27

Everyone stared blankly. Even Lord WattPad. Even Ree-bot—though him being permanently disabled made his blank staring not too surprising. Okay, @TheGorillatan didn't, since he was still asleep.

"That was weird," Olive said.

"Reminded me of Alice in Wonderland," said Rick.

"Reminded me of More Than Meets the Eye," Mike intoned—because, to be perfectly honest, he was goddamn tired of just "saying" stuff. "Remember that one, Olive?"

She nodded.

"HmhmhehehahahaHAHEHHA HEH haaa!" Lord WattPad laughed, but you already knew that. "Is that all you foolish peasants got from that? Well, good. That's why you're losers. You don't see a grade-A magikal spell when it's right under your noses! Fools! Begone from here! Flee from my Pleasure Tower and I'll ignore this transgression! You will live meaningless lives from here on out, but you will live nonetheless! What say you, dumbasses?"

"What's he bitching about now?" asked Olive. "Magik spells?"

"Idiot girl! Magik is real, it is imbued in the words we write! You would know such a thing if you weren't so dim! That 'how-to guide,' as you call it, is far more than that! It is the Bible of the faith by which we live our lives! It is the key to the doorway of the soul! It is— Ow!"

Mike drew back his fist again. "Need another fist injection?"

Snapping his fingers, Rick rushed over to the laptop. "I've got it! All his talk about magik was just a load of crap to steer us away from the obvious solution to our problems." His fingers tip-tapped away.

"What's that?" Olive asked. "We're just going to write him out of our world?"

"We've got a perfectly good world right in this how-to guide," Rick said. "We'll write him into it."

"How does that make sense?" Mike asked, because he could tell the readers were asking themselves the same question.

"I dunno, but something about that last story really bent the rules a bit, I think."

"Something about this feels a bit... underwhelming," Olive said.

"Yeah," Mike agreed. "I thought it would be an epic battle between good and evil, with lots of explosions and roller-skating monkeys who fire rocket launchers and stuff."

"That's the problem with expectations," Rick said sagely, as if he'd been empowered with the spirit of a guy currently typing away at a keyboard who was getting tired of the story in question but needed to get it done. Not that that was actually the case—oh no. "When your expectations don't match the reality of the situation, it can negatively affect your enjoyment of said reality. The moral of the story," he added, finishing off the last sentence of Lord WattPad's new existence, "is to never expect a thing. That way you can't be disappointed."

"What about my feelings on this matter?" Lord WattPad asked. "Guys? Guys?"

"Nobody cares what you think, dumbass," Rick said. He hit CTRL+S and watched the real technomagik take place right in front of him.

Shrieking like a banshee, Lord WattPad tried to escape from his shackles, tried to find his freedom. But it was too late. The words had been written, and reality had been rewritten. The deed had been done.

"NOOOOOoooooooooo......." Lord WattPad faded away like the colour on an old pair of jeans. The last of his physical existence seemed to shimmer for a moment, and then he was gone. And all that was left of him was the smell of partly digested beef brisket.

A silence filled the room—or, more accurately, all sound emptied from it.

"Well, that's that, huh?" Olive said.

Rick slapped his forehead. "Shit! All this other stuff going on and I totally blanked on the FAME bringing you back to life, Mike. And to think, if I had a whole safe filled with FAME, maybe, just maybe, I could try to bring back my brother Phil."

Mike booted the desk and a panel slid down, revealing a hidden safe. He ripped off the door and pulled out a whole binder of high-grade FAME vials. "This enough FAME for you?"

Everybody laughed and the scene ended on a corny freeze-frame shot.

Epilogue

i

Here's the part where we learn about what happened to all the still-living characters after the story ended. It's still technically part of the story, so the story hasn't really ended just yet, but that's why epilogues are so fun!

Anyway.

ii

Phil was resurrected by Rick, and he sat up in the parking lot and complained about a headache. The two brothers caught up on old times, and Phil even got away with the murder of @MadHatter, seeing as how his body was never found and Phil's coworkers assumed it was a roast-beef sandwich left to rot in a desk drawer. That was pretty normal behaviour for Wattpad's writing drones.

One day Phil remembered his dying mother in the hospital.

"Rick, should we go visit Mom?"

"Huh?" Rick didn't understand. Their mom had been dead for eleven years, of big-toe cancer. Then he remembered the fact that Phil had been reprogrammed in CrazyTown; there were bound to be some residual memory kinks for him as he shook away his programming. "Sure, man," Rick said, thinking he'd humour Phil and they'd see nobody at WattHospital.

Rick was surprised when the receptionist-bot nodded and said go right ahead when Phil gave it the room number.

Both were surprised when they entered the room and found an old dude squatting over a bucket, pissing into it through a tube.

"The hell're you lookin' at?" the old dude growled.

About to leave, they heard a cough from the bed by the window. "Is that my Zayxii?" an old, weary woman's voice asked.

Zayxii.

Rick stepped past the old dude and peered behind the curtain. The lady looked like cold death warmed over for another century. FAME and electrolytes pumped into her veins through an IV line.

"Zayxii, is that you?"

"No, ma'am," Rick said, "my name's Rick, but I know your son."

"You know my Zayden? Is he coming to see me soon? He sends all these people"—she hacked up a lung—"but he never comes visiting himself. He used to be such a nice boy, that Zayden. My little Zayxii..." She looked out the window, longingly.

Rick and Phil later learned Lord WattPad prolonged his mother's life and suffering by abruptly stopping and starting FAME therapy. When she'd get closer to death, he'd have her injected with FAME some more, and when she'd get too strong he would have her FAME intake halted.

With Lord WattPad out of the picture now, she would receive FAME, get healthy and get out of WattHospital.

It was just one more reason why the world was better without that bastard.

iii

Speaking of "that bastard," WattLand was a mixed bag of emotions after it was revealed Lord WattPad had gone missing. Some were parading in the streets. Some questioned whether there was any point in even going on, and thought that maybe everyone should just go and kill themselves.

A mass-suicide party was organized.

Thousands said they'd be attending.

Only fifteen people showed up.

Only two people ended up offing themselves. Three others got cold feet when it came time to guzzle gasoline and chase it with a lit match, and the remaining ten only showed up to see if anyone would actually do the deed.

But, hey, free pizza and beer, right?

iv

Olive, always obsessed with superheroes, had secretly held a grudge against Mike—because he had powers and she didn't, if you can believe it.

So, naturally, at some point after Lord WattPad was written out of this world and into another, she went back to the laptop—which still sat on Lord WattPad's desk at the top of his Pleasure Tower, gathering dust—and used it to give herself superpowers. She now had the ability to shoot lasers from her eyes, but not in a detrimental way like, say, Cyclops. And she could electrocute people by sucking on her finger and then jamming it into one of their orifices. But perhaps most useful of all was her ability to make Mike read her mind.

These days, Olive and Mike—now known by their superhero names: Lazy-Eye and The Chosen One—fight crime, which still runs rampant despite the biggest criminal of all, and crime's biggest supporter, no longer existing in the world. Weird how that works, huh?

They ended up having five kids and none of them were named Olive Jr.

v

Eventually @TheGorillatan woke up. Feeling unchained now that Lord WattPad was gone, he changed his name (for some reason) to Flyte Dekk, and unleashed his pent-up aggressions by going on a killing spree.

Remember Lazy-Eye and The Chosen One?

Well, thanks to them, the supervillain named Flyte Dekk was promptly caught, tried, charged and executed. It was epic. You should've been there.

vi

Lord WattPad could enjoy this existence. He sat on an outdoor chaise lounge chair, with his legs elevated on the back of a small dog that wouldn't go away. To his left was the ocean, bluer than the crayon up his ass, and to his right was a crystal-clear swimming pool. The stereo at the bar played Rocka Rolla by Judas Priest, always a classic. And it never rained here, wherever this was. He didn't know why the hell he'd ever made it rain back in WattLand. Stupid idea, really, considering he'd controlled the weather.

And the best part of all? There was no one else here. Despite the fact that whenever he checked the kitchen or the bar it was stocked with fresh food and drink. There was no one around to supply it. It just was.

Now how was that for service!

It was paradise.

Yup, this was the life. If he'd had the ability to contact the "real" world, he might even send those fags back in WattLand a thank-you message. But, alas, he did not.

Hearing the wailing guitars of Glenn Tipton and K.K. Downing, Lord WattPad sipped his virgin strawberry daiquiri through one of those crazy, loopy straws.

And then it happened.

"Yo, dude, mind if I crash next to you, stranger-danger?"

Lord WattPad turned to see a man, wearing nothing but sunglasses and a red towel, setting up his own chair.

"What up, bro? Name's Alan Undertone. My main dude Gerard went skedaddle and I saw you down here from up the beach and thought: Shit, now there's a dude who can replace Gerard! So here I am, bro, scooting up beside you." Alan grinned behind his sunglasses and popped a cigarette into his mouth. Lit it up and jetted smoke from his nose. "True story."

"Could you leave me the fuck alone?" Lord WattPad found himself asking, and it was very strange because he was used to ordering.

Alan threw his head back and laughed. His burning cigarette slid down his throat and he didn't seem to notice, just popped in another and lit it up. "Comedian, eh? I could get used to this. I'm an actor myself. You might recognize me. No?" He made a face, pooching out his lips and raising one eyebrow. "Still nothing, eh? You must not be much of an action fan. Extreme Force was my main game in the 2180s, and after that I worked as a bricklayer for a few years until I could find a better agent. Then it was smooth sailing with the second Matrix reboot. I played Morpheus, who was changed to become Neo's grandpa and best friend. Lotta makeup for that role, dude-a-lot, fo' serious."

Lord WattPad grabbed fistfuls of his own hair and screamed at the perfect sky.

Seeing what he was doing, Alan nodded appreciatively. "Gettin' a good scream in, eh, bro? Right there with you, man." He shouted, his smoke disappeared down his throat again, and once more he pulled out a replacement.

This wasn't paradise at all. This was hell with some pretty scenery.

vii

Deep in the basement of WattTower, in the second storage room, the TK supercomputer emitted a beep. The lights blinked.

The screen displayed:

REFORMATTING... COMPLETE.

WELCOME TO TOTALE KONTROLLE.

SCANNING FOR WIFI SIGNAL...

ESTABLISHING CONNECTION... COMPLETE.

SCANNING WATTPAD DATABASE...

SCANNING...

SCANNING...