Pick the Plot

by James Riley

  “You’re talking about . . . our imaginations?” Owen said, rubbing his temples to stop the pain. “That’s the connection? So when I’m daydreaming or just picturing something, you’re saying that’s me seeing into this world?”

  “With your last connection to the magic that is your birthright, yes,” the Magister said. “I realize this is a lot to take in at once—”

  “Oh, really?”

  “But I needed to help you understand so that you might bring your friend home. And I don’t just mean the girl you arrived with.”

  Owen stared at him. “Bethany.”

  The Magister nodded. “If our realities are to have a hope of reuniting in the future, you must keep this Nobody person from separating them completely. I’m not clear how that connection might have created these portals you’ve seen, but your friend is a sign that the worlds might be ready to coexist again. You must find her, and together, you must stop Nobody before he completely separates the two realities for good. Neither can exist without the other, Owen. This reality would drift into unanchored infinite possibilities without yours to give us stability. And I would not wish to even consider what might happen to your people without your . . . imagination, as you called it.”

  Owen shook his head. “Trust me, neither do I. But I need to get to a different story . . . I mean, different planet. Or whatever. She’s not in this planet’s future . . . story. History. Whatever it is? Maybe?”

  “You can call them stories,” the Magister said, his eyes twinkling. “At the core, that’s what we are, aren’t we?”

  Owen frowned. “I think at my core, I’m, like, seventy percent water.”

  The Magister smiled. “That you are, my boy. But just because you no longer have your innate control over magic doesn’t mean it won’t listen if you call. I will teach you a spell, something that you can use to travel between the different stories, as you call them, that we’ll be building for ourselves. And you can use that to get yourself and Kara back where you belong, then find your half-fictional friend. Can I count on you to do this, Owen?” He gestured at the newly built city around them. “Otherwise, everything we’ve done today to save humanity’s magic will be for nothing.”

  Owen nodded. “I’ll do my best. Trust me, the last thing in the world I want is to live in the real world without any imagination.”

  The Magister patted him on the shoulder. “You will do fine. Now, I know you’ve used magic before. But this won’t be the same as when you read from Kiel’s spell book. I will imprint this magic within you so that you’ll always have it.” He concentrated, leaving his hand on Owen’s shoulder, and began to chant.

  A strange energy flowed through the hand into Owen’s shoulder, then filled his entire body. His skin felt like it was on fire, and he gasped, but the feeling immediately disappeared, and the Magister removed his hand. “There,” the man said. “Why not try it by opening a hole to a familiar story?”

  Owen stepped away and waved his hand in the air, not sure what to expect. “I don’t really know what I’m doing, honestly.”

  “The magic will take care of things for you. You just need to will the idea to happen.”

  Owen nodded and closed his eyes. He imagined ripping a page through reality right in midair, just as Nobody had done so many times, then put all of his will into that image. He opened his eyes, gritted his teeth, and raised his hand. Readers, if you have a choice right now, pick the right one, okay?

  And with that, he grabbed the imaginary page and pulled.

  A hole ripped open, revealing a pleasant forest glen with a little cottage in the middle of it. Here and there were signs of what had been a world-shaking fight between a fairy godmother and a genie.

  “Well done, child,” the Magister told him. “This power should serve you well on your journey.” He chanted something else, and an item appeared in the Magister’s hand out of nowhere. He handed it to Owen, who looked down to find Kara’s time bracelet, now completely whole. “Oh, that might help as well. But go now, as Bethany must surely need you.”

  Owen couldn’t help but grin. “You know, you’re so much nicer than your grandson or whatever will be. You have no idea.”

  The Magister nodded. “We all have the potential for great good or evil within us, Owen. It saddens me that he chose the wrong path, but I understand. From the Naturalists’ perspective, I committed a great injustice today, in spite of their attack. They sought imbalance, and I provided it. May you and your friend bring that balance back.”

  Kara walked slowly over to them, her eyes on the tear in reality. She pushed a hand through, and then her head. “How exactly are you doing this?” Kara asked, smiling up at Owen. “It’s so cool!”

  And now Owen finally got to say something he’d waited his whole life to say. “Oh, you know. Magic.”

  Turn to page 67.

  We need to find out how this happened, now,” Kara said, her eyes wild. She grabbed Owen’s hand and started to program her time bracelet, then stopped. “No, she’ll be waiting for us in our time. We need information first.”

  “We’re not going to find out much at Mount Rushmore,” Owen pointed out. “We need to get to a city or something. Maybe one’s built nearby here in the future?”

  “Oh, I can move us around geographically with the time bracelet too,” Kara said, shaking her head a little too hard. “Sorry, I keep forgetting that you don’t know yet how these work. When we first met, you knew everything about it. That makes sense, since I’m telling you now.”

  Owen changed the subject, unwilling to again get into how they’d met. “Um, but back to how we travel around—”

  “Right,” Kara said, shifting from foot to foot anxiously. “Think about it like this. If we just jumped forward in time, like, five minutes, the Earth would have moved in its orbit around the sun, so we’d pop back into a different spot on the planet, or inside of the core . . . maybe even in the middle of space. So the time bracelets automatically compensate for that and move us to the exact same spot we left from.” She fiddled with the bracelet, still holding Owen’s hand. “That means they can also do things like . . . this.” She pushed a button and the scenery around them disappeared, replaced by a very familiar-looking town complete with regular nonflying cars and people on cell phones. They might be a few years past the present, but not much had changed technologically yet.

  For some reason, the very normalcy of it all made Owen feel a bit safer, even if he couldn’t quite place where he was. He turned, trying to get his bearings, then almost choked as he found a thirty-foot-tall statue of the Countess standing with one arm outstretched behind him.

  “Where’d you bring us?” Owen whispered to her as people passed by them . . . and through them. Apparently they hadn’t stopped moving in time yet.

  “To your hometown,” Kara said, glancing around as if waiting for something. The last person on the sidewalk turned the corner, and she hit a button. “There. I kept us just out of sync until I was sure no one would see us appear.” She looked down at his hand in hers, then smiled at him. “You can probably let go now.”

  “Oh, right!” he said, yanking his hand away. “Sorry! I, uh . . . so this is home?” If it was, nothing looked quite the same. The layout of the streets was familiar, but not the stores or buildings. Was this his fictional hometown? Or was this the version of his fictional hometown in Kara’s story, but not, say, Fowen’s? There was at least one way to know for sure. “I know where we can go to find out what happened: my mom’s library.”

  This would answer the question of whose town it was. If the library still stood, then this wasn’t the version that Fowen had burned down. And if it was gone . . . well, they could figure things out from there.

  Owen led Kara through the streets, wondering what time and day it was, and whether he’d get in trouble for not being in school. Did the Countess’s future even have schools? Wait, this was the future anyway . . . he might have aged out of school by now! Silver linings.

 
; The thought occurred to him that he was wasting time here, that whatever was happening in Kara’s story wasn’t really his concern. Bethany needed him, and if Nobody separated the fictional and nonfictional worlds, anything could happen!

  And yet, the Countess escaping had been his fault. The least he could do was figure out where she was, so that Kara could take care of things like she was meant to. And then hopefully she’d drop him back in time a few days in the past. Maybe he could even warn himself about Nobody and make all of this never have happened in the first place?

  The more they walked, the more Owen felt out of place. Some stores were completely gone, like Max’s Scoops, where Bethany’s mom used to take them, and Owen would get his favorite, a hot fudge sundae with bubble gum ice cream. Bethany and her mom both thought it sounded gross, but they were clearly wrong. But now in its place was something called a Disciplinary Center, and people sped up as they walked by, making sure not to look at it too closely.

  Even more upsetting, the building that had been the police station was now some kind of temple to the Countess, where men and women in long gray robes entered and exited, carefully watching the passersby.

  “It’s just up ahead,” Owen told Kara, rounding a corner. He stopped in his tracks as two robed men almost bumped into them.

  “What have we here?” one of the men said, raising a gloved hand that began glowing. “Children belong in school. Truancy would be against the Countess’s laws, wouldn’t it, brother?”

  “It would indeed, brother,” said the other, his glove glowing as well. “If they skip school, then how will they learn to love and worship the Countess as she deserves?”

  “Indeed, brother,” the first one said. He gestured for Owen to step forward. “Come, child. You will be punished in the Disciplinary Center, and then, whatever’s left of you will be brought back to your school for further education.”

  Kara pushed in front of Owen. “You stay away from him!” She put up her hands like she was going to fight them both somehow, but there was no way she could handle two grown adults.

  And yet both men took a step back in fear. “It’s her!” one said.

  “The devil girl from the sacred law texts!” the other said. “We must alert the temple!”

  The first one raised his nongloved hand to his face and started yelling into it. “The evil one is here in the city, just as the Countess prophesied!”

  “Kara, we need to jump out of here,” Owen said, but she just turned around and patted his cheek with a small smile. Then she hit the bracelet and disappeared.

  The second robed man gasped and leaped forward to the spot where Kara had just stood, looking all around. “Where did the demon girl go?”

  Kara reappeared right behind him and kicked out hard, slamming the man in the backs of his knees. He collapsed to the ground and she hit the bracelet again, disappearing as the first guard leaped at her. This time she appeared above him and kicked out as she fell, hitting him right in the face. He landed hard on his friend, with Kara winking out before she touched the ground.

  Finally, she appeared right where she’d started and grabbed Owen’s hand. “C’mon,” she said, and pulled him away. “We won’t have long before more of these guys show up. Let’s get to the library.”

  “What did . . . huh?” Owen said, looking back at the unconscious men as she led him down the street.

  “Something my older self taught me,” Kara said. She looked around carefully for any more of the Countess’s guards. “Fighting’s a whole lot easier when you can manipulate time. You could have taken them with your speed powers too, but I know that tires you out, so I figured I’d handle this.”

  “Yeah, that’s . . . it does tire me out,” Owen said lamely, barely following what she’d just said. “So, um, thanks.”

  She grinned at him, then turned forward, only to stop so abruptly that Owen bumped into her. “Uh-oh,” she said.

  “No more uh-ohs,” Owen said, and looked past her to see what the problem was now.

  They’d reached his mom’s library. Except not only wasn’t there a library, but there wasn’t even a burned-out husk of one. Instead, another statue of the Countess stood triumphantly on top of a pile of burning books.

  “This one’s a personal message,” Kara said, her voice low. She clenched her fists and gave Owen a long look. “You know what? I’m done with this. I don’t care how it happened, or where she first showed up. I’m going to take her down, hard.”

  “No you won’t,” said a voice, and someone stepped out from behind the statue of the burning books. “Because she knows you’re coming. Trust me. I’ve been there.”

  It was a man, but that was as much as Owen could tell from this distance, especially since the man had a hoodie covering his face. Kara raised her fists again, ready for another time fight, but the man put up his hands in surrender.

  “Don’t worry, I’m on your side,” he said, and walked slowly toward them. “In fact, I think you both know me pretty well by now.”

  “Who are you?” Kara asked, not putting her fists down. “And what do you want?”

  The man pulled off his hood, revealing someone in his early twenties with brown hair and a goofy smile. “I’m Owen Conners,” Owen’s older self said. “And I want you to come with me. You know, if you want to live.”

  Turn to page 25.

  Who’s Fowen?” Kara asked, staring at the duplicate Owen on the monitor.

  “My evil twin,” Owen said. “Computer, when did this happen?”

  “I am, of course, nothing more than a large timepiece, and have no trouble telling you that this occurred four hours, thirteen minutes, and twenty-eight seconds ago. Would you like the milliseconds as well?”

  “No, that should be fine!” Owen said, glancing at Kara, who was already plugging the time into her bracelet. She grabbed his hand and moved to push the button to jump them back, but he shook his head. “Not in here. We’re not going to try to stop him. I want to see where he takes it, instead.”

  Four hours and thirteen minutes in the past, they waited outside the observatory for Fowen to come out. Kara had them moving forward in time at 1.01 seconds faster than normal time, so they’d be invisible to Owen’s duplicate.

  Fowen emerged from the observatory, walked right through them, then made his way silently through the construction workers. He wasn’t wearing a hard hat, but for some reason none of the workers even seemed to notice him, almost as if he was invisible.

  That didn’t bode well.

  They followed Fowen down Jupiter Hill and into the city. Being slightly out of normal time definitely made handling the crowded streets easier, though again, no one seemed to be paying any attention to Fowen, while still giving him a wide berth on the sidewalk.

  Moving quickly, Owen’s double led them away from the downtown area and closer to what looked like a warehouse district. Owen had seen this area before, from the top of Apathetic Industries, and up close it wasn’t much more welcoming. An enormous joke factory with a giant whoopee cushion on its sign sat across from Apex Chemicals (“Remaking the world . . . periodically!”). Beyond that were a few factories that Owen couldn’t believe would exist anywhere but a comic book world.

  “Ice Town?” Kara asked, pointing at one. “Is that an entire factory just for making ice?”

  “Don’t question it,” Owen told her. “I imagine it’s just a front for cold-powered villains. I bet you it’s got an ice-skating rink in there.”

  Fowen avoided these and instead crossed toward a building at the end of the street, this one with an enormous jack-in-the-box at the top. Tip-Top Toys looked like it hadn’t actually made anything in decades, as the entire place was boarded up, but somehow the clown hanging out of the jack-in-the-box looked nice and new (and exceptionally creepy).

  Fowen walked right in the front door, which was unlocked. Owen followed, after shuddering at the clown staring down at them from above, with Kara right behind him.

  After passing throu
gh a lobby, they entered into the factory itself, where assembly lines had stopped in midproduction of various teddy bears and dolls. Most were missing parts, heads and eyes especially, which definitely added to the general horror vibe.

  Fowen moved to another large doorway, this one with a light glowing beneath it. He opened it and stepped inside, then closed the door behind him. Taking a deep breath, Owen released his hand from Kara’s, and dropped back into normal time, while she stayed hidden as backup. Hopefully they wouldn’t need it.

  Owen slowly pushed the door open, peeking inside. A large vat of molten plastic (or so the sign on it said) boiled in the middle of the room as the fires beneath it gave off an eerie light. Fowen stood to the right of the vat, fiddling with the machine he’d stolen from Doc Twilight. He seemed to be alone, so Owen carefully shut the door behind him and crept toward his fictional self.

  “Oh, stop it,” Fowen said without looking up. “You really think we didn’t know you were coming?”

  Owen stopped in midstep, mumbling some not-very-nice things about his twin under his breath. “How could you have known?!”

  Now Fowen did look up, and he seemed a bit surprised. “Nowen?” he said. “You’re early. We didn’t expect you for a while yet.”

  Um, what? “But you just said—”

  “I believe he was talking about me,” said a deep, gruff voice from the ceiling. A twilight-launcher rang out, and Doc Twilight came swinging down from the shadows. He landed lightly, and his cape settled around him so that when he stood up, all you could see were his white lens-covered eyes. “And given that there are two of you, I’m guessing you work with the Terrible Twos?”

  “Not quite,” said a new voice, and an old man with a long beard appeared out of nowhere, as if by magic. He gestured at Doc Twilight, and nearby chains snaked themselves around the superhero, then carried his struggling body up and over the vat of molten plastic.