Babble - Beyond Dimensions

Chapter 10: The one where you mess with reality

Your mouth dropped open with shock as you watched the two boys fumble and finally crash into the place where they had put their bags in a tangle of limbs and bagstraps and the others watching amused. Your eyes fell instantly upon the notebook that laid innocently closed in your lap.

This was probably just a coincidence, right?

RIGHT?!

Dread pooling in your stomach you opened the notebook again. And peacefully, almost mockingly stood your written notes out to you, undisturbed.

Breathing a sigh of relief, you almost felt silly, before giddiness started to flood your being. What a coincidence! It almost scared you, to think you would be able to influence anything in this story, how silly of you!

Giggling you wrote: A bus drove down the streets of Hyrule.

Not hearing or seeing anything beside the chaos in front of you, you partly felt foolish, partly bubbly. There, right there, was all the proof you needed to know that you needed more sleep. And definitely find a way to cope with your situation because you were beginning to lose touch with reality to think that foolish.

Warriors had come out from wherever he had hidden, and you watched him stare at the chaos in front of you. Legend and Hyrule had yet to successfully untangle themselves and he just stood there, unblinking to not miss a second and grinning like a fool, enjoying that the others (especially Legend) embarrassing themselves.

You had to admit, that unlike your brother, you had enjoyed his game very much. There was nothing more relaxing than slaying a few thousand monsters a time after a long and hard school day. Though it had been frustrating when his character had run of to do his own thing as soon as you had changed to another character, all for the sake of plot while you feverishly tried to keep the characters together to keep getting magic boosts.

Seeing the real person in front of you now, was even more frustrating. Reality clashed with imagination and it was indescribable. Yeah, okay, maybe you had done a slight mistake when you punched him. And then threw a snowball at him. But well, he kept glaring at you and then he definitely had helped orchestrating the invading of your privacy and resulting breaking of your phone. Because Wild had been too sweet with you to be guilty of orchestrating it and Legend quite obviously was a poor traumatized boy, that left Warriors as the one main guilty to orchestrate what lead to the impaling of your poor, innocent phone. How dare he…

…

Okay, breath. Breath. Calm down.

Let’s put this animosity away. You don’t need it right now. Actually, in order to survive right now anything but bitterness towards what happened would be more helpful.

And your phone was not that important to help you survive here, anyway. In your life home, yes totally, but not here.

So breath, stay calm, think, and don’t antagonize anyone who could and probably will save your butt several times over.

Okay. You’re calm now.

So let’s try this again, a bit more friendly this time.

…

He still hadn’t blinked. “This cannot be healthy” common sense uttered.

And they still hadn’t managed to untangle themselves. How did that work, anyway?

Maybe you’re crazy, maybe still sleep deprived. You didn’t know. But you simply opened the innocent notebook again, and giggling, wrote down: Warriors should blink.

You were still giggling, sleep deprived and just the weight of the situation crashing down upon you – because you were still trapped in a time and place so strange and dangerous as it was – when suddenly Warriors yelped. Your eyes shot up from your notebook, and you saw him blinking furiously, fighting tears, wiping away at the poor innocent insect that had found its way into one of his eyes. His misfortune made Legend stop struggling to watch now gleefully how the other had problems, making it possible for Hyrule to finally escape the tangling and thus ending the unconventional and unwanted hug.

And then your mouth dropped open as you watched the two sentences, which had been written by you and somehow happened in reality, got erased from the paper, leaving only the other notes behind.

…

Duck.

…

Oh my God.

…

You closed the book with a clap and pressed your hands against your mouth forcing the upcoming scream down your throat again. This couldn’t be happening. This cannot be happening.

…

Duck, this is happening.

…

“Breathe, idiot. And calm down” common sense chided. It had to talk, hadn’t it? You’d like to see it in your situation and not freak out.

Because you had a notebook on your hands that was apparently magical and could influence reality.

Or was that your writing? After all, this was a fanfictional world and as a fan it should be possible for you to influence things if you wrote about it…did that mean you shouldn’t write anymore at all? Oh god, what if you were going to kill someone by accident, cause every time when you wrote something down, it happened by misfortune, like the tripping or an insect flying where it didn’t belong and…

“Breathe” common sense said. Okay, you could do that.

“Think” common sense said. Okay, you could do that.

Every time something happened you put a name from this world in the sentence. Okay, but then there was the case of the bus on Hyrule’s streets, and you didn’t see a bus yet, so it had to have something to do with the formulation. You wrote in both sentences the word “should”, so that was probably the key to this problem.

Okay, you could do that. Just avoid writing and if not writing, avoid the word “should”. And figure out if this was yours or the notebook’s doing.

Easy. Good and nice to follow, you could do this.

You should be able to do this.

Okay, scratch that and don’t write this down unless your new weird power takes it and twists it into something bad. Just avoid that one word and you’ll probably be fine. Just don’t use it unless it’s death or life situation, and you’ll be fine.

You can do this.

A hand taps your shoulder and you look up, surprised. Four stands in front of you, smiling and gesturing to get up and to follow him.

Guess while you freaked out and experimented with bending reality, the Links had sorted themselves out and got ready to go.

Quickly you stuffed the maybe cursed notebook in your backpack and got up, ready to follow them.

This situation was less than ideal, but you were going to deal with the cards you got the way you got them.

You can do this. Just follow your list and you’ll be fine.

And do not write. Just to be sure.