Part 2 - Outside

Hanabusa Aido is just lying there on the carpet, staring at the ceiling with one vacant eye, an overturned armchair resting over the other half of his face. It's a little unsettling to see him in such a position, because I know the real Hanabusa would never stand for it. He looks dead, even though I know this isn't possible. He's just a character in my story.

Books are scattered everywhere, and there are massive claw-marks in the ceiling. My Yuki-doll is completely missing. Kaname probably took her with him, but where did they go?

I catch myself in the middle of a sigh. I take off my mask and set it on the empty shelf beside me, but I don't put away my sword just yet.

Kaname could be anywhere. This is my infinite dreamspace. He could be hiding in this very room, invisible, watching to see what I do next.

"Hey! Are you zoning out again?" a woman's voice booms from somewhere far away.

I blink. I'm sitting on my mother's back porch with my computer on my lap. My hands are poised over the keyboard, but apparently, they have been still for quite some time. Rainbow bubbles flicker onscreen and bounce around in front of my open windows. It's just my screensaver.

"Did you hear anything I just said?" the voice continues from directly behind me.

"No? Sorry. I was writing. Um, what did you want again?"

"I wanted to know if you're coming in to watch Big Bang Theory with us," my mother continues.

"Oh. Uh. No. How about you guys go ahead without me. I'm kinda in the middle of something right now."

"What's the point of visiting us at all, if you just spend the whole time sitting on the back porch with your computer?"

"Sorry. I'm just... I'm in the middle of something, like I said. I've... uh... got a big project for school due next week."

My mother's eyebrows shoot up to the top of her forehead like they always do when she doesn't believe me.

"You weren't doing anything. You were just sitting there."

"I was thinking."

"For half an hour?"

"Y... Yeah. I guess so. Were you watching me or something?"

"We can see you from the couch."

"Right, well. Sorry. I just have to finish this part before tomorrow, and I can't concentrate with the TV blasting."

"Suit yourself, but don't sit out here for too long. The mosquitoes will eat you alive."

I look down, and notice my arms are already covered with angry, red bites.

"Too late," I smile, showing her my bug-bitten arms. "Just give me a few minutes, and I'll come in, okay?"

"Hurry up. They say there's swine flu going around right now. You don't want to get sick from an infected mosquito bite."

"Uh. Yeah," I say, fighting the urge to tell her that swine flu isn't transmitted via mosquito bite.

(Who is that woman you are talking to?)

I shake my head. What was that?

"Come in when you're ready. The show is about to start," my mother adds before she closes the back door.

My eyes return to the computer screen. I brush the touchpad to turn off the screensaver. My mind wanders for a moment, picking around the edges of useless facts about screensavers and how they are obsolete unless you're still using an old-school CRT. Yeah, but they're so pretty.

Okay. No. C'mon, focus, me. There really is a school project due next week, although I haven't even started it yet. It's something something something about human resource law and how it relates to some other law or something. Then, there's this thing I've been working on for a fanfic site for the last week about some silly shojo manga I stumbled upon a while back, called Vampire Knight.

It isn't any different than the hundreds of other titles out there that could be grouped under the same classification. Underage teenage girl meets boy, and has a bunch of over-dramatized moments of oblivious sexual awakening. Eventually, the two discover they have a deeper connection, and additional drama ensues. I can't get it out of my mind, though.

I know shojo is supposed to be for teenage girls who proudly proclaim they read books like Twilight, who obsess about shows like Vampire Diaries. I'm a grown man. I ought to be ashamed of myself for reading such silly crap.

For a moment, I remember this photo of a hard-core fanboy dressed up as one of the characters from Vampire Knight. He... or she…? (It's really hard to determine gender just by looking with these shojo characters.) Okay, so let's just say it was a dude for the sake of argument.

So, he was supposed to be dressed up as Kaname Kuran. I see the bad wig, the ill-fitting goth-ish formal suit, and I can't help but smirk. He looks like an androgynous evil minion from a comedic superhero movie. The only thing he got right was the eyes, which he could have done without the elaborate costume.

"Is that supposed to be me?"

I jerk up and start looking all around. Everyone is inside, their faces dyed a sickening blue color, bathed in the flickering light of the television. They aren't even looking at me.

"Who said that?!"

There is no response. I put the laptop on the table beside me and pace around the back porch, still searching for the source of the voice. I mean, I swear I heard someone talking.

Tropes. The idea surfaces from nowhere. This what I start thinking about at a time like this? I resist, but in that other place inside my mind, invisible fingers flick through my memories like cards in a rolodex.

Tropes are memes. Memes are these little bits of infectious information that get passed from person to person much like a viral infection. Tropes are memes that come from stories. Tropes are the concepts used over and over by writers all over the place. The vector of infection for a trope-meme infection is the story an already "infected" writer creates. Once you read the story, you are infected, too. If you happen to be a writer, you spread the infection by writing. Characters can be tropes. Scenes in a story can be tropes. Tolkien's fantasy style is a trope because other writers used the concept for their own works. Even plot devices can be tropes.

Stop it. Why am I thinking about this right now?

Psychotic geniuses on television often talk about a mental visualization of their memories, such as Sherlock Holmes's `Mind Palace'. This is one commonly used screen-writers' plot device meant to make an unfathomably intelligent character's mental processes more palatable to average viewers who are, thankfully, not psychotic or geniuses. If you need to, you can even insert a scene where the character explores their 'mind palace' or whatever the visualization is supposed to be, so the viewers can follow along as Sherlock or Hannibal comes up with a genius deduction or a devious manipulation.

The 'mind palace' is a trope because it's a commonly imitated plot device.

The first time I read Silence of the Lambs, I was so awestruck at the use of mental visualization for perfect memory recall, I vowed to try it out for myself. Thanks, Hannibal.

Okay. Stop. Why is my brain babbling at me like a professor of liberal arts? There's a man skulking around here somewhere saying random things at me. The first thing I need to do is figure out where that voice came from. Then, maybe I should call the cops.

I look behind the fence. I peek around the side of the house. I even check the bushes beside the shed. No one is crouching. No one is hiding in the shadows. There aren't enough shadows for anyone to be crouching in right now. It's broad daylight out here. Maybe I'm hallucinating, hearing things, having a flashback. That's got to be it. Well, maybe not a flashback. Don't you have to do drugs to have flashbacks?

"Hello?" I say again, hugging my arms around my torso.

Ugh. What am I doing?!

"What are you doing out there!?" my mom calls out from the back door, startling me.

"I'm... I saw an animal going for the tomatoes. I was just chasing it off before it started tearing up the garden," I lie.

I don't really want to tell her I'm chasing disembodied voices in her back yard.

"The show is almost over! I thought you said you were going to watch with us!"

"Sorry, mom. I just got distracted."

"Well, come in already! We're going to eat supper soon!"

"Okay..."

What the hell was that voice? I mean, I know what it was. I don't want to know what it was. It's just one more sign I'm a crazy person who hears voices. Next thing you know, I'll be wearing a tinfoil hat, crouching on a street corner somewhere, nipping at people's ankles as they skirt past me.

"You coming?!"

"Yeah. Just let me grab my computer."