The elevator wheezed like it had opinions about my life choices.
With one final existential sigh, it deposited us into what I can only describe as a multiverse hoarder's basement. Dim lighting. Dust motes the size of regrets. And ambiance that screamed: abandoned plotline with mild haunting.
> ⚠️ [ARCHETYPE STABILITY: COMPROMISED]
Cool. Just what I needed. Emotional instability with theme music.
Captain Rejecta stepped out like she still thought capes meant something. She swept an arm wide, gesturing at the mess of glowing trope debris and twitching narrative threads.
"Welcome," she announced, "to the Museum of Maybes."
I tripped over a crate labeled:
> "VERSION 2 PROTAGONIST DRAFTS – EMO-HEAVY. HANDLE WITH THERAPY."
Inside, something groaned, softly and unconvincingly.
This place was a disaster. No—correction. It was a disaster with lore.
Floating trope nodes bobbed through the air like mood lighting from a fanfiction rave. Dialogue fragments blinked on and off like haunted thought bubbles. One fizzled past my head muttering:
> "The Chosen One was—wait, no—maybe her cousin—wait, is this a romance arc now?"
Hana made a sound like she'd just discovered a limited-edition magical girl transformation gif pack.
"Oh my god," she breathed. "This place is so aesthetically unstable."
She pointed at a twitching biography stuck between formatting modes. It kept switching between bold italics and Comic Sans.
> "Jasper D. Moonshadow – Brooding Assassin / Corporate Intern / Magical Raccoon Prince?"
"Is that...your type?" I asked without looking at her.
"Maybe," she replied with zero shame.
Ezra didn't say anything. His jaw was tight. His hands were fists. He looked like he wanted to break something but couldn't decide what deserved it most.
Captain Rejecta was already monologuing again.
"This is where the system stores what it can't control. Prototypes. Rewrites. Characters that don't test well. Arcs that go rogue."
Bob the ex-Tutorial NPC kicked over a crate labeled "Side Characters Who Got Too Popular." It growled at him.
"I think I saw myself in here once," he muttered. "Or maybe I dreamed it. I don't know. The v2 patch erased my therapist."
Zara drifted by like the ghost of a Pinterest board—her horns glitching through genres, her cloak static-blending between fantasy royal and space-witch.
I didn't move.
Didn't speak.
Because somehow, the vibe of this place was familiar.
Not the aesthetics. The feeling.
Like being the draft nobody finished.
Like the System had once looked at you and gone: "Pass."
The elevator behind us clanked shut with finality. A glitchy UI cursor popped up, shrugged at me, and exploded in a shower of corrupted dialogue options.
We were in.
Welcome to the junkyard of destiny.
Where arcs go to die and tropes come to overstay their welcome.
I didn't mean to wander.
One second I was judging a pile of rejected magical girl wands (sparkly, broken, and weirdly judgmental), and the next… I felt it.
That buzz. Low and mean and wrong. Like a plot thread I wasn't supposed to pull.
A flickering glow called from between two crates labeled "Redemption Templates: Discontinued" and "Villain Monologues – Unused."
It was a terminal. Half-lit. Rusted at the base like even the metaphor didn't want to work anymore. The screen pulsed once—then booted up with a sound that could only be described as "theme music gone sour."
The UI blinked to life.
> [LOADING: VILLAIN UPGRADE TREE – SUBJECT: LEO]
[WARNING: FILE INTEGRITY COMPROMISED / MORAL ALIGNMENT UNCERTAIN]
Cool. So, Tuesday.
I stared.
And the tree stared back.
Each branch was wrong. Glitched. Beautiful in the way train wrecks are beautiful if you're not inside them.
Tier 1:
🔹 Cosmic Tragedy Catalyst
> "Convert existential failure into passive AoE despair."
Tier 2:
🔹 Glorified Plot Hole
> "Become the exception to every rule. Including gravity, morality, and logic."
Tier 3:
🔹 Genre-Level Mass Disruption
> "Cause multiversal tonal dissonance. Bonus: sarcastic echo aura."
I scrolled further.
The final perk tier just said:
> "[UNLOCKS: ???] – You'll wish you hadn't."
The screen pulsed again. A message appeared.
> ⚙️ [INSTALL RETROACTIVELY?]
[Y/N]
[WARNING: EXISTENCE MAY BECOME…INTERESTING]
I didn't touch it.
Didn't even breathe.
Because for a second—just one—it tempted me.
Not because I wanted power. Not really.
But because finally, finally, something in this twisted, glitch-ridden story recognized I wasn't a placeholder. That maybe I could've mattered.
Maybe I could've burned brighter than their stupid, shiny golden-boy hero templates.
I flexed my fingers. Felt the cursor hover near the "Yes."
And then I said it.
Quiet. Flat. Final.
> "If I have to download meaning, it's not mine."
The screen glitched.
Once.
Twice.
Then spat out one last message:
> [POTENTIAL: WASTED / UNSTABLE / INTERESTING]
It powered down with a whine like disappointment.
I stared at my reflection in the black screen. It stared back.
Still me.
Still broken.
Still here.
---
Ezra didn't ask to see the file.
But Zara handed it to him anyway.
No words. Just a look—level, unreadable—and the thick, data-laced folder etched with D.A.R.D.'s signature and a flickering watermark that read: "HIGH PRIORITY CONFLICT."
The moment his fingers touched the file, the terminal beside them hummed to life.
A holographic timeline unfolded.
Two branches.
One labeled "Ezra Drake: Unmarketable"
The other: "Aurelius Dawn: Approved Protagonist v3.9"
Then a third.
A possibility.
Ezra Drake, center stage. Aurelius gone. Deleted like a redundant paragraph.
The UI chimed, clinical as ever.
> [CONFLICT RESOLUTION OPTION: REMOVE COMPETITOR]
[METHOD: NARRATIVE OVERWRITE / COSMIC DELETION]
Ezra's jaw locked.
He stared at the option like it was daring him.
Zara watched him with that same unsettling stillness—part curiosity, part test. Behind them, the archive groaned, like the walls themselves were uncomfortable with the silence.
Then came Rejecta. Voice quiet. Heavy.
> "Would it be so wrong?"
Ezra didn't answer right away.
He just looked at the glowing projection of Aurelius Dawn—clean, righteous, impossibly perfect. The kind of hero story that came pre-packaged with theme music and a full merchandise line.
The kind of story he was never allowed to have.
Ezra's fingers curled.
He didn't move.
Then, quietly—so quiet it almost wasn't heard—he spoke.
> "So I erase a golden boy… to get back what I earned?"
The terminal pulsed. Waiting.
Rejecta tilted her head. "If the system stole it from you, maybe it was never his."
Ezra nodded slowly. As if agreeing.
Then snapped the file shut.
> "Yeah. That's the problem."
He turned.
> "It'd be easy."
And he walked away.
Not fast. Not dramatic.
Just quiet. Solid. Controlled.
But something in his posture had cracked.
He didn't stop walking until he was out of the room.
Didn't look back.
But his shadow stretched long behind him.
And it shook.
---
Hana didn't mean to stray.
One moment, she was chasing a glitching butterfly that looked vaguely like her favorite magical girl mascot having a breakdown. The next, she was alone—wandering between cracked concept art and twitching lore scrolls that pulsed with half-forgotten dreams.
The hallway was quiet.
Too quiet.
Which, for Hana, usually meant something was about to explode or confess deep emotional trauma. Possibly both.
Then she saw it: the mirror.
Tall. Gold-framed. Flickering around the edges like it couldn't decide what genre it belonged to.
A placard beside it read:
> "What If: Narrative Fork Simulator – Beta Build (Unstable)"
Hana blinked.
The mirror blinked back.
And then it showed her.
Her—but not.
This version had perfect bangs. A confident laugh. A glitter filter that seemed permanent. She was radiant in a way Hana had never been without several layers of coping mechanisms and possibly a chainsaw.
Mirror-Hana wore a pristine uniform. Held court in the school hallway like a beloved NPC. She sparkled when she smiled.
> "You didn't have to crash your whole life to matter, you know," Mirror-Hana said, head tilted just so. "Some of us find our story without impact trauma."
The real Hana stared.
Didn't laugh.
Didn't quip.
Didn't even breathe.
Then—without a word—she clenched her jaw, stepped forward, and punched the mirror.
Hard.
The glass fractured in a satisfying, melodramatic spray. Shards scattered across the archive floor, catching flickers of other possible versions—each one vanishing on contact with the air.
From the shadows behind a broken bard statue, Jaxxx the Bard emerged with a theatrical gasp.
He clapped once. Slowly.
> "Symbolism," he whispered. "Delicious."
Hana didn't reply.
Just stared at the cracked frame. Her knuckles were bleeding.
For a moment, all she could see were the fragments—bits of a girl she once wanted to be. Before the truck. Before the glitch. Before the system rewrote her pain into someone else's punchline.
She turned.
Started walking.
Didn't speak again until she found Leo and Ezra by a broken villain console.
> "I used to dream about being her," she said, voice barely above a breath.
No one answered. Not out loud.
Ezra gave her a look. One of those heavy, wordless ones that meant I get it without claiming to understand.
I just stood there, pretending not to feel the fracture running through the room. Through us.
Then the damn ceiling lit up.
The archive groaned as a corrupted constellation unfolded overhead—throbbing wires of lore, lore, and more lore, all glitching together like someone tried to patch three updates at once and forgot to read the changelog.
And there it was.
The center.
The beating, bleeding heart of everything:
> The Narrative Engine.
Zara didn't dramatize it. She just pointed.
> "That's where D.A.R.D. decides who gets to matter."
The map zoomed in. Not gently.
It honed in on the core: a jagged, flickering structure buried so deep in the grid it looked like a plot hole someone tried to fill with SEO buzzwords.
> "It assigns arcs," she said. "Based on archetype balance, emotional yield, narrative saturation."
I blinked. "Did you just say I've been living in a focus-tested redemption funnel?"
The UI chimed in, like a dog hearing its name mid-murder documentary:
> [ARC ASSIGNMENT CRITERIA: MARKET SATURATION / ARCHETYPE DIVERSITY QUOTA / EMOTIONAL ROI]
> [SUBJECT: LEO // STATUS: NULL]
[ERROR: UNTRACKABLE NARRATIVE INSTANCE]
[PREDICTABILITY INDEX: N/A]
[RELEVANCE: ESCALATING]
They all turned to look at me.
I did the classic "look behind me" maneuver, just in case there was a different existential mistake standing nearby.
Nope. Still me.
I raised a hand. "Okay, so just to recap: I'm a glitch. A narrative freeloader. A protagonist typo with no story rights and increasing relevance."
Captain Rejecta didn't blink. "You weren't chosen. You weren't forecasted. That makes you dangerous."
"Well, it also makes me tired."
Zara stepped closer to the map. She pointed to a pulsing line—a thread of corrupted plot stretching from our world toward the Engine.
> "You're a drift instance," she said. "Your arc wasn't assigned. It emerged. Organically."
Bob chimed in from the crate he'd nested in.
> "Spontaneous narrative self-assembly. Unlicensed storytelling. Illegal, technically."
I groaned. "So I'm contraband?"
Ezra stepped forward.
His voice was quieter than usual. Which for him meant emotionally nuclear.
> "Then we break it."
I turned.
"No, no, don't you 'break it' me right now."
> "It assigns the stories. It decides who gets erased. We storm the Engine."
"And what? Uninstall the narrative economy?"
Hana stepped between us, arms folded. Still shaky. Still sharp.
> "Do we even survive something like that?"
Ezra didn't answer.
Of course he didn't.
Because Ezra Drake doesn't deal in survival. He deals in retribution.
I took a slow breath.
The UI flickered in the corner of my eye.
> [NEW OBJECTIVE: STORM THE NARRATIVE ENGINE]
[WARNING: CANON UNSTABLE // EMOTIONAL FALLOUT LIKELY]
[RECOMMENDED PARTY SIZE: WHOEVER'S LEFT]
I stared up at the map, glitching like it was about to apologize.
Or explode.
And I said the only thing that made sense.
"We're gonna piss off God,"
And apparently, God doesn't like delays.
Because right then, the UI in my vision froze mid-snark. A hiccup. Then a hard lock—like someone had slammed the emergency brake on reality.
No ambient glitch static. No system jokes. Just a flat silence that felt... final.
[CANON THREAD STABILITY: COMPROMISED] [SPOOLING: ADMIN RESPONSE] [AUTHORITY OVERRIDE IN PROGRESS]
My UI flickered. Then choked out one last warning:
⚠️ [CANON BREACH DETECTED] [DEPLOYING: GENRE WARDEN]
Oh no.
The lights dimmed. The archive itself flinched. Tropes curled in on themselves like burned film.
Something stepped through the collapse.
Tall. Clean. Unimpressed.
Cloaked in gleaming archetypes, every line of their outfit cut from the spine of a bestselling genre. A sword strapped across their back hummed with pure narrative authority.
Their voice? It didn't echo. It overwrote.
"YOU," they said, "HAVE EXCEEDED YOUR NARRATIVE PERMISSIONS."
The system groaned under the weight of those words.
Behind them, banners unfurled in glitchless symmetry: High Fantasy. Cyberpunk Noir. Heroic Coming-of-Age. All spotless. All enforced.
I didn't breathe.
Ezra didn't blink.
Hana leaned closer to me and whispered, "That's... that's the Warden, right?"
I whispered back, "That's a lawsuit in a cape."
The Warden stepped forward. The floor corrected itself beneath their feet. Genre around them stopped glitching. Stopped daring.
[SYSTEM LOCKDOWN INITIATED] [ARCHIVE SECTOR 7.5: COLLAPSING] [EVACUATION: STRONGLY ENCOURAGED (LOL GOOD LUCK)]
Reality buckled.
Map threads snapped like live wires. A lore tome caught fire.
The Warden raised one hand—gloved in Canon Compliance—and pointed it straight at us.
"CANON SHALL BE RESTORED."
And the world started coming down.