I rubbed my temples to dull the oncoming headache I could feel building due to the latest bizarre happenstance that was complicating my life. Turning away from the group of unfamiliar people sitting the other side of the dining table, I asked my counterpart "And just why do you think I need an apprentice?"

"It's simple," Troper!Shirou said in a tone of voice which implied it should be painfully obvious. "Ever since our three duplicates returned to their respective dimensions, there are far too many women who want in your pants for you to handle right now. By taking on an apprentice to handle the overflow, that frees up more time for you to the things you want." He gestured to the young man sitting directly across from me. "Plus, I found the perfect guy for the job. This aspiring young Harem Hero has already collected a sizable harem of women with his numerous feats of badassery."

"What are you talking about?" The young man across from me asked. He looked to be around 16 years old, definitely a high school student going by the slacks and short sleeved button up shirt. He had a mass of spiky black hair on top of his head and weary expression on his face, as if he had faced a run of bad luck lately. "I don't have a harem! I just helped these girls out when they were in trouble, that's all!"

Troper!Shirou and I both gave him a flat look as all the women on his side of the table proceeded to give him exasperated glares. The sheer level of obliviousness the man in front of me just displayed regarding the numerous females surrounding him was almost mind boggling… and, as I was a little embarrassed to admit to myself, causing me feel some déjà-vu.

My doppelganger coughed. "…As you can see, he needs someone him how to handle the large number of women pursuing him, and soon before their numbers grow any larger. Or before he does something stupid like picking one of them, causing the rest to try to kill him. That's what you'll be teaching him."

I briefly considered pointing out that I wasn't exactly the smartest when it came to understanding women either, but I thought better of it and instead asked the young man (whose name escaped me at the moment) "So, umm, what you do normally?"

He rubbed the back of his head in a sheepish manner. "Well, aside from going to high school, I spend a lot of my time helping out people wherever I can. I also often end up in fights with amoral magician with shady agendas, and getting beat up by the numerous women in my life for reason I don't really understand."

I felt a brief moment of vertigo as I suddenly saw my own sixteen year old self suddenly super imposed over the kid's form. I thought I was the only one I thought, small tears of sympathy starting to form in my eyes.

Before I could say anything to my newfound brother, the girl to the young man's right, a small blue haired nun in a white and gold habit of all thing, finally stopped stuffing her face with the food I prepared to say to him "Touma! You need to accept this job so he can keep feeding me this delicious food!" Indeed, this was the first time she had spoken since I set the food down on the table. I had never thought I'd see the day, but I think this nun could actually give Saber a run for her money when it came to the sheer speed and quantity of food she could absorb. I shuttered at the thought of the carnage that would result if the both of them ever sat down to a meal together.

"Index," Touma said, and I could almost see an anime style sweet drop on the side of his head. "I can't take a job just because you like the employer's cooking."

"Yes you can! Stop being selfish and think about me!"

Touma sighed. "Well, his cooking is pretty good. Maybe if you ate enough of it you'd finally be able to grow out of the pedeo body of yours."

Index's fists balled up in righteous fury. "Touma! Are you thinking lewd thoughts about me again?"

"What? No, of course not! I'm just stating the obvious! I'm mean, sure, I know better than most because of all those times I've seen you naked but- uh oh."

"TOUMA!" With a final cry of feminine fury, Index launched herself at Touma and sank her teeth into his head. Touma began to thrash around, yelling as he tried to pry Index's jaw off his cranium with no avail.

To make matters worse for him, it seemed Index wasn't the only one who was angry at his comment. "Wh-what do you mean you've seen her naked?" yelled a middle school girl with short hair. She got up and walked over to where he was sitting, looking so angry I swear I saw sparks of electricity arching off her head. "Just what have you been doing with her in that apartment of yours?" She started to kick him until he fell over, and I swore I could hear a muffled cry of 'Fukoa da!' among the gnashing of teeth.

At that moment, I felt another odd bit of sympathy for the young man, knowing full well the pain caused by small girls and their surprisingly sharp teeth. I looked at Troper!Shirou and asked "Where did you find him?"

"Oh, a couple of dimensions over," he replied vaguely. "Well, for the sake of the poor boy's skull, I think we should assume he's on board." Troper!Shirou blinked in surprise as he looked back in Touma's direction. "Oh look, he's learning from you already! He already has his own version of Akitsu."

I was confused for a moment before I followed his gazed, and then I jumped in surprise when I saw a girl I had somehow completely failed to see before. She had long black hair, was dressed in a shrine maiden outfit, and was kneeing to Touma's left just like Akitsu usually did in regards to me. "Gah!" I exclaimed "Where did you come from? How did I not see you before?"

"… I was always here." The girl said in a soft and somewhat depressed tone, as if people not noticing her was something she expected.

"Ah," Akitsu said from her usual position to my left. "I saw you."

"…Thank you." The two gave each other a brief smile, finding an odd camaraderie in their respective passive natures.

"Anyway," Troper!Shirou said, "We should probably stop those two now before Miya comes back from making tea." He pointed at the two girls who were still inflicting Amusing Injuries on my newly acquired apprentice.

I thought about it for a moment before picking up a plate and loudly saying "Well, there's still a large amount of sushi left over. I guess I just have to throw it out…"

Faster than I could see, Index detached herself from Touma and practically jumped on the table, knocking the short haired girl aside as she did so. "No! I'll eat it!" I put the plate down in front of her and she resumed consuming the food faster than several small nations could produce it.

Straightening herself, the middle schooler looked down haughtily at Touma. "Well, don't think you're off the hook. I still intend to beat you someday!"

Touma sat back up and stared at her. "You're still going on about that, Biri-biri? Why do you care about beating me so much? And for that matter, why do you care about what goes on in my apartment?"

In response, the short haired girl blushed and stuttered "Wh-what are you talking about? I-it's not like I care about you or anything…" she looked away from him. "You just shouldn't be doing inappropriate things with other people…" She suddenly realized the implication she had made and franticly looked back at the young man, a Luminescent Bush on her face as she did so. "Wait! I'm not saying you should do inappropriate things with me or anything! It's not like I think about that kind of stuff!"

Wow. And that girl could give Rin a run for her money on whose more Tsundere.

"Onee-sama isn't honest with herself… Misaka says as she tries to move closer to her Savoir." This came from a girl almost identical to the short haired girl, save for some slightly different colored eyes and a pair of night vision goggles on her head. She ended up squeezing herself in between Touma and Index, wrapping her arms around his as she did so.

I sighed as this resulted in some more chaotic shouting. I then noticed that one of the girls wasn't participating in the madness before me, and was instead kneeing primly off to the side. She seemed older than the other assembled girls, with long black hair, a white tee-shirt tied off at the mid-rift and a pair of jeans with only one pant leg. Most notably, she had a massive nodachi resting as her side. I blink a few times in surprise before I asked her "Umm, excuse me? Are you sure you're with him and not a Sekirei that happened to wander into the house?"

The swordwoman gave an annoyed scoff. "Of course I'm with him." She gestured to the young man currently obscured by the gaggle of girls. "Seriously, why is it ever since I got here people keep mistaking me for one of these 'Sekirei' things?"

Troper!Shirou spoke up before I could. "Probably because of you borderline Striperiffic outfit, your beautiful looks, your ridiculously oversized weapon for you size, your superhuman fighting prowess, and let's not forget your huge-" he abruptly cut himself off at the sound of steel being drawn a few inches from a sheath and hastily corrected himself "-tracks of land."

Lucky for him it seemed where she was from didn't have Monty Python, so she merely looked at him in confusion. After a few moments, there was a knock on the door. "I'll get it!" Troper!Shirou said quickly as he stood up. "It's probably Touma's parents."

"Wait, what? Why would his parents come here?" And for that matter, why would they be getting to the door just now? Didn't they come from Another Dimension?

"It's an apprentice thing," Troper!Shirou said with a shrug, apparently not noticing the strange lapse in continuity. "You want to apprentice a kid, you have to go to his parents."After disappearing for a moment to go to the front door, he came back with nice looking, older couple. However, going by looks alone they couldn't have been that much older. The man looked like he was still in his thirties, and the woman looked like she was in her early twenties! Seriously, no woman who has a teenage son had any right looking that young!

"Ara ara, what's all this ruckus?" Miya walked back into the room with a tray full of cups and a tea pot. She surveyed the chaos and said "It seems that the guests haven't been made aware that there is no violence in the Izumo House."

Darkness from the outer reaches of the universe began to coalesce around the landlady, forming into a black curtain of pure malice and doom. From this aura of endless night came a mask bearing the grotesque visage of a Hannya, its tongue curled around a dagger which promises sorrow and eyes weeping tears of crimson. This mask was soon joined by another from the void, and then another, and then another until the landlady was backed by a legion faces, all of which promising despair with no chance of hope.

Needless to say, the room quieted pretty quickly after that. The only one spared from the horror was Touma, and that was because he was at the bottom of a pile of girls at the time. Oddly enough it was Touma's father that seemed the most affected, turning white and saying to Miya "Yo-you're not perchance my wife's long lost sister are you?"

"Ara ara," His wife said in a sweet voice, "You think the strangest things."

Things managed to settle down after that, with pleasantries being exchanged, explanations given, and tea being consumed. Touma's father, whose name I learned was Touya Kamijou, seemed to particularly enjoy it.

"Ah Miya-san, this tea is excellent!" He said. He added with a smile "And it's made even better being severed by a lovely woman like yourself."

The landlady blushed slightly at this comment. However, Touya's wife Shiina was far less pleased with the comment. "Touya-san, you doing it again." She said in a sweet voice that was not at all indicative of the dark aura of malice gathering around her in a manner very similar to Miya's own Demon Head projection.

While the rest of us were busy being terrified, Miya simply giggled at the display. "Ara ara, men can be so thoughtless to their wives sometimes."

"Ara ara." Shiina agreed.

"Ara ara." Both women said in perfect unison.

"Uh, let's move on shall we?" Troper!Shirou asked nervously, mildly unnerved at how well the two women who could summon embodiments of doom were getting along.

"Alright." Touma said. He paused for a moment then asked uncertainly "Um… so what exactly should I do?"

"First thing first," Troper!Shirou said. "We need to add all of the extra Sekirei to your harem. Normally their biological impulses would lead them to imprinting on someone else, so we'll need a way to overpower it."

I nodded in resignation. "I'll get the Bar."

"No, no, that only works for you." My counterpart said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "Fortunately, Touma here has his own method for adding girls to his harem. Apparently his Chronic Hero Syndrome has an extra side effect of making any girl he saves fall for him. So all he has to do is save all the Sekirei from trouble."

I arched an eyebrow in doubt. "But none of the Sekirei are in trouble right now. Not only that, there are several dozen which he would need to save. What do you suggest, just waiting around until each and every one of them is in danger?"

I felt an all too familiar sense of dread as I saw a smile slowly spread on Troper!Shirou's face. "Oh, don't worry," he said, the glint of madness present in his eyes.

"Oh dear god no…" whispered in horror.

"I have a plan!" my counterpart said in triumph.

I gave an explosive groan, knowing that this could only end badly (for me anyway). Troper!Shirou opened his mouth to begin explaining his plan which no doubt ignored all laws of logic and some of causality

WARNING

when suddenly my doppelganger seized for a moment, his eyes going wide in surprise. His right hand reached up to grasp the back of his neck, and when it came away he was holding a silver thread between his fingers, one end going into the back of his neck and the other trailing off into nothingness.

"What the…? What the

MENTAL

hell is that?" I asked. I then noticed that everything in the room seemed… off. No one else seemed to notice the sudden change in Troper!Shirou's demeanor. Not only that, they all seemed

INCURSION

distant or unreal, like some kind of memory I had trouble remembering. "What's going on?"

DETECTED

"It seems someone is trying to invade our mind." He said, still looking at the thread between his fingers with a serious expression.

"Huh?" I said in confusion. "What do you mean 'our'?"

"Well, really I mean yours which by extension means mine and-" He sighed in exasperation. "You know what? I'm not going over this again. I've explained this to you half a dozen times already but you always forget when you wake up and right now I really don't have time to explain it." As he said this, he began wrapping the thread around his hand.

"Wake up? You mean I'm… dreaming?" Normally I would have brushed this of as Troper!Shirou just spouting crazy nonsense again, but for the moment it actually seemed plausible. Things around me had started to become disjointed and surreal while I was talking to him, with the walls and furniture being incorrectly proportioned and objects coming apart at the seams.

"Yes, and from the prospective of someone else no less." Troper!Shirou said with an amused look. "It gave me a rather interesting opportunity to be you for a while. Unfortunately though, it seems we're going to have to cut today's session short so I can deal with this." He planted his feet in a steady stance. "I need to drag whoever's doing this into the deeper part of your mind. You can't exactly follow and keep your sense of self while there, so mind the shift from first person to third." Without further preamble, he gave strong pull on the silver thread in his hand and suddenly I was

Nowhere

As Troper!Shirou pulled on the thread, the room came apart with it, the walls and floors separating and drifting off into the white void that now surrounded everything. Words and concepts floated through the void as well, with connection and references between them constantly shifting and changing. This was the center of a certain state of mind, an alien view point which no human should have. Such a thing was referred to as a Reality Marble by those humans who practice the art of Thaumaturgy, who also referred to themselves as magi. As things would have it, one such magus appeared in existence inside this Reality Mable, stumbling forward as the length of silver thread currently grasped in his and was being pulled on by Troper!Shirou.

"What the devil?" the man said in surprise, clearly not expecting this turn of events. He was an arrogant looking man, wearing old fashioned and formal cloths, with black hair and hawkish features similar to another man who was likely busy with his own problems at the moment. The man stared at Troper!Shirou with indignant rage and said. "What have you done? I should be able to bypass your conscious mind completely in your current state. How have you brought me here?"

The younger man opposite to him 'tisked' and said "I was able to bring you here because you forgot the first rule of psychic combat: any door you open can be traversed both ways. I merely followed your connection back to your mind and pulled it into his." He said, gesturing around him. He frowned. "Well, technically it's my mind too. I'm never sure what pronoun I should use."

The magus gawked for a moment before saying "What are you going on about? That shouldn't have mattered because you're unconscious. How could a third rate magus like yourself possible be aware of what I'm doing?"

"Well," Troper!Shirou gestured awkwardly for a moment before continuing. "That's mostly because I'm not Shirou Emyia's conscious mind. Hell, I'm not entirely sure what I am: his subconscious mind, the Anthropomorphic Personification of his Reality Marble, his Id, or maybe just a thinly veiled rip off of Dresden's subconscious from the Dresden Files." He said with a smile. "Personally, I just think of myself as Troper!Shirou."

The magus blinked in confusion for a moment. "How did you pronounce the exclamation point?"

"Don't worry it," Troper!Shirou said with dismissive wave of his hand. A serous expression crossed his face. "What you should worry about is that you are poking around where you don't belong."

The magus gave an unimpressed grunt. "Bah, you're clearly insane. It doesn't matter, I am Peter Eltanwise and I will not be demeaned in such matter by a third rate magus like yourself!" And with that, he thrust out his hand still holding the silver thread and a red light emitted along its length, heading to where the other end of the string was still imbedded in the younger man's neck. Curiously, as he did so, some of the words and floating in the void moved from their normal position and seemed to wrap around the red light. If one was trained properly and focused enough, they would have been able to make out the words Psychic Link and Mental Manipulation.

In a likewise fashion, before the light could reach Troper!Shirou, more words darted out from the void and placed themselves in front of him. If the same hypothetical person with training and focus were to give it a look, they would have seen the words No Sell shaped conspicuously like a shield. When the light reached the younger man, it merely dissipated with no effect.

"What?" Eltanwise said incredulously. "Impossible!"

"You really think you could possibly control all this?" Troper!Shirou said with a smirk, gesturing to the endless number of tropes floating within the white void. "Usually I'm not very good at the offensive part of psychic combat, but the inside of this mind is a labyrinth which you could not possibly hope to understand." He paused for a moment before continuing. "Do you know what his distortion is?"

Eltanwise was caught off guard by the apparent non sequitur. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"Quite a bit for your immediate future I'm afraid. I could spend quite some time going into the details about it, but to sum it up, it would be 'All is Fiction'. To him everything everywhere is a story, even his own life." Troper!Shirou gave a chuckle. "I'm afraid I was wrong when I said I don't know what I am, because I do know one thing about myself. Shirou has turned the idea of the Fourth Wall into a pseudo-philosophical metaphor for the barriers between dimensions, but that is an ideal tempered by logic of the reality around him." The Troperiffic man gave a grin. "I however have no part in any reality outside of this, and so am not limited by it. Which means not only can I truly Break the Fourth Wall, I know exactly who my author is too."

The magus just stared at him in bafflement, barely understanding what he was talking about. "You're insane." He concluded simply.

"True, but if I wasn't I wouldn't exist." was Troper!Shirou's somewhat circular reply. "Of course, you attempted to read the mind of someone who you had to have known was a Reality Marble user, which are by definition insane. I guess that means you're an idiot." The younger man shook his head. "Anyway, my question to you is this: how would you like to see the world from my perspective?" And with the he grabbed the thread between them and-

No Fourth Wall

Imagine if you will a curtain which has been kept in front of you your entire life, such that while you don't even notice it, it is still a comfortable point of reference to your awareness. Now imagine that curtain being forcibly ripped away from you, shedding a horrible new light into your eyes, showing things you at first don't understand and fear. Then as your learn to focus on what's beyond the curtain your fear doesn't abate but intensifies, for you can feel things watching you, but it's not just watching. You can feel them judging, evaluating, analyzing every last piece of your existence and eventually dismissing you as insignificant to some grand overall scheme which you don't know. Imagine that just when you think that existence can't possibly be worse, you somehow realize with utter horror and finality that the gaze of these thing which deem you as a tiny piece in some unfathomable game are the only reason you currently exist, and for them to stop watching you would return you to the void from which you came.

That would be an approximate summation of what a character would feel if they suddenly had their fourth wall removed and didn't have the kind of mind that could handle it.

Needless to say, Eltanwise began screaming. "WHAT ARE THEY! WHAT ARE THOSE THINGS WATCHING ME!"

"Readers." Troper!Shirou said simply. Somehow this explanation failed to comfort the magus and he continued to rave incoherently. Troper!Shirou walked forward to the terrified man. "It gets even worse for you though, because I happen to know what the author likes. He just loves his Happy Endings, and in this story you're a villain. And in a story with a Happy Ending," Troper!Shirou stopped in front of the man. "The villain always loses!" With that he gave a mighty forward kick to the magus's midsection, and Eltanwise was promptly launched out of the mindscape.

For a moment, all was still within the white void. Then Troper!Shirou looked at his watch and said "Oh, better start getting this place ready. It's my turn to host poker night and I do not want put Deadpool next to Ajimu-san again."