As if to bring home the point, the second game-show host showed me the hunting rifle.
“Unless,” said Julian Sparkle, “you want to play Puzzlemania?”
“What do I win?”
“A set of steak knives.”
“And if I lose?”
“We destroy you with a high-powered eraserhead.”
“Fair enough,” I replied. “I’m in.”
Sparkle smiled warmly, and I stepped to a mark on the floor that he indicated. As I did so, the lights seemed to dim, except for a bright spotlight on the two of us. There was a short blast of applause, seemingly from nowhere.
“So, Thursday Next, today we’re going to play . . . ‘Escape Across the Bridge.’”
He indicated the long, narrow causeway.
“It’s very simple. We erase anyone we see walking towards us across the causeway. There is no way to go round the causeway, and you’ll be dissolved in the Text Sea if you try to swim.”
“And?”
“That’s it. We check the bridge every half minute, and it takes four minutes to run across.”
As if to accentuate the point, the second host noticed someone trying to sneak across as we were talking. He shouldered the rifle and fired. The unfortunate escapee exploded in a chrysanthemum of text, which was quickly snapped up by the gulls.
“Ha-ha!” said the host, reloading the rifle. “Bagged another Baggins.”
And he made a mark on his tally board, which contained several hundred other Bagginses, three dozen Gandalfs, a plethora of Pratchett characters and sixty-seven Harry Potters.
“Right, then,” said Sparkle, “off you toddle.”
“Don’t you want the answer?”
He smiled in an oddly unpleasant way. “You can figure it out for the return journey.”
I walked across the causeway with a curiously heavy heart, as I had no idea how to get back, but once I arrived on the other side, it seemed a party was in full swing. Everyone was chatting to everyone else, and the mildly depressed feeling I had felt over in Vanity seemed to vanish completely.
“What’s the party about?” I asked a Hobbit who had thrust a drink into my hand.
“Where have you been?” she said with a smile. “Fan Fiction isn’t copying—it’s a celebration. One long party, from the first capital letter to the last period!”
“I never thought of that.”
“Few do—especially the authors who should really accept the praise with better grace. They’re a bunch of pompous fatheads, really—no slur intended. Nice clothes, by the way.”
“Thank you.”
And she wandered off.
“Thursday?”
I turned to find myself staring at . . . well, myself. I knew she wasn’t me or the real Thursday because she seemed somewhat narrow. In fact, now that I looked around, most people here were similar to real characters but of varying thickness. Some were barely flatter than normal, while others were so lacking in depth that they appeared only as an animated sheet of cardboard.
“Why is everyone so flat?” I asked.
“It’s a natural consequence of being borrowed from somewhere else,” explained the Thursday, who was, I noted, less than half an inch thick but apparently normal in every other way. “It doesn’t make us any less real or lacking in quality. But being written by someone who might not quite understand the subconscious nuance of the character leaves us in varying degrees of flatness.”