I do not own the rights to the Justice League.

Meeting Annie's Author

I know that Eugene created the device to reunite Annie with her creator, but really, what were the odds that the jerk would turn out to be her brother? Out of all the people I could have met, I just had to meet her brother? The only explanation were the Rules. (Later, according to Eugene it was actually due to the fact that he made the device focus on reuniting Annie with her author, but may have gotten bumped in the struggle so it targeted Gardner instead. I still blame the Rules.)

And okay, so she was actually eleven, (or ten when she wrote Annie), and not thirteen, but that still didn't excuse her writing such a character. And it certainly didn't excuse Gardner (who was forced to edit the story) from telling it was great and allowing her to post it in the first place. He should definitely have known better, but claimed he didn't want to crush her feelings. Lame.

So after talking about all that, and explaining my side of dealing with Annie, we then had a 'chicken or the egg' discussion. Basically, did Annie exist in my world first and did his sister (who I learned was named a normal name, Lucy) pick up on her, or did Lucy create Annie and as a result she then showed up in my world? In the end we agreed that the latter made the most since. It wouldn't be till later that we would learn things didn't quite work that easily.

Eventually we arrived to his house, which was a modest bungalow that could have passed in my own neighborhood. By then I was eager to meet Annie's creator and give her a piece of my mind, age be damned. Such a person had to be stopped and who knew how many Sues she had already gone on to write.

I wasn't even out of the car before a blur came out of the door and ran into Gardner's arms, which were already full with unloading his stuff. While Gardner's hair was more of a dark brown that was cut short, her's was a frizzy mass of ginger curls. I consider my hair auburnish, but her's was full red ginger. Didn't excuse her behavior, but it certainly gave her some sympathy. Her face was covered in freckles, and behind her glasses I could see a familiar pair of hazel eyes.

"You're here, you're here!" she squealed rather excitedly in Gardner's arms.

Gardner managed to get a hand free enough to ruffle her curls. "Well of course I'm here squirt. Great food, free laundry, my own room. Almost enough for me to come home more often."

"Lucy," cried a voice from inside the house, which I assumed was coming from his mom. I was proven right when the front opened to reveal a women with the same mass of ginger curls as Lucy's. Her face lit up as her eyes landed on Gardner. Then she saw me and said, "You brought a girl home. I thought they were all manipulative."

He smiled. "They all are. This here is Suzy, Angela manipulated me into bringing her home since she has nowhere else to for the break."

His mom smiled back since she evidently knew Angela quite well. Then she turned her attention to me. "We usually have a small Thanksgiving, but we're more than happy to have you join us Suzy."

She seemed nice, not unlike my own mom. The thought of my mom and dad then sent a pang of homesickness through me. I couldn't remember ever not being with them on a major holiday. But ever the polite daughter like my mom raised me (hey, I can be polite if I want to be. The key word there is want) I responded, "Thanks, it's great being here, Mrs. Gardner."

"Call me Carol. Well don't just stand there, come on in out of the cold."

The house was small, but was well decorated so the house felt bigger than it actually looked. In order to celebrate Gardner's homecoming (and the fact that he brought a GIRL home) his mom ordered pizza for all of us. Over supper Gardner told her some story about how I was fighting with my family and needed somewhere to crash for the break. She gave me a lecture of how family should be valued, and I should give them a second chance blah blah blah. If I could be home, I would, and didn't need to be reminded of it. Since I couldn't admit the truth, I instead said I'd consider her advice and the conversation thankfully turned toward other topics.

Once done with supper, his mom made the move to start cleaning up so I went to help her. I was stopped by a mass of curls tugging on my arm. "Come on, I'll show you the house, and you can see my room."

I was about to object, but then Gardner's mom spoke out from the kitchen. "You go with Lucy, since you'll be rooming with her. Ashley can help me with the dishes."

I snickered; his mom called him Ashley. My snicker was met with a glare that could rival one of my own. "Not one word," he said.

Before I could respond, I felt my arm once more being tugged on. "Come on, it's this way," Lucy kept saying as she dragged me down a skinny hallway filled with various doors. The far left door she finally stopped at and opened to reveal her room.

I guess I had expected her room to be painted Barbie pink; full of stuffed animals and rainbows and unicorns, and other various Sue stuff. Instead it was covered in posters. Posters of superheroes from my world. Wonder Woman, Batman, the Flash, Superman and more. If there was a superhero that existed in my world, they were on a poster somewhere in the room. To go with the posters were figurines and other DC merchandise. One corner had a bookcase that was dedicated to comic books which were in some protective plastic thingies that I don't know the name of. In all honesty the bedroom looked like it belonged to a comic nerd who lived in his parents basement rather than a pre-teen girl.

Said girl had plopped on her bed and was watching as I took in her room. "You like it? A lot of this stuff belonged to my dad who gave it to Gardner who gave it to me."

I had noticed Gardner's dad was absent and that there had been no mention of him at dinner. Not wanting to pry, I let it go. But since she had brought it up... "What happened to your dad?" I asked, sitting on top of the Wonder Woman comforter.

"He died four years ago," she began, and her voice got quiet. "He was a cop and there was a robbery..."

Oh. Maybe I shouldn't have pried, I'm not good at dealing with sappiness. Time for a distraction. "So Gardner says that you write."

She shrugged. "I used to, but I wasn't very good at it. I didn't get many reviews and nobody seemed to like my stories." Seeing my confused face she explained, "I wrote fanfiction."

Ah, fanfiction, the source of Annie's existence. No doubt Annie's character was the reason for Lucy's lack of reviews. By the sound of it she thankfully hadn't written anything since, but in this case I'd rather be safe than sorry. She wasn't about to release any more Sues in my world (or others) if I could help it.

"You know," I started off, "I read a little of what you wrote."

"Really?" she asked, looking at me from under her mop of hair.

No, not really. But I had lived with her character for over a year so it still counted. Now came the hard part: telling her to never write again.

"Yeah, it... had potential," I said, wimping out. So much for me telling her off. I can be such a softie at times (stop snickering Gardner, it's not that funny). "It's just your main character, Marianna, was just really annoying and unrealistic."

When I had mentioned the story had potential, Lucy had brightened up. Then I mentioned Annie, or as she knew her, Marianna, and she became gloomy again.

"That's what the few reviewers said. They called her a Sue."

"Well she was a Sue. Super beautiful, perfect, every power imaginable, everybody loved her. I mean, how would you react if you met somebody as perfect as her in real life? I know I would be fighting back the urge to strangle her within the first couple minutes of meeting her." And fighting that urge had been really hard too. Really really really really hard. So instead I slapped her that once to relieve the tension.

To my surprise, she wasn't insulted by my reaction to her character, she just giggled. "I guess she would be kind of annoying."

"Kind of? Try mega super ultra annoying to the infinity power." Seeing the confused look on her face I added, "My roommate has a personality that reminds me of Marianna."

"Oh."

Awkward silence followed that reveal, and I was quickly remembering that I suck at interacting with kids which was why I tried to usually avoid them. They're naive and annoying like Annie used to be, except you can't be too sarcastic or mean to them since they'll go running to their mommies. Wimps.

I could have let the conversation died, but there was something that I really wanted to know. Something that had been bothering me for a while, and now was the perfect time to ask it.

"So if you knew she was so annoying and a Sue, why did you create her like that?"

"I don't know... I just thought it'd be cool to be pretty, popular, and having a lot of powers so no innocent people would ever get hurt."

At first that sentence sounded so Sueish that I wanted to roll my eyes; what a lame excuse for the creation of a Sue. Except... there was more to it, but I didn't know what. Then I figured it out. The only reason I didn't figure it out earlier was because I didn't really care that much. I saw Lucy as the Sue author, not an actual person and had judged her accordingly. Just like I had once saw Annie as the Sue, and not as an actual person until she pulled a Casper on me. Apparently that little lesson hadn't stuck and I was now being forced to learn it again.

Basically what I had missed were some subtle clues pointing to Lucy having issues that she didn't realize she had, and I didn't feel like dealing with. Ginger hair, glasses, freckles, comic book nerd, wanting to be pretty and popular, daddy issues. My guess was that she didn't have many, if any, girl friends at school, and was probably picked on. Add in her dad being defenseless in the face of danger, and you had the perfect recipe for a Sue author. A young girl who felt like she didn't quite fit in at school, so she writes a character that is everything she wants to be. Beautiful, popular, perky, and having every power imaginable to protect the ones they loved.

Now, with that revelation I could have done something. Told her things would get better, all the girls she wanted to be friends with were bitches who would end up being a teenage mother, having an eating disorder, cheating husband, or a combination of all three. That's what a nice caring sympathetic person would do. I'm not that person. So I just let the conversation die. I'd tell Gardner about her issues and let him deal with them.

However the dead conversation was followed by awkward silence that was starting to get to me. "So you like the Justice League. Who's your favorite hero?"

Her face lit up, very similar to Annie's. "Wonder Woman, but I also like the Question, and Batman, and Flash, and J'onn, and Huntress." So pretty much every single one of them.

Gardner then knocked on the door entered the room then, and I was grateful for his presence (a first). "Everything going okay?"

No, everything was not going okay, I wanted to say. Except I didn't. Lucy answered for me. "Yep. Is Suzy coming to KlingCon with us?"

While I wondered what KlingCon was, Gardner's face turned an embarrassing shade of pink.

"You forgot didn't you?" said his sister accusingly.

"I did not forget, I just didn't think Suzy would be interested in that sort of thing." In other words, he forgot.

"Actually it sounds interesting, what is it?" I asked, grinning on, while Gardner looked like he wanted to kill me.

Oblivious to me and Gardner, his sister explained. "KlingCon is like ComicCon, except smaller. Our dad used to take us when we were younger, but now Ashley takes me." I smirked. His sister and his mother called him Ashley, how cute. Wait, she didn't call him Ashley a while ago, just when he was present. Maybe she wasn't as bad as I originally thought.

"Count me in," I said knowing it would bother Gardner. He was probably hoping he would just be able to dump me once he got home, but I wasn't going to let him have it that easy. Then to further irk him I added, "Sounds like fun, Ashley."

**Author's Note**

Thanks goes to Loki's Son, AidenSurvival, and Fox Alder for reviewing.

When it came to the reasons behind Annie's creation, I wanted them to be realistic and believable. I knew that Suzy and maybe some readers might bash her author due to how annoying Sues are, so I wanted to show the reasons why I believe so many of them are created. When I was younger, around Lucy's age, the majority of the stories I came up with featured Sue characters or were terribly cliched. Thankfully I never got very far in those stories or forced anybody to read them. My reasons were similar to Lucy's and also due to my inexperience as a writer. In a weird way those stories actually helped me improve my writing. Anyway, I hope Lucy comes across as realistic for a Sue writer.

Enough of that. I'm excited about the next chapter since a lot of stuff happens in it. A cameo from a one-shot of mine, Angela makes an appearance, Suzy makes an interesting discovery, and the overall plot is back on track. Everything has slowly been building up, but after the next chapter things start happening fast.

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to review!