by James Riley
“It’s Twilight Girl,” Bethany said, launching another throwing star at a second criminal before sweeping the leg of a third leg, knocking him to the ground. “Kid Twilight’s the one who’s missing all the fun!”
Behind her she heard Kid Twilight growl in frustration. “I was waiting until we fully assessed the situation, Twilight Girl. Being stealthy? You’ve heard of it?”
“Sometimes action is required,” Bethany said, and pulled her telescoping staff from her back, shaking it to expand it to full size. She shoved one end of the staff into the stomach of the first criminal she took down, then leaned on it, giving him her most intimidating look. “Now, let’s just be clear on the name, okay?” she growled. “I don’t want you giving Kid Twilight the credit when you’re telling the other guys in jail how I beat you up.”
The man groaned in pain. “No, I got it!” he said quickly, the staff digging in. “Twilight Girl, your name is Twilight Girl! I get it. I won’t make that mistake again!”
“Or the mistake of breaking the law?” Doc Twilight asked, landing in the middle of the room. He gave Bethany a disapproving look. “That would be the most important lesson to teach criminals, wouldn’t it, Twilight Girl?”
She grinned, then planted the other end of her staff on the ground and pushed off of it to kick the second criminal in the face, just as he tried to attack her. “We can agree to disagree.”
Kid Twilight shook his head but picked up one of the other men on the ground by his shirt. “Where did you get these weapons? I’ve never seen anything like these in Jupiter City.”
The man just laughed. “You’re not getting anything out of me, Kid. You haven’t seen what these things can do. And there are more where they come from. There’s a pipeline into the city—”
A beam of light shot out from the doorway to the warehouse, striking the criminal in the leg. The man screamed in surprise, and Kid Twilight quickly pulled him behind some of the boxes, out of range of whatever had fired.
But other than the shock of it, the criminal didn’t seem hurt at all. What had he been hit with? And who had fired at him?
“Twilight Girl, get under cover!” Doc Twilight shouted, leaping away as another ray shot directly at him. He pushed her behind another set of boxes and moved to follow, only for a third ray to hit him in the chest, knocking him to the ground.
Instantly, Bethany’s entire body went cold, and all the fun of her first superhero patrol disappeared.
“Doc!” Kid Twilight yelled, moving to the hero’s side, but a beam struck him next, and he collapsed as well.
“NO!” Bethany shouted, throwing her Twilight stars in the direction the beams had come from as she leaped toward her father. She heard the throwing stars hit, and someone groan. Whoever it was stumbled into the dim warehouse lights, and she gasped.
A man wearing a full-body toad costume (now with three Twilight stars embedded in each of his rubber costume biceps) bounced into view, staring at her through the mouth of the toad. “You’re new,” the costumed villain said. “Nice to see the Twilight family adding some tadpoles.”
“What did you do to them?” Bethany shouted, pulling more Twilight throwing stars from her belt as she quickly looked between her father and the froggish figure. Her dad (and less importantly, Kid Twilight) looked unharmed, but that didn’t mean anything in a world full of comic book weapons.
The villain smiled. “Let’s just say that I . . . expanded their horizons.” He lifted the gun and aimed it at Bethany. “Now, Twilight Tadpole, it’s time for you to join your fellow heroes. With Doc Twilight out of the way, there’ll be no one to stop the Toad Prince from taking over Jupiter City, once and for all!”
In spite of the situation, Bethany couldn’t help but pause at this. “The Toad Prince?” she said. “Shouldn’t it be the Frog—”
“No, it shouldn’t!” the Toad Prince shouted. “Why does everyone ask that? Stop questioning me, lady!” He angrily pulled the trigger, and a beam of light shot out at her.
Without pausing to think, Bethany transformed herself into a tiny rubber ball and fell to the floor as the ray passed over her. She hit the ground hard, bouncing off at an angle.
“What?” the Toad Prince shouted, aiming the gun around the room. “Where did you go?”
She bounced again, closing in on him. Then, as she soared in an arc toward the villain, she morphed back into her normal superhero self in midair, slamming feet-first into the Toad Prince and knocking the ray gun from his hands. She drove her staff against his stomach hard enough to hold him in place, then yanked his mask off, revealing a man covered in warts. “What did you do to them?!”
The Toad Prince croaked in pain, then slowly smiled. “You’ll find out soon enough! I’ve finally beaten Doc Twilight! After all this time, he and his sidekick—”
Bethany growled and hit him in the head with her staff, then turned back to check on her father. Doc was slowly pushing to his feet, though he didn’t look very steady. Kid Twilight seemed to be more dazed and was barely sitting up.
Inwardly, she cursed herself for being too slow. Why had she waited so long to attack in the first place? She didn’t have to listen to her cowardly nonfictional side anymore, after all. Not taking action was what had caused all of her problems before!
“What was that?” Doc Twilight asked, running his hands over his chest, as if looking for a wound. “I don’t feel hurt, but something’s definitely . . . different?”
Bethany ran to his side and carefully helped him stand, lending him her shoulder to help support him. “We need to get you to a hospital, or to the Lawful Legion,” she said. “They’ll be able to figure out what those ray guns do.”
Beside her, she heard Kid Twilight gasp, and turned to find him staring at the criminal the Toad Prince had hit first with his ray. The man was still lying on the ground, only now his entire body was convulsing violently. Suddenly a flash of light exploded out of him, blinding them. It took a moment for Bethany’s vision to clear, but when it did, she found that the criminal’s clothing and frog mask had morphed into what looked like a man-sized peach costume.
“The Peach Pit will choke your justice, Doc Twilight!” the man shouted, rolling around as if he was trying to get to his feet, but having no luck. “As soon as I get up, there will be a reckoning!” He rolled over onto his face and groaned. “Um, can I get a little help over here?”
“The Peach Pit?” Kid Twilight said. “Have you heard of him, Doc?”
Bethany’s father shook his head, looking worried. “Sounds like one of the Fruit of the Loons—”
“They would be so lucky!” the Peach Pit shouted, only to start shaking again. Another flash of light, and now he wore an ambulance driver’s uniform instead of a supervillain costume. Without missing a beat, the man leaped to his feet, assessing the scene before him. “We’ve got men down in the Miracle Mile warehouses,” he said into a radio on his shoulder, then rushed toward one of the other criminals. “Looks like three males, two unconscious, all three wounded via superhero.” He bent over to check on the nearest henchman, who stared up at him in confusion. “Might be some blunt force trauma to the head. Standard Twilight actions, it seems.”
“What is happening to him?” Bethany whispered to her father.
“I don’t know, but we need to get to the Lawful Legion right away,” he whispered. “Whatever this is, we’ll need their help to figure it out.” He clicked his Twilight communicator. “Legion transport, I have four to teleport to headquarters.” He paused, then looked worried. “Legion transport? Is anyone there?”
The paramedic put his fingers on the downed henchman’s wrist, looking at his watch like he was taking a pulse, then began to shake again. Another burst of light, and now he wore a brown furry costume and moved incredibly slowly.
“The . . . Sloth . . . will . . . ,” he said, pausing with every word, only for the light to flash again. Bethany turned away as the brightness burst from the man faster now, and she heard him begin t
o scream. Squinting against the blinding light, she could just make out his silhouette as it grew larger or smaller, thinner or fatter, costumed or in normal clothes. Finally, the light explosions grew too frequent to watch, and Bethany covered her eyes with her arm as she heard him let out an awful scream.
All at once everything went silent and the light disappeared. Bethany dropped her arm, only to find the man was gone. She scanned the entire warehouse, but there was no sign of him. It was as if he never existed.
“Behold the power of possibility!” the Toad Prince shouted from the ground. “The man from another world was right. It truly is the most powerful weapon of them all!”
CHAPTER 3
Kara?” Owen said, his mind racing with questions, thoughts, and emotions as she held his hand. How could she be here? What had happened to her since Nobody had sent her back to her world? What had happened to her future selves, and the Time Security Agency? Why had she come?
And most importantly, how had she made it to the nonfictional world? It shouldn’t be possible, but here she was, standing right in front of him.
“Who else would it be?” Kara said, and pointed at the bracelet on her wrist. “I got ahold of a more advanced time bracelet, one that can track people down by their chronal signatures, and I used it to find you. Only to get over to your world, I had to go back in time first, to the beginnings of my universe, when our worlds were the same. Remember when we discovered that, back when we were escaping the time prison?”
Owen blinked in surprise. They’d discovered what, now? He did have a vague half memory of going backward in time after the time prison, and something about magicians . . . wait, there’d been magicians in this world, the nonfictional world! Those magicians had used magic to create a new universe, a place where magic could safely exist, after being attacked by the nonbelievers.
But wait. He also had a foggy memory of traveling forward in time and meeting his future self in a world taken over by the Countess. How could that be? He and Kara obviously didn’t go to both the past and the future. Was this something to do with the readers, back in the Pick the Plot book? Did he have memories from all the choices? That seemed impossible. But Kara was immune to paradoxes, so—
“Are you okay?” Kara said, dropping his hand to take a step back. “You seem completely lost in thought.”
As she let go of him, his questions all shut down and he shrugged. “Sorry, I got distracted for some reason. I sort of remember what you were talking about, but it doesn’t really matter. What are you doing here?”
She gave him an odd look. “What do you mean? I came to find you and make sure you were okay! You were going after Nobody, and I couldn’t just abandon you, not after he stuck me back in my reality halfway through everything. I figured that if he returned me to my world, he might do the same for you.” Her forehead wrinkled. “But once I got to your universe and traveled forward to your time, something . . . interfered with my time bracelet, almost like a tractor beam, pulling me toward it in time.” She shook her head. “It brought me to a point five years from now and almost trapped me there. I had to overload the time bracelet just to escape—”
“Owen, who’s your friend?” Bethany asked, smiling politely and extending her hand.
“I’m so sorry, that was rude of me,” Kara said, shaking Bethany’s hand. “I’m Kara Dox. Owen and I are good friends.”
Bethany raised an eyebrow. “Oh, really? He didn’t mention you. How do you two know each other?”
Kara glanced at Owen, looking a bit hurt, but quickly turned back to Bethany. “I’m sure you two have been too busy to talk much. But he told me all about you, Bethany. I recognized you immediately from his description.” She leaned in closer to whisper. “And don’t worry, I know that you’re half-fictional, so you don’t have to hide it.”
Bethany raised a hand to stop her, shaking her head. “Not anymore, actually. When Nobody separated our worlds, he split me in two.” She shrugged, still smiling. “Now there’s a fictional me and a regular, rule-abiding, nonfictional me. It actually makes a lot more sense this way.”
This seemed to confuse Kara even more. “Makes . . . sense? But you’re not yourself anymore! We have to fix that. And we can! You should both come with me, and—”
“Wait, hold on,” Bethany said, her smile fading. “We’re done with all that sort of thing. Owen and I are both safer this way, now that life is back to normal, without any fictional craziness. The last time we went into the fictional world, I almost got lost forever as a beam of light, and Owen got trapped behind the scenes of a comic book. What if we’d never come back?” She shook her head. “We can’t just leave and run off on some adventure or another. There are consequences if something happens to us.”
“We’re really okay, Kara,” Owen said. “Thank you for coming all this way, but you didn’t need to. We’re—”
Kara stared at him for a moment, then grabbed his arm. Instantly, the flood of questions hit his mind, and he couldn’t figure out which to ask first. “What did you mean, I’m going to die if we don’t reconnect the worlds, Kara? You mean like from natural causes when I’m really old, the normal way?”
Kara released his arm, and the questions stopped. “Actually, it doesn’t matter,” he told her. “But thank you for—”
“It’s your heart,” she said, touching his arm again. “Something happens to it, I’m not sure what. But I’ve seen you, Owen, five years from now. When I got pulled into your future by whatever was guiding me, my time bracelet still tracked you down—the seventeen-year-old version of you. And that you was lying in a hospital bed barely alive, Owen! I didn’t have much time before a doctor came and called security on me, but the older version of you told me he needs to talk to you, so you can make things right. He said your heart wasn’t working anymore, your robotic heart. And that’s impossible, because it can’t break down, right?”
Owen blinked, trying to keep up with her whole story. His heart? The one that he’d gotten from Charm, that Dr. Verity had inserted in him, way back when he’d first jumped into a Kiel Gnomenfoot book with Bethany? He put a hand on his chest and felt the regular thumping. “I . . . I don’t know,” he said. Logic said that a robotic heart would probably outlast a human one. But logic didn’t really take into account a half-robotic girl building that heart in a fantasy world either.
“There’s more,” Kara said, holding his arm tightly now. “That future was nothing like what you’ve told me about your world. You have to see it, or you’ll never believe it. Come back with me and talk to your future self. He knows how to change things, to reconnect the worlds. He told me!” She moved her hand down to his and squeezed it supportively. “And when we do that, you should be okay too, most importantly.”
Owen looked away, his mind racing with questions and ideas in a way that he hadn’t dealt with in months. Could Kara be right, that five years from now he’d be dying? But how could his robotic heart stop working? And how would reconnecting the worlds fix it? That didn’t make any sense. His heart might have been made in the fictional world, but it still worked here, in the nonfictional one.
He turned back toward Kara, pulling his hand from hers. Instantly, things fell into a logical order in his mind. Fact: His heart was working perfectly now, and he couldn’t imagine that changing. Therefore Kara had to be mistaken. Fact: Seeing the future would just lead to insanity and less ordinary advancement in life.
Plus, what could he possibly do to reconnect the worlds? He couldn’t beat Nobody, that was clear, not after losing twice now. After all, he was just a nonfictional kid, which wasn’t any use against someone who could rewrite themselves to be whatever they wanted.
“I think I should just stay here, Kara,” Owen said quietly, not looking at her. “Yes, Nobody separated our worlds and split Bethany in half. And I remember thinking that’d be bad at the time, but actually, things just seem easier now. Less of a headache all around, you know?” He gave her an apologetic look. “I’m fine too
. So is my heart. Nothing’s going to happen to it.”
Kara just stared at him. “I didn’t believe your future self about this at first. He warned me you’d lost your imagination, and only contact with something fictional would bring it back. But this is so crazy to actually watch it happen!” She took his hand again, which started another round of questions popping up in his head. His imagination could come back . . . just by touching something fictional? And she’d known this? More importantly, his future self knew it too? What was going on here?
“It all makes sense, Owen,” Kara continued. “You lost your imagination when the worlds split. Remember what we learned, back in the past? The fictional world’s magic came from nonfictional people, remember? That’s what the magicians used to create the fictional universe. But they left you nonfictional people a connection to that magic, your imagination. And now that the worlds are split, you’ve lost that connection!”
“But my heart came from the fictional world,” Owen said. “If touching something fictional brings back my imagination, why doesn’t that count?”
“If I had to guess, it has to do with what’s happening to it in your future,” Kara told him. “All the more reason to come with me and find out!”
Bethany stepped between them, looking uncomfortable as she separated them. “Kara, maybe you should go. Owen’s mom might hear you, and then we’d get in trouble. After Nobody sent us back here, we landed in London, and that didn’t go over well with our moms. We’ve been grounded ever since, and if they found out we’d been talking to a fictional person?” She laughed nervously. “We’d be in huge trouble.”
Kara gave her a long look. “Really? Huge trouble? Like what? What do you think they might do to you? Let’s think of some punishments for a second.”
