Element Eight. The Ghost of Plots Rehashed.
Curled like an earthworm worm long stranded on the scratchy sidewalk and left to alone to dry to death, Marcia built up her defenses and petulantly let her tears evaporate. Still she refused to consider herself as an individual who had been in the wrong, and denied emphatically what she saw as defeat. For as she saw it, there was to be no improvement upon perfection, and therefore - why bother fixing what wasn't broke? She was a good writer, no matter what anyone said ...
I don't care. I don't care. I ... don't ... care.
Wobbling, she exerted a bit of effort and rose to her meaty knees ... a position from which she slipped almost immediately; there existed on her floor an inexplicable piece of drenched fabric which declined to support her weight. She studied the thing almost as she would a stranger, with the same paranoid gaze, investigating it as thoroughly as it were possible for her to do. She felt first the fabric which had probably caused her a bruise, and next encountered the shape of a foot beneath it, and finally her hands encountered a sharp rod which prevented her from taking her physical inquiries any further. The device was of a glittering golden color and possessed an end of metallic graphite gray, something merciless which gave the appearance of a weapon.
She looked up to find an immense cloaked figure hanging majestically over her, a fog of sorts rolling out from the few openings in his expansive robes of muted black. With a creaking sound, Marcia turned her head to the side as far as it would go in order to read the scrolling type that ascended the staff this spirit held. It contained nothing but bad news, for it ascertained his identity ... of which there could be no denial, for it was too plainly true - he was the final spirit she would greet tonight, the Ghost of Plots Rehashed.
Marcia Laverne Whitaker was pretty sure that she should have been feeling happy at this moment, considering that she had lasted each of them out so far. And yet ... the mere thought of accompanying this one anywhere made her break out in a cold sweat, with mouth parched and throat patchily voiceless. Like a statue, he stared at her unblinking (or at least she thought he was, for she could not see where his face could be under that deep hood), utterly mute.
Laughing uneasily, Marcia raised a hand and waved with a desperate passion, somewhat of a discombobulated cross between meeting him and driving him off. The Ghost of Plots Rehashed raised his stave as though he would strike her down, but instead he merely reversed it - now the end which had so worried her was safely farther away, and he set to work on ... he ... Marcia gawked with shock - why, he was erasing the floor!
She reached out to stop him, but was far too inept, too slow. With a yelp and a howl, Marcia fell through the void, landing quite hard on her backside in what appeared to be none other than the peaceful Kakariko village from Ocarina of Time.
She rubbed her vapid eyes as the Ghost of Plots Rehashed forced her to her feet and onward, through an alleyway of sorts where original Legend of Zelda characters she had created over the years resided in groaning, writhing, wretched agony. Many tried as hard as they could to rip the hair from their heads, all appeared to be very ill, and one man - an old man, helplessly attempting to tend to these desolate failures - turned to face her. Marcia's stomach fell to her feet as she recognized the deplorable, tortured visage of the Hapless Fanfiction Reader, and she quickly hid her face from his gaze. As she passed by, she could hear his evangelical voice - he was speaking to her still, though as this was the Past he knew her not. "There is no defeat," he hissed at her. "No winning or losing! Just relief! Just relief!"
She couldn't bear at all to look at him, and strangely enough the seraph looming behind her didn't force her to. This omission of a possible source of pain frightened her, and she slowed down quite obviously. Yet he never failed in his stride, and dispassionately he continued to push Marcia on ... for as wordless as he was, he seemed to have a goal they had not yet reached. In a foreign moment of brilliance, she realized where they were going, although she couldn't surmise why they would be going there. The Graveyard of Kakariko Village ...
Filmy clouds still emanating from his very being, he handed her a silver-toned mask. Marcia recognized it instantly as the Mask of Truth, and instinctively she began to whimper and fidget. He had her don it, asking her no questions and giving her no quarter or choice. He then took her not to a grave, but to a Gossip Stone, one of the ever-observing monuments of Hyrule, oddities that had been scattered about perhaps many eons ago ...
"They say," quipped the Stone with surprising seriousness, "that the terrible M.L. Writer finally died with her plots last winter due to fan arson."
... no.
I can't care. I won't, dangit!
Unwilling to believe what she had heard, Marcia turned back to The Ghost of Plots Rehashed, somehow seeming to hope that he would deny what had been spoken. But from within his robes he extended a single hand, and with that hand he intended to further reinforce what he knew as true. His fingers alone dwarfed her forehead as his grip caused Marcia to wince ... The Ghost of Plots Rehashed then gave to her what were the best of his words - words perhaps not as we see them, but presented rather in a manner of visions, sights of frustrated anger, hacked homepages, and even ... glee. People were delighted that the who she had been was forever passed away.
He withdrew, and the world around her melted away to reveal the next November morn of the Whitaker household, calm and abandoned as it always seemed to be.
