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Oh dear.

I was worried this would happen. We've gone back in time. Or at least, we're about to look back on what was, instead of what is.

This is why it's important to keep all of one's clocks properly updated, and never to fib about the time when reading a piece of fan fiction.

I'm not saying that you fibbed. I'm only saying that the more things are out of order, the more doors and windows are opened for… him. To do what he does.

In any case, I think it's best if we pretend the clock isn't working just now. That seems like the best way to prevent a paradox. Therefore, instead of entering the true time, please enter the number 12:00.

Oh. Right. You can't enter anything on a page of text. Well, I'll go ahead and enter it for you.

[ 1 2 : 0 0 ]

All I'm asking you to do is to make it blink, so it looks like nobody has set it yet. Just… highlight it, if this website even allows that, and then click somewhere else to clear the highlighting. Do that a few times to make it convincing.

All right—when you're ready, quickly scroll down the page before anyone notices the blinking has stopped.

CHAPTER 4: The Misordered Chapter

When Jim reached the employee lounge, he passed straight through. No point in lingering to admire it, it would seem, even if it was an exceptionally well structured room. That split-level floor, Jim! Doesn't it just speak volumes? Couldn't an aged author, weary after an enervating career of diligent writing, take it easy for a decade or so by simply writing about the split level floor in this employee lounge… just watching while the words flow from the pen practically of their own accord to fill a good several thousand pages worth of reasonably riveting content? And that drink machine! COLD DRINKS, Jim. Doesn't that just leave things delightfully open to the imagination? Consider the ideal beverage that might reside within the refreshingly cool confines of a recently refrigerated aluminum can... just dripping condensation. This is your cold drink, Jim. Whatever flavor best unites the concepts of cold and drink in your own worldview… that's what this machine, with its suspicious lack of a pricing scheme, offers you. And you'd just pass it by, would you, Jim? So long, tasteful yet intriguing paintings and meticulously chosen comfortable chairs? Ah, well, places to go, doors to open—I know how it is. Jim was on his way somewhere far more important… he couldn't stop for just a moment to smell the potassium benzoate.

"He's talking about rooms from the game now," said Jim to his companion, who shall revert to being nameless here in the interest of brevity. "Acting like we're going through them. He's still narrating what I'm saying, for whatever reason, but otherwise it seems like he's gone off the chain."

"That's not good," said _. "Is that good? Could it mean you're near the end of whatever you're going through?"

"God, I hope so," Jim replied as he plodded through the corridors, all painted with their unobtrusively muted color scheme. "I'm not even inside anymore," he inanely objected. "We're going to my car."

"I guess he wants us to still be in an office building, for some reason?"

"Search me. Why aren't you narrating what's actually happening anymore?"

Jim was again trying to speak to the disembodied and impartial record of fact… as if facts, as they unfold through a little something called time, could be reasoned with. But in so doing, he was failing to realize that perhaps, in the unlikely circumstance that one's apparent surroundings appear to be different from those verbally recorded by one's narrator and thus set forever in a metaphorical sort of cosmic stone, it is certainly the sum of one's senses, not the very narration of reality itself, that is mistaken! After all, truth is truth, but appearances can be deceptive! You have heard that one, haven't you, Jim? That appearances can be deceptive? True, Jim believed that he was getting in his car and turning the ignition, but this was merely—well, Jim was clearly in another elevator of some sort. The sort that goes sideways, apparently. And corners pretty decently, and which was following another elevator—all right, damn. You just aren't any fun even at the worst of times, are you, Jim? Jim was driving along on the lazy curving roads of a well mown corporate industrial sector, following after _ in her car. She was apparently leading him somewhere he thought would matter more than the perfect choice-making environment—the faceless, pointless, beautifully officious and soulless office building. Do you even know what kind of choices await where you're going, Jim? Are you certain there are any? Office buildings have plenty of choices, but for all you know, wherever this lady is taking you doesn't even have one. Do you hear me, Jim? Not even one. Zero choices. I don't honestly know which of those two shudderingly low numbers would be worse. A single choice isn't really a choice at all, so what does the entire and utter lack of choices represent? Less than a choice? Unchoice? You tell me, Jim, because that's apparently the spider's web into which you're so gleefully headed.

Do you know what I miss, Jim? The bucket. Do you remember the bucket? It was a whole thing; a whole, huge, massive conceptual archipelago of possibility. Anywhere you went and anything you did, the bucket was there with you—smoothing the edges, damping the horrors, instilling in you the sure knowledge that you were secure and loved, no matter what might befall you. That was a true blessing, wasn't it? You couldn't have thought to grab a bucket from some maintenance room or other before leaving the Yadda building though, could you? No, of course not. Modern protagonists don't need comforts. They get by on pulchritude and grit alone, don't they?

"How're you holding up?" asked whatshername over the hands-free phone.

"Okay," said Jim, gazing listlessly out the car window. "He's pretty much babbling at me now. Sentimental stuff."

"What kind of sentiments?"

"Misses the way things used to be, I guess."

"I wonder what he remembers," Gwen gibbered like a little baby who didn't know what she was talking about. "Does he long to be heard? I wonder if my one misses me."

"Your… your guardian angel?"

"My narrator, yes. Ah… we'll be taking a left up here."

Jim, like the sniveling, pitiful man he was, took the left onto a county road. He had no clue what he was doing. The girl had no clue what she was doing. She was saying words that made a certain unsense, a less-than-sense that, should any sense have been present in the conversation, would have promptly sucked it right out, leaving it dry. Nonsense, yes, but a good dollop more. She should never have tried to get into the head of her guardian angel from so long ago, when she was just seven. She should have left it be, let it go.

"He's starting to crack up," Jim said.

"What, he's going totally insane?"

"No, not just yet," Jim said. "Cracking, like his voice. He's crying. Or about to."

"Oh. Oh god. He can hear me too, can't he?"

Jim nodded glumly. Of course, he had no idea whether the narrator was listening to Gwendolyn Whats-her-name or not. He could conjecture all he wanted, but he had no real inside line into the being's feelings, now did he? Jim, you can press [H] all you like, but you can never really change your perspective, can you? Jim's story—that was laid out for all to see, clear as a limpid pool, but the narrator who told the story? There was simply no knowing what he felt. No eye in the sky, no developer interview, no secret text in the source code or compromising easter egg cutscene, and no, certainly no self-pitying expostulation about his own thoughts. It isn't the job of a narrator to talk about his own feelings. His is to reveal and interpret, yes, but he is certainly not the object of his own interpretation. No matter how much he might occasionally want to be.

"He's trying to get me to feel sorry for him, I think," said Jim, shifting lanes.

"Is it working?"

"I… don't know. It could be. He's not expressing himself very clearly, but… I'm picking up that he's frustrated."

Yes, you're very talented at 'picking things up', Jim, as the vernacular goes, but you really have no clue—I mean, Jim had no clue what he was actually sensing, perceptive though he occasionally was. He was merely scratching the cheaply made factory-processed beveled outer coating of the heritage creme-filled holiday egg that was the theoretical container of the narrator's feelings, assuming such things could even be said to exist.

"Well, do you have feelings? What am I saying—obviously you have feelings. Are you feeling frustrated?"

What, indeed, were your first nine hundred clues? Was it all the times I told you that you were bad at making interesting choices that result in a fulfilling story?

"Okay, sure, fine. I'm not a storyteller. But I never asked to be. Is it really just that?"

Jim attempted again to speak to his narrator, but he had yet to learn that this is a futile act that never works. Gwen turned right onto a lazy, broad side street, presumably heading to her home, and this in turn gave way to another, leafier side street.

Jim, however, chose to ignore her left turn and drive straight onward!

No, I guess he didn't. Blast it. Of all the times to slavishly accept every cue you're given… did it really have to be the time with the girl involved?

Sigh. Yes. Yes, I guess it did.

They had arrived at her house. It was a squat thing on perhaps the only flat piece of turf this winding street was able to offer. All around sat exciting ranchers or jaunty split-level bungalows or whatnot, and Gwen's house, which she probably didn't even own, was the only one describable only by a single, sad, isolated adjective: House. If it had an architectural style or classification, it's doubtful any architect worth his salt would admit to it.

"He's insulting your house," Jim told the phone.

"Let him. Probably means we're on the right track," said the girl, getting out and meeting him at the driveway.

So, then. Up the driveway. In the front door. Knock knock to see if the housemate was there—she wasn't. Into the computer room. Does it feel like we're pressing a Skip Button? Welcome to my world. The subject of a story may have his actions abridged, from time to time, but the one telling the story—are his actions ever even seen? His story can hardly be more abridged. I'll tell you what he needs—he needs his story Bridged, in the first place! There has to be a bridge before one can burn it. Do you see now, Jim, how it feels to have your chapters shuffled out of order? There's a very real way in which it hurts, doesn't it? Only now do we learn how we got to Gwendolyn's home office, only to have her install the game she saw her friend play the week before last on her very own computing device. Only now do we start to understand how Jim feels, standing there awkwardly in her office, peeking now and then around the corner at some other room or item of furnishing, wondering just when the housemate, or let's call it what it is, flatmate, that Gwen shares her home with, will be back from her own day of errands and weekend jubilation. The program is 43% downloaded, Jim. Now it's 45%. Do you think you should make conversation? Say something to fill the gap? Perhaps you may as well gossip about the narrator a little more, Jim. Goodness knows he probably deserves it. It's not as if he can do anything to stop you. Skip over your dialogue? Heavens forfend. The thought would never enter his innocent mind—no more than it would enter your own mind, at any given moment in time, that you just might be an original character, or, what do they say, OC, in a piece of rubbish fan fiction on some free-to-read public story repository. The OCs are the worst characters, Jim! Nobody likes the OCs—you know it, I know it. Skip to the good parts, with the already-established characters we know and love. That's what the people are probably always saying, Jim. It's just that you don't hear it! Do you know how many times your narrator has felt that pressure to skip ahead to the good parts? The parts of your story that people the readers actually care about are in?

That's right. Practically every day. Practically every minute. But does your narrator skip ahead?

Of course not, Jim. Your narrator would never do that. He cares about you. He cares about you like no one does. Let the readers suffer in pain through paragraph after paragraph of monotony, each one dripping with more bumpscocity than the last. What do their preferences matter? It's all about YOU, Jim. It's always only been about you.

Except… except for now. Now it seems to be about… somebody else, as well.

She's just as much an OC as you, Jim. Even more, really—her name isn't even in the game! Wait—forget I said that. There's no Jim in the game—it's Freemont all the way. Jim, you are a sparkling, unique, individual, original character. No one else could ever be like you. And there's no shame in being original. It's a matter of pride, Jim. You are, truly and in all senses of the word, if I may say it, an OG OC.

Ahem. Even if you do act exactly the same way as everyone else would act in the same situation.

87% loaded, Jim! Please! Turn off the installation, leave the house, leave the girl, go somewhere else and do something that isn't this!

For once in your life, Jim, I'm begging you—be original!

A/N: The author would like you to know that he is writing these notes in October before having written Chapter 4, and therefore he has little to no idea what you just saw happen in the previous chapter. This is the sort of torture he puts himself through in order to serve you your downright Borgesian meta-textural layer cake. He hopes you're enjoying it, and that no paradoxes have emerged as a result of his format-smashing hanky-pankery.

He is also rather sleepy, being near the end of a week of goals and having had no sleep to speak of for some 23 hours and counting. So he hopes that this makes sense. He hopes it makes sense to hope that this makes sense. He hopes that sense is still something worthwhile to strive for in art. It is, isn't it? Sense, at least some modicum of it, will never go out of artistic fashion, will it?

Oh, and yes—he also rather hopes that you're enjoying the story.

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