James sat at the bar with his friends once more. He was thinking about why people loved narrative stories so much. He wondered why he enjoyed them.

"It allows you live a thousand lives" he said out aloud. Alicia was not there, and he realised that he missed not having someone who would pick up all the stumps of conversation that he had, even if she sometimes was a bit too complimentary.

"You can pretend to be somebody else and you can learn from the mistakes that they make and perhaps not make them yourself" he said again out aloud.

"You think that every story needs a moral?" said his friend Richard, who he had invited over despite not having seen for years. The other people he had invited had not responded to his messages.

"No, not all stories are Aesop tales and sometimes we despise Aesop tales because they fail us in the real world" answered James.

"I just want to be entertained. I don't want to be preach to, just tell me what happened and get on with it" replied Richard.

"Yet still you learn from them, even if that was not intention" said James "You learn the way that life is and then you think that is the way that life is supposed to be"

"Me personally?" said Richard.

"No, not you personally, people in general." Said James "But don't go thinking you are excluded from the concept of people. You are part of the masses."

"Surely not, here I am having this conversation. Surely people who have conversations like this are excluded from the masses" said Richard with a laugh.

"Yes, even you" said James.

"Why are you saying this?" said Richard.

"People are saying that I mustn't try and impose my morals on others, that it's best to keep religion and politics out of it, and I don't know how to do it, and besides I think that is a religious and politically position."

"James, I have been reading your work since you were in school. The problem with you is that you are constantly changing your position and there is no consistency. You want to please everybody and as a result you make everybody mad with you because nobody knows where you stand on anything. It's maddening" said Richard.

"I don't know what is true, I don't want to discount things just because I have never experienced them."

Ferne' stood in front of the large army.

"While Annabelle was brave to lead you into the attack like she did, she paid the ultimate price. The Mamlish will accuse her of many things. But remember that though the Mamlish can make forgery and summon false witnesses. Though the Mamlish can change the meanings of words, we know what truth is."

The army held their heads low and thought of their own private loss. Over the years many of them had lost relatives and friends to the disease caused by the polluted water. Many had found themselves in contracts that they couldn't get out of. Many had taken deals in desperation.

"Do not lose morale, do not think of losing Annabelle as losing a leader, but rather think of it as gaining a martyr to fight for."

"Yeah!" cried one boy out of the crowd "What are we going to do about it?"

James's relationship with the stats was an interesting one, theoretically he didn't care about them and he did everything he did for love of the craft. He needed to keep that attitude especially in the early days of writing; otherwise, he would grow despondent and give up.

Theoretically he was also incredibly surprised whenever anybody had heard of his work or had read anything that he had written. Theoretically he was grateful for any opportunity that he was given, no matter how small or unglamourous.

But in reality, he was very competitive. He hated for his numbers to go down. He always felt he would feel better when he crossed the next milestone, but when he got there a new bigger number would appear in his head and he wanted that one too.

He always knew someone who had done more, and these people served twin roles of being able to inspire him to do better and to remind him of his failures. He found that other people always wildly overestimated how well he was really doing. This made them awkward to talk to, because he was never quite sure how reliable the information, they gave him was, also he was afraid to talk openly to them, because he was scared that they will lose the respect that they had for him if they learnt the truth.

Then there were those in the industry who would swing between boasting impossibly high numbers and being quite impressed when he gave them small numbers.

"You've got to remember James, there aren't very many people in the world. Seven billion might sound like a lot, but when you take away all the children who are too young to read or are forbidden by their parents from watching your show due to its needlessly violent content and then there are those who are in the wrong time zone and speak the wrong language, and those who have only so much time and would rather be watching Top Gear anyway, you are left with a very small number and they've got all this stuff they have to do. Quite Frankly I'm surprised that anybody who is not directly related to a crew member watches anything." Thought James to himself in Paul van Staden's voice "I'm still planning to read War and Peace and that Zilby cuts into that time"

"But Tolstoy doesn't care whether or not you read War and Peace" countered James in his own voice.

"You don't know that. I'd care if I were Leo Tolstoy"

With thoughts like this it was easy for James to fall into depression when he thought about his own works. He didn't like reading what he wrote, lest he saw a mistake in it. He didn't like thinking about what he had already put out into the world, lest he start worrying about plot holes. Releasing things out into the world seemed to him to be vanities of vanities.

Now that people were giving him money for his work, it seemed that the numbers came to haunt him even more. He wondered what his experience would be like if there were no stats, if he had no way of knowing what impact his work was having on the world. But he couldn't, it was such a different paradigm he had no way of knowing of imaging it.

After the story about Annabelle's arrest, James was supposed to focus on Ferne's leadership of the people of Zilby. He did manage to include a story where Ferne' blew up the safe houses of Zilby in an attempt to rid the people of all records of their debts, but it turned out that the Mamlish kept back-up copies in another secret location and all that happened was that the Mamlish lost record of a single day's transactions.

The Mamlish contended that it was necessary to discourage further attacks on their institutions to assume that all money that was paid back on that day, was not. But James grew bored with this story arc and he kept on thinking back to Annabelle, he kept on wanting to write about Annabelle.

More and more he found the studio quiet. This place used to be so busy, James thought, now the only excitement that happens is when there are protests outside. He laughed and imagined his life as an Aesop tale with a lesson attached. "You see everyone, the donkey James was a fool, he tried to please everyone and now no-one is happy" He laughed at himself, he imagine himself as Eeyore trying knock over honey pots or letting bears ride his back. He shook himself awake and got back to his sober thoughts. He knew that some advertisers were thinking about pulling back.

He hadn't noticed it at first, but with Alicia gone, there was no-one going around telling the crew just how great he was and nobody telling everyone just how good his ideas are. Sometimes people didn't listen to him in the same way that they formerly had.

It was lonely in be in an office filled with hard workers and not one of them a person who you unjustly hate. He opened his emails. Always a mistake.

"I can't believe that you have made Annabelle useless in the way that you did. She used to be fighting fit and now she can't even walk down the corridor without bending over and gasping for breath." He read a comment that was several weeks old.

"Despite her infirmities she still manages to outsmart the Mamlish and all their research and planning departments." He thought to himself.

"She was bad before, when she was better than any human alive, but now she represents the worst of all worlds". Yeah, James got it. But the words still kept on coming.

James didn't like the series now that it centred on Ferne'. He thought about it in an effort to put this feeling into words to help him resolve his inner tension.

For one he felt bullied into it. Paul went around acting as though he had single-handedly saved the show, but James felt as though the show had lost its soul. James had always liked Ferne's character. In the early days of writing the script and developing the storyline, he had even seen Ferne' as a substitute for himself. Ferne' was nerdy, eager and a little bit on the small side. Ferne' was easy to overlook. Ferne' wanted to learn, but wasn't as keen on applying the things that he had learnt.

When Paul took on the role, things changed. Ferne' became brash, he said clever things to put everyone in their place. He was a popular kid.

Annabelle just did stuff; this was in contrast to James. That was why James had started to enjoy writing her so much. Annabelle riled emotions, he liked that, despite what people said about Annabelle being flat.

Ferne' was exactly like Phoenix in many ways. Paul even had the same magnetic charm that Andrew that had had. It seemed like forces he couldn't control had taken control of the story, that kind of defeated the point of being a writer. When you write you are the God of that universe, so to have a something like an actor dying in a motorbike accident determine the direction that your entire storyline went, seemed kind of against the point. Now to have to the fanbase and the advertisers come and tell him to change everything. Wasn't it called word of God for a reason?

Self-doubt was no friend of the creative process. He needed somebody to him that the decisions he was making were the right ones.

James wrote another line, and then pulled his hair by ears. Veronique was turning into Annabelle. He couldn't help it. Maybe he should bring Annabelle back. Afterall he hadn't killed her yet.