Chapter Six
"WHAT?" Janet was sure she'd heard him wrong. This was impossible. Worse than impossible, although she wasn't quite sure what the word for that would be. "But. . . but I didn't sign up or anything! Even in, even in the Fan Fiction Universities you have to sign up," she recalled, the name coming suddenly to her lips. "And I didn't!"
"Sorry." George did look sorry. He didn't shrug impassively or anything. "It's just we're really short on staff right now, and. . . Well, look on the bright side, now you don't have to ask questions for me to tell you things. And you'll get something done for all your bruises."
"But that was going to happen anyway, wasn't it?" Short on staff? They had a bloody dragon! It was at least four metres tall!
"Er, no, actually. Agency facilities are only available to registered characters. And news gets around fast- here's a nurse now."
As Janet had her various and numerous bumps and scrapes washed, be-lotioned and bound by a rather pretty young man in white, George explained the situation to her. She had, according to the message he had just received from Captain Peter, been what is officially known as 'shanghaied' into joining the True Continuum Police after displaying a rare and unwritable (Janet didn't quite understand that bit) talent for reading herself into a canonverse via badfic. She would, when the paperwork was sorted out, become an Agent of Division Eight of the True Continuum Police, the eighth and, according to George, absolute best of thirteen Divisions.
The True Continuum Police itself was, as far as Janet could make out, a sort of government department whose job it was to jump in and out of badfics that had breached the True Continuum of any canon (as opposed to, Janet supposed, the False Continuum, although what either was she had no idea) and apprehend the Mary Sues within. What happened to the Mary Sues afterwards Janet didn't quite catch, although George seemed quite disgruntled about it. The Agency itself, George explained, was the governing force that ruled over every character extracted from fan fiction.
Well, almost all.
Anyway, the Agency was quite good in that it made sure everyone was employed and fed and, it tried to ensure, not killed too horrifically (in the case of TCP Agents, that is). Its largest Department was the Ministry of Edibles, followed by the TCP and Internal Affairs, followed by a great many other Ministries and Departments and so forth, the names of which flew in and out of Janet's head like little birds. Birds in a nest, obviously, not in Janet's head.
And, now, the Agency had employed Janet. According to George, employment in the TCP was far preferable to employment elsewhere, and much better paid. She would have to go through training first, of course, but that wasn't too hard, especially since the training centre itself had been pulled down only last week to make room for the new Mary Sue Rehabilitation Association Centre. Again, Janet noticed a hint of the disgruntled and, possibly, resentful in George's voice as he talked. Again, she didn't ask him why.
"And, well, that's about it, really," George concluded weakly, brushing a hank of golden brown hair off his face. "Pamela will probably end up training you, but it'll be either Colin or Barbara who actually take you out on practice missions. Pete's too busy and, well, they don't let Jack go on missions with newbies. Not any more, any way." Something occurred to him suddenly. "And, hah, now that you're here I won't have to take mission shifts any more! Great! Er, I mean, great in a very-sorry-for-you way."
"Do you do missions, then?" Janet suddenly noticed that George was sporting a fresh-looking bruise on his right cheekbone.
"Um, yes, actually. A few." He also, Janet noticed with a growing feeling of unease, had a bandaged hand. His left hand.
Oh dear.
"Have you, ah, done any missions recently, then?"
George could actually feel himself starting to blush, bother it. "Yes."
"Oh."
There were a few minutes of agonizing silence before:
"Look-I'm-so-sorry-I-usually-don't-go-around-knocking-people-out-with-chloroform-but-you-were-going-to-"
"Omigod-did-I-do-that-to-you? God-um-I-don't-usually-bite-people-you-just-really-scared-the-shit-out-of-me-um-"
"Sorry, pardon?"
"What?"
The two considered each other carefully while they tried to remember what the other had said.
"So. . . you don't usually bite people. That's good to hear." George felt the blush subsiding. That was good. Maybe this could all be worked out calmly-
"You knocked me out with Chloroform?" Or perhaps not. "Isn't that dangerous? I read somewhere that you can die if you breathe in too much!"
"No, wait, I- really? Where did you read that?"
Janet stuck out her chin defiantly. "Somewhere." She really couldn't remember where, and was beginning to wonder if she hadn't just made it up.
"Oh, well then. It might be in the Outworld but over here it just puts you to sleep for a while. Blyton issue, I think, they usually have a good supply, what with all the smugglers and kidnappers that lot runs into. . ."
"Blyton? Like, Enid Blyton? Lashings-of-ginger-beer-for-Timmy Enid Blyton?" Janet was, despite herself, intrigued. Enid Blyton had played a reasonably sized part in her childhood, and had resulted in no less than three separate lots of neighbors complaining to Janet's parents about being accused of, respectively, burying stolen bullion in the back of their garden (actually turned out to be potatoes being planted), kidnapping the son of a wealthy American bank manager (the boy turned out to be the couple's nephew, being babysat while his parents, both science teachers, went to a conference in Wellington) and being a secretly wealthy recluse who stole children's tennis balls (this one is thought to be true, although has not been thus far proven y any reliable authorities). Now that she thought about it, Janet could remember a great many of the kidnap plots (and a great many of them there were) including the kidnapped person being overcome by what usually turned out to be a chloroform-dipped handkerchief of some description. And none of them had ended up with brain damage.
At least, they hadn't ended up any more dimwitted than the rest of Blyton's adult characters.
"That's the one! Famous Five, Five Find-Outers, those ones with Barney, Malory Towers, St Clair's. Gosh, I really do envy the Division that looks after those. Hardly any Sues at all, and all that food!" George had actually been granted holiday leave into a Blyton continuum some time ago, and had come five kilos heavier.
Janet nodded, reminiscing. "And the Secret Seven, of course. Didn't they have picnic lunches in a shed, or something? Jack and Janet's shed, wasn't it? God, it's been ages since I read them, who were the others? Peter and Barbara, Ju- no, he was Famous Five- um, Colin. . . George. . ."
George watched Janet's face as realization struck. It was quite interesting, really. "And Pam, too," he prompted. "Only you haven't met her yet. Or Colin, but that's probably a blessing."
"You're. . . you're really. . ." Now this was going too far. She had been kidnapped By Enid Blyton characters?
"No." Oh, good. She hadn't then. That would have been worse than just being plain kidnapped, a concept some distant corner of her brain was still coming to terms with. Luckily, it was a rather somnambulant bit of her brain and was therefore not likely to cause her to run around screaming just yet. "That was just an idea of Miss Janet's, when HQ put her in charge of putting together our Division."
"What, she picked you for your names?" Miss Janet? Who was that?
"No-o. She oversaw our reassignments and had us all named for the characters." Seeing Janet's look of mixed despair and confusion turn to one of just plain confusion, he explained: "Reassignment is when an original character is plucked out of a condemned fic and, you know, retrained and fixed up for work in the Agency. We all get name changes, otherwise we'd be up to our necks, well, just past our knees in Jack's case, in Ravens and Hazels and variations of Serena. Barbara used to be Varvara, you know? They just needed to change the language for her new name, Russian to English. Jack, now, Jack was Lord Ker'Lautius the Destroyer. He really enjoyed that job."
"So, do I have to change my name?"
"No, I shouldn't think so, not with you being an Outworlder and all. Besides, you . . . fit. Slot right in, I guess. Bit strange, really." Had George been Peter he would have eyeballed her suspiciously right now, but he wasn't. He was George, and so took this moment to quietly bask in the knowledge that he wouldn't have to take assignments any more.
"You keep saying "Outworlder". Out of what, exactly?" The proper method of allaying confusion was to deal with, one by one, the things that are causing the confusion. People using strange phrases and terms were one of these things- strangely enough, the appearance of a great scaly dragon was not. Janet was still young enough to harbour a small and shameful hope that such things existed, so she wasn't really all that startled by the discovery that they actually did. Well, not too startled.
"Out of. . ." George waved his arm around all-encompassingly. "Er, I guess it's more that we're all in, if you see what I mean- no, you don't, do you? Gosh, um, let me see. . . you were in your world last night?"
"Yeah," Janet answered. She could almost feel her brain crying out in anticipation of sweet blessed explanation.
"So, when you left your world, you did so by falling into the badfic. Yes?"
"Yes." All very good, Janet reasoned, but with one problem. "Yes, but now I'm out of the fic, right? Wherever this place is, isn't it just as out of it as my place is?"
"More sideways, really. Look." George pulled a battered notebook out of his pocket. Multifunctional green bricks were all very well in their own way, but you couldn't beat the good old pencil and paper for explanatory diagrams. "Look- see this bowl here? This is 'fanfiction'. All this outside it-" George scribble-shaded the page to emphasise his point, "- is your world. It is outside the bowl, right?"
"I already understood that bit," grumbled Janet.
"Right-ho then. Now, this rectangle here? This is where we are now. It doesn't exist quite as much as your world, so the rectangle is actually rather flat and sub-dimensional, but that's quite hard to draw so it's just a plain rectangle. Please don't ask about sub-dimensional worlds. I don't understand them either."
"So. . . sideways." This was, strangely enough, just understandable enough for Janet's brain to deal with. It just filed the whole thing under 'quantum'. 'Quantum' was, in Janet's brain, a very large file. It included information on not only actual ordinary (i.e. everything taught up to NCEA Level One- everything else is psychophysics, and therefore automatically filed here anyway) physics, but also on how light particles always manage to find the quickest route from one spot to another and why some old pictures of the Big Bang in progress had stars in the background. "I can deal with that, I think."
"Brilliant! We'd better get over to barracks then, if we're going to catch Pamela in that wonderful but short period of time between her recruiting for tea and serving it. Shall we?"
Janet agreed that they should, and George led the way out of the linoleumed depths of the Hospital Wing (it is a true but little-known fact that most of the disappearances of TCP Agents are not due to malfunctioning portals or the fatal talents of Amazonian Sues, but to their being taken to the Hospital Wing and forgotten about. Some eminent theorists with little else to do have put forward the idea that these forgotten Agents have grouped together and formed a collective responsible for the current shortage of blue vein cheese. This theory is untrue: the person responsible for the shortage is Jack. Jack is, in fact, responsible for most of the shortages of blue foods in the Subverse. He says they make his breath sweet, but are no substitute for a good Sue).
It was a long walk.
Ten minutes later, it became a long hobble. Whatever the nurse had done to Janet's leg to make it feel better hadn't been strong enough to make it able to hold up when the elevators were out of order.
Ten minutes later, the hobble became a blissful collapse as the two reached their destination. Just in time for tea, too.
- - - - -
Author's Note: Now, I really hate to do this, guys. But gosh darn it if I'm not, at heart, just another 'thor who needs constant encouragement and advice to retain the will to live.
In other words- OMG PLZ RED ND REVEWE PLZ YAY!
Heh. George is the Lord of Exposition. Poor bloke.