“It should be around here,” Lostina said. The water rumbled down the cliff into a deep fall, where the river meandered down the valley. Meanwhile, she carefully jumped over boulder after boulder embedded in the water, trying hard not to look down the cliff. Finally, she stopped, and waved Theora close.

Her gaze was fixed to a barely visible, low floating beige fog exuding from a very slim, long crack in the air. “There,” she said. “That’s a freshly forming rift. It’s where the Errata will come from.” She turned around, and pointed at a settlement of a few hundred buildings down by the river. “They’ll come out, have their vanguard rip open a few more cracks in the area, and then swarm the village. Gonell will try to stop them, but fail.”

At that last sentence, Lostina pressed her lips together. Theora kept her in her gaze for a while, then shifted between the rift and the village. Gonell will try to stop them, but fail.

“How will she fail?” Theora asked.

Lostina shook her head gently. “Doesn’t matter now. Let’s try to do something about this thing, because if we close it, none of it will happen.”

Theora stood there, arms hanging down to her sides, clothes shifting in the wind. “You can be honest to me, if you want to.”

Lostina made a step back, folding and hugging her arms, and gave a pained look. “I know. I know. Let’s just — focus on what’s important right now, okay? Rift. Rift bad. Errata spill out, bad things happen. So, let’s stop that.”

Theora gave a nod.

“If we can, that is,” Lostina added. “[Summoners] are usually the ones in charge of closing or opening these structures. But, when I tried recruiting Luke for this task, it threw an outline error. So, I stole one of their Skills instead.”

“What?”

Lostina smiled triumphantly. “[Pretender], remember? It’s a Class used for infiltration jobs, intelligence gathering, and diversion. It would kind of suck if I disguised myself as another person but couldn’t use a single Skill from their Class. I made a point of levelling to 23 just to get the Skill before we got here. Only issue is that I can’t copy a combat Skill.”

“I could probably destroy the rift using one of my Skills too,” Theora said. “With what you said about the dangers of changing the outline, perhaps I would be the better choice.”

Lostina frowned for a moment, then shook her head. “Nah. Extremely unlikely, if what you said about me being the main character of this story is true.”

“Oh? How does that relate?”

“Well, if I’m the MC, then I have plot armour. Means I’m unlikely to just be killed off this early on in the story. Especially anticlimactically, like here.” At that, she grimaced. “Whoops, raised a death flag. Either way, I think I have better protection overall than some random girl from another world.”

“I see,” Theora said, even though she didn’t understand it at all. “But there is still a chance these rules don’t even apply to me, considering I visited this place voluntarily.”

“You’re pretty adamant on fucking around and finding out, huh?”

Theora bit her lip. “I simply do not wish to see you harmed. I feel confident in my ability to withstand some amounts of damage, even against a strong opponent.”

“Strong opponent,” Lostina echoed sarcastically. “It’s the author. Whatever, go ahead and try to turn this crack into flour, if you want to do it so badly. But, if it throws an error, that means you are affected by this world too, in which case I’d prefer if you let me take over.”

Muttering “It’s not flour” under her breath, Theora approached the rift, and reached out. She felt a certain push as she got closer; as if the laws of physics changed in its vicinity. She didn’t need to touch it to activate the Skill, although she generally preferred having additional control like that.

Eventually, she felt close enough.

Obl—

ERROR.

Action restricted. Cannot deviate from original author outline.

The Skill puffed into nothingness, as if Theora had deactivated it herself. Except, she hadn’t. It was like some entity had taken control of her for a brief moment.

“That’s interesting,” she murmured. “That shouldn’t be possible.”

Lostina gave her a questioning look. “What? Got an error?”

Theora nodded. “I kind of want to break it. See if I can persevere, if I try very hard. I would like to know if I could.”

“Look, this isn’t for your ego, okay? Things can go seriously wrong. But, I agree in principle, and that’s why we’re here. Please, step aside. I’ll try to ignore the error and push through, and see if it works.”

Theora reluctantly decided to give way, and observed Lostina get in position to close the rift. Somehow, she felt slightly jealous. If she had the choice, obviously she would not wish to be a ‘main character’, but it was certainly tempting.

“Alright, let’s see…”

Lostina seemed to focus for a while, and then her hand started shining in a green and pink light. “That’s glue,” she explained, and tried to put it on top of the rift. Some magical barrier seemed to prevent her from outright touching it. “Figured.”

“Error?”

“Yes, unfortunately,” she said. “But, I still have another idea.”

Instead of applying it directly, she started painting around the cracks, as if she was weaving them into a cocoon, slowly walking around it.

“What are you doing?”

“It’s a trick,” she said. “Like… The errors seem to only interfere very late. As in, the outline lets us do whatever we want, until the action that would actually break it.”

That made some sense. The outline hadn’t prevented them from coming here. It had only meddled the moment Theora tried to destroy the rift.

“I couldn’t recruit Luke because it required sharing information about future events. But, it allowed us to come here, and we haven’t exactly been secretive about our intentions.”

“If it interferes at the last possible moment, we should try to obscure that last possible moment.”

Lostina smiled brightly. “Exactly! We’ll trick it!” Soon, she’d embedded the entire crack in a thick layer of healing light goo that simply stuck to the air. “There! This doesn’t prevent the rift from growing, so it was allowed. And now…”

With a few light jumps, she made it to the side of the river, and then tried throwing larger and larger rocks into the water. She wasn’t a very strong person, so she struggled a lot.

“Am I allowed to lend you a hand with that?” Theora asked.

“Sure, why not. I want to build up water somehow, so it washes the goo into the rift… and closes it. Actually, if we had a ramp of some kind, that would be nice… I want the action that eventually causes the outline to break to be really abstract. And when I do it, I’ll just think ‘let’s lift that ramp for no reason at all whatsoever’, you know? Ideally, it either doesn’t recognise the violation, or the agency restraints will be easier to overcome if it’s indirect. If we’re lucky, that is.”

From the limited understanding Theora had of the situation, it did sound like a reasonable approach. One that she probably wouldn’t have come up with in a thousand years. She looked around the area to find something that could help with Lostina’s plan, and within two hours, the two managed to build a somewhat complicated construction out of several larger rocks and earth and branches.

“Damn, you can lift,” Lostina said, heavily out of breath, as she looked over their little project. “So, we only have to roll this pebble down this wooden ramp, and then it should hit that pendulum, and then…” She went to double-check the chain reaction. If it didn’t work, they’d have to try again, but ultimately, she seemed rather confident, as they’d tested the parts in isolation a few times.

“Looks good,” Theora agreed.

With a confident grin, Lostina took the pebble into her hand, and walked a few steps back. “Gonna do us the honour! I’ll throw from further away so that I can’t be sure if I’ll actually hit.”

She launched the little rock, and started cheering when she didn’t receive an error. Of course, the rock didn’t land where it was supposed to, instead plonking into the river. Excited, she went to fetch it back, and tried again.

Five times, five misses. Until finally, just as Lostina was launching the rock for the sixth time, she froze for a second right after. And then, she stared, wide-eyed.

“Got an error,” she muttered excitedly, as the rock rolled down the ramp and knocked against the pendulum. “Got an error! But it came too late! Had already thrown it!”

She ran up to the construction, and Theora followed. The pebble rolled down a slope, hit a few plates of thinner stone to transfer energy into the mechanism, and, as it went through the motions, Lostina held her breath.

“Oh, come on! Please work! I got an error so it should work, right?”

Finally, the construction knocked up a heap large enough to funnel water over the crack in the air.

“Oh my god,” Lostina let out, unable to hide her excitement, as the crack sealed up, and disappeared.

“It worked,” Theora observed.

“It worked!” Lostina cheered, jumped and hugged Theora tight. “Thank you so much!” She let off immediately, to examine the remains of the crack, carefully removing excess healing paste from the air with her Skill. “Oh, I’m kind of nervous. Did we do it? We sealed it, didn’t we? Now, nothing can hap—”

SYSTEM FAILURE.

Outline Integrity compromised. Calculating alternative…

Initiating Author Intervention: Dramatic Irony.

At that exact moment, a little crackle issued from right beside Lostina’s head. She turned around to see the smallest rift form at a new spot, right next to her, fog slowly exuding from it like from the old one. Then, with another crackle, a second rift opened right where she was trying to evade to.

She slipped, and landed in the water, being pulled along by the stream.

Within a second, Theora paced over the rocks in long strides, ducked beneath the cracks, and fetched Lostina from the river before she’d be flushed down the cliff. Wet and breathing heavily, Lostina stared at the rifts as she unwrapped herself from Theora, now on safe ground beside the river.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, this is impossible,” she muttered. “Oh, god. These aren’t supposed to just pop up! They are incredibly rare!”

“Does that mean…”

Lostina’s face went grim. “Author intervention. Oh, fuck. This is bad. In the original, Gonell only had to fight off one rift, and the village still got destroyed.”

She pushed a hand through her hair, grabbing tight. She stared up at Theora wide-eyed. “We made it even worse.”

Theora knelt down beside her, wanting to take Lostina’s hand to calm her, but Lostina evaded the gesture, rubbing her eyes.

“I’m such an idiot!” she went. “I thought the author’s retaliation would hit only us, since we’re the ones messing with the outline. But of course, they’d let it out on the residents! That just makes more sense to do! Oh, god. I should have known. I should have predicted that.”

“There was no way to know,” Theora said.

Lostina’s grab of her own hair tightened, and she started shaking her head a bit too strongly. “No, there was! It’s a simple rule; if you can’t threaten the people who have plot armour, you have to threaten or hurt the people around them. Also, dramatic irony. I was too confident. Provides a perfect avenue to get us punished.” She trailed off, eyes on the village, and then looked back at Theora. “Wait,” she said. “Wait. So, even if we can change the outline, it just gets overwritten immediately. That’s like, the worst case scenario. And this author doesn’t even care about story-internal logic! Just having two appear? It’s impossible! It’s an ass-pull! The author will just do anything to get their way. Oh, we messed up so bad.”

“We still had to try,” Theora said. “The things you say sound like conjecture. We couldn’t have just left the rift here, could we? We had to try.”

“We had to try,” Lostina echoed, nodding weakly. “I guess you’re right. Some authors give their characters more agency than others. Some authors will amend their outline if their characters ask for it.” She took a very deep breath.

She needed tea.

Theora started rummaging in her cloak to prepare it. She had water here, and there was moss nearby. She could make moss tea again.

Lostina mostly ignored Theora’s shifting. “Now we know that this author will make hell break loose just to get their way. Fuck. What do we do now?”

“I suggest we go to the village.”

Lostina took a few deep, calming breaths. Her gaze was resting on Theora’s hands lighting a fire, but she didn’t seem to register much beyond that. “Okay. Yes. Ugh, my whole skin is burning.” She wiped sweat from her head. “Yes. Yes. Maybe we can ask the villagers for help. Ahh… but we can’t talk to them without breaking the outline… can’t even be honest to them… We’ll have to talk to them knowing they will all die and—”

She paused, frowning. “Wait… Yes. Wait. This doesn’t make sense, does it? No story would just do this. We wouldn’t fail like this, would we? There has to be a way. Something we’re not seeing yet.”

Theora put the pot on. “What do you mean?”

“Like, okay. If we were to fail, we wouldn’t fail like this!” She pulled her hand out of her hair, leaving it a mess. “From a structural perspective — It’s much more likely, we’d come up with a very cool plan, unsure about whether it works until the last second, and then, in a big moment, when we think everyone is safe, then something awful would happen telling us we were wrong. Right?” Lostina started shaking a bit, playing it off by gesturing as she spoke. “Assuming this is a story written in your world, this would feel way too bland. No, for example, we would have closed the rift, been all happy, and then, five hours later, we’d have realised in shock that the author randomly opened two more. But we were shown immediately. For one, it tells us that we can’t mess with the outline, but thinking about it from a narrative perspective, it means there has to be some way to do this.”

Theora had completely lost that line of thought. There had to be a way for them to succeed based on the fact that they had… failed in the wrong manner? “That sounds like a bit of a stretch…”

“Yeah… maybe,” Lostina conceded. “But, what else can we do? We have to believe it, or this is just going to be depressing. It would be the worst story ever. Would your companion like a story like that? Oh… unless it is a tragedy… Well, even if it’s a tragedy, it would probably still work better if we only realised we’d lost at the very end…”

This girl really needed a night’s rest and a few hours to calm down. Theora pressed the cup of moss tea into her hand, which Lostina reluctantly took.

“Drink up,” Theora said. The scent of the tea was fresh and slightly acidic, the pungent note of moss weaving through the air.

“The village will be attacked by Errata,” Theora murmured after a while. “Gonell only had to fight one rift, but we caused there to be two. However, I’m here now, as well. Perhaps I should join the fight.”

“Even if you do,” Lostina said in a low voice, sounding defeated, “I don’t think it will matter.”

There was a certain finality to her voice.

“Why not? I could try to make sure everyone stays safe.”

“Yes. But the author doesn’t want them to be safe.”

“How can you be so sure? Does this relate to something that will happen later?”

Lostina took a slow breath, swallowing some more tea. She didn’t answer at first, until she finally spoke again, but quietly, this time.

“Gonell used to be a cheerful person.”

Upon hearing these words, Theora shuddered.

“That’s what they said, in the book,” Lostina continued. “She used to be happy, and confident. Until, in her backstory, she arrived at a village for other business, and was surprised by a sudden rift. Errata streamed out, but she’s the strongest, right? She went to fight them.”

Lostina rubbed her eye.

“[Ray of Annihilation],” she said. “Her Ultimate Skill. She underestimated one of the Errata, wasn’t aware what it could do. Her Skill got deflected, and hit the village.”

She looked at the rooftops in the valley.

“Gone in an instant.”

Theora’s stomach dropped out. She felt dizzy, like her arms and legs weren’t lying where they were supposed to. Like they were suddenly out of reach for her blood.

“She was never the same,” Lostina added, and took a larger sip. If it was too hot, she didn’t seem to care. “You can go and help her fight them — I don’t think it matters. She’ll win. She’d win against an army. But, I don’t know how we could prevent her Skill from misfiring. Because the author will make sure. It’s part of her backstory. It makes her who she is.”

Lostina shook her head.

“It needs to happen. And I don’t know what to do.”