Chatterbox: Inkwell

Finkleberries Return!!!

You all remember this tale, right? Over down at http://www.cricketmagkids.com/chatterbox/inkwell/node/112269 and http://www.cricketmagkids.com/chatterbox/inkwell/node/114116, if you either haven't read it or want to catch up.

Harold Hogsmith, the editor-in-chief at Kinkle Komiks, was outraged. Some stupid green vortex had opened and two weird folks had stepped out, claiming to be from another dimension. Then they had taken him to this house and tied him to a pipe in the basement, where he had had to be content with finishing his sleep. All this had occurred at 1 in the morning.

Now, here he was, in a room with a two kids who looked very much like the character he had ordered the artists of Looped End to kill off and his brother, and another guy who appeared like the protagonist of that publication, Dexter Ash. And those dudes who snatched him resembled the villains of the comic. “What is the meaning of this foolishness?!” Mr. Hogsmith shouted angrily for about the twenty-seventh time that morning. “Why, we are at the dawn of a new age,” answered Jarod Douglas for about the… first… time that morning. “The age in which the rogues are eliminated. And then we shall rule this world, before continuing on to rule all of them for all time!”

Mr. Hogsmith roared. “The rogues were stupid! I ordered them all killed off in issue #17!” Jarod laughed. “Yes, you did, I suppose. In doing so, you manipulated our actions from your dimension when you published the issue in which we executed the rogues. But a canon can think for itself sometimes, and fill in the holes the creators left open. It turns out the rogues we burned and crushed were clones, and the real ones were still on the loose. That was because our canon was thinking for itself.

“It was thinking for itself when we transported Harry Finkleberry from your world to ours. It was thinking for itself when we, so many years ago, kidnapped his uncle and stranded him in a state of suspended animation using the inconscium. It was thinking for itself, when Harry Finkleberry met Dexter Ash and helped begin to change the course of your stories. Or rather, your stories in your canon, anyways. In our canon, your stories are our lives. What you write is just one part of a whole world… and what you don’t write tends to think for itself and go in its own direction.”

Mr. Hogsmith was sick of this. “You let me go, you lunatics!” The King smiled. “Oh, we will not let you go. Not until you witness what you wanted, no? The death of Harry Finkleberry?”

Mr. Hogsmith attempted to escape from his chair, but then he took a good look at Harry Finkleberry. Then a look out the window set him straight.

Out that window was a thing he had seen only on paper. A large group of people was surrounded by red lasers. And in the center of them was a 17-year-old in a blue skintight outfit. Dexter Ash. Harry Finkleberry. Tanya Slicepit. Red restraining lasers – one of the preferred methods of containing prisoners of the King who were soon to be executed.

Then he remembered his arrest for kidnapping a kid he once believed was completely fictional.

No amount of screaming the usual outrage he used at the office for threatening to fire everyone would ever help him escape this. It was no longer a story, no longer a drawing, no longer entertainment. No longer one of the many publications he managed on a daily basis at the offices of Kinkle Komiks.

It was no longer a fiction. It was real. 

Thanks for reading!