METAFICTION

Chapter 2. THE REALM OF FICTIONAL CHARACTERS

"CHARLIE? ARE YOU there? Charlie!" pleaded Susan's thoughts through the Realm of Fictional Characters awaiting their turn. The characters referred to their world simply as the Realm. The buildings and their furnishings were composed of hard-light but the characters were composed of a ghostly soft-light. The only sense they had was that of sight. In order to give the appearance of speaking they would move their mouths in synchronization with their publicly projected thoughts.

Susan lifted her ghostly form off the armchair she was sitting in and ran out of her English village house into her brightly lit outside back garden. There was no air but still the hard-light grass trembled as if in a pleasant spring breeze.

"Charlie!" cried Susan up to the hard-light blue sky. Her transparent eyes searched among the slowly moving puffy white clouds; as always there was never a sun to blind her.

Streaking down from the clouds like a blur of dry water sped Charlie.

He speedily decelerated and alighted weightlessly onto the lawn to face Susan. She felt her mind glowing within itself as Charlie's presence gently nuzzled her.

Out in the bright light Charlie and Susan's transparent bodies were hard to see.

"Quick, follow me inside where we can see each other more clearly," said Susan, as she turned and rushed back into her quaint house.

Moments later, Charlie and Susan were sitting comfortably in her living room.

"And?" questioned Charlie. Susan could feel him caressing her mind, soothing her thoughts, dancing upon her imagination.

"Did you feel it?"

"You mean that pulse of hard-light awareness? Just a short while ago?"

"Yes. It brought back memories of us being called to a place called the Realm between Realms?"

"Yeah, it did the same for me too."

"Julia called us there from our dreams, didn't she?"

"Yeah, that's right. And she had a full name."

"Julia Strauss."

"Yeah."

"The recent pulse of hard-light awareness has brought it all back. And there was an author. Eddie Sharpe. Remember him?" Susan's transparent eyebrows knotted with inquisitiveness.

"Oh yeah, of course. A god sitting with us. It's all coming back now. We worked with an author!" And now it was Charlie's turn to knot his eyebrows. "He didn't say much though, did he?"

"No, he didn't. Julia seemed to be in charge of everything. We were helping her write the end of the novel. I presumed she was following the lead of the author; but, sacrilege I know, I saw no evidence. Did you, Charlie?"

"No. But whatever way you look at it, there's just no way a character from our Realm of Fictional Characters awaiting their turn could possibly write an author's novel. She had written up the novel. It was in her hand. But the author must have somehow been directing her. We lost our telepathy in exchange for our superior hard-light bodies and additional four senses, but maybe the author Eddie Sharpe used his powers of telepathy. He's a god, so he must have had the power of telepathy."

"But why did Julia call us to help her? She knows tons of characters."

"Hey, Susan, I think she said there was something about our inner character that would help us write clauses that would help keep control of the novel's antagonist, Neil Barrington. We had knowledge of non-fictional writing techniques. Footnotes, especially."

"Ah yes, that's right. We helped ensure Neil Barrington could never leave the novel's published prose. Right? Our footnotes trapped him good and proper. I never did like Neil when he was in our Realm. He once told me, we were all prisoners. That our life could only make sense if our true bodies were elsewhere. He said that even if we received our calling to a Novel Realm, we would still be prisoners."