by S. G. Wilson
I’d been expecting a thick wooden door like the kind that led to a dungeon or a dangerous tavern. What I got was the standard, boring glass door of a modern office building, complete with bland stainless-steel trim.
The door didn’t even creak when we opened it. All was silent save for the MeMinder X: “This is not a good deed.”
“Yeah,” I told the watch. “What else is new?”
We walked into Me Corp. to find Hollywood sprawled on a sofa in the lobby, eating from a bowl of Minotaur Munch mini bars perched on his stomach. Flakes of chocolate and caramel had wedged into the links of the chain mail armor he wore.
Hollywood looked even more dumbstruck than usual. “Gee whillikers, guys, if you’ll pardon my French!”
He leapt to his feet and started in for a hug. Then he noticed Meticulous. He tugged on the sword at his side, but it wouldn’t come out. After a few more tries, the entire sword belt popped open and the whole shebang clattered to the floor. “Fiddlesticks!” He hurled the candy bar at Meticulous instead.
Meticulous caught the treat with one hand. It would have missed him anyway.
Hollywood stamped his booted foot. “What’s he doing here?”
“Trust me, we can hardly believe it’s him either,” I said. “But we’re more or less stuck with each other.”
Meticulous read the nutrition information on the bar wrapper, not bothering to look up. “Hello, assistant.”
“Gosh darnit, hello yourself!” said Hollywood. “And I’m not your assistant anymore!”
“Right, right, you’re a reality star now,” said Meticulous. “So tell me, Chosen One, where’s None of Me? Have you challenged the so-called Dark Lord to the big climactic match your viewers want to see?”
Hollywood grabbed another Minotaur Munch bar from the bowl. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been waiting here to build some suspense for my viewers. I don’t want to rush the big finale.”
“In other words, the elevator’s locked and you can’t find the stairs to take you to the top floors so you can face your adversary,” said Meticulous. “So much for the big finale.”
Hollywood fell back into the sofa and draped his forearm over his eyes as if acting out a Shakespearean death scene. “Fudge! This is bad. This is really bad. My reputation is ruined! I’ll never work in this town, or on this Earth, again!”
If I didn’t snap Hollywood out of this, he’d be wallowing in melodrama all day. “Well, you were clever to make it this far,” I said. “How did you get into the building, anyway?”
Hollywood peeked at me from under his arm. “Oh, that. When I first came out here a few days ago, I circled all around the building, trying to figure out a way in. Then I had to relieve myself, if you know what I mean.”
“Take a wee?” asked Meticulous.
Hollywood cringed. “Please don’t use that language. Anyway, that’s when I found out the vines don’t like urine.” He said it like a bad word, which, on his Earth, it might very well have been.
“You peed your way to the entrance?!” I asked. “That’s awesome!”
His face went red. “I’d had a lot of Fairy Fountain Soda that day. Fairy Fountain is one of the show’s sponsors. Or they were. They’ll be sure to pull their advertising now. My career is ruined!”
“Why should you care?” said Meticulous. “It’s not your Earth.”
Hollywood tossed his Minotaur Munch wrapper at a wastebasket. He missed. “I’m always pigeonholed as the comic relief. For once I wanted a dramatic role I could really sink my teeth into.”
Meticulous pointed to a nearly full wastebasket of wrappers. “And in the end, all you’ve sunk your teeth into are these bars.”
That didn’t help Hollywood’s mood, so I steered the conversation toward our mission to fix the Rip, with a rundown of everything that had happened to us so far. It took his mind off his problems, and soon enough, Hollywood was back to himself with such probing, insightful questions as, “What were the Mes at Me HQ wearing?” and “What products does Prez use in his hair?”
Meticulous, exasperated, marched over to the elevator. “Enough of this! We need to find a way upstairs!” He popped open the elevator control panel but looked confused by what he found inside. “What?! No wires? Motor, can you make sense of this? There’s a bunch of…little people running around down there.”
“It’s an imp engine!” Excited, Motor pulled from his bag a small metal tin labeled Satyr Sprinkles and dumped a stream of rainbow candy into the panel. “You can usually bribe them back to work with sugar.”
“And then what?” asked Hollywood. “We take on None of Me by ourselves? You guys can’t fizz, and Motor and I have always been useless in a fight.”
“Well, remember, Twig and his parents don’t think None of Me is bad,” I said.
“Yeah, but they’re Twig and his parents,” said Hollywood. “Of course they’re gonna say nice things. Too bad we don’t have Resist with us. She could take him on.”
“When was the last you heard from her?” I asked.
“Like never?”
“We’ll look for her after this,” I said. “No Me gets left behind.”
Hollywood gave me a weird look. “I’m glad you’re back, Average, but there’s something different about you.”
“Uh, something good, I hope?”
But I never found out the answer, because the elevator dinged and the door slid open. Motor and Meticulous took a bow.
“Going up?” they said together. Great, now those two were jinxing too.
Compared to getting blown up, zapped to the wrong Earth, nearly drowned, and all the other bad things that had happened to us in an elevator, listening to Hollywood gripe as we rose to the top floor wasn’t as bad as it could have been.
“Stupid show,” Hollywood muttered. “Should never have signed that stupid contract! After this, I’ll be a laughingstock forever.”
Meticulous snorted. “Are you implying your biggest ambition was to be a reality-TV star?”
“Hey, it beats ‘stealing inventions from other Earths for fun and profit’ as a life goal,” I said.
I traded high fives with Motor and Hollywood as Meticulous rolled his eyes.
“It’s not like doing a reality show was the be-all and end-all for me,” said Hollywood. “But it was supposed to be a step toward bigger things.”
“Then take the next step anyway and stop whingeing about it!” said Meticulous. “What good does it do to worry about what anybody else thinks? Motor made a complete plank of himself at that magic school of his, but he kept plugging along without a gripe. And now he has the distinction of being the most wanted arsonist to ever drop out of that place.”
Motor blinked. “Um, thanks?”
“And look at Average,” said Meticulous. “Leaving all you Mes behind and being locked up for a crime he didn’t commit has done a number on him. He’s saddled with guilt and uncertainty about his moral compass. But he carries on, trying to do the right thing, no matter how miserable his existence may be.”
His words were a dropkick to my gut, but I had no time to stew over them—the elevator slowed to a stop, and the door rumbled open. “After you,” said Meticulous, finger on the Open button.
The room we tiptoed into looked like a lab designed by a mad scientist on a shopping spree at Ikea. Chemical concoctions bubbled and burned in tastefully designed glassware. Old and musty spell books lined the simple yet elegant shelves. The tasteful end tables and cabinetry, all of it matching, held a mess of magical odds and ends: glowing gems of power, rows of staffs and wands, a couple of giant hovering eyeballs. But I couldn’t take my eyes off a black cloak draped around a mannequin in the corner. It seemed to be made out of hundreds of tiny origami meshed together. A cable ran from the hem of the cloak, along the floor, and outside a window, where it attached to an antenna mounted o
n the wall. As I watched, a bolt from the Rip struck the antenna, sending a surge of power to the cloak. The origami seemed to ripple and flow. If this wasn’t origamagic, I didn’t know what was.
“Why is None of Me, um, charging his clothes with the Rip?” I asked.
Meticulous ignored the question as he shoved me aside. He made a beeline for the big metal box in the center of the room that hung in the air, flying-carpet-style. It looked like a cross between a floating coffin and a covered litter box. Electric wires and blinking lights ran along its sides, which gave the thing a scientific vibe that didn’t really click with the glowing green runes carved into the lid. I hadn’t been around magic long, but I could feel the power wafting from those mystic symbols.
“Is this a magic thing, or a machine thing?” asked Hollywood, standing beside me.
Motor whistled as he took it all in. “Maybe it’s a little bit of both.”
“This is the Stitch!” Meticulous orbited the box, eyeing every inch of the thing like it was a package that had arrived damaged. “He stole the Stitch from my lab! And vandalized it!”
Meticulous reached out to touch one of the runes on the lid. It flared green sparks, singeing his hand. He shoved his fingers in his mouth and growled.
“That’s the Stitch?” I said. “How did it end up here?”
Meticulous slammed his fist on the lid, activating two more runes. They would have burned off his hand if he hadn’t yanked it away in time. “None of Me nicked it! That chav really is a dark wizard! Look how he ruined my beautiful creation!”
“How does it feel to have someone steal from you for once?” said Hollywood.
Meticulous probably deserved to hear that, but this was all so creepy that nobody laughed.
“Are you sure None of Me meant to ruin the Stitch?” said Motor. “Maybe he was trying to get it to work. You said yourself that you hadn’t finished it.”
Meticulous waved his hand at his creation in pure disgust. “Rubbish!”
“Motor’s right: he did make the effort of going all the way to your Earth and bringing it here,” I said.
“Exactly!” said Motor. “I know enough about runes to recognize that these are superpowerful. He might have been using them to finish the Stitch. Maybe he picked up with magic where you left off with science.”
“Enough with this science-meets-magic nonsense!” yelled Meticulous. “It’s a grotty idea!”
We all went quiet as a door at the far end of the room creaked open. And a devil stepped through.
He was big, beefy, and shirtless, with skin the color of leftover cranberry sauce and horns straight off the alpha ram on the tallest mountain in the world.
“Could you guys keep it down in here?” said the devil. “The boss has some important work to do.”
“It’s okay,” said a distracted voice from the room behind him. “Send them in.”
With a sinister smile, the devil held the door open and waved us inside. Meticulous marched right on through, still so irate about the Stitch that not even a demonic creature from the underworld could bother him now. Hollywood, Motor, and I opted to hang back.
“None of Me must be the Dark Lord after all!” whispered Hollywood. “He’s in league with Papa Evil!”
“Is that what they call the devil on your Earth?” I asked, eyeing those thick and pointy horns.
“Where I’m from, he’s called the Absolute Worst Host,” said Motor.
The devil cleared his throat, and we took the hint. Shaking at the exact same frequency, the three of us shuffled past him.
We stepped into an office that looked a lot like the one Meticulous used back on Earth One. Same modern furniture, same fancy art. The difference was that all of this décor moved. The chairs, sofas, and tables scooted out of each other’s way so a crew of full-size broom people could sweep and dust. As they bustled about, the lines and colors of the paintings changed from cave drawings to oil portraits to abstract shapes.
The only thing that didn’t change was a desk near the window and the hooded wizard who sat there, glancing at a bunch of crystal balls lined up in front of him. Under all that glass I could make out flowcharts, calendars, product shots, and other businessy stuff.
“Would you look at that?” Hollywood whispered. “His chair’s normal! I was expecting it to be made out of swords or skulls or something!”
None of Me looked up from a sphere with a set of blueprints titled Self-Flying Umbrella. “Thanks for bringing them in, Mr. Fartz.”
“Mr. Fartz?” whispered Motor.
“Why’s this devil named after every Me’s favorite stuffed animal?” Hollywood whispered back.
From the depths of his hood, None of Me smiled at his demonic assistant. “On your way out, don’t forget to check in with the MeSphere X development team about installing those new curses we talked about. And let me know how much more money we can divert to boost that contribution to the Talking Tree Forest Relief Fund.”
Mr. Fartz bowed. “You got it, boss. Have a good chat.” Then he disappeared in a puff of sulfur.
When the smoke cleared, None of Me leaned back in his chair, regarding us from under his hood. “I’ve been waiting a long time for this day to come.”
Meticulous marched up to the edge of the desk and folded his arms over his chest. “You have, have you?”
None of Me chuckled.
“Hey!” said Hollywood. “What’s so funny? I’m the Chosen One!”
None of Me pulled off his hood. That is to say, her hood.
This Me was a she, a particular she who everyone in the room knew well.
Resist Me.
Resist whipped out a slingshot from the pocket of her wizard robe and pointed it at Meticulous. Somehow, she looked even scarier with a puny slingshot than she had with a hood over her face and a devil at her side.
“Back away from them!” She flicked the ball in the sling with her thumb, and it lit up like the head of a match. Now she aimed a flaming missile at Meticulous.
“Resist, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“She was the Dark Lord all along!” said Hollywood. “She was playing us!”
Resist rolled her eyes. “It’s good to see you too, Hollywood.”
“I see what’s going on here,” said Meticulous. “Resist made her way into this tower, found the Dark Lord gone, and took over his identity, including his business operations.” He picked up one of the crystal balls, which showed a financial chart with an arrow shooting upward. “Who would have thought that the most anticorporate, down-with-authority, money-is-evil Me would have such a head for business?”
Resist glared at him. “Would somebody please explain why he’s here?!”
So I told her. Resist took it all in, never taking her aim off Meticulous. When I finished, she tightened her grip on her flaming slingshot. “I haven’t fully explored this building, but I’m told it’s built on top of an old-fashioned dungeon. There’s probably a cell down there that would be just perfect for Meticulous.”
“That’s a tempting offer,” I said. “But you’ve gotta tell us what happened to you. Is it true that you took over None of Me’s operation?”
“This is his place, all right,” said Resist, eyes still on Meticulous. “Everything’s pretty much how I found it when I broke in here awhile back.”
“Including the Stitch?” asked Meticulous. “Don’t look at me like you don’t know what I’m talking about!”
“It’s the giant floating litter box in that room back there,” I said.
“Litter box?” asked Hollywood. “Is that your Earth’s word for scoop-a-poop?”
“On my Earth we call it Pray-the-Cat-Goes-Here-and-Not-in-the-Plant,” said Motor.
Resist chuckled. “You may not believe this, but I’ve missed you guys. Anyway, the Stitch thing was there when
I got here. Along with all that other stuff.”
“How did you even get in?” said Motor. “We had to solve a riddle and everything.”
“So did I!” said Hollywood.
“No you didn’t,” said Meticulous. “You just took a wee like a little child.”
Resist flicked the flaming pellet in her sling again. The flames rose higher. “Hey, Fancy Pants! Nobody gets to make fun of Hollywood but me. Got it?”
Meticulous just scowled at her, trying not to look impressed.
“So, you were about to tell us how you got into the tower,” said Motor.
“Oh, that,” said Resist. “I just sort of jumped and dodged the vines and thorns as they came at me. You know, my usual thing. Not that it was easy or anything. I’m not sure if the scratches will ever heal all the way. But I got inside and found all his stuff. And I met Mr. Fartz. That’s not his real name, in case you were wondering. Apparently, None of Me gave him the nickname, because his name is unpronounceable or cursed or something.”
Hollywood made a squeamish face. “So, does None of Me make it a habit of summoning evil things? And does that make him evil?”
Resist shook her head. “That’s a negative stereotype about otherworldly beings. Let’s keep an open mind. Just think of Mr. Fartz as a genie with an edgy look. He’s an invaluable executive assistant.”
“Does he know where None of Me went off to?” I asked.
“Not a clue,” said Resist. “Before I got here, None of Me ordered all his employees to work from home and sealed off the building with the vine curse. He claimed he had a big emergency to research and couldn’t be disturbed. Mr. Fartz tried to disturb him anyway a few days later but found that his boss had disappeared.”
Meticulous ran his fingers along the line of crystal balls on the desk. “So where do you fit into this? When did you sell your soul to the devil and take over the business in None of Me’s place?”