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Chapter One
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Once upon a time, a girl named Aline tried to write a story.
And failed spectacularly. This was no fault of her own, and merely due to a lack of any talent whatsoever.
Once upon a time, a girl named Aline tried to understand, if not master, the world of fiction by traveling to the physical plane on which it existed, encountering shippers, fangirls, ornery reviewers, characters at the ends of their wits and some very cruel adorable fuzzballs.
And failed—but, on the bright side, came away from the experience with a valuable life lesson: never write bad fiction without Navy SEAL-level training.
Once upon a more immediate time, a girl named Aline was lying on her bed and staring at the ceiling.
It wasn't a particularly interesting ceiling. While it did have an irregular pattern of ridges that she'd never really known the purpose of, it was a dull off-white color and generally not that entertaining to look at in any way at all.
It wasn't a particularly interesting girl. She was tall in the same way short people subjected to the rack were tall. Her limbs were of the scrawny barely-pubescent kind. Her hair was blonde, but it was a dingy, dishwater-toned variety of blonde, and her eyes were blue, but they were a watery, uninteresting sort of blue. Her manner was that of a person who wasn't really there, or at least one who would much rather not be. On the whole, she was an unremarkable teenage girl.
And, above all, it wasn't a particularly interesting time. It was the dead of summer, somewhere in the middle of July, a month which has an uncanny ability to make every single day drag on like a Sunday afternoon. Though Aline was too deep in her stupor to take note of the fact, it was Tuesday. Looking back, everything that would happen to her later could probably be blamed on the fact that it was Tuesday.
She wondered if sighing would relieve the boredom.
She sighed.
It didn't.
Boredom, she thought, sucks. She was not an imaginative child at the best of times, and it being a Tuesday in the middle of July was not helping.
Though boredom was preferable to the alternative, she supposed, of a screaming hell of confusion, stupidity, death threats, pain, more pain, and possible gibbering insanity: namely, fiction. She found herself thinking about it after months of careful mental avoidance of the subject. Her foray into the physical world of all things written, and hence fiction created by both competent professionals and fanatical children with access to pencils, had been brief and regrettable. Aline in no way minded adventure. She considered adventure to be, on the whole, very fine indeed. She just didn't want any happening to her, considering all the pain and trauma generally associated with adventuring.
And to think she'd been there on a slow day.
Boredom was alright, really. At least she wasn't being electrocuted by embarrassingly adorable yellow creatures.
(She would later desperately regret thinking this, as while she was not religious, she was sure that any god or gods that were out there had a great love of irony. She was also not entirely clear on the meaning of the word 'irony'.)
Suddenly, in a completely unrelated coincidence which had nothing whatsoever to do with the progression of the plot, a swirling green vortex of inter-dimensional teleportation appeared in her bedroom. It wasn't even an unobtrusive sort of swirling green vortex of inter-dimensional teleportation. As it appeared and expanded out of nowhere, unearthly howls filled the room and strong winds from the nethervoid displaced everything that wasn't nailed down, and the nails on a few things that were.
Aline, naturally, shrieked and fell off the bed.
"Oh my god!" she screamed over the noise, clinging to the bed post in terror. "It's a swirling green vortex of inter-dimensional teleportation!"
"Don't be silly," a voice said. "It's only a plot hole."
Aline whipped her head around wildly, eyes sweeping the room for the source of the sound. "Wha—?"
"A plot hole," the voice repeated, making itself heard over the howls. "You know? Things in the plot that don't make sense? We use them to hitch rides. I believe some call them space-time anomalies."
"I—what?"
"Anyway, Aline, nice to see you again," the voice continued, suddenly manifesting itself into a dreadfully familiar figure. The figure itself – that of a tall and lanky girl in her late teens – was not familiar, but the painful disharmony of colors it wore definitely were, as was the very bright and very fake smile plastered on its face.
The winds and shrieks ceased, and Aline's things crashed to the floor loudly. The room was trashed, but she barely noticed. She was too busy trying to untie her gut from the knot it seemed to have twisted itself into.
Nikki.
In her mind, Nikki and disaster were synonymous, and perhaps she should have started running then and there – if anything, what came next was far worse than a mere cheerful sociopath. But the sudden appearance startled her legs into gelatinous pillars of immobility.
"N-Nikki…um, hi? What's going on?" She was stumbling over the words, her tongue apparently dissatisfied with obeying her commands.
Nikki rubbed the back of her head in a gesture of sheepishness that was silicon-real. "It's kind of a long story. We'll explain later."
"Oh." A beat. "Wait, we?"
"Uh huh," Nikki replied brightly. "D and my sister will be here shortly. They got held up. Jen was saying something about an apprenticeship and somewhere in the confusion we were separated."
"Sister?" Aline said faintly, taking in absolutely none of this.
"Half-sister, actually. Our mother had a taste for evil overlords and easy access to them. In the meantime, I am in dire need of your help," Nikki said gravely, surveying the formerly-neat room with her hands on her hips. "Do you have any snacks?"
"Uh." Aline blinked the stupid away, the shock slowly beginning to wear off. "My parents are out shopping, but there's a funnel cake in the fridge if you—"
"Thanks," the older girl cut her off, and disappeared out the doorway.
Aline sat back down on her bed mutely. Tuesday did this. She just knew it. No good ever came of Tuesday.
She barely had time to wrangle her thoughts back into coherency in order to figure out what to do next when the next plot hole appeared. This one was purple, and it seemed the accompanying winds and howls were messing up her room with particularly vitriol. It was somehow less impressive the second time, but no more pleasant.
Aline crouched clutching the steadiest object she could, loose strands of hair lashing at her skin. When the chaos ceased, she cracked open her eyes, already knowing what sight would greet her.
D, an unimposing figure dressed in somber grey, stared at her from behind curtains of stringy black hair with eyes that might have been black or dark brown if the light was brave enough to shine on them. A contraption that a person of her height could not possibly have been able to lift was strapped to her back, a hose with what looked like a spray-bottle squeezer on the end extending from it. "Oh," she said. "It's you." Her tone was impartial, distracted even, but Aline still felt like 'you' was one of the worst things she'd been called in her life.
Aline started to open her mouth to say—well, she definitely would have thought of something, when D became the second (and by no means last) person to interrupt her that day. "What a dump," she said. "Don't you ever clean up around here?"
"I—"
"Yeah, uh-huh. Just tell me where the coffee maker is and there won't have to be any unpleasantness." Aline noticed the twitching in D's left eye and the finger hovering over the contraption's trigger (Aline would eventually remember a picture from her history class and identify it as a flamethrower), and decided that was probably a good idea.
"Downstairs, third cabinet on the right," she said. "It's kind of an old model, though, so be careful with it. But seriously, what are you doing here? What about that girl Nikki mentioned? What kind of cruel person would condemn a child to be her sibling? And above all, why do random people I never want to see again come bursting through the boundaries of time and space into my bedroom to torment—" She cut herself off abruptly as she realized D was not in the room, and probably hadn't been after the first sentence out of Aline's mouth. D was very easy to start accidentally ignoring when she wasn't being the elephant in the living room. A very small elephant, but an obtrusive one nonetheless.
She fumed quietly at the snub, mildly surprised at herself even as she did. Anger was not something she was prone to. She had only just begun to wonder at this when she was forced to put it down to D's essential D-ness and leave it at that, as at that moment yet another plot hole appeared. The obligatory dramatic soundtrack started up.
"Oh, shut up," Aline told it crankily, sitting down and resting her head on her knees as her eyes slid shut. For reasons she did not care to fathom, it did, allowing the third voice to be heard.
"Hello?" The voice was light and dripping with sweetness. If marshmallows were sound, the voice would be one.
This is new, Aline thought. If this was Nikki's sister, she supposed she ought to get up and offer her condolences, but – No, she thought. No. I'm not getting up. I'm not talking to this new person. Knowing my luck she'll probably end up being a six-eyed, multi-tentacled demon from the eighth dimension. So, no. I'm not going to. I'm going to stay right here curled in my little ball of isolation and let whatever it is go away.
"I'm so sorry to intrude," the marshmallow-voice continued. "But is D here?"
"Downstairs." That's right. Now go away. Don't mind me.
"Thank you."
See? See how well that worked out? Ignoring problems really does make them go away. They all lied to you. See how nice this is? No more plot holes. That's right. Calm. Nice. No more nasty portals to disturb your peace. I bet there weren't even any portals. You just imagined them. That's a comforting thought, isn't it? Makes everything much easier, doesn't it?
Several minutes passed in silence. Aline remained curled up, contentedly deluding herself, a skill she had been refining for the last few months. Just as she had safely convinced herself that she had hallucinated everything, a relatively small explosion sounded from below, rocking the house on its foundations and causing the light fixtures to shudder.
Cautiously, Aline opened her eyes and lifted her head. She heaved a sigh. "Why doesn't that ever work," she muttered as she began the doom-resounding trudge down the stairs.