“Game engine!” I called out with my mind, keeping Fizzbarren pinned behind the column with carefully positioned Fireballs interspersed with enough Lightning to keep his health down.

Kat level 22 (Health 10,955/20,105) (Mana 17,035/21,660) Poisoned (-75/5 seconds)

“What?” a skeletal mouse appeared beside me on the altar.

“Uh,” I stammered with wide eyes.

“I’m tired of giving you stat bumps just to talk so I created a conduit,” the mouse explained. “I found an example of it in my recent readings on Amazon Unlimited. Thanks for the subscription!”

“No problem.” It was easier to cast my rotation of spells than accept that this skeletal mouse was a representative of the god of this world.

Kat level 22 (Health 10,600/20,105) (Mana 17,035/21,660) Poisoned (-75/5 seconds)

“I’m the god of this world?” the mouse asked, whiskers of bone clicking as it washed its hands in the way that a real mouse might do. “That doesn’t sound right. I thought you were taking over godhood from Fizzbarren. I really don’t feel qualified to be a god, do you?”

“That sounds like a really good conversation to have very soon,” I stalled, casting poison and cement shoes on the man in a woman’s body who was trying to work his way toward the double doors leading out of the cathedral. That wasn’t happening.

Kat level 22 (Health 10,450/20,105) (Mana 17,035/21,660) Poisoned and Grounded (-75/5 seconds)

“Okay,” the mouse sat complacently as I schooled my thoughts.

“I would like to use my god card,” I told the mouse out loud.

“What’s that?” Fizzbarren stopped trying to drag his cemented feet toward the exit.

“I’m going to use my god card!” I called out to him.

“If you do, I’ll just counter it with mine!” Fizzbarren promised, probably thinking he was right.

There was a little pause as the mouse glared at Fizzbarren.

“What do you mean +1 to Acting?” Fizzbarren snarled at nothing around his head. “I’m not acting!”

Again, the fight paused as we all considered godly things. The differences said a lot about our characters. Fizzbarren believed that he was god. The game engine believed that it wasn’t god, and I didn’t want to be god so much as I wanted to be a helpful programmer to a godlike computer with a little bit of magic to spare. I considered myself more of a Jiminy Cricket conscience (damn Ditzney) to the benevolent game engine with godlike powers in this world and no control of anything in the real world.

“I think I like that idea,” the game engine mouse said to me with a non-Ditzney smile.

“Me too,” I gave it a smile even as I manifested a very loud thunderstorm over Fizzbarren. “Now, about that god card.”

“Make your wish,” the mouse nodded its adorably Burtonesque little head at me.

“I wish that Fizzbarren’s consciousness be transferred to another body in a shelved book so that Kat’s consciousness can be returned to her own body,” I said, trying not to wince at how badly the Evil Genie in the Royal Road forums would have messed up the wish.

“That fits within the parameters of the power of a god card,” the game engine nodded, its twitching whiskers clicking in what sounded like a happy sound.

“Wait!” Fizzbarren called out over the storm around him. “I’m using my god card too!”

I crossed my arms over my chest and waited to see what the mouse would do. After living with the constructs, I had more respect for them than their creator did. I trusted them to make decisions without strongarm tactics, especially since I knew they liked me better.

“Thank you,” the mouse whispered.

Game Paused

The world paused with a stillness that echoed in our Fireball, Lightning, and Thunder concussed ears. Our ears were ringing, and my nerves were fraught with what could happen, but I held myself in check. In some weird way, Fizzbarren, the mouse, and I were capable of moving naturally, and yet movement accomplished nothing. Don’t imagine this too hard. It will hurt your head. If this were made into a cartoon or movie, our real bodies would be frozen in place while our double-exposed “ghosts” would have a civil conversation in a paused world. It wasn’t like that at all, but that’s the way the movie version would work. At least Fizzbarren was in his own form in this paused place. It made it easier to face him now that he wasn’t wearing Kat like a costume.

“Make your wish,” the game engine mouse morphed into a Jerry-style mouse with a toothpick in its mouth and boney eyebrows raised up. Don’t imagine that too hard either. Paused game-time was totally weird.

“I wish to counter her god card and be transported back into my workshop where I can dismantle her entire storyline and shelve it,” Fizzbarren stated, clearly believing he’d won.

“You are aware that god cards can’t counter other god cards, right?” I asked Fizzbarren. I could feel the engine working in the background.

“You’re bluffing,” Fizzbarren gave me a bored look, as if I was a bug in his universe. “You, yourself said you’d use yours to counter mine, so you already know that I’m right.”

The story has been taken without consent; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

“I didn’t make the rules,” I explained calmly. “When I said that, the game engine told me that it wouldn’t work. How do you not know the rules of your own world?”

“When a person tells as many lies as you do, dear, it is simplicity itself to catch you in your contradictions,” and his tone of voice, as he condescendingly called me dear yet again, grated on my already frayed nerves. I itched to throw a fireball into his face, but there was simply no magic in the air of the paused game. I contented myself with trying to kick a piece of rubble at his incorporeal form but, as I’d suspected, it sailed straight through him.

“Agreed,” I nodded to him. What? I was done. I had no respect for him so I didn’t believe his lies and I couldn’t blow off steam by blowing him up anymore anyway.

“Karma’s god card takes precedence,” the mouse seemed to muse out loud.

“Why?” Fizzbarren blustered.

“Because I played mine first,” I reasoned.

“But I’m more powerful, and I’m the creator of the world,” Fizzbarren countered. “My wishes should take more precedence than a mere player with no real world magic.”

“But this isn’t the real world and here, in this world, I have more magic than you,” I argued without heat. “AND, as the main character of this particular book, I’ve done more to create the content than you have. We could go back and count the words and I’d bet I have more dialogue than you have.”

“If main characters had,” Fizzbarren warmed up to the subject. The man sure did like arguing.

“Because it’s the rules,” the brown-boned mouse stated authoritatively. “Now shush so I can think.”

“This is absurd,” Fizzbarren fussed. “I created you and I can uncreate you and make another one just like you.”

“I said, hush,” the mouse snapped its boney fingers at Fizzbarren’s mouth and Fizzbarren’s mouth was covered in a large cartoon zipper. My lips twitched, but I took the hint and kept my opinions and snickers under wraps. “I’m thinking.”

Fizzbarren frantically felt at his mouth like Tom and had the audacity to unzip himself. “That’s enough of this nonsense. I am the god of this world and I say you will listen to me.”

“The moment you entered the world, your old life was compiled into a set of numbers and variables that even now don’t apply because you have the benefit of Kat’s numbers instead,” the mouse countered. “You are technically Kat, who has no more control of the rules of this world than any other player.”

Fizzbarren goggled at the mouse until fury took over his features. The top of his head began to smoke. I mentally popped popcorn and took a wise step backward before the top quarter of Fizzbarren’s head turned into an exploding volcano.

“Oh, that is funny,” the mouse said to me.

I pressed my lips together as my only reply. It was still reading my mind and while I was trying to be respectful, I was a sucker for a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Kat would sit and watch them for hours at a time in her early teens. It was how we decompressed from college idiocy.

“Parameters under review,” the mouse ticked off boney fingers. “Karma is correct in that one god card cannot counter another directly.”

“I object!” Fizzbarren managed to snarl out.

“You are only here as an observer,” the mouse interrupted Fizzbarren, pulling a remote from a pocket the mouse didn’t have. “I do not need your input as it is irrelevant to…”

“I am not irrelevant!” Fizzbarren protested hotly only to have his words cut off abruptly at the click of a button on the remote in the mouse’s hand that looked oddly like another kind of mouse entirely. To be clear, Fizzbarren continued talking. He even continued talking to a mouse who seemed to pay rapt attention to him while an irreverent me stood idly by.

“I changed his channel,” the mouse explained.

Have you ever watched two channels at once while they overlapped with each other? Me neither. Let’s just leave that one right there under the category of too hard to explain what really happened and pretend that Fizzbarren didn’t continue his silent diatribe around us. It was distracting but somehow you could almost get used to it as a visual form of background noise. Hey, if I could ignore the years of professorial injustice where they called me stupid and told me I needed to seek psychiatric help, I could ignore this.

“As I said,” the mouse went on while my mind tried to compartmentalize the insanity of all this, “your god card takes precedent, but I have to try to honor both god cards equally.”

“Did you want my input?” I asked only in my own mind because I didn’t want to interrupt or seem disrespectful to the entity that had my family’s life in its boney mouse hands.

“I’m just talking it out, here,” the mouse explained, not answering my question.

I took that to mean that it didn’t want my input yet and kept my mind as silent as possible with a madman ranting spastically in and around me, and my life in the balance. This was like sitting in a professor’s office where they discussed the rules of the class in minute detail when you’d asked about how the attendance policy applied to your accommodations.

“With the counter portion of his wish negated, we are left with several grantable and non-contradictory wishes,” the mouse mused. “Fizzbarren’s consciousness has been removed from Kat’s body and her consciousness is now returned.”

I breathed out a sigh of relief, dragging my gaze to Kat’s part of the tableau. Maybe I was imagining it, but I thought I saw her eyes sparkle with her own personality, unwinding a knot inside me.

“I can now take the next part of your wish, which is to put his consciousness into a shelved book, which I can do with that manifestation of him right there,” the mouse went on.

I was starting to see where this could go. The shelved book could actually grant the rest of his wishes.

“As I have no control over the real world,” the mouse paced on the altar, its tail flipping as it turned. “Therefore, I can only grant his wish in the game world.”

My mind raced excitedly ahead of the ramifications, and deadly hope bloomed.

“The only place he could dismantle your storyline without unwriting a book that would make your god card have never appeared, which, skipping a bunch of extraneous catastrophes, would have made his god card not be played in response is in a workshop that is fictional. Yes, that gels with the wish that his story be shelved.”

I closed my eyes and yet I could still see Fizzbarren’s image being transferred to an imaginary book, my closed eyelids no barrier in this oddly ephemeral multi-channeled world. It was like that moment when our family sat around the unopened letters of acceptance to medical school. One minute we were reaching for Fireball to drown out what we were sure would be another kick to the teeth, and the next we were popping champagne instead. The high of actually not getting kicked in the teeth was far greater than the one provided by the few sips of champagne we managed to down around all our dancing around in glee.

“Fizzbarren’s shelved story will be centered around his workshop which we can place on the outskirts of the buffer. I am obligated to run the story until,” and I saw the pages ruffle by as the book was written in front of my eyes, “he shelves the…”

Pages fluttered by, more than seemed necessary but it was like watching one of those animations you made at the corner of your notebook in high school, each page a frame of the animation.

“That took longer than necessary, but it will just have to do. It’s his own darn fault for not playing his role. If he’d just accepted his place in the buffer, as he often said of other buffered characters, that story could have had a much happier ending.”

The book closed and settled upon a bookshelf that sputtered into and out of view as it was used on a different channel?

“Yes, exactly!” the mouse told me as if speaking to a child who’d finally figured out how to do long division. That was okay with me.

Nemesis defeated.

Checkpoint Saved…