Worlds Apart

by James Riley

  For a moment, she brought to mind what things were like when she was half-fictional, when her whole life had been miserable because of one small part of her, the part that forced her to hide everything that she liked and made her special, just so she wouldn’t get into trouble. And because of that, look how long it’d taken her to find her father. All those years he’d been held by Nobody, when she could have saved him, if only she hadn’t let that horrible part of her hold her back for so long!

  Almost without meaning to, she focused in on her normal, nonfictional self, hatred flooding her brain. Yes, Nobody separating the worlds was a bad thing, but every day without that part of her was a blessing—

  “You did it!” Kiel said, clapping her on the shoulder. “See? I knew you could.”

  Bethany opened her eyes to discover she was a whole lot shorter. “I did?” she asked, looking around. “See? I knew I could!” She laughed, covering her confusion.

  It didn’t make sense. None of this did. She’d just been thinking about her nonfictional self, and suddenly she was back to normal.

  So wait a second. What if this wasn’t related to her superpowers or Quanterium or anything so much as Nobody separating her? What if now that she was completely fictional, she could rewrite herself, just like Nobody could? He’d mentioned that there was no way she could beat him without rewriting. A grin spread across her face.

  Well, look who learned how to do it on her own, Nobody.

  “Are you okay?” Kiel asked, his hand still on her shoulder. “You’re smiling creepily.”

  She turned to him and laughed. “I think I figured it out. You might want to back up, ’cause I’m about to do something awesome.”

  He did, and Bethany concentrated on one part of herself, just her arm. She remembered how her old powers changed her body into words when jumping into books, so she imagined her arm as literal words instead of skin and bone.

  And then, in her mind, she rewrote those words, changing them to become a long, superstrong arm.

  As she watched, her arm grew out to twice its usual length, bulging with muscles.

  “Um, didn’t you just fix that?” Kiel asked.

  “I’ve got it!” Bethany said, closing her eyes. She rewrote herself into being able to fly, and just like that, enormous butterfly wings sprouted on her back. With a joyful cry, she took to the air, her eyes wide with delight. “Are you seeing this? How amazing is it?”

  “It’s like magic without the spells,” Kiel said, staring at her in awe. “But are you sure this is okay? This seems really similar to what happened here to Quanterium and the Science Police. Even your dad switched into different versions of himself, right? What if you disappear too? Maybe it’s not safe.”

  Bethany laughed. “Not safe? That’s hilarious coming from Kiel Gnomenfoot. Watch this.” She landed back on the ground, and her wings disappeared, only for her head to rise into the air, pushing up from a long, green, scaly neck. Her arms moved forward on her body as they grew larger, and her hands transformed into enormous, scaly paws. A moment later, she snarled down at her friend as a dragon. “Now, little magician, think you’ve got what it takes to defeat me?” she growled, then winked at him.

  Kiel didn’t wink back, though. Instead, he looked worried. “Beth, this is fun, but it really does seem too coincidental, you discovering new powers as everything on Quanterium falls apart. We should get back to figuring this out instead of just playing around.”

  “You’re the one who told me to be more fictional!” she growled through her dragon teeth. “There’s nothing more fictional than rewriting yourself. Why don’t you try it? Maybe you could learn magic again!”

  “I’m fine without it,” Kiel told her, smiling slightly as he shrugged. “I’m also fine with you as you are too, by the way. Now, why don’t you turn back to yourself, and we’ll go find Charm and find a way to fix Quanterium and save your father?”

  She rolled her eyes, then tried to turn back to her normal self, only it wasn’t easy, as a thousand more fun ideas passed through her mind. She frowned and concentrated harder, remembering her worrying, awful, nonfictional self and what it felt like to hate everything awesome.

  Immediately her body morphed back into its normal shape. Apparently all it took was picturing herself as the worst, most boring version of herself, and she instantly became normal again. Disturbing, but at least it worked.

  She turned back to Kiel, thrilled with her newfound knowledge. “You’re not getting it. If we figure this out, we’ll be able to do anything. Maybe I’ll learn magic! If I can rewrite myself, we don’t even need Charm. I’ll be able to fix everything on my own. Watch!” She concentrated, rewriting herself into someone who knew magical spells, then held out a hand. “Fireball, LAUNCH!”

  Nothing happened.

  “Huh,” she said, then rewrote herself into a lava monster that could shoot fireballs from her hand. Her feet began to burn through the rubble beneath her, but this time, she successfully launched a ball of magma from her hand. “Ah, there it is!”

  “Beth, you’re going to burn the science center down!” Kiel shouted, leaping away from her and the heat she radiated. “What’s left of it, anyway.”

  Reluctantly, she shifted into a water elemental and put out the fire, then sadly imagined her nonfictional self and reverted back to her lame normal body. “When did you get so boring?” she said, glaring at him. “You used to be the one jumping into danger without a second thought!”

  “I’m still that person,” Kiel said, looking relieved now. “But I also took a long time to figure out who I wanted to be, at least before Nobody captured me. There’s no challenge to life if you can change into whatever you want, Beth. I learned that when I lost my magic. Suddenly everything was harder, but now things actually mean something when I succeed at them.” He half grinned. “Which I do all the time, obviously.”

  She rolled her eyes. “So, what, you think rewriting yourself is cheating or something? That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Magic has consequences,” Kiel said. “Even if you don’t see them at first. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.”

  “If you tell me that with great power comes great responsibility, I’m going to punch you,” Bethany told him. “And look, I’m fine. So what’s the problem?”

  He stared at her for a second. “What happened to your cape?”

  Huh? Why was he changing the subject? “It’s right here, what do you . . .” She felt around to her back, only to have a cold shiver go through her.

  There was nothing there. Her cape was gone.

  Kiel reached around and pulled a small bit of fabric off of her back, then held it out to her. “This is what I meant. Consequences.”

  Bethany couldn’t think of a thing to say, staring at the few inches of what had once been her Twilight Girl cape as it slowly dissolved in front of her.

  CHAPTER 19

  You thought you could trick me?! ” a voice shouted in the darkness.

  Owen opened his eyes slowly, feeling more normal than he had in months. Not only were ideas and questions pouring into his mind like a steady rain, but it was almost as if he could suddenly see again after being blind. The whole world seemed different, less horrible and more hopeful.

  And it all came down to one thing: He could imagine again!

  He almost shouted in joy, before realizing there was an enormous ray gun aimed right at his nose, humming with terrible power. The ray gun was easily half the size of Dr. Verity, who seemed to be having trouble holding it.

  Owen swallowed hard, noticing for the first time a faint pain in his ribs. “Oh, um, hi. Sorry, I was distracted for a second. Can you repeat whatever you said?”

  “How could you think I wouldn’t recognize the heart I gave you?” Dr. Verity shouted, leaning closer until the ray gun’s multiple barrels were just inches from Owen’s face. “I implanted it in you! Of course I would know my own handiwork. You thought that I, the most brilliant scientist
who ever lived, wouldn’t know upon seeing your heart that you must be Kiel Gnomenfoot in disguise?!”

  Owen blinked several times in a row. Um, uh-oh. Things seemed to have taken a bad turn while he was unconscious. He looked down and saw the faintest hint of a scar running down his sternum. “Wait, you opened me up?” he shouted. The doctor’s threat to take his heart came rushing back, and he almost dry heaved.

  Dr. Verity had been inside his chest? Again?

  “You don’t get to be indignant with me, magician!” Dr. Verity roared, then swept the ray gun over the table next to Owen, sending instruments of all kinds crashing to the floor. “It wasn’t enough to leave me to die in the Source of Magic vault. No, you have to follow me to this pathetic, science-draining world too? I won’t have it!”

  Owen’s mind raced with options, and he couldn’t help but delight in it, even as he feared that Dr. Verity would disintegrate him at any moment. Denying he was Kiel Gnomenfoot, while ironically the truth, didn’t sound like it’d accomplish much. Attacking the man wasn’t going to do much with that ray gun so close. And if Owen tried using his time powers, they could kill him.

  So what if he pretended to be Kiel again? That opened up some possibilities.

  “You’ve found me out, you, um, evil scientist,” Owen said, glaring at the man. “Yes, I did return here to defeat you. But now you’ve got me at your mercy, so you might as well tell me all your plans, like how you intend to get back to the fictional world!”

  “I should have let your little robotic heart die, like everything from our world does here,” Dr. Verity continued, his eyes filled with rage. “But then I wouldn’t be able to turn you into a mindless zombie and force you to first kill the Magister, then take on my real enemy, the one who exiled me here. So I’m resisting killing you for now. But don’t test me!” Abruptly, the anger seemed to disappear, and he grinned. “By the way, you’re welcome for fixing your heart, Kiel. It should last another few years in this world, even though it’d tick on for a thousand years back on Quanterium.”

  Wait, that was a lot of new information. Verity had fixed his heart? Could that have brought back his imagination? It made sense, since the doctor must have used fictional parts to repair a fictional heart.

  Except he’d already had a fictional heart, even before it broke using his powers. And he’d lost his imagination as soon as Nobody separated the worlds. Why had it stopped giving him his imagination, then? Did it have something to do with the last bit Dr. Verity had said? “My heart doesn’t work as well here? Why not? What’s wrong with it?”

  “Nothing works correctly in this world!” Verity roared, the anger quickly resurfacing. He screamed loudly and shot his ray gun through a blinking machine to Owen’s side, blowing it apart. “Nothing Quanterian, at least! It all slowly breaks apart, which should be impossible. But here, nothing’s impossible, apparently!” He paused, raising a finger to his lips as the rage seemed to be replaced by an epiphany. “Maybe I should leave you here so it breaks again. Failed by the only science you’ve ever relied upon! That’d be poetic.” He grinned widely, then spat in disgust, right on Owen’s foot. “I can’t believe a clone of mine would become so enamored with that foul magic. It’s enough to make me want to just end this farce right here and now!”

  If fictional things gradually broke down in the nonfictional world, then Owen might not have his imagination back for long. He’d have to use it as best he could while he had the chance. And that meant getting all the information he could from Dr. Verity at the moment.

  “Magic just makes more sense,” Owen said. “Besides, it defeated you, didn’t it? That must have hurt a lot, considering you’re trying to get back to the fictional world for revenge. How exactly are you doing that again?”

  “Magic didn’t defeat me!” Dr. Verity shouted, banging his ray gun on the now-empty table. “Kiel, you are my clone. Anything you did is all because of me! Everything that happened had to have been planned from the start. My genius allows for nothing less!”

  His eye on the ray gun, Owen wondered if he was maybe playing with fire here. Maybe he should back it up a bit? “How did you get out of the Source of Magic? I thought the vault couldn’t be teleported in or out of, and you set off that bomb. It must have been a pretty smart plan if I couldn’t stop you, honestly.”

  “Because I foresee all, know all!” Dr. Verity roared, glaring at Owen. “I had my escape in place from the start!”

  Owen gave him a disbelieving look. “I’m not sure I buy that. Even you couldn’t have gotten out all on your own. You probably had help, right? From your Science Police or something?”

  Dr. Verity blushed a bit, then turned away and whispered something Owen couldn’t hear.

  “What was that again?”

  “I said that I, uh, arranged to be removed from the vault at the last moment by a faceless pile of human-shaped mush,” Dr. Verity said, glaring back over his shoulder. “Obviously I knew that only one with powers like his could have saved me, or I’d never have allowed you to close the vault door with me in it. I must have foreseen it. There could be no other reason!”

  Oh, wow. Nobody rescued Dr. Verity? Sure, he was probably the only one who could have. But why would he do that? “What did this, um, faceless pile of mush say?” Owen said, sitting up on the table. Nearby, a few Science Police robots whirred their heads around to face him and aimed their laser rifles at him, an unsubtle warning not to move any farther.

  “He claimed some ridiculousness about me being written like this, to be some sort of villain,” Dr. Verity said, sneering. “As if my all-encompassing intelligence could ever be constrained by such quaint ethical constraints as good or evil. No one could craft the perfection that is Dr. Verity. I am all-knowing, I am all-powerful, and I am all-science!”

  “So he just . . . let you go?”

  The mad scientist sighed dramatically. “No, he didn’t just ‘let me go,’ you simpleton. When I proved his intellectual superior (and perhaps also threatened to tear him down to his component atoms), he sent me here.” Dr. Verity made a disgusted face. “He pretended to want me to see proof of his impossible claim, that this was a nonfictional world to our fictional reality, and from here, so-called writers invented our clearly superior, fictional universes.” He looked around with a haughty sniff. “The very idea!”

  “Why did you stay here, then? I mean, you said you had a way back, didn’t you?” This was going better than Owen could have expected. All he had to do was make sure he didn’t anger Verity too much, or he’d be disintegrated.

  “I don’t have to answer your questions!” Dr. Verity shouted, bringing his ray gun back around again, and Owen winced, realizing he might have just crossed that line. But then Verity seemed to realize he couldn’t continue his story if he didn’t, and he relaxed a bit. “But if you must know, the featureless monster suggested to me that I rewrite myself into a quote better person unquote. Obviously I couldn’t let that insult go unanswered, so I destroyed him!”

  Owen’s eyes shot wide open. “You did? But . . . but when?”

  Dr. Verity rolled his eyes. “Well, mostly destroyed him. In that I blew him up, and then he reformed a moment later and suggested I stay here as a learning experience. As if Dr. Verity could learn anything from anyone, let alone a world such as this!” He leaned in closer, his eyes flashing with madness. “No, instead, I’d prove that Nobody wrong. If he thought he had been controlled by the nonfictional idiots around here, then I’d become their masters. I decided to take charge of this world and prove once and for all that Dr. Verity is superior to anyone, anywhere, in any reality!”

  Owen flinched as spittle flicked on him. If what he said was true, Dr. Verity taking over things here explained some of what was going on. Certainly how fascist everything had gotten. But how could the world just let him do it? “I don’t know,” Owen said carefully. “The people here seem to hate all fictionals. Why would they have let you take charge?”

  “Who do you think made
them hate fictionals?” Dr. Verity shouted. “Shortly after I arrived, I set out to determine the psychological makeup of this planet’s people, in order to most conveniently rule them. What I discovered was not only were they hideously behind in technology, but the reason for that seemed to be a complete lack of any creative imagination. With that knowledge, it was easy to use my overwhelming inventiveness to provide the old rulers with all the technology they could use in exchange for power.”

  “Like hover shuttles?”

  Verity rolled his eyes. “Child’s play. I’m referring to weapons, you clod! These nonfictionals live within arbitrary borders and fear anyone from the other side. They couldn’t get enough of the weapons I provided. Soon I didn’t even need to ask for authority . . . they freely gave it! And then, when fictional people began appearing, I was in a position to further stoke their fears and make sure that instead of seeing the fictionals as helpless refugees, they believed them to be an invasion force!”

  Owen stared wide-eyed at the scientist. Kara had been right all along. Losing their imagination had made nonfictional people more selfish, even paranoid toward one another.

  But that didn’t explain where the fictional people came from. “So what was the invasion?” Owen asked. “Who invaded?”

  “That was the best part!” Verity screamed. “It was my old people, the Quanterians. They managed to destroy their world somehow, and then sought refuge here!” He clapped his hands and danced around Owen gleefully. “Can you even imagine? A few months without me and their home planet gets destroyed, I’m told. It still makes me laugh!”

  What? Quanterium was destroyed? “What happened to the planet?”

  Dr. Verity looked left and right, like he wanted to be sure no one could overhear. “I’m not going to tell you exactly what they built,” he said, then pulled a smaller ray gun out of his lab coat. “But let’s just say that I . . . improved upon it.” He patted the ray gun lovingly. “And now it’s the perfect weapon for when I see that nebulous waste of a faceless space.”