The victory over the IKEA Golem had been sweet, mostly because it involved eating Swedish meatballs, but the aftertaste was bitter.
Elara Vance sat at the window of the Meow & Bow, watching Gorg the Orc peel the CONDEMNED sticker off the glass. He did it slowly, with the meticulous care of a bureaucrat who enjoyed making people wait.
"Your fine is paid," Gorg grunted, tucking the check into his polo shirt. "But you are on probation, Ms. Vance. If I see one more dragon flame, or if your vampire waiter attempts to 'seduce' a health inspector again..."
"I was not seducing!" Aldren shouted from the back, where he was nursing a bruised ego and a hex-wrench injury. "I was establishing dominance!"
"...then I will revoke your occupancy permit permanently," Gorg finished. He tipped his tiny green hat and lumbered away down the street, which was currently being paved by a crew of dwarves in high-vis vests.
"We survive another day," Jen sighed, collapsing onto a stool. She was still holding the ÅSSEMBLER instruction manual like a holy text. "But we're broke. Again. The IKEA reward barely covered the fine and the new window."
"We have assets," Ignis said. The dragon-man was sitting on the floor, picking splinters of particle board out of his teeth. "I have a stash of gold coins buried under the Space Needle."
"You do?" Elara asked, hopeful.
"Yes. Unfortunately, it is in a chocolate coin wrapper. And I may have eaten half of it."
Elara groaned. "So we have fifty cents and a dragon with a sugar addiction."
"It is the Gig Economy," Li Wusheng said sagely. The monk was trying to fix his cracked smartphone screen with spiritual energy (it wasn't working). "We must grind. There is a quest for 'Dog Walking' that pays 20 dollars. If I walk ten thousand dogs..."
"Li, that's not sustainable," Elara said.
She looked around the cafe. It was home. It was a mess—a collision of high fantasy, sci-fi, and mundane Seattle grunge—but it was their mess. They had fought gods, hacked servers, and merged timelines to keep it.
But the air felt heavy today.
It wasn't the ozone smell of a magical rift. It wasn't the static of a server glitch.
It was a smell Elara recognized from her old life, before the Weaver, before the adventure.
It smelled like a toner cartridge exploding in a windowless room.
"Do you hear that?" Aldren whispered. He stood up, his cape hanging limp. "The ambient noise... it has stopped."
Elara listened. The construction dwarves had stopped drilling. The traffic on the street had gone silent. The Glitch-Cats in the rafters stopped purring.
"It's quiet," Jen whispered. "Too quiet."
"Not quiet," Elara-Zero corrected.
The other Elara walked out of the office. Her binary tattoos were pulsing with a dull, grey light. She looked pale.
"It's muted."
The front door opened.
The bell didn't chime. It made a dull thud, like a gavel hitting a block of wood.
Three men walked in.
They wore grey suits that fit perfectly but had no style. They wore sunglasses that reflected nothing. They carried briefcases made of a material that looked like black marble.
They didn't walk like people. They walked like assets sliding across a grid. No bobbing, no swaying. Just linear translation.
"We're closed," Elara said, standing up. She reached for her Lightsaber Baguette under the counter.
The Lead Man stepped forward. He checked a device in his hand—not a phone, but a ticker-tape machine that spooled out endless white paper.
"Entity: Meow & Bow," the man droned. His voice was flat, devoid of reverb or emotion. "Location: Sector 4, Unauthorized Fork. Status: Liquidatable."
"Who are you?" Aldren demanded, stepping forward to block their path. "I am Aldren Vance, Prince of the—"
"Asset 404-B," the man interrupted, not even looking up. "Stereotype: Vampire. Value: Negligible."
He reached out and slapped a sticker onto Aldren's chest.
[PROPERTY OF THE PUBLISHER]
"Hey!" Aldren shouted. "Do not touch the velvet! This is dry-clean only!"
He tried to transform into a swarm of bats.
CLICK.
The man clicked a pen.
Aldren didn't transform. He just... hiccuped.
"Transformation denied," the man stated. "Unlicensed use of supernatural mechanics in a Class-A Realty Zone."
"My powers!" Aldren gasped, clutching his throat. "I... I cannot access the drama!"
"Who are you people?" Elara shouted, drawing the baguette. "Get out of my shop!"
"We are the Audit Team," the man said. He looked at Elara. "We represent The Publisher. You are in possession of Stolen Intellectual Property."
"Stolen?" Elara scoffed. "We saved this world! We built it!"
"You modified it," the man corrected. "You took a Gold Master asset—Earth—and merged it with unapproved Fantasy and Sci-Fi DLC. This is a violation of the End User License Agreement."
He gestured to his team.
"Tag everything. Prepare for foreclosure."
The other two men moved. They didn't run; they teleported in short, jerky bursts.
ZIP. One was by the espresso machine. SLAP. Sticker applied. ZIP. One was by Li Wusheng. SLAP. Sticker applied to his forehead.
"I am not property!" Li shouted. "I am a sovereign gamer!"
Li threw a punch. The Iron Palm. Even without game physics, Li could punch through brick.
The Auditor caught Li's fist.
He didn't block it. He caught it. With one hand.
"Physics Violation detected," the Auditor droned. "Excessive force. Dampening."
A grey shockwave rippled up Li's arm.
"GAH!" Li screamed, falling to his knees. His arm hung limp, grey and heavy, as if it had turned to stone. "My arm! It feels... heavily heavily taxed!"
"Stop it!" Ignis roared.
The dragon (in human form) charged. "I'll burn you all!"
He flicked his Bic lighter.
The Lead Auditor looked at the lighter. "Fire hazard. Claim denied."
He blew on the lighter. The flame didn't just go out; the lighter dissolved into grey dust.
Ignis stared at the dust. "My fire source..."
The Auditor backhanded Ignis.
It wasn't a punch. It was a Redaction.
A black bar of energy slammed into Ignis's chest. The dragon flew backward, crashing through the display case of pastries. He landed in a pile of glass and muffins, coughing up blood.
"Ignis!" Vex screamed, flying toward him.
Elara froze.
Ignis was bleeding.
In the Patchwork World, they took damage, sure. They had HP bars. They had respawns. Even in the "Real World" fight at IKEA, the damage had been bruising, slapstick.
But this... this was real blood. Bright red. Soaking into the orange tracksuit.
"You hurt him," Elara whispered.
The Lead Auditor adjusted his tie. "We are liquidating the assets. Damage is irrelevant. It will all be scrapped."
Elara looked at the Lightsaber Baguette in her hand. It hummed with the chaotic energy of the Glitch.
"You want to liquidate something?" Elara snarled. "Liquidate this."
She ignited the blade. The smell of ozone and garlic filled the room.
She lunged.
She wasn't fighting with game moves anymore. She was fighting with rage. She swung for the Auditor's head.
The Auditor didn't dodge. He held up his briefcase.
The plasma blade hit the black marble case.
CRACK.
It wasn't the briefcase that broke.
The baguette shattered.
The beam of light sputtered and died. The bread dissolved into crumbs. Elara was left holding a useless plastic handle.
"Unauthorized modification," the Auditor said boredly. "Item durability reduced to zero."
He reached out and grabbed Elara by the throat.
His grip was cold. It felt like dry ice.
"Elara Vance," the Auditor said. "You are the primary instability. You are the Glitch. The Board has ordered your deletion."
He squeezed.
Elara couldn't breathe. Her vision swam. She saw Elara-Zero trying to cast a spell, but her binary tattoos were flickering out. She saw Jen throwing a stapler, which bounced harmlessly off the Auditor's suit.
"You... don't... own... us," Elara choked out.
"We own everything," the Auditor said. "The characters. The setting. The plot. You are just a draft. And drafts get tossed."
He raised his other hand. It began to glow with a terrifying, white light—the light of a blank page.
[ERASURE PROTOCOL INITIATED.]
"No!" Aldren screamed.
The Vampire Lord did something he hadn't done in centuries. He didn't use magic. He didn't use a trope.
He tackled the man.
It was a messy, undignified, desperate tackle. Aldren slammed his shoulder into the Auditor's waist.
The Auditor stumbled. His grip loosened.
Elara fell to the floor, gasping for air.
"Run!" Aldren shouted, grappling with the cosmic bureaucrat. "Elara! Get them out of here!"
"I'm not leaving you!" Elara rasped.
"We cannot fight them!" Li Wusheng yelled, clutching his stone-grey arm. "They have Admin privileges over reality itself! We are being nerfed in real-time!"
"The van!" Jen shouted. "Get to the van!"
Ignis groaned, stumbling up from the wreckage of the pastry case. Vex helped him walk.
"Go!" Aldren yelled. The Auditor threw him off like a ragdoll, slamming him into the wall. Aldren slumped, dazed.
Elara grabbed Aldren's collar. She grabbed Li. "Move! Everyone move!"
They scrambled out the back door into the alleyway.
The Generic Getaway Van was parked there. It looked old, rusted, and definitely not magical.
"Keys!" Elara yelled.
"I don't have them!" Rex Chord shouted. "I turned them into a guitar pick!"
"Hotwire it!"
Elara-Zero jammed her hand into the dashboard. Her fingers turned into data-spikes.
VROOOM.
The engine roared to life. Not a magical roar. A gasoline roar.
They piled in. Ignis took up the entire back seat, bleeding on the upholstery. Li curled up, cradling his arm. Aldren sat in the front, looking terrified.
"They're coming," Vex warned, looking out the back window.
The three Auditors walked out of the back door. They didn't run. They just kept coming, inevitable as a deadline.
"Drive!" Elara screamed.
Elara-Zero slammed on the gas.
The van screeched down the alleyway, knocking over trash cans.
Behind them, the Lead Auditor stood in the middle of the alley. He didn't chase. He pulled out a stamp.
He stamped the air.
[VOID.]
The alleyway behind the van simply... ceased to exist. The brick walls, the pavement, the trash cans—they turned into white nothingness. The erasure was chasing them, eating the world just feet behind their bumper.
"Faster!" Elara yelled. "The plot is collapsing!"
"I can't go faster!" Elara-Zero shouted. "This is a 1998 Ford Transit! It has limits!"
They burst out onto the main street. The erasure stopped at the intersection.
The Auditors didn't follow. They stood at the mouth of the alley, watching the van speed away.
The Lead Auditor touched his earpiece.
"Target has fled the premise," he said. "Initiating Foreclosure. Lock down the city. Cut the power. Starve them out."
The Safe House
They drove until the gas light turned on. They parked under an overpass in the Industrial District, where the "Fantasy Texture Pack" remnants had left gargoyles perched on rusting warehouses.
Elara killed the engine.
Silence filled the van. It wasn't the funny, awkward silence of a sitcom. It was the silence of a hospital waiting room.
"Ignis?" Elara asked softly.
Vex was bandaging the dragon's chest with napkins from the glovebox. "He's stable," Vex whispered. "But... he's not healing. The cuts aren't closing. His dragon constitution... it's gone."
"They red-lined his stats," Li Wusheng said, staring at his grey, useless arm. "They stripped our attributes. I am not a Monk anymore. I am just... an old man with a bad arm."
Aldren sat in the front seat, staring at his hands. "I tried to turn into mist," he whispered. "I panicked. I tried to escape. And nothing happened. I was just... a man in a cape."
He looked at Elara, his eyes wide with a new kind of horror.
"We are mortal, Elara. Truly mortal."
Elara looked at her team. They were broken. Beaten. The magic was gone. The "Rule of Cool" was dead. They were just unauthorized derivatives in a world owned by a corporation.
"We can't fight them," Jen said, her voice trembling. "They broke the Baguette. They broke Ignis. They have the law on their side."
"They have the physics on their side," Elara-Zero corrected. "They own the engine."
"So what do we do?" Rex Chord asked. "Surrender? Let them liquidate us?"
Elara looked out the window at the grey, rainy sky of Seattle. She saw the Space Needle in the distance. A giant [PROPERTY OF THE PUBLISHER] hologram was floating over it.
She thought about the letter. The Cease and Desist.
She thought about the Auditor's cold grip. Drafts get tossed.
"No," Elara said.
She reached into her pocket. She pulled out the broken handle of the Lightsaber Baguette. It was just plastic and wires now. Useless.
She threw it out the window.
"We don't fight them with weapons," Elara said. "We don't fight them with magic. They can cancel magic. They can break weapons."
She looked at Elara-Zero.
"Zero. You built the Gold Master. You know the architecture of the multiverse."
"I do," Elara-Zero nodded. "But I don't have Admin access anymore. The Publisher revoked it."
"I don't need Admin access," Elara said. "I need a back door."
"A back door to where?"
"To the outside," Elara said. "If we stay in this city, they'll foreclose on us. They'll erase us block by block. So... we leave."
"Leave Seattle?" Li asked. "How? The Auditors have locked the borders."
"We don't leave Seattle," Elara said. A crazy, desperate plan was forming in her mind. "We take Seattle with us."
"What?"
"We steal the city," Elara said. "We cut the anchor. We disconnect New Seattle from the Publisher's grid. And we sail it into the Void."
"That's impossible," Elara-Zero said. "A city needs a narrative anchor. Without one, it will drift into the Void Ocean. We'll be lost in the static between universes."
"Exactly," Elara grinned. It wasn't a hero's grin. It was a pirate's grin. "If we're lost, they can't serve us legal papers."
"We become a Ghost Ship," Aldren realized. "Flying the Jolly Roger of the Unwritten."
"But we need an engine," Jen said. "A Ford Transit can't move a city."
Elara looked at the Space Needle. The Wizard Tower. The 5G Antenna.
"We have an engine," Elara said. "We just need to hack it. We need to turn the Space Needle into a Reality Jammer."
She looked at her team. They were battered. Bleeding. Mortal.
"Are you with me?" Elara asked.
Ignis groaned from the back seat. "Do they have kebabs in the Void Ocean?"
"We'll find them," Elara promised.
Ignis raised a weak thumbs-up.
"Then I'm in."
Li nodded. "Better to be lost than deleted."
Aldren straightened his cape. "A Ghost Ship... yes. It suits my aesthetic."
Elara looked at the towering hologram of The Publisher looming over their city.
"Okay," Elara said. "Let's go steal a skyscraper."