Escape: Through the Fourth Wall

8: Wen and Jack: Plot Twisters For Hire

"Mooooorning, sleepyhead!" Zac hollered, throwing open the room's curtains and letting in a supernova's worth of light.

Jack hissed at him and pulled his blanket over his head. "This is a book anyway," he gurgled, "so does it matter if I bunk any classes? I mean, in the grand scheme of things--"

Zac waited for him to finish but he had already pretended to have fallen back to sleep.

Jack heard what sounded like Zac facepalming, and something about it being only their second day, and that they didn't want to be late for homeroom, plus there was all that making fun of Mr. Redmond to look forward to, and they were going to meet up at the library again to make sense of this book world.

Jack was about to fake snoring, but realised that he had to do a whole lot of stuff- mostly snooping around and investigating his friends, and snooping around and investigating the Mayor, and snooping around and investigating why his socks smelt so bad.

Zac whipped the blanket off his face, so the day was relatively bad already- sunlight, people, interacting with said people- Jack was half-heartedly hoping Tenebros would annihilate the school so he could go back to sleep.

Ten seconds and no unrealistically large explosions later, Jack was brushing his teeth angrily while calculating the required trajectory for his socks to land in the trash can.

Zac materialised from behind the bathroom door, looking more zonked out than I do when I wake up at 11:00 a.m., which is around two hours too early in my opinion. "Hey bud, have you seen any of my socks? I've used up all of mine."

Jack hurled his aromatic socks at his face.

That's right, the ones he was wearing. How did he manage to rip them both off with one hand while brushing his teeth in just over a second, you might ask?

Well, don't.

Zac sniffed the two reincarnations of Satan and his face lit up. "Hey, these almost smell as bad as mine!... (Kidding of course, not even close.)"

"Whath thith you thay?"

"Nothing, nothing. Hey, you don't mind if I borrow these, do you? They kinda smell like mine, except as if I only wore them for a day or so. You have smelly feet too, huh?"

Jack shook his head, wondering how Zac was so casual around people and why it didn't really bother him.

"Perfect!" Zac wore the socks with the sort of zest you expect to see from a lemon.

Jack spat out his toothpaste and the puddle managed to make a spitting image of the trollface. He knew he had a lot to learn before he began jumping to conclusions, but it was pretty hard to see how Zac was not the top contender for the Most-Likely-To-Be-A-Supervillain/Murderer Award. Although, if this was a book, that would probably be reason enough for him to not be involved entirely.

Unless whoever wrote the Author's Note the previous day- Jack supposed he'd just call him (or her?) The Author for now- had predicted this, and that made Zac Tenebros after all?

Come to think of it, did this mean that any of the decisions he made really mattered? Was the ending already scripted? Were any of his choices even his own?

Jack decided to stop thinking about it from The Author's point of view because if he continued that way he'd probably end up with an existential crisis on his hands.