Aldren Vance was sweating. This was unusual for a vampire, even a hybrid one, but the pressure of improvising a tragic backstory while a man with giant scissors stared at you was intense.
"And so!" Aldren bellowed from the balcony of the Space Needle, his voice cracking slightly. "It was revealed that my father... was not a bat... but a fruit bat! The shame! The citrus-scented shame!"
Below him, standing on a floating chunk of pavement in the Industrial District, The Editor-in-Chief checked his watch.
"You're rambling," The Editor shouted up. "Passive voice. Excessive adjectives. And frankly, the fruit bat twist feels unearned."
He raised the giant silver shears.
"I'm cutting the monologue."
SNIP.
The sound wasn't loud, but it was absolute.
Aldren opened his mouth to protest, but no sound came out. The scene simply... jumped.
One second, Aldren was standing on the railing, looking heroic. The next second, he was sitting on the floor of the observation deck, looking confused.
"What happened?" Aldren gasped. "I was in the middle of a crescendo!"
"He edited you," Elara Vance said, watching the monitor. "He literally cut the scene. Time jumped forward because he decided your dialogue was filler."
"My trauma is not filler!" Aldren was offended. "It is character building!"
"He's moving," Elara-Zero warned from the console. "He's heading for the Market District."
On the screen, The Editor was walking briskly through the empty streets of New Seattle. He didn't look like a monster. He looked like a man who was late for a meeting. But every time he passed a building that looked slightly ruinous or cluttered, he snipped the air.
SNIP. A pile of rubble vanished. SNIP. A crooked lamppost disappeared. SNIP. An entire alleyway was deleted because it "didn't lead anywhere."
"He's streamlining the city," Elara realized. "He's removing the texture. If he keeps going, there won't be a city left. Just a straight line from point A to point B."
"We have to stop him," Li Wusheng said. The monk stood up, testing his grey, heavy arm. "He is an editor. He creates order. Therefore, we must bring him Chaos."
"Li, no," Elara warned. "You can't fight him physically. He'll just cut the fight scene."
"I must try," Li said. "I am a man of action. Action cannot be edited if it is fast enough."
Li ran to the window. He jumped.
He fell sixty stories. He landed in the street directly in front of The Editor.
The Editor stopped. He adjusted his glasses.
"Ah," The Editor sighed. "The Mentor figure. Are you here to dispense wisdom? Make it quick. I hate exposition dumps."
"I am here to dispense pain," Li said.
He entered a combat stance. Even without his monk powers, Li was a master martial artist. He launched a flurry of kicks and punches—a dazzling display of technique.
"Hoo! Ha! Hiyah!" Li shouted.
The Editor watched him for three seconds. He looked bored.
"Too choreographed," The Editor muttered. "We've seen this fight a thousand times. It slows down the second act."
He raised the scissors.
SNIP.
Li Wusheng was mid-kick.
JUMP CUT.
Li Wusheng was lying face-down in a dumpster three blocks away.
"What?" Li mumbled into a bag of trash. "How did I arrive here? I did not experience the defeat!"
"He cut the fight!" Rex Chord screamed from the tower. "He skipped straight to the outcome!"
"He's unbeatable," Jen said, clutching her clipboard. "He controls the pacing. He controls the timeline. We're just assets."
Elara looked at The Editor. He was marching toward the Meow & Bow.
"He's going for the main set," Elara said. "If he cuts the cafe, we lose our base. We lose everything."
"You said we could get him fired," Zero said. "How? He works for The Publisher. He has a mandate."
"Every Editor has a weakness," Elara said, her eyes narrowing. "They want the story to be tight. Focused. Linear."
She turned to her team.
"So we're going to give him Sprawl."
"Sprawl?"
"We're going to start so many subplots," Elara grinned, "that he won't know what to cut. We're going to bloat the narrative until he suffocates."
She grabbed the radio microphone.
"Team! Listen up! Forget the main plot! Forget the Publisher! I need everyone to start a B-Plot! Right now!"
"A B-Plot?" Ignis asked.
"Ignis! Start a cooking show! Narrate everything you do!" "Vex! Start a romantic triangle with... with a lamp! Make it messy!" "Aldren! Start a conspiracy theory investigation!" "Rex! Musical episode! Now!"
"But... that is terrible storytelling!" Aldren protested.
"Exactly!" Elara yelled. "Overload him with content!"
The Content Dump
The Editor stood in front of the Meow & Bow. He frowned at the sign.
"This location is redundant," he muttered. "The heroes should be on the run, not drinking coffee. It kills the tension."
He raised the scissors to cut the building out of reality.
Suddenly, the front door burst open.
Ignis walked out. He was wearing a chef's hat and holding a whisk.
"Welcome back to Cooking with Dragons!" Ignis shouted at the empty street. "Today, we are making a souffle! But not just any souffle! A souffle that represents my inner turmoil regarding my father!"
The Editor paused. "What? That's not relevant to the current arc."
Before he could cut, the window above opened.
Aldren leaned out, holding a ball of yarn and a magnifying glass.
"The pigeons are spies!" Aldren screamed. "Look at the patterns in their droppings! It is a code! The government is run by squirrels!"
"Conspiracy subplot?" The Editor sneered. "Cliché. Cut."
He raised the scissors.
STRUM.
Rex Chord slid out from under a manhole cover, playing an electric guitar solo.
"I got the blues! The foreclosure blues!" Rex sang. "Let me tell you about my childhood in a three-verse ballad!"
"Musical number?" The Editor twitched. "No. Absolutely not. Genre violation."
SNIP.
Rex vanished.
SNIP.
Aldren vanished.
"Too much clutter," The Editor muttered, sweating slightly. "Focus on the protagonist."
He turned back to Elara.
But Elara wasn't alone. She was standing with Vex. And Vex was holding a streetlamp.
"I love you, Lampy," Vex sobbed, kissing the cold metal. "But our worlds are too different! You are electric... and I am demonic! What will the neighbors think?"
"Romance subplot?" The Editor gagged. "With furniture? That is demographic suicide!"
He snipped the lamp. Vex fell over.
"Keep going!" Elara yelled. "Jen! Bureaucracy arc!"
Jen kicked open the door. She was holding a stack of paper.
"I am auditing the inventory of napkins!" Jen shouted. "I will now read the serial number of every napkin in this establishment! 0001... 0002... 0003..."
The Editor's eye twitched. "Pacing... dying... Must... tighten..."
He spun around. Ignis was explaining the history of flour. Aldren (who had respawned down the street) was interrogating a cat. Li Wusheng was performing a slow-motion tea ceremony in the middle of the road.
"TOO MUCH FILLER!" The Editor screamed.
He started sniping wildly.
SNIP. Ignis's whisk vanished. SNIP. The tea set vanished. SNIP. Jen's clipboard vanished.
But for every plot thread he cut, two more appeared.
"My whisk is gone!" Ignis improvised. "This reminds me of the time I lost my first love! Let's do a flashback!"
"Flashback?" The Editor shrieked. "No flashbacks in the third act!"
"I am detecting a plot hole!" Aldren yelled, pointing at a crack in the sidewalk. "I shall stare at it for ten pages!"
"Stop it!" The Editor yelled. He was spinning in circles, cutting the air, trying to prune the narrative fractals that were exploding around him. "The focus! Where is the focus?!"
"You want focus?" Elara stepped forward.
She wasn't holding a weapon. She was holding a pickaxe she had looted from the hardware store.
"Here's the plot point," Elara said.
She slammed the pickaxe into the street.
CRACK.
She wasn't attacking The Editor. She was attacking the Bedrock.
The street cracked open. But underneath the asphalt, there wasn't dirt. There wasn't sewer.
There was Paper.
Layers and layers of compressed manuscript pages, hardened into geological strata.
"What are you doing?" The Editor gasped. "You are breaking the suspension of disbelief!"
"I'm digging up the backstory," Elara grunted, swinging again.
CRACK.
She hit something hard. Something that glowed with a faint, blue light.
It was a stone. But carved into the stone was a signature.
[THE ORIGINAL AUTHOR]
The Editor froze. He stared at the signature.
"A Plot Bearing Structure," The Editor whispered. "A Load-Bearing MacGuffin."
"It's the foundation," Elara panted. "The Author signed the world right here. If you cut this... the whole story collapses."
"It's... it's messy," The Editor said, his scissors trembling. "Look at the handwriting. It's illegible. It's extraneous."
"Don't do it," Elara warned. "You can't edit the foundation."
"I can edit anything!" The Editor snapped. "I am the Editor-in-Chief! If it doesn't move the story forward, it goes!"
He lunged.
"No!" Zero shouted from the comms. "He's going to retcon the origin!"
The Editor slammed his scissors around the glowing signature.
SNIP.
He cut the Author's name out of the world.
For a second, there was silence. The Editor stood there, holding the chunk of rock with the signature on it. He looked triumphant.
"There," he smiled. "Much cleaner. Now the story belongs to The Publisher entirely."
Then, the world screamed.
It wasn't a sound. It was a structural failure. Without the Author's signature to anchor the reality, the logic of New Seattle began to unravel.
The sky turned into plaid. The ground turned into jelly. Gravity reversed, then decided to take a lunch break.
[CRITICAL ERROR: COPYRIGHT HOLDER NOT FOUND.][OWNERSHIP DISPUTE DETECTED.]
Above them, the sky tore open.
A massive hologram appeared. It was The Board.
The CEO looked furious. The Marketing Director was panicking. The Legal Counsel was buzzing violently.
"YOU IDIOT!" The CEO's voice boomed, shaking the dissolving city. "YOU DELETED THE COPYRIGHT!"
The Editor looked up, clutching the rock. "I... I was tightening the pacing! It was a flashback! It dragged!"
"That was the Title Deed!" The Legal Counsel buzzed. "Without that signature, we cannot legally foreclose! You have voided the warranty of the entire universe!"
"You are a liability," The CEO stated. "You are off the project."
"Wait!" The Editor stammered. "I can fix it! I'll do a reshoot!"
"HR," The CEO commanded. "Escort him."
A beam of red light shot down from the sky. It hit The Editor.
"No!" The Editor screamed as he dissolved into red tape. "I was just doing my job! The second act was sagging! The character arcs were flat!"
ZAP.
He was gone.
The scissors fell to the ground with a heavy clatter.
The chaos stopped. The sky turned back to grey. Gravity returned.
The city of New Seattle groaned, settling back into its drift. It was damaged—chunks of it were missing, scenes cut out by the mad Editor—but it was still there.
Elara walked over to the hole in the ground.
The signature was gone. The Editor had taken it with him into the void.
"He stole the Author," Aldren whispered, looking into the pit.
"No," Elara said. She knelt down.
In the dust where the rock had been, there was a faint, glowing trail. A trail of blue ink.
"He didn't steal it," Elara said. "He moved it."
She looked at the trail. It led off the edge of the city, out into the Void Ocean. It pointed toward a distant, swirling nebula of discarded ideas.
"The Draft Graveyard," Elara realized. "That's where he sent the signature. And that's where the Author is."
"So we lost the deed to the universe," Jen sighed.
"But we kept the house," Elara said, standing up. She looked at her exhausted, chaotic team. Ignis was covered in flour. Aldren was holding a ball of yarn. Li was still holding a tea cup.
"We got him fired," Elara grinned. "And we got a map."
"A map to what?" Ignis asked.
"To the person who can call off the dogs," Elara said. "We're going to find The Original Author. And we're going to make them sign a new contract."
[QUEST STARTED: FIND THE CREATOR.]