OLD READERS: Please read the author's note at the beginning of the prologue.

NEW READERS: Hey. I'm assuming you already read that author's note. So. What's up? Enjoying the fic? Good, good. Read on!

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Chapter Four

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Nikki continued piling Advanced Physics books on the growing blockage—most of them with the margins scribbled in, the title scratched out and the author's photo magic markered. Physics was like the Liberal Arts degree of the Hub, because it had about as much bearing on anything important. Nikki paused to glance at her watch, which informed her that it was seventy minutes past pancake. A couple more minutes of cartoonish door-blocking should suffice, she reckoned. She'd better get out the industrial strength stuff, though, just to be sure…

Aline took the entirely less useful action of sinking to her knees and taking deep breaths. This didn't help in the slightest, which annoyed her, because as far she knew any kind of stress could easily be dealt with by breathing deeply. Now that the immediate danger had more or less passed, though the shrieking and pounding on the door was not reinforcing this idea, the realization that she was embroiled in this world of fiction once again was setting in. And now this was a war, and she was a soldier, a meat shield to be thrown at a problem until it went away.

Aline didn't think it was possible to take revenge on a day of the week, but oh, if she ever got out of this, Tuesday was going to pay.

Her fingers brushed her jacket pocket. It felt fuller than usual. Stunned, but stunned in an 'oh look yet another thing to be stunned at' way, Aline pulled out the Cliché Compendium. She blinked at it.

"Didn't I leave this on the kitchen table?" she asked the room at large. Her voice was shaking, but not much. Thoughts of revenge on Tuesday were helping.

Nikki lifted a welder and mask from a rack on the wall. "Mm."

"Alrighty then. You do that."

Aline pulled her jacket tighter around her shoulders. Usually when under siege (though the things she was used to being under siege from were family members and history exams, which were, as she was just now realizing, far less terrifying than a zombie horde or Jenna), she fled from reality. Unfortunately, she was no longer strictly in reality, and the only thing left to flee to was a guidebook.

But it was something.

Page 421 had an entry on the Super Best Friends Club. 'An amalgamation of several seemingly completely random (yet popular) characters all crammed together in a large house doing fun, crazy, and often fluffy things. Jawdroppingly common in fanfiction for very serious works. Also known as Cullen House Syndrome. Difficult to destroy due to sheer popularity, but perseverance, tact, and possibly an army of ninjas should be sufficient.'

Nikki was now welding the door shut. Aline shifted to avoid the sparks.

She came to a page about critics. Still stinging from the first remark about her writing all those months ago, whatever she liked to tell herself, she was almost unaware of the malicious smirk forming on her lips, which disintegrated in short order as she found the entry to be nothing but a list of references.

Critic: See:

Troll

Troll (literal)

Angry Douchebag

Fact (truth, reality, etc.)

Come on, don't kid yourself, you know they were right.

Who writes this crap, anyway? she thought, annoyed, and realized she actually wanted to know. The front cover simply had the title and nothing else besides a few gold-leafed designs around the edges. Nothing on the few opening pages, either. After a moment's searching, she found something: in small print on the last page before the back cover, a name: Deborah Rutherford. Under it, three blacked out and unreadable words. She murmured the name aloud. "Huh. Who's that, d'you think?"

Nikki grunted. She had now produced miniature cement mixer from somewhere and was haphazardly pouring cement over her door-obstructing structure.

"Okay then."

Aline absentmindedly flicked through the pages, coming to a stop at a long bibliography of biology and anatomy books which were under the subtitle 'Mpreg'. Huh, she thought. I wonder what that is…

Nikki had straightened up and tossed away the empty cement mixer, examining her handiwork when the shriek filled the room, at which point she nearly landed face first into the still-drying cement. For one wild moment, she thought the laws of physics had won over the laws of narrative convention after all, the fangirls had defeated the barrier and were going to break in, but then realized that the scream had come from Aline. "What? What? Did you have some kind of horrible epiphany about the futility of life or something?" Nikki asked roughly. Sympathy was not her strong suit and having the ever-loving bejeezus scared out of her was not among her hobbies.

The girl shuddered and mutely shook her head. Horrified tears were shimmering in her eyes.

"Residual shock of almost dying suddenly hit you?"

Another shudder, another shake.

"Lost the Game?"

A personal note to remember to complain about that later, another shake.

"Found out some horrible secret that you wish you could forget at any price?"

A nod. Nikki's forehead furrowed. She looked between the abandoned copy of the Cliché Compendium on the floor, then at Aline, then back again. "Ah," she said conclusively. "I see. You read the one about Mpreg."

A slightly chocked sob. "But why would people do that?" Aline moaned. "It had pictures!"

"I'll tell you when you're older," Nikki said, the mild and unusual bout of concern for Aline now gone. She didn't know for how long the barrier could hold off the horde, but according to narrative convention, at least enough to get the canons out to somewhere else, where they could regroup and plan a counterattack. "Come on, we need to get moving before they break through." Silence from the wide-eyed and shuddering Aline.

"You know? To avoid the messy death we ran in here to avoid?"

Now no longer silence—instead, unintelligible muttering.

"Fine then. See if I care." Nikki started for the door that led to the main chambers beyond, then realized that it wasn't going to work and came back. She sighed and grabbed Aline by the arm, dragging her none-too-gently to the door.

Now, at least, we're getting somewhere, Nikki thought, the feeling of contentment that came with returning to a place closer to home than anything else blossoming in her chest. Now we can start kicking some ass.

She paused. Alright, at least kicking a few shins. At least.

She pushed open the door.

Three seconds later, Aline's dead weight hit the stone floor with a dull thud as Nikki tried to process the scene before her.

She swore. She swore again. She swore mildly enough to print under a PG-13 rating: "Oh…god damn it."

Empty.

How could it be empty?

Impossible. It had to be an illusion. How many canons could conjure illusions? Plenty! Somebody had thought to use one, banking on the enemy's minimal brain capacity. Of course. That was the obvious answer. All she had to do was walk forward and it would be broken.

She did so. Nothing happened.

Alright, so it was a very clever illusion. That didn't mean anything. Nothing at all.

"Guys! It's me! Nikki! You know, next in the line of caretakers? Stop…doing whatever it is you're doing, we've got a war to fight!"

The silence ignored her rather ostentatiously.

She strode forward purposefully, stopping at the center and turning on the spot. The chamber was remarkably and eerily different when it was empty. No winged people of various castes flitted among the stalactites which adorned the high ceiling. The large underground pool, usually used by waterbenders and sons of sea gods to annoy everybody else, was still and calm. The café, light bulbs flickering sadly, was pathetic in its barrenness.

"There must be some kind of clue," Nikki muttered frantically. "Something they left to tip us off to their location. Surely they must want to defend themselves. Surely they would be doing something to help. Just…not here! Yes, that's right. There must be a clue. The enemy is too bloody stupid to understand clues, they would have thought of that. I've just got to find it. That's right. Just got to find it."

The chamber was easily large enough to hold a dozen cathedrals, though even its grand size could only accommodate a small fraction of canons at a time. This was a fact that did not escape Nikki.

"Well, best get searching!" she said brightly, producing a magnifying glass and smiling in a way that suggested her mind was going to crack magnificently at any moment.

Aline remained where she had been left, not even noticing the possible concussion she could have gotten on contact with the stone floor. She stared blankly at the distant ceiling. Luckily, the human mind being the remarkable thing that it is, she eventually managed to convince herself that surely this Mpreg thing couldn't exist. That left dealing with Nikki, wherever she had gotten off to. Aline struggled up from the heap she had been left in and looked perplexedly at where Nikki was almost comically combing the stone floor for…well, something. She tried not to be unsettled by the emptiness and the loud echoes her footsteps sent emanating across the chamber, and walked over to her. "Um, Nikki?"

Said girl stopped examining the floor and looked up, the glint of madness in her eyes. "What?"

"Er, what are you doing?"

"Are you blind? What's it look like I'm doing?"

Aline thought her reply through carefully. She was not a quick thinker, but a good one when she bothered with it. "It looks like you're crawling around the floor looking for something that isn't there."

"Give the monkey a banana!" Nikki laughed loudly, and not very stably.

"Nikki, you're going insane. Stop it."

"I'm looking for clues, you dipwad, what else would I be doing? Clearly there's no one here, so clearly they must have left some hint of their location, so clearly it is here, so clearly I've got to find it! You'd think you'd use that half-priced Wal-Mart brain of yours once in a while!"

There was a brief echo around the enormous cavern.

"Ah…I see." Aline nodded. "I just thought we could go through that plot hole over there instead, is all."

Nikki whipped her head around to where Aline was pointing. Indeed, a swirling chartreuse wormhole about five feet in diameter was hovering a few inches from the ground. There was a little sign stuck in the ground besides it which read 'To Headquarters'. She blinked at it, then scrambled up, brushing a misplaced hair away from her forehead. She coughed and looked regally around. "Ahem. Uh, right. You can just forget the last ten minutes now. Let's go."

"Right. By the way, you still haven't explained what you meant when you said our auth—"

But Nikki had already stepped into the vortex, yanking Aline with her.

They fell through time and space again, an experience which is impossible to process by the human mind and is generally automatically erased.

This time, Aline arrived at their destination without solid ground under her feet. Or any kind of ground, for that matter, as it seemed that the plot hole had misfired and deposited them some ten feet off the ground. She groaned inwardly—and so the predicted abuse began. Resigned, she braced for impact, but it turned out she didn't have to. A gust of air suddenly came up below her and she found herself being gently lowered to the ground. A bald boy with a blue arrow on his head was offering her a hand. "Thanks," she said, pulling herself up.

"You're welcome!" he said brightly before taking off, in the quite literal sense.

Aline started after him. "Did that boy just—?"

"Yeah, he does that," said Nikki beside her, brushing dust off her clothes. There was no dust to be seen, on the ground and on her clothes, but what else could you do after falling but brush yourself off? "Well, we've found the canons."

They indeed had, but this was not what was causing Aline to look around in her signature bewilderment. That honor went to the fact that they appeared to be located in a World War I era trench. A rather nice one, at that. It was concrete enforced with sandbags piled along the top edges, and at various spots along the walls canons were posted, a few operating actual cannons, a few with other weapons or binoculars. Aline thought she heard the rat-at-at-at-at-at of a machine gun. And what was that greenish glow…?

"Oh, hello," said a mild voice. There weren't exactly any shadows, but D managed to melt out of them anyway. "Finally showed up, I see."

"How long have you been here?" Nikki demanded.

D shrugged. "A few days. Insofar as there are days, anyways. No attacks yet, but I've been enjoying the flaming crossbow." She displayed it proudly. 'Lucy' was carved into the side. "It's semi-automatic."

Aline's eyes nearly popped out of her head, which was less comical and more disgusting when it was actually happening. "Days? We couldn't have been gone for more than forty minutes!"

"Time doesn't exactly work like that in this dimension," D said, seemingly only half-aware who she was talking to. "It's not linear. It's more five-year-old-scribbling-on-the-walls…-ear. I remember I once left for a short vacation and returned to find that I had already been back for a week."

"B-but," Aline sputtered. "What about my parents? What about my brother? Won't they wonder where I've gone?"

"Don't worry," Nikki said reassuringly. "In this canon, they conveniently don't exist for now."

"What do you mean they don't—?"

At that moment, something exploded, drowning out her next words. There was a blinding flash of light followed by an ear-shattering boom. Acting on pure instinct, Aline dived and covered the back of her head, heart hammering. A few seconds later, she opened one eye and noticed that absolutely nothing was different. No shrapnel, nothing burning, nobody even seeming all that worried.

"Wh-what was that?" she asked shakily.

Nikki eyed her. "That," she said slowly, "was an explosion."

"I got that part. But it doesn't seem to have affected anything."

"Well, of course it didn't," Nikki scoffed. "Nothing's out there."

A few neurons in Aline's brain went fzzt. "But. I heard it. And there was the light. And the shake. And the. But the. Wha?"

"Now you're just being silly. It's a trench. If there aren't explosions around it, it isn't a trench; it's just a great big fortified ditch in the ground."

"Page 512," D put in helpfully.

"Anyway," Nikki said, rolling her eyes as if the concept of finding an explosion that did and didn't exist at the same time odd was the height of absurdness. "What I was trying to ask was: just what happened here?"

"Not much, actually," D said. "Once we decided that nobody was going to show up, we, in a very calm and orderly fashion with no disturbances whatsoever, took a plot hole back here. But Janella was with me, so it was thrown off course and we ended up in an encampment of fangirls."

Nikki's brow furrowed. "Oh dear. Casualties?"

"All of them—about a dozen, I think it was. I, ah, forgot to tell her the rule about not killing unless absolutely necessary. Anyway, it was fangirls, you know how they frenzy."

"Yes," Nikki said tartly, "I do."

D continued, "We found this place shortly afterward. It goes on for miles and miles; whole hosts of canons were already here. More showed up every day. I don't even know how they all found out about what was going on. I asked around, and apparently they were, eh, drawn to this place. Anyway, in other, more important news, I got this crossbow! It's got flaming arrows. I accidentally set a walrus on fire. It was awesome. Don't let the flamethrower fool you, old fashioned arson is plenty of fun, too."

Suddenly, another explosion. This one was green, but seemed to be real this time. Debris rained from the heavens, miraculously missing everybody except D, the corner of whose trench coat caught on fire. She didn't seem to notice. Aline coughed, her eyes watering.

"Oh, hell," Nikki growled, stalking in the direction of the blast. She was soon obscured by the smoke.

"Whatdid you do, George?"

"Nikki! A pleasure to see you, O most beauteous of the caretakers. What took you so long?"

"Answer the question before I reach down your throat and rip out your testicles."

"It was Fred's idea!"

"Was not! Besides, I'm George, he's Fred. Can't you remember your own name, Fred?"

Silence. Presumably, a glare to end all glares was being delivered.

"Er. We were experimenting with this Greek fire the Stoll twins gave us, that's all."

"Tell me, what is it with twins and chaos, anyway?"

"Don't ask us."

"And stop talking in unison, it's bloody annoying."

The argument continued, now part of the obligatory background noise that accompanied any war scene. D straightened suddenly and began to chew her thumbnail. "Newbface. Walk with me. I have a question."

Aline hesitated.

"I don't bite," D promised. "And I only set things on fire occasionally."

That seemed reasonable enough to Aline; she fell into step beside her.

"Have you written anything since the last time you were here?" D asked.

"Besides English essays?"

"Those don't count. Not real writing. Bullshit wrapped in words, but not writing."

Aline thought back. She hadn't, now that she thought about it. She'd had ideas. Whole truckloads of ideas, though only if the average idea took up a significant amount of space in a truck. And lots of incredibly clever little quotes that probably wouldn't have looked nearly as clever if she'd written them down. Oh yes, she had ideas—they haunted her almost as frequently as the memory of her first foray into the realm of fiction, but not once did she put pen to paper. Or finger to keyboard key, as it were. "No, nothing. Why?"

They walked in silence for a few seconds. "No reason. By the way, do you have house insurance?"

Aline blinked, a shadow passing briefly over her face. There was a conclusion on the horizon that she didn't want to arrive at. "Y—yes…?"

D nodded. "Good. I better be off now, got to find where Jasmine's gotten off to."

However, this proved to be unnecessary, as a moment later another figure rounded a bend in the trench. It was Jenna, carrying a pitcher of lemonade and a rolled up magazine. Her face and dress were slightly smudged with ash, but she was otherwise as deceivingly loveable as always. "I got that lemonade you asked for, but I couldn't find any still-beating hearts of virgins. Well, actually, I just couldn't find any virgins. Is that okay?" she asked, looking at D with wide, anxious eyes.

D took the pitcher and flipped open the magazine, nodding absentmindedly; a second later the rest of the girl's words registered. "Eh, Jessica," she said slowly. "I didn't ask for any still-beating hearts of virgins." She paused. "But then again, I guess you can never have too many."

Jenna nodded enthusiastically. "I'll search extra-extra-hard! I promise! So what were you saying before about evil laughter?"

A teenage boy, a canon presumably on guard duty judging by the binoculars, glanced up. "I wouldn't recommend it," he said. "Oh, sure, it seems like it would intimidate your enemies and relieve stress, but you'll only end up looking stupid—and possibly dead."

Aline stared at him. He was Asian, and classically handsome. He was neatly dressed, with immaculate brown hair and soft golden eyes. He was otherwise unremarkable, except for the notebook, which looked a bit—

She gasped.

"You!" she said shrilly.

He blinked. "Me?"

"Yes, you! You threatened to kill me!"

His brow furrowed. "Hm. That's odd," he said. "I don't think I've ever actually threatened to kill anybody. I just kill them."

Jenna's head snapped ninety degrees to the left. "Oooh!" she squealed. "Are you the Light Yagami? I've heard about your work. Taking over the world with such ingenuity really has to be admired. Can I have your autograph?"

He looked pained for a moment at the mention of name-writing. He was spared having to answer by the third explosion of the chapter, this time accompanied by the sound of breaking glass and a column of green flame. A moment later, Nikki stalked toward them, rubbing at a conspicuous red stain on her shirt. "The good news is we've found some ways to use Greek fire to kill people in new and inventive ways," she said, giving up on the stain and deciding that it would match the rest of her wardrobe anyway. "The bad news is a few pairs of twins are going to be out of commission for a while."

"Because of the fire?" Aline asked.

"No."

Aline tried to summon up the energy to be shocked or appalled and failed.

"Right, I've got a plan. I need to gather the fandom representatives as soon as possible, figure out how many are with us and have the representatives head the others from their worlds," said Nikki, clapping her hands together once. "So—" Her gaze landed on Light. "Hang on, what're you doing here? I didn't think you had any particularly crazy fangirls."

He sighed ponderously. "I'm not hiding from my fangirls. I'm hiding from his fangirls." He pointed viciously to L, a man of indeterminate age wearing faded jeans and a ratty old shirt, with messy black hair and a dead-set determination to give himself scoliosis.

Nikki nodded. "I see."

"I don't," Aline said flatly.

"Page 725, the Inexplicably Popular Character," D said, not looking up from her magazine.

"Oh…thanks."

"No problem, newbface."

Aline didn't bother to wonder how the book had managed to find its way back into her pocket when she had last left it in a small dark antechamber probably overrun by fangirls now. The Cliché Compendium had this to say on Inexplicably Popular Characters: 'A bewilderingly widely-loved character who may or may not have any actual appeal. While everybody is entitled to their odd tastes (just as they are entitled to be bitchslapped when they refuse to shut up about them), it is the sheer pervasiveness of this popularity that makes them an IPC. Often it is difficult to find even one person who honestly dislikes the character. In accordance with the Theory of Inverse Likeability, relative 'awesomeness' levels will wrap around the integral and become dislike in some fans. Hardcore fans are usually completely rabid and are not to be approached under any circumstances. Photographs of shrines have been found (see below). Also see: Inexplicably Popular Pairing.'

What followed was a long, finely-printed list of characters to which this applied, along with photos and brief biographies. Aline was not surprised to find that she recognized almost all of them from her first trip to the Canon Retreat Chamber. By the time she returned to the relatively-real world, Nikki had left to collect representatives, Jenna was practicing her evil laugh, D was paging through Overlord's Day, and the two canons – Light and L the IPC – had to be sent to opposite sides of the trench after they'd gotten into an argument about whose fault the yaoi was. The section of trench was otherwise empty, the roar of machine guns and explosions forming a comfortable aural backdrop.

Nothing terribly interesting happened for some time. It might have been hours if hours existed on the Hub. Aline read through the Compendium, discovering interesting things about shipper's tribal wars, some reasonably hilarious examples of purple prose, and a list of facts about the human liver. She supposed that they would just be hanging around for a while, waiting for the Big Important War Meeting (also in the Compendium, which merely said 'Self-descriptive' for its entry) to start when the crackfic ran in.

They heard it before they saw it, as a long string of unintelligible, high-pitched babble reminiscent of a five-year-old having inhaled helium and quite a lot of sugar. It was loud enough to drown out Jenna's laughing practice. (She'd moved on to experimenting with wicked cackles and malevolent chuckles.)

"Gah," Aline managed, clamping her hands over her ears. "What's that?"

"What's what?" D said, not looking up from Overlord's Day's top ten list of hilarious misuses of ominous dark cloaks.

At that point, the thing fell over the top, not breaking stride. It bumped against the opposite wall, still shrieking, and ran around in a small circle.

"Sounds like a crackfic," D said mildly. She lowered the magazine and kicked the thing solidly with one booted foot. It soared through the air, hitting the wall with a loud thump. It quivered there for a moment, then fell stickily to the floor, and lay there twitching.

No longer dashing around madly and shrieking, it was possible to get a clearer look at the thing…which really didn't help that much, as it looked like a living, three dimensional version of a child's scribbling with a quartet of stick limbs. Aline paged through the Compendium feverishly, but when she found the entry on crackfics, all she discovered was an illustration of one and the word 'Cheese'.

Jenna poked it with a stick curiously. "It's actually kinda cute," she said, cocking her head to the side. "Can I kill it?" she asked D.

"Sure, kid, knock yourself out." D rummaged with one hand in the depths of her mysterious coat pockets for several seconds and withdrew an enormous hammer that was almost taller than her and probably weighed twice as much. She tossed it at Jenna, missed, and ended up creating a large hole in the wall. Jenna didn't seem to mind, but while she was extricating it, the crackfic regained its wits and jumped up, resuming its call and running away from the girl with the manic grin and giant hammer.

"Hey, come back here!" Jenna whined, making a frustrated noise in her throat and starting after it. Both of them were soon out of sight, but the floor shook every few seconds when Jenna—hopefully—missed.

I need to get out of here right now, thought Aline, who was not particularly a fan of having her head smashed in. She began to inch toward the wall, toward escape over the top. Just when she was close enough to risk breaking out into a full run, a plot hole a nasty sienna color appeared not a foot from her face.

That was it. If she had any doubts that plot holes existed solely to inconvenience her, they were now banished.

"Hi," Aline squeaked, more out of surprise than anything else.

"Hello," Nikki said, looking around, puzzled. "So, why is the floor shaking, and where is my—never mind, I just answered my own question." She turned to wanly look at D. "You know, you could have helped with the representative-gathering."

"I could have," D agreed.

"It isn't exactly easy to get the fictional population to agree on who's the most worthy of going to the Big Important War Meeting, you know."

"I do," D agreed again. She yawned and turned a page. "Are there any other insightful truths you would like to imprint on me?"

The background drone of the crackfic intensified; it ran past, spewing inside jokes and pop-culture references as it did. Jenna was not far behind it, hammer brandished.

"Remarkable how you learn just not to ask," Nikki marveled as she seized the back of Jenna's collar. "Oi, Jen, time for the Big Important War Meeting. Murder innocent creatures later."

Jenna pouted, letting the hammer drop. "I never get to have any fun."

Aline was still formulating escape plans, but it seemed she wouldn't be getting her chance any time soon. Plot holes of every sort were beginning to appear—slowly at first, then in droves. There was a cowboy. A spaceman. A few space cowboys. A creature that seemed to be nothing but a pulsing blue orb. A giant rat. Pretty tame by anybody's standards, but more were coming.

Soon the area, which had somehow grown from a relatively small corridor to a space large enough to hold a crowd (The Cliché Compendium's entry on the Laws of Physics merely said, 'an annoying aspect of reality that is better off ignored'), was soon tightly packed with at least one canon from most of the larger worlds. Aline found herself being squeezed into what could only be described as a corner beside a man with an abnormally large cup of tea and several people with hair that put Nikki's to shame. D had not seen it fit to acknowledge the fact that anything out of the ordinary was happening, and instead was now clipping her fingernails and seeing how many people she could hit on the rebound.

Jenna stood close by and smiled. Very widely. For some reason, despite the cramped quarters, nobody stood within five feet of either of them.

At the center of this, Nikki stood silent. She would have preferred a proper headquarters, all sleek and shiny with a big round table and a giant screen displaying their symbol, but since she wasn't one of those uppity Sue-Hunters, she would just have to make do. But no matter.

The Big Important War Meeting had begun.

Somewhere in the crowd, Elrond commented to a gargoyle, "I've hosted better."