Okay, some sad news coming up. Please don't make plans to kill me and read on.

Thanks to Lord Lithos Maitreya; Trekkiness is planned for the arc, no worries! ~ Thanks to Lunar Clockwork; I'm glad you liked. ~ Huge thank you to RaymondTHEspriter; you made my valentine's day with the flowers. ^_^ Thank you so much. ~ Thanks to STKB; feel free. ~ Thanks to TheOracleOfTime; Whoa, this is the key to happiness? O.0 I feel honored. ~ Thanks to NinFreak95; ^_^ Thank you so much. ~ Thanks to SchwarzWeiss ZwillingsMonde; Haha…Ollie. And something's planned to happen with compromising positions in the arc, but it's going to be Smarthus related (oh yes). ~ Thanks to Cardcaptornicole; I'm really glad you liked it. ~ Thanks to Kyanite Archer; You, my friend, could be my clone. X_x Forever alone. But then Raymond gave me flowers! ^_^ Find people on the internetz! ~ Thanks to NiRvAnAaDvAnCiNg95; OLIVER IS A LIE! ~ Thanks to catsrae; The Est thing was actually done on purpose (I love her in Shadow Dragon…), although I didn't know that Oliver was a FE character too. ~ Thanks to Sir StarlIl; Yeeeeeaah! I'm glad that you liked it—at least you gave her a cheesy poem. Go you! ~ Thanks to TehGameBoy; All will be revealed at some point yet to be determined… ~ Thanks to OuranFruitsluvr; XD Pit and Quincy are adorable. ~ Thanks to Linira; Yeah, I'm sorry. X_x ~ Thanks to Foxpilot; ASLLdfksklkl….I can't believe I forgot you in the thanks section of the last one, because your review really made me happy. Agh. Anyway, thank you so much for letting me bounce ideas off of you. Thanks for being so willing to help me out all the time. ^_^ ~ Thanks to FullmetalWizard1995; This is completely unrelated, but do you take your name from Fullmetal Alchemist? Because I finally started watching that anime and it is amazing. ~ Thanks to musiccat19; I bet your story doesn't suck. Keep it up! :) Chinese is so much fun, I hope you stick with it. ~ Thanks to BreeZaps; 1000 reviews would be insanity… ~ Thanks to piplupfan580; I got a bouquet of virtual roses, a LoZ card, and lots of chocolate. ^_^ happy day. ~ Thanks to Tune4Toons; Maybe neither one is Oliver's real name….Mwahaha. ~ And thanks to NintendoGamerX; Man…Link in Batman boxers…what's sexier than that?

Disclaimer: Marth is not mine, but everything else in this chapter is with the exception of my muse Fang from Maximum Ride.

This is my second insertion chapter, and I reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeally hope you all don't kill me. e_e Please be nice and don't flame and just hear me out, okay? I'll explain things in the AN.

Please read, understand, and review. ;_;

Chapter 53: The Beginning Of

The end.

"What?" Marth cried, throwing his hand across the keyboard. "What do you mean 'the end?' You don't really mean 'end,' do you?"

"Yes and no?" the girl sitting at the computer said hesitantly, worming her hands underneath his arm so that she could continue tapping out the words on the old-school keyboard. "Let me finish the sentence and I'll explain, alright?"

"Explain now," Marth insisted, bracing himself up against the curving desk and glaring out of the window. The view was far from picturesque, with just a sliver of grey-blue water visible from between the neighbor's yellow-sided house in the birch trees that lined the property. It was a spring afternoon, and precipitation that couldn't decide whether it wanted to be snow or rain was dripping out of dreary grey clouds.

"I'll explain," the girl said, her voice stern, "When I'm done with this sentence." She jabbed a finger at the spare chair. "Feed the plot bunny if you need something to do, I think he's got a cold."

The brown rabbit sniffled pathetically in its ethereal cage, and after a moment of watching the high-schooler type and realizing that she really wasn't going to talk to him until after she finished her ridiculously long sentence, Marth sighed and shoved a potato chip through the wire mesh. Hershal immediately perked up and started nibbling at its edges.

"So, how's that sentence?"

"I'm ninety-nine percent sure it's actually a run-on," the girl said, tapping on the period key and swiveling her chair so that she could look at him. "Now what was it you wanted to ask about?"

"Honestly!" Marth threw his hands up in the air and put his feet onto the desk, carefully avoiding placing his shoes on any important papers. "You're such a space-case!"

"Only when you're trying to distract me from writing," she snapped back, clearing off a space to set down a spiral-bound notebook. "Okay, about the ending…"

"You're not ending the Game," he commanded.

"Let me explain!" she cried, slamming the notebook for effect. "This fic was never meant to continue on forever—you knew that. It was just supposed to be a springboard for my creativity whenever I hit a block and needed to write something fluffy with no thought behind it."

"Psh. Look how that worked out," said the dark-haired boy lounging in the corner of the room.

The girl made an exasperated noise and threw a pen across the room with lucky accuracy.

Marth gave her a look, and she stopped just short of throwing a sketchbook. She dropped it onto the table next to the notebook and cracked open the spiral book, flipping through college ruled pages until she stopped on a particular page.

"I wrote this down right before I finished my first arc," she said, turning the page around so that Marth could read it on the other side of the table. "It was right out then that I decided I was going to work on this fic full time, and I figured that I needed to know how I was going to end it."

"It looks like there's more than one idea," Marth pointed out, tapping the scrawled words with his index finger.

"Yeah. I figured there were three ways the Game would end, I'll explain those in a minute," she said, tossing her hair out of her eyes. "But the point is, I never intended the Game to run forever. Eventually I was going to run out of ideas. So, I made fail-safe plans: The first was that I run completely out of ideas, announce that I'm out of ideas, and essentially just dump the story, maybe write a quick wrap-up 'they all lived happily ever after' chapter, maybe not. That was plan A."

"You're not doing that," Marth said hesitantly. "You said you had a plan for an arc."

"I do. Anyway, plan B was that I don't run out of ideas, but it becomes pointed out to me either by my mentors or him,"—she jerked her chin over at the winged boy lounging in the corner of the room, playing with the pen that she had thrown at him—"that my ideas are getting steadily lamer. Once I reach that point, I planned to throw up a chapter involving somebody jumping over a giant shark, and have that serve as the end of things rather than forcing myself to plod on with ideas that aren't worth reading."

"Jumping the shark, I get it," Marth said wearily, running a hand through his hair. "But that hasn't happened either. Nobody's ever said that you're getting unoriginal or desperate."

"I know that," she snapped. "Stop interrupting. That was only plan B. There's still a plan C, right?"

Marth nodded, but wisely remained silent this time.

"Plan C was that I'd keep the fic going until Nintendo released the next version of Smash Bros for the WiiU or 3DS or whatever, and then the ending would be everybody leaving the stadium and moving to the new one. Plan C or B were definitely preferred over A, and plan C was preferred over B. With me so far?"

Marth couldn't help it: "But there isn't a new game out yet, so why are you talking about ending it?"

Mouse sighed heavily, closing her eyes. "Because now there's a plan D."

"What is plan D?"

She spun around in her chair, gesturing about herself. "This."

He looked around confusedly at the ordinary-looking room. "This?"

"She means what she's writing right now," the dark-haired muse spoke up.

"What is this?" the Altean prince demanded angrily. "Come on, stop being cryptic! It's not cute."

"Plan D was that I would decide to drop the project gracefully," Mouse said coolly, not responding to his second comment. "Under my own terms, without anybody suggesting it, without me becoming angry at a project that will lose what makes it special if I push it past its natural limit. I want to end the Game while it's still the Game."

"You think it will stop becoming the Game soon?"

She sighed, leaning back into the chair. "It's complicated," she said. "I don't think I'm running out of ideas, but I feel like all of the characters are known too well. I feel like I don't have a whole lot of maneuverability room left with the characters I enjoy writing. I've already gone into everything I've wanted to go into. Sure, I could branch. I could develop the underdeveloped characters like Donkey Kong and the Star Fox group. I could go into all of that, and I could probably make it interesting. I could break up the established pairings too, throw everything back into chaos—and I've debated that as well—but that's not how I do things, and that's now how this fic works. The Game is really…" She trailed off, and thought about how to end what she was about to say. "It's really about enjoying life as a teenager. It's documenting a group of friends' passage through that period of adolescence, and it's not taking any of it seriously. It's about flying by the seat of your pants and not caring what the adults will think, not caring what anybody thinks so long as you're having a good time. It's meant to show what adolescence is really like, as opposed to the angst-filled drama-fest that Hollywood makes it out to be. That's how I've come to see it. Maybe it's not how other people see it, maybe it's just a drabble with no deep meaning, but I like to think that there is. At least a little. I'd like to think that this fic meant something to someone."

"So," the boy in the corner spoke up, becoming her spokesperson as she ran out of words. "It would be odd for the focus to shift away from the teenagers. They are her core group. They are the people she understands. And GeeLee's"—like always, he referred to her using the name that was not quite hers the way Mouse had become—"reached the point where she feels like everybody understands the characters as well."

"My work here is done, to coin a phrase," Mouse said with a half-hearted smile. "Not to mention that…I hate to say it—but I feel like I've outgrown this project a little. I want to write an actual story."

"So you're just dropping it," Marth said, an edge of anger creeping into his voice again. "Jeezum, Mouse! I thought you were going to stick it out, but you're here throwing in the towel!"

"I'm not dropping it. This is NOT the last chapter!" Mouse shouted. "Absolutely not. I have become WAY too attached to you to let you just die, okay?"

Marth scowled. "So what then," he said under his breath, obviously annoyed.

Mouse visibly calmed herself. "I knew you'd be ticked," she said. "And I'm sorry. I'd love to say that this would go on forever. I'd love to say that I could keep pulling original ideas off the top of my head once every week. But everything ends, and this is my notification that the end is coming up soon. This is the beginning of it."

Marth cursed.

"You're not going to disappear," she assured him, grabbing his shoulders. "I love you too much to let you go quietly, okay? Trust me. At this point, I think I know what I'm doing."

He didn't look reassured.

"Please," she scoffed. "Since when have I been the sort of person to let things end quietly? This is plan D, people. This is the plan where I take the end of the Game seriously. So strap yourself in for the coolest finale ever."

AN: PLEASE DON'T KILL ME. And I have no idea how much sense that made. It made sense in my head…

Huge thanks to Foxpilot for letting me bug him with the moral issues I had about wrapping this project up…

But anyway…There isn't a whole lot to say. I'm going to wrap up the one-shots I've got left (amusement park and sardines) and then start in on the final arc. Don't flip out: the arc is going to be a long one, and is going to involve lots of Nintendo craziness. The arc will also incorporate a roadtrip, hotels, swimming pools, and trekkies (I told you they'd pop up) as well as the usual craziness. You don't think I'd let things fizzle and die, right? Come on.

There are a few people who I still owe one-shots to (mostly people who drew me artz ^_^): If I owe you a one-shot, you can either give me the idea now and I'll squeeze it in before the arc, or I'll just write it as a separate one-shot and upload it after I finish this project. One way or another, I'll make sure you get it.

But I guess my biggest thing is that I DON'T want you guys to think I hate you or anything. I LOVE you all, it's ridiculous. This has been so much fun. But…I dunno, all things end, I guess. Exactly when and how everything's going to wrap up is still pretty conceptual, so if you have any ideas, I'd be interested in those as well.

I'll make sure to keep you guys posted. PLEASE DON'T MAKE PLANS TO STORM MY HOUSE AND KILL ME BECAUSE THEN YOU'D NEVER KNOW HOW IT ENDS. X_x

Because this chapter was sort of short, I included some random notes on Oliver, describing how he matured as a character for anybody who's interested.

Notes on Oliver:

Of all the things I did NOT expect to happen with this fic, the most incredible for me was the evolution of Oliver. You have no idea how cool it is for people to enjoy you writing an original character. Indescribable. Because at this point I plan to go into his backstory a bit in the upcoming arc and because I'm shocked by the fact that some of you actually enjoy him as a character, I thought I'd stick some information on him in here, because out of any character I have ever created, he has shown the most change.

The 26/27 year old smart-alecky manipulative Dr. Oliver Stoelhart actually began his life as a character as 15-year-old Oliver Mantle, a character from one of my earlier attempts at a novel. He was originally a psychic (ESP only. No PK abilities whatsoever) and had the ability to communicate telepathically with his twin brother, Stephan Mantle. I also put a huge emphasis on his and his brother's religion and used the two of them essentially as plot devices to keep the story rolling (he wasn't the main character. XD). Nothing except for his first name and the fact that he has black hair has really stuck with him as he developed. After that project was abandoned, he was rebooted and inserted into a short office drama as the main character at age twenty-two. It was at this point that he got the name Oliver Stoelhart and his green eyes and was introduced to a love interest, whose name I cannot reveal due to the arc that's coming up (love triangles~). This was also around the point where he was introduced into the Game. Right around this point, a group of friends and I had an epic nerf-gun fight in my house that turned nasty when I ran around the corner and was promptly shot in the face by my teammate, who spontaneously decided to switch sides. We thought it would make a good idea for a spy novel, and I started turning around ideas for an espionage agent named Kazuya Tsubasa, code-named 'the Blue-Eyed Specter.' Not entirely sure how, but his story fused with Oliver's, and Oliver's personality turned out to be dominant, and this is essentially how Oliver Stoelhart was born. The fusion between Kazuya and Ollie happened between Oliver's initial introduction and the beginning of the Assassin arc.

The story that Oliver is currently involved in is largely based on the positive/negative reactions that his character has gotten from this fic. Est Benignus is not the girl from the office drama, but was rather from Kazuya's backstory. She was his fiancé, and became Oliver's fiancé as well, although I had to tweak with the ages a bit. Due to the fact that she died, Oliver has a separate love-interest as the events of the novel actually play out. Oliver's twin Stephan morphed into Ollie's sadistic partner Steven Gustalis. Oliver's pen-flipping quirk was actually stolen from Steven—in the novel it's Steven who constantly has a pen in his hand. Oliver also is much more monochromatic and reserved, sticking mostly to black and white clothes (in the Game, he's fond of khaki), and is three years younger than he is in the Game. His dialogue is also slightly more immature, with him preferring to say "I told you so" later as opposed to actually warning you about something beforehand (he still has a bit of this characteristic. He loves his strings). The idea is that the Oliver Stoelhart of the Game is the Oliver of Project: BANG after the events have taken place, which is why he's suddenly getting phone calls from mysterious women and why his character is slightly more mature.

Oliver has been a huge source of inspiration to me, and is hands down my second-favorite OC. I'm so glad I got the chance to watch him grow, and it's been so much fun watching everybody slowly warm up to him. Thank you so much.

Next chapter is the amusement park (I'm sorry the hide-and-seek keeps getting pushed back). I'm really hoping I can upload that later today, but otherwise you guys might have to wait until next week because starting tomorrow I don't get home from school until nine (go stage crew!). X_x So either today or next week sometime. Until then business as usual.

Please review but please don't flame or rage or anything. Please. ;_;