Disclaimer: no ownership here. :)
Rachel faced herself. Then she jumped back, startled.
Rachel number 2 just glared.
"This better not be a book 32 fic," Rachel 1 said, hands on hips. "I hate those. You split me up, I get a bad rap no matter which one of me you look at." She paused, horrified. "Oh my God! I think Marco's cute!" She paused again. "No, okay, I still want to beat him up. Everything's fine."
"Fine?!" Rachel 2 demanded.
"Well, not fine," Rachel 1 clarified. "Who are you? Where did you come from?"
Number 2 snapped: "K.A. Applegate! I'm the real Rachel."
"But-" Rachel 1 said. "Well, all right then, who am I?"
"Fanfic Rachel," a cheerful voice explained from nowhere, and, fruitlessly, the two girls looked at the ceiling. "The conglomeration of all the fanfic representations of the real Rachel."
Suddenly, both Rachels were seated in an auditorium, facing a large projector screen.
"It's like this," the voice continued, embodying itself in the person of Jake's mom. "Here's a real tree."
A real tree sprouted before them.
"Here's a 'fan's' interpretation of a tree."
A six year old's version of a tree appeared on the screen.
"I resent that," fanfic Rachel said.
"Wait," Jake's mom said, and another tree, masterfully drawn in long artistic strokes and life-like detail, sprung up beside the child's drawing. "This is also an interpretation of a tree. Some people would say it's better than the original tree. But that still can't make it the real tree. It's still a variation on a theme.
"Even a photograph includes some measure of interpretation—angle, color differences, light and contrast. There are choices involved that by definition removes it from reality."
Real Rachel was smirking.
Fanfic Rachel glared at her. "I don't care if I am just a variation," she addressed to Jake's mom, "I still exist, don't I?"
"As much as she does," Jake's mom agreed. "Although there are certain issues of validity and intellectual property that--"
Real Rachel interupted: "It doesn't matter, because I'm here to get rid of you."
"What?!"
"I can't have another one of me just hanging around! What if you get taken by Visser 3?"
"I can hold my own with Visser 3, I'd never give the Animorphs away," fanfic Rachel cried.
"Oh yeah? Says which fanfic writer you literary whore?" Real Rachel was on her feet, ready to pounce.
"Now this," Marco said, appearing with a small yet effective poof of smoke, "is good. In fact, the only way to make this better is to add bikinis and some mud. Or maybe jello."
Both Rachels looked at Jake's mom, who held up her hands. "No one knows. Any version of Marco could have said that."
"Disgusting" real Rachel said.
"But. . . oddly. . . compelling. . ." fanfic Rachel replied, eyes wide with shock.
"See my point?" real Rachel muttered.
With another, more billowy puff of smoke, Marco was gone, replaced by two boys with identically touseled hair.
"Tobias!" Rachels said.
"They should be easier as far as demonstrating goes," Jake's mom explained, and snapped her fingers.
The Tobias on the left blinked. "Oh wow," he said. "Two Rachels." He thought a minute. "There are possibilities there I really shouldn't be thinking about."
"A-ha!" real Rachel said. "The real Tobias never would have said that."
The Tobias on the right right blushed faintly pink. "I would've thought it," he mumbled.
Then they both vanished.
Fanfic Rachel shook her slightly blonder head. "This is crazy."
"And it gets crazier," Jake's mom replied. "See, the 'real' Rachel, by stepping out of the actual books into here, into the consciousness of herself as a fictional character, has ceased to be real. She's as much the interpretation of an author, as much fanfiction, as you are, now."
Both Rachels stared at each other, and then there was a shlooping sound, leaving only one Rachel in its wake.
"Wow," the composite Rachel said. "Wow."
"Tell me about it," Jake's mom said.
"So," Rachel ventured once she had ascertained that her limbs were all still in place, "then where's the 'real me', so to speak?"
"I'll show you."
Jake's mom clapped her hands once, and they stood in Rachel's closet, peering between the slats in the door.
"Is this really necessary?" Rachel asked in a whisper.
"No," Jake's mom said, "but it makes me feel like a spy. You kids get to do all the fun stuff. I never get to do anything."
There was a tapping on the window outside, and a nightshirt clad Rachel slipped out of bed to open it. "Tobias?" her sleepy voice asked softly.
It's me, came the reply.
"That's the real you and the real Tobias," Jake's mom explained in a low voice. "They're always here, in one book or another. They can't exist outside of a fixed place in time, unconscious of everything but the lives they're living."
Rachel just shook her head, still watching.
"Now this," Jake's mom said as the scene altered, "is a fan fiction piece. In this case, the characters are as unconscious of themselves as characters as the real ones from before, but they're definitely fanfic for the simple reason that they are involved in situations that could have but didn't technically happen in the series."
In this version, Rachel's oversized nightshirt became a shift nightgown, and Tobias morphed human to talk, say on the edge of her bed, his head in his hands. "God, Tobias," the gowned Rachel was saying, "don't. . . don't talk like that." Her eyes were bright with tears. She reached out to tentatively touch his shoulder, and he looked up at her, his dark eyes haunted, painful. "I don't have any other way to talk, I don't have any other way to be." His voice broke, and he shivered and covered his face with his hands. Rachel moved closer and put her arms around him, let him cry on her shoulder.
"But I don't get it," Rachel said, frowning, as they returned to the auditorium. "I mean, what's the difference, really, between the real characters and the fanfic characters we saw? The real ones are still characters, none of it's really real, not the way the tree was real. It's just the stuff K.A. made up."
"Okay, maybe the tree wasn't the best metaphor. The difference, basically, is in ownership. It matters who invented the characters in the first place. Technically, whatever the original author writes for a character is 'real', such as it is, and becomes, when published, a definite and fixed value. Real is the starting point. Facfiction, on the other hand, is the realm of all conceivable possibilities stemming from that point. Not any less valid, just not 'real'." Jake's mom checked her watch. "Oops. We kept you over."
"We?" Rachel asked.
"You're due in another story someplace else." When Rachel didn't move, Jake's mom made shooing motions with her hands. "Go on."
Rachel protested, "But I don't get it all yet."
"You'll just have to forget it for the next story anyway."
Rachel shook her head. "But I don't know how I'm supposed to ge--"