Well, I remembered why I decided Xiaobai needed two chapters of characterization. So I guess that chapter stays. Anyway, here's the most ridiculous MGP chapter I've ever written... Enjoy!
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“3… 2… 1… fire!”
The illusory plant vine growing out of the Infinity Spiral shot its thorn into the air. In the blink of an eye, the thorn had disappeared. After a few seconds, a twinkle appeared for a brief moment in the sky, signifying that the thorn had gone a very long distance in a short period of time.
“Twinkle confirmed!” The general who would man the Infinity Spiral’s artillery during the Planar War broke out into a big smile. “Our artillery is fully functional!”
Loud cheers broke out from the entire spectating crowd.
“My, it’s as if we already won the Planar War, judging from these roars of adulation. This is just rocket science, any Algebra expert should know how to do this.” Financial minister Jingji chuckled.
“Well, okay then.” Fengshui looked a little annoyed, but did not argue the point. “Now that we have created our long-range support system for the Planar War, it’s time to assemble our Corps.”
“Wait, hasn’t Mr. Xiaobai already been doing that?” The Sphinx growled. “Or did he fuck that the same way he fucked that poor girl?”
“Ah, Sphinx, it seems you need to relax.” Jingji raised his hands up placatingly. “It’s almost as if you haven’t let go of your past angers.”
“Yeah, shut the fuck up.” The Sphinx lapsed back into a huffy silence.
“Sorry, Sphinx.” Fengshui coughed. “What I meant, was we need to assemble the Core of our Corps!”
“... What?” The Sphinx stared at her as if she was an idiot.
“The Corps must have a Core! While the Corps is the army that enters the Planar Battlefield, the Core is like the special forces that secures tactical objectives and carries out crack missions.” Fengshui explained.
“Cool, I get the feeling that you’re talking about two different things here.” The Sphinx sighed. “When you say Corps, do you mean, c-o-r-p-s, and when you say Core, do you mean, c-o-r-e?”
“Yes. How could you not tell the two apart? They’re clearly spelled differently.” Fengshui sighed.
The Sphinx didn’t know what to say, so he waved his hand. “Continue.”
“Yes, so our Core must be made up of our top experts. Currently, it is composed of Shuxue, Zhujiao, and you, Sphinx!” Fengshui spoke, her voice cutting a nearby iron beam in half with its sharpness.
At his spot at the head of the circular conference table, Shuxue coughed. “Well, I actually have another person to add to our Core. It will be the infamous criminal destroying Mountain Ranges of Mathematical Beasts all over the world, the throat destroyer and also my subordinate, Jijian!”
“Yes, I’ve never met this Jijian, but she seems quite lethal.” Fengshui nodded. “Our Infinity Sector alone does not have the troops to defeat the Trash Plane. We must integrate as many powerful individuals into our Corps and our Core as possible before the Planar War starts!”
“The Bulai Kingdom, where Lady Daoli is, also has an expert I am thinking about.” Shuxue’s eyes glittered, causing Minister Ellis’s cigar to light up. “Its king is the premier expert in rigorous mathematical proofs. If we can add him to the Core, then our attacks and defenses and movement speed will inexplicably become better due to his knowledge in rigorous mathematical proofs.”
“Yes, that sounds completely logical to me.” Minister Jingji nodded vigorously. “It’s as if this Core is one that can rock the heavens! Zhujiao, who has the ultimate defense of Plot Armor. Shuxue, the Mastermind and Strategist! Sphinx, the ultimate offensive technique, Integration! Jijian, an expert in both finely aimed critical throat-stabbing strikes and widely spread demolitions technologies! And that nameless king, the one who complements every part of the team! It seems as if our Core will be unparalleled in the entire Weakest Plane.”
“It doesn’t seem that way. It is that way!” Zhujiao, who had just woken up, crushed a teacup as he shouted for extra emphasis.
“Well, yes, but I don’t want to speak in absolutes. Therefore, I must use ‘it seems’ and ‘it’s almost as if’ a lot.” Jingji smiled apologetically.
“You can be right, or you can be wrong! If you want to say something, don’t say something like it seems! It’s really annoying and I have to ask whether or not it’s true!” Zhujiao was hopping in anger.
“If an economist like me speaks in absolutes, my entire profession would be a mockery.” Jingji sighed. “That’s the only absolute thing I will say about economics.”
“Well, stop it anyways!” Zhujiao yelled, then went back to sleep.
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Shuxue demanded. “It’s time to go pay my subordinate Jijian a visit.”
After slapping Zhujiao awake, the two of them teleported to Jijian.
“Weird, I don’t see Jijian anywhere.” Zhujiao scratched his head. They were inside a farmer’s pen, surrounded by grunting pigs.
Shuxue looked around, scratching his head. “Uh… you sure Plot Armor is working properly?”
“Yes.” Zhujiao said indignantly. “Well, I have the solution to find Jijian.”
“What?” Shuxue raised an eyebrow.
“Kill them all!” Zhujiao shouted, punching the nearest pig. It blew apart in an explosion of flesh and blood in a manner that completely defied physics.
“Ohhh, right, that’s the perfect solution!” Shuxue smiled, and began to send quadratics dragons roaring through the farmer’s pen. “This way, the one that’s Jijian, is the one with a man with golden hair crawling out of the pig’s destroyed head.”
“Duh!” Zhujiao shouted as he punched another pig.
“All right, all right, stop it!” A girl with immensely large breasts climbed out of a nearby pig’s body. “I’m trying to hide from the authorities, you know!”
“Haha, found you!” Shuxue laughed heartily. “Killing them all works every time.”
“What do you guys want?” Jijian demanded as she pulled out a makeup kit. A cloud of gray smoke enveloped her body. When it disappeared, a tall, skinny man with a face mask and suit had replaced her.
Zhujiao’s eyes bugged as he saw this. “Whoa! How did you do that?”
Jijian looked at him as if he was an idiot. “I put on some makeup, obviously. If you have properly analyzed the profound mysteries of Fashion, you can look like anything you want.”
Shuxue scratched his head. “I’m no expert on makeup, but I’m going to call bullshit on that. There are no profound mysteries of Fashion.”
“Ha, not in the Tesseract. But I’m from the Multiverse!” Jijian smiled smugly. “There, all I have to do is pay a lot of wordforce and then do nothing for long periods of time to unlock insights into profound mysteries. Then, I pay more wordforce and wait a little bit longer to create a random skill. Then, I can pay either wordforce or mathforce to use that skill. But mathforce sucks, it’s only half as good as wordforce.”
Did you know this story is from Royal Road? Read the official version for free and support the author.
Zhujiao’s eyes bugged. “What! You can just pay wordforce to get techniques? You don’t even have to study anything?”
“Of course not! The Laws of Mathematics are stupid and tedious. The Laws of Writing are much more elegant, diverse, and easy! All you have to do is put in wordforce into your chosen concentration and wait a little while until you accumulate enough lightbulbs in your head.” Jijian was about to speak further when Shuxue slapped him.
“I’m not even going to waste my time explaining why you are wrong.” Shuxue sniffed. “But continue.”
“Yes, well, my Makeup skill is at the thirtieth grade. Sadly, I can still only read at a second grade level.” Jijian sighed, before frowning.
“Wait a moment, why am I even explaining these things to you? This is strange. This is queer!” He looked around, as if searching for something.
“What are you doing, big bro Jijian?” Zhujiao asked, tilting his head in confusion.
“It’s the Author!” Jijian hissed. “The Author is unconsciously controlling my actions for one of his or her murky purposes.”
“Who’s the Author?” Shuxue laughed. This Jijian was clearly a nutjob, with his claptrap about Multiverses and wordforce. Normally, Shuxue would never give him the time of day, but Jijian was an important asset. Also, he felt an unconscious urge to indulge in this question.
“The Author is the creator of all things!” Jijian mumbled to Shuxue and Zhujiao. “I’m going to whisper these things to you so the Author can’t hear what we’re saying. The Author can be a male or a female. But if the Author is a male, he is typically a complete wimp, because all male Authors are wimps unless they write about power trips. I’m pretty sure this Author is a wimp, so this Author must be a male. But that’s irrelevant. Anyway, the Author is an all-powerful, all-knowing being who likes to create universes for his own enjoyment. The Author is a deity above deities, the Overgod of Fiction! And he likes to focus on the stories of the Zhujiao Society!”
“What? Go on! This sounds cool!” Zhujiao shouted.
“The Zhujiao Society is comprised of main characters. They’re the focal point of the Author’s universe. It’s common knowledge that the Multiverse revolves around Zhujiaos.” Jijian explained.
“The world revolves around me? Duh!” Zhujiao hopped in excitement.
“Yes, well, the Author wishes to push an agenda by moving Plot forward. I’m sure that he’s here right now, but we can’t see him. He exists in the fourth dimension, beyond the fourth wall. Maybe if we broke it, we could see him. But I don’t know how to do that.” Jijian sighed.
“But the Author supports us Zhujiaos! I can see that you two have clearly entered zhujiao, so you two clearly belong to the Zhujiao society. The Author is assisting the both of you behind the scenes. The Author must be worshipped. Otherwise, he will punish us with his wrath! Quick, on the count of three, start kowtowing.”
Jijian ushered all three of them onto the ground, where they began to kowtow.
“Author-sama, you’re so great!” Jijian screamed. “But please stop invading my privacy! It’s embarrassing! Go away!”
Shuxue got up, brushing the dust off his pants. “Okay, I was going to roll with it, but this is absolutely ridiculous. There’s no way this Author thing exists! If your Author was so cool, shouldn’t he have better things to do? How do you know any of these things, did some bush light on fire in the middle of a desert and tell you about it? Actually, the practicalities of what you’re suggesting is completely ridiculous! How does time pass for this Author? If he couldn’t stop time, then how omnipotent can he be?”
“I honestly have no idea how time works.” Jijian shrugged. “It was said by the Grand Ancestor that trillions of our years can pass in the blink of the Author’s eye, whereas three of our seconds can also take the Author to take a long time to describe. It’s all very confusing, but these are the facts passed down by our Zhujiao Society, written in this Holy Text.”
She produced a book from her makeup kit, handing it to Shuxue.
“... This is ridiculous.” Shuxue snorted as he pressed the book to his forehead. “I’m not getting anything.”
“No, you have to read it. What that means, is you put in some wordforce, and wait a set amount of time before the book’s contents are absorbed by you.” Jijian sighed. “If only there was wordforce in the Tesseract. This place is a barren wasteland.”
Zhujiao flipped through the pages of the book, his eyes hungrily devouring it.
“What the!” He shouted, collapsing to his knees. He clutched at his head, shaking uncontrollably. “I feel like something in my brain is opening up!”
Shuxue and Jijian watched, transfixed, as Zhujiao shook on the ground. It seemed almost as if he was remembering something. But that would be speaking in absolutes, and I shouldn’t really be typing it because it wouldn’t make sense for Shuxue and Jijian to realize that Zhujiao was remembering something. Whatever.
After a few moments, Zhujiao got back up. “Nope, nothing happened. But I read that entire book! It felt really familiar!”
“What! Recite Article 6, Section 420!” Jijian demanded, a disbelieving look on her face.
“Your mum is a loser!” Zhujiao yelled.
“Impossible!” Jijian yelled uncomprehendingly. “Article 1, Section 1!”
“Never, under any circumstances, explain your life goals and aspirations to anyone! When this happens, it is possible that you are being unconsciously manipulated by the Author to make you seem like a great person so that his audience feels more pain when you die! The longer it takes for you to develop yourself as a human being, the less likely you are to die. If you are a Zhujiao, make sure to pick stupid fights and act stupidly and drag out your mental development for as long as you can. That way, you will never die. If you are an Erji (meaning: secondary [character]), keep your head down and try to stay close to your Zhujiao when he offends a great enemy. This way, you can leech off of his Plot Armor.” Zhujiao did not even bat an eyelid as he rattled off the verse.
Jijian nodded vigorously. “Article 8, Section 24!”
“Once upon a time, a Zhujiao was explaining his life goals to another Zhujiao. He died shortly thereafter! The moral of the story is, if you must do something important that you don’t want the Author to know, make sure you do it while on the toilet! The Author will never cast his all-seeing eye on you when you are taking care of natural biological processes, for some strange reason. Thus, if you truly must place a death flag on yourself, the best time to do so is on the toilet, because the Author will never notice.”
“Excellent!” Jijian smiled. “You truly read that book quite quickly. It was impressive.”
“Uh…” Shuxue was speechless. “Well, anyway, we came here to order you to join our Core for the upcoming Planar War.”
“Cool.” Jijian nodded.