Honesty is the Best Policy {Comic Edition}

Chapter 33: The Bookkeeper of All Realities

The first few moments in the elevator were filled with silence. However, Honest felt it creaking and in seconds it broke and fell through.

"Metal Sonic?" Shadow asked, completely at a loss as to why he, of all characters, was here in No Zone, and in that form specifically.

Honest shrugged. "Yeah, I know. Pretty random, right? But I don't think he's involved in this, so you shouldn't dwell on that." She then smiled a cat smile and turned towards Shadow. "What do you think of Infinite being here, though? Huh~?"

Shadow glared at the shut door in front of them. "I don't really care why he's here, actually. A moment of respite from that idiot is worth not knowing."

Honest tapped on her chin, still smiling. Shadow wasn't her or Mephiles or Finitevus, that was for sure. The possibilities Infinite could provide her story were endless, much like his name, but Shadow would probably never see that. Not like it was important that he did. Shadow was her control for most every experiment in this series. She didn't get excited to see his reactions like she did other characters, but that was probably more due to how long they've been so close than anything else. Sometimes it felt like they were sharing a brain, at least to Honest. Shadow felt differently.

“Is he really not involved? How do you know?” he asked, sounding somewhat angry. He was thinking about something else, though. Honest wondered why he wasn’t bringing it up.

“Scrapped plot,” she answered simply. “Three years ago, I wanted this No Zone arc to go in a completely different direction than it’s going now. I thought I told you.”

“You never tell me anything,” he argued, looking solemnly at the porcelain floor. “I think you underestimate my ability to understand what it’s like to write fanfiction.”

Honest put a finger to her mouth in thought. Sometimes she forgot what she was writing. She liked to tell others that she was a writer, and she was, but it was hard for her to consider herself a fanfiction writer specifically.

“Yeah, you’re right, I do,” Honest responded. She closed her eyes and shrugged. “But I also don’t like to spoil the readers. Plus, don’t you think breaking the fourth wall too much lessens its effect?”

When the elevator dinged and the doors slid open, the two left and started looking for Zonest’s room. The hallways were awfully wide and empty. Each door had a plaque next to it on the wall with a name engraved there, each beginning with a Z of course. Just as Scourge said, they found the room fairly quickly. The plaque beside the door said “Zonest Cat” and then what Honest guessed was once her title engraved beneath it. It looked as if it had been scratched off by something sharp. 

The hallways were bare and pristine, a sharp contrast from the interior of Zonest’s office. When Honest turned the knob and the door swung open, Honest had to stand agape for a moment. It was like a writer’s paradise. Strings of index cards held together by rope hung like party decorations from every wall. Every wall had a corkboard chock full of notes. A line of filing cabinets with paper poking out of every drawer stood as a room divider, dividing an extremely messy desk from the rest of the room. There, at the desk, sat Zonest. She had a laptop sitting in front of her that she was typing away on even after they came in. After a while, she lifted her head and beamed. “Hey, come have a seat, you two.”

Honest and Shadow picked their way across the room and waded through the sea of multicolored sheets of paper to get to the big, cushy pink armchairs in front of Zonest. It reminded Honest of stepping through tentacles on the way to Mephiles’s desk. Zonest’s chairs looked similar to Mephiles’s except that they were much fluffier and a brighter color than his, but they were nearly identical in shape.