind hooked more and more automatically into the minds of others. Memories of what she had done to this ghost sliced uncomfortably into her head, and then mixed around with other memories from Mira herself. It was enough to paralyse you.
"I'm so sorry," Jazz muttered, quickly. "It shouldn't have come to that, I'm—"
"You're not worse."
The rest of Jazz's sentence fell straight out of her train of thought. "What?"
"Him. He was worse," said Spectra, and so honestly that it gave Jazz serious pause. "The man who kept me."
Jazz was pulling herself away from Spectra's mind by force, now, some primal sense of survival screeching danger from within. "… What are you talking about?" said Jazz, slowly.
Mira's voice was quiet. "Life."
A million possibilities ran through Jazz's head at once, screeching and jeering for equal consideration, each one considerably more horrible than the next. And yet here Mirabella Spectra was, sitting quietly as she stared down at the floorboards beneath her feat.
"… Who was the man who kept you?" Jazz asked, a little more urgently.
Mira didn't immediately respond, almost as if she was off in some sort of distant dream world. Instead, she started to float away from the couch, and Jazz saw it for real now — this strange, elegant, entrancing way she moved, something Jazz had only seen hazily and infrequently from the inside of the Ghostwriter's memory. Mira stepped out with grace unlike any other ghost Jazz had ever seen, and like countless individuals before her, she just couldn't help but stare.
"… Not Ghostwriter, someone else…" Mira muttered, distantly. She was looking around now at all the little suspended dust particles, never having seen anything quite like it before. "Dust, dust everywhere…" she added, apparently in some kind of haze.
A mistake — Jazz had the audacity to stand up. Mira froze midair like a deer in the headlights, still drifting forwards a little even as every one of her muscles locked up tight. Jazz froze too, hands out in front. "Sorry!"
"I thought—" said the ghost, unable to banish a shudder. "—No, sorry, I thought… I don't know."
She was only managing whispers at this point, so Jazz took this as a good indication to stay well away from her. And as much as it horrified Jazz to watch the shaken actions of a ghost who had been so terribly taken advantage of, it horrified Jazz much more to cause further harm than she already had. So she did the only thing she could — slowly sit down again, and try to make herself look as though she wasn't going to be a threat.
Well, not again, anyway.
"… Spec—Mira?" Jazz began, cautiously. "Can I call you that?"
Her gaze drifted down to Jazz as if she was only half seeing her. "Mm," she said. "… Mira."
"Are you sure you don't want to sit down?"
One side of her mouth slid downwards, the other enduring a slight delay before it made a proper frown. "No, I want to… I can move, I want to move around, the other one was always moving for me, and I couldn't…" Mira hesitated for a second, eyes darting around the room as she twisted midair to see what was behind her. The bottom of that white summer dress followed in a swirl. "I can do everything myself now."
Jazz watched this spectacle with absolutely no idea what to actually do. She didn't want to admit it, but a ghost who had suffered in such a way and still actively traumatised was quite a bit out of her depth. Maybe there wasn't anything she really should do anyway — maybe it was better just to wait.
Mira swung around to face Jazz again, expression knitting together into honest contemplation. "You're not the same person as the one in that big house, are you?"
… This was going to take some processing. "Um, what do you mean?"
"… Never mind," said Mira, quietly.
This painful conversation was cut blissfully short by the Ghostwriter's sudden reappearance in the middle of the room, prompting Jazz to come uncomfortably close to liberating herself from her own skin. Mira on the other hand simply watched amiably, as if she was already so used to herself performing erratic teleportations that it was no longer a surprise when someone did one in front of her.
Perhaps the whole thing was par for the course, at this point.
The Ghostwriter hadn't only brought himself, either. At least forty books appeared suspended in the air behind him, not floating — instead, they were simply stopped in time, suspended. It gave one a feeling bordering on anxiety, knowing that the moment time caught up with the fact that it was supposed to flow, all of those were going to come crashing down to the floor.
"Sorry for the wait," he apologised. "I was testing something."
Jazz almost hadn't even considered it waiting. In fact, for having picked out and gathered several dozen different titles, the amount of time the man had taken was little short of a miracle. Mira turned her gaze to him levelly almost as if the sight of him relaxed her, but it certainly didn't take long for her face to screw up in worry.
"But you always said you might not be able to go back."
He shot Mira a guilty sideways glance. "It was probably going to happen sooner or later, anyway."
She shook her head. "But in a few hundred years."
"Well," he said, but rather than heated he seemed utterly resigned. "What's a few hundred years in the face of eternity, anyway?" Short. Overwhelmingly short.
"Do you think you can go back?"
The Ghostwriter shrugged, eventually, while trying his damnedest to look away from Mira and over at the bookshelf instead. "Don't know. I haven't tried to yet."
Of course, Jazz had hooked into exactly what was meant by all of this the moment the ghosts had opened their mouths to discuss it. She could feel the discomfort coming from the Ghostwriter in particular in ebbs and waves, and decided steadfastly not to prod him — his mental state about the entire situation was haphazard at best and it probably wasn't worth risking the Jenga tower that was his mind.
"… Do you really think you're stronger than her?" asked Mira, eventually. The Ghostwriter had been halfway through plucking one of the books out of the air behind him but had stopped this action simply to turn and face her properly. "I mean… you can't just make her disappear, can you?"
"I can't make any change that would directly result in her death or otherwise any sort of disappearance from causality," he elaborated, carefully.
"So what can you do?"
"… That would mean you'd have to find some indirect way of getting rid of her," said Jazz, finally, who was reluctant to use the word kill but who was also painfully aware of what would need to be done. "So wouldn't that make the first question, how can you destroy a ghost?"
That was when the Ghostwriter shot Jazz a glance that made her insides wobble. Raw green ectoplasmic energy, so concentrated that she could feel it screeching into existence through her heart, quietly surrounded his fingers.
Mira said nothing. In fact, every time Jazz stole a glance at her, she seemed to have moved slightly further backwards.
"Good question," said the Ghostwriter. "I'm hoping one of these books is going to give us a good idea, or else I'm just going to have to get creative about it and pray it works."
I wish I didn't have to kill her… I wish I didn't have to use my power like this.
Those words entered Jazz's mind with no permission whatsoever, and yet she was almost certain they weren't meant to be heard. Confined to her head and yet still the thought seemed to echo around the room, accompanied by an unmistakable chill that settled into the inside of your skull. There was a tired, measured acceptance of the events that may soon come to pass, and it was the first time the Ghostwriter had really slipped his thoughts on the matter. How had he hidden this feeling from her? All this time? … Or maybe it was only just now that the issue had truly come to a head.
In an attempt to escape from what she'd just heard, Jazz ran down another train of thought. "But," she began, "How can you even hold all of that power, anyway? I can feel it from here."
The Ghostwriter looked carefully at his dangerously glowing hand, turning it over and stretching his fingers through the ectoplasmic energy that emanated from it. "I can't. It's potential."
"Potential…?"
He frowned, a strange shade falling over his eyes. "The potential to create energy from nothing at all…" he said, quietly. "When I use my power, I don't… the energy doesn't need to come from me. I'm just the conduit."
"I think most ghosts are like batteries," Mira added, and then she pointed squarely at him. His eyes zeroed in on the tip of her index finger. "But Ghostwriter's also kind of like a power line."
Jazz was still staring at his hand. "Doesn't this violate one of the most basal laws of physics? What happened to matter cannot be created nor destroyed? I know I'm human and I probably just don't get it, but even in mum and dad's experiments, we never found any evidence of ectoplasmic energy coming into being without some kind of conversion or source."
"… Don't ask me how it works," the Ghostwriter said, but only after considering his thoughts carefully. "If I want something to happen, it happens. Reality be damned."
Mira had finally stopped backing away, and now, it seemed, the curious side of her had her haphazardly leaning forward, squinting at him. "You are kind of like a god."
"I told you not to say that!"
Unfortunately for the Ghostwriter, Jazz had been paying attention over the past week a little too carefully. "If she truly wanted a god, then she can have one," she repeated. "I dunno, you kind of admitted it there."
"Please don't—"
"I mean, how many other ghosts can create energy from nothing?" Jazz continued, much to the Ghostwriter's dismay. "Probably—"
"The Sorceress can't."
Both sets of eyes shot straight to Mira, and she inched backwards in surprise. "Did I… say something?"
A million tiny scraps of knowledge about the Sorceress rushed through the Ghostwriter's mind, and he barely stopped himself from summoning her right there and then. Books he'd forgotten he'd ever read constructed themselves out of thin air straight on the floor, the change to reality committed before he could even contemplate stopping it. His eyes darted down and then back up as if embarrassed, and he quickly changed the topic before either of his accomplices might have chance to comment.
"It seems like she can bend reality too, we've seen that much," he began. "But that uses an enormous amount of power. If you can't make at least some of that on demand—"
Mira almost couldn't get her own words out — Jazz could see it. The ghost had stopped, leaned forward, almost seeming to choke as she forced herself to speak. "It's from other ghosts, all of it," she managed. "Y-you know those stories, how she… killed ghosts, forever? I saw her do it, and she — I don't know, she makes her whole arm disappear, and then… it's like she reaches right into their chest and tears their core out, crushes it in her fingers! The light from that, it's so bright, I think the amount of energy she can get from that is unimaginable…"
Unimaginable was right. Trying to visualise the death of a ghost, as described by a variety of books that detailed the Sorcerer's terrible and terrific service of Pariah Dark, was like trying to visualise the creation of the universe. You could try as you might to wrap your head around the idea, and yet even if you conceptually understood it a solid visual would never quite come to mind. The Ghostwriter suspected heavily it might look, to a bystander, like a contained nuclear explosion, but the writers of that time were a little bit too early to be able to have nuclear weapons in mind as a point of reference.
"But how can she do all of that without an arm?" asked Jazz, breaking him out of his train of thought.
"I don't know," said Mira. "It's like her arm's still there, underneath. It's gotta be in the same phase as a ghost core, right?
Jazz's mind seemed to be ticking over. She fidgeted as she thought. "Does anyone know what a ghost core's actually made from?"
Silence.
"… But if you break it open, it causes a huge energy release? Ectoplasmic energy?"
"Something from it likely converts into ectoplasmic energy, if the Sorceress is taking it and saving it for later," the Ghostwriter added. "Cores are out of phase with ghosts. The Sorceress can manipulate them, though, which… hmm, wouldn't that suggest she can operate through multiple separate planes of existence?"
If Jazz hadn't already read his mind, then they might indeed have actually been one and the same person, he was sure of it. Because the next words out of her mouth sounded so predictive, so exact to the wording of his own thoughts, that he wasn't sure how else they could've been sourced. "So, she's getting energy by killing ghosts on a level that's essentially an inaccessible plane of existence, and she possibly gets access to that by leveraging an ability to bend reality. Or—"
"Or…?" said Mira, who was staring fixedly at Jazz.
This is the part where Jazz's thoughts diverged. "Or, she doesn't have a core ability that allows her to bend reality at all. What if her core ability allows her to shift through dimensions and planes of existence instead? What if the things she does look like reality bending, but are actually more like… I dunno, controlling… how… dimensions go together? Maybe? Manipulating how she can move around in those dimensions?"
The Ghostwriter's first reaction was to reject this entirely. It sounded like something baked up out of a mind that had little context for the situation, and honestly, that's… pretty much what this was. The problem herein, however, was that he couldn't find any scrap of knowledge that might discredit her. To make things even fishier, the Sorceress had already shown herself to heavily favour dimensional jumping, and could obviously operate in some kind of strange etheric form to remove and destroy cores in the first place.
… It was an interesting guess. It still wasn't magic like the stuff the Sorcerer had always been associated with in lore, but perhaps from an outside perspective, any appearance of bent reality might itself look like magic. Any technology sufficiently advanced, as they say.
The uneasier part of this was that it raised some interesting questions about the flow of time, particularly in hypothetical dimensions where things like that might not be so straightforward. It was true he'd frozen time for every conceivable point of causality, but what about the inconceivable? Could the Sorceress know or operate in some way he couldn't even imagine? Was there a way to circumvent time itself, or would she merely remain trapped in the dimension she was in? The very idea made his non-existent blood run cold in his veins. Maybe he wouldn't bring that up, for Mira's sake. Jazz's face had already turned white, though — when your partner is a telepath, you've little choice but for full transparency.
The Ghostwriter made a mental note to himself, and to Jazz, that he would, from this point forward, be keeping a very close eye on things with all the mental capacity he had available to do so.
"… We need to do some proper research before we commit to anything," he eventually declared, with a quick glance to the books suspended behind him. "We've got about fifty different books that might have relevant information — I'm going to drag Randy back here so he can help. Any objections before I do that?" Jazz shook her head. Mira's face brightened a little, though, apparently looking forward to seeing him. "Okay, good."
It was a display of enormous self control, in fact, that Randy hadn't magically appeared here already. The very moment the Ghostwriter had started thinking about wanting — no, needing — his presence, the risk of an accidental summoning shot straight up. In response, the writer was already beginning to compartmentalise his mind into thinking softly and thinking permanently. The last thing he needed was for a wild daydream to leak into reality, to speak nothing of the other horrors that could accidentally be done. Now, though, now it was time to think permanently — the words arranged themselves in his mind and no sooner had he done that did Randy appear, startled, red-eyed, and for some reason clutching a rifle.
Not a normal rifle, of course. Jazz knew what it was in an instant; a prototype long-range projectile rifle that carried miniaturised prods from the Fenton Inhibitor as its bullets. Randy had managed to grip this so hard that he looked as if ready to break it in half, and then started to stare around at the strange state of the time-frozen library.
"I stopped time," said the Ghostwriter, helpfully.
"… Huh. So that's why those books are… stuck, rather than just floating."
"I didn't get around to putting them down," he explained. "… By the way, you might want to take a look to your left."
Randy's eyes met with those of the reanimated Mira. He almost seemed to forget about the rifle in his hands and indeed dropped it on one side, causing its tip to strike the floor gently. At first Mira didn't seem all too inclined to emote, but just when Jazz was thinking it a lost cause, she broke out into an awfully tense but relieved grin. "Hey," she said. "… Look, I can move!"
Randy smiled just a little, but his eyes zipped back to the Ghostwriter. "Exactly how long did you have time frozen for before you zapped me in here?"
"It felt like fifteen or twenty minutes," Jazz supplied, trying to be helpful.
Randy turned back to Mira. "… About enough time for you to get your wits together, it seems. And I assume John had something to do with restoring your autonomy?"
It seemed like Mira didn't quite get it. "Uhh, yeah, I think so?"
"I rewrote her back to normal and took her here."
"Rewrote, or rethought?"
"Rethought."
There was a slightly awkward pause in which Jazz and the Ghostwriter didn't quite want to stop Randy from saying something to Mira, but in which Randy also found himself at a loss for words. He held his free hand up, half pointing and half not pointing at the female ghost in the little white dress. "… It's good to see you as yourself," he managed, eventually.
Mira didn't seem to mind. The Ghostwriter cleared his throat.
"Anyway, I've got a job for you. There's about fifty books here that might have information on the Sorceress, and I'm going to need some help picking through all of them."
Everyone expected Randy to immediately accept, but that was the exact opposite of what actually happened. His brow furrowed as if he thought he was missing some kind of important joke, and then he looked from the books in the air to the books on the floor in quick succession just to check he wasn't. After that, his free hand found his opposite arm's elbow, and rubbed it. "… Why?"
The Ghostwriter stared back, expression blank and confused.
"Look, well, it's not really my place to explain to you how to use your own powers—" Jazz suddenly realised what was happening, and stifled herself from laughter. "—but couldn't you just change reality to instantly zap all of the knowledge into our heads in about half a second and with zero percent of the legwork?"
It was the loudest silence Jazz had ever known. The Ghostwriter's face didn't move. Mira's grinned.
"Really?" Randy continued. "You have all of causality at your fingertips, the very fabric of space and dimensions, and you somehow managed to forget that the power that allows you to do anything allows you to do anything? My—"
The Ghostwriter interrupted him, far too green-faced for dignity. "I've considered your proposal and offer my own esteemed opinion: Shut up."
Randy paid no mind. "—It's not that I'm criticising you or anything, but you could really do to be somewhat more creative—"
"Randy, I can and will create the ideal conditions of your second death," the Ghostwriter shot back, pointed teeth grinding together. "I may have overlooked some slight logistics of this situation."
I could disappear right now. Scratch that, I should disappear right now. Definitely should've thought of that sooner — in fact, why the hell didn't I? Damnit, Jazz is looking at me. She must have heard everything.
After a brief period of total humiliation, the writer finally cleared his throat and crossed his arms and realised he'd just have to take it all on the chin after all. "Fine, but just you and Jazz, yes? Mira's been through more than enough and this might be uncomfortable even outside of that."
"Uncomfortable?" asked Jazz.
"I'm about to inject potentially fifty books worth of random knowledge directly into your mind in an instant of a second. I have no idea of the psychological implications of that."
"Just mitigate them," said Randy, helpfully. The Ghostwriter pretended to pay him no attention but wrote the advice down on his mental scratchpad like a hypochondriac at a doctor's office anyway.
"… Well, are you ready?"
Jazz nodded. Randy decided to take a seat and simply shoot a lingering indifferent look at his brother, but only after carefully putting the Inhibitor Rifle down on the floor. "In your own time, John."
Honestly, Jazz was surprised at how smoothly it all went. She didn't even notice anything different — the Ghostwriter had made no move except tightening the cross of his arms. When you got down to it, the information was simply absent one moment and available the next — Jazz had been expecting some kind of mental whiplash even with Randy's suggestion, but there was no such thing at all. It was a little unbelievable, really, but then when she thought about the Sorceress suddenly she had all of these unexpected ideas about her wild and ruthless history.
"Well, it seems you didn't kill anyone," said Randy, after a moment. It was obvious in his eyes that he was sifting through things in his head, too. "Plenty of people died at the hands of that menace, though."
"What do you know about her now?"
Mira's innocent eyes were shining up to them, but there was a silent not-exactly-telepathic debate going on between the three who Knew about whether Mira was really in a good position to be finding out now. In the end, however, it was the Ghostwriter who knew her best, and both Jazz and Randy found themselves awaiting his response.
He said nothing.
There was a small technicality about shoving dozens of books worth of research into your brain at once; you might have had the chance to absorb it, but your mind sure hadn't had the chance to process it. The Ghostwriter had a feeling he could just think himself into improving that processing power millions of times over, but also concluded that doing so would be objectively terrifying — why do that when his library's current state of timelessness would probably suffice for their safety? After all, as long as he kept everything suspended in time, there wasn't much possibility of the Sorceress bursting out of nowhere and disintegrating them.
… But the possibility did still exist, and so he remained sitting on the edge of his comfortable armchair, leaning forward and drumming his fingers upon his knee, filled with that staticky nervous energy. He didn't want to answer questions right now, but fate was going to bring them to him anyway.
"What happened to her?"
Jazz. His Jazz. Mira and Randy were gone by request, and so at least in this room they were alone. And yet, with a question like that, the Ghostwriter's eyes suddenly felt so overwhelmingly heavy.
"Mira?"
"She said a man had kept her," Jazz elaborated.
He slumped forward a little more, hand catching his chin. "I see."
"Well?"
The writer was mulling it over in his head, the ultimate question of whether or not it was even a good idea to tell her. It seemed she was trying her best to keep her mind out of his and ask the questions properly, rather than just extracting answers by force — respectful. The thought of telling her rolled from one side of his head to the other as he contemplated the situation, not quite coming to the best of conclusions but to a resting point nonetheless. "It's not really my place to give detail," he began, carefully. "But before this life, she was a kidnapping victim, Jasmine."
She paused, having already figured this out but wanting to approach the subject with respect. "… For a ransom?" she asked, slowly. When that yielded no response, she continued: "… Human trafficking?"
"I believe it went on for a number of years." His voice was quiet — maybe even a little fearful. In truth the Ghostwriter felt uncomfortable even acknowledging this, knowing how horrible it had been and how hard Mira herself had tried to put it all behind her. "What happened doesn't bear describing, really."
"… Did they kill her?"
No. They hadn't. The Ghostwriter wasn't sure if that was any better or if it was worse, and so he stared down at the floor trying to find his voice and failed.
"… Maybe she escaped?" Jazz guessed.
"Mm…" said the Ghostwriter, eventually. "… Well, I suppose you could say that, in a way."
"What do you mean?"
…
"She took her own life, Jasmine."
Silence. Jazz somehow backed away without moving.
"Don't you understand?" he asked. "… Someone who can teleport can escape from almost anything."
They stared at each other, and Jazz finally understood.
"We can't ever tell her."
