TBOS R6.4: Wait, what?

     Weaving through the aisles and passageway, he followed the compass’ directions. Five minutes turned into fifteen minutes, which turned into thirty, then an hour. Still, Reinald remained patient; he was Theseus, the library was the labyrinth, and the compass was his string. Except he wasn’t seeking the way out—not yet, at any rate.

      Finally, after eighty-three minutes (gauging time was an essential skill in his line of work), the compass guided him to a small alcove the back of a dimly-lit corridor. Calm, but resolute, he reached inside and withdrew a moderately sized chest from the opening. The case bore no lock, so he was able to swing the lid open with ease.

     Reinald was no ichthyologist, but he instantly knew that the scarlet fish at the bottom of the box was from the herring family.

     He’d found the plot device.

     After uttering a few curses (both at himself and the person who’d sent him on his mission), he slammed the chest shut. Antagonist had lied about the whole thing. But why? If it had been Chaos, he would have chalked it up as a prank. But the ink man was different. He had an agenda. This wasn’t just done for giggles. Think! What could be gained from sending him on this wild goose chase? All he’d done was waste his time—

     And then it dawned on him.

     “It was a distraction,” Reinald realized. 

     But from what?

      “How can you be sure this is the way out of here?” Campren asked. He and Smith had been walking for some time now, and the area of the library they currently found themselves in looked no different from where they had begun.

     “Intuition,” was Anna’s terse reply.

     “It’s just, well, we haven’t seemed to be making much progress, and—”

     The woman stopped dead in her tracks and glared at her new associate. “Do you want to follow me or not?”

     “I do! I do!” he exclaimed, backing up against a shelf. “Sorry. I’ll be quiet now.”

     After a few more seconds of glaring as punishment, Anna resumed her pace. Her partner trailed behind with his metaphorical tail dangling between his literal legs.

     Not five minute later, Anna felt a tap on her shoulder.

     “Excuse me,” came a meek voice.

     “We are not turning around!” she yelled.

     The outburst sent Campren cowering, but he still managed to gestured to a nearby hallway and timidly squeak out the word, “people.”

     Anna swiveled around. Sure enough, three figures were closing in on them from a distance. Her non-mutated hand instinctively made a move for her gun.

    “Don’t shoot!” Campren cried. “I know them!”

     She rewarded for this statement by turning the gun toward his head.

     “We are not turning around!” she repeated.

     As the approaching group entered earshot, Campren began to make out bits of their conversation. “Look! There they are!” Ricco’s voice. “Where have you been? We’ve been looking all over for you!” Jaya’s voice. “Watch how you phrase that; he’ll think you’re talking to him.” An unfamiliar voice.

     “Hey, is it just me or does it look like she's going to—she is!” cried Ricco. “She’s going to shoot him! Do something, Bobu!”

     “Relax, shark brains,” replied the anthropomorphic beetle. “He’ll be fine. The jacket shred, remember?”

     Anna’s gun directed itself back toward the incoming strangers. “We are not turning around.”

     His confusion mounting, Camren’s head tilted to one side. “Okay, something’s definitely wrong with his gal.”

     “She's pointing the gun at us!” Ricco exclaimed. "And I don’t have a jacket shred!"

     “Point taken,” Bobu conceded. “Some help, Jaya?”

     The silver warrior nodded. As she ran, she thrust one of her arms forward. It kept travelling forward, stretching and elongating until it became a whip. By the time Anna realized what was going on, her hands were pinned behind her back.

     “We are not turning around!” she said again, struggling to free herself.

     Ricco scratched his head. “Didn’t she say that already?” 

     “Yep,” Bobu confirmed. “She’s been possessed recently. Chaos, from the looks of it. He must have left some emergency programming in her brain. I’d better take care of that.”

     The bug lady closed the last few feet of distance between Anna and herself. As the possessed woman reiterated her contempt for turning around, Bobu lifted a boxing-gloved hand and pressed it to Anna’s forehead. Almost immediately, her ravings stopped. The touch changed her physically as well: Her hand shifted back into its regular form, the ink dripped off her arms, and her face went from a papery white to a more healthy shade of pale.

     Her eyelids fluttered for a moment, as though she was waking up from a dream. When her alertness returned, he eyes grew wide. She stared at the blue bug boxer, then the metal girl with the stretchy limbs, and finally muscular drag queen whale shark.

     “Answers would be nice,” she said.

     Ricco stepped forward. “Allow me to explain!” he declared, swishing his hands dramatically. “I am Ricco and this is Bobu. We were both stuck in a video game together, but then got zapped here and Bobu became the book. But when she figured that out, her personality split itself into all the different archetypes, and one of them was evil! She knew the only way to fix the book and save everybody was to pull herself together—literally—so she set off on an adventure to find her missing parts. Then we met Jaya, who died, but came back to life as a deer that could shape shift and stuff.”

     He gasped for air.

     “Thanks for the recap,” said Bobu.

     Ricco bowed. “Any time!”

     “I’m going to pretend that made sense,” Anna told them.

     “It makes sense in context,” Bobu said sympathetically. “All you need to know right now is that Chaos isn’t in your head anymore, but he left a bit of himself behind. And apparently, that part of him really, really didn’t want you to turn around.”

     Anna nodded. She looked relieved to hear something she could understand. “Any ideas why he would want that?”

     “He probably wanted to make sure she didn’t get anywhere near Ink and Mudd,” Jaya supplied.

     “Did you say Ink and Mudd are here?” Campren exclaimed. The four heads looked at him in surprise, like they’d almost forgotten he was there.

     “That’s why we’ve been looking for you,” Bobu continued.

     Anna glanced at the timid man behind her. “Him?”

     “No, you. And Reinald. If the unwriting is going to be stopped, we need to get you guys to Ink and Mudd, pronto.” Anticipating more questioning, Bobu added, “That’s where things start to get complicated. I’ll explain later.”

     Anna closed her eyes and pressed her fingers to her forehead thoughtfully. “Let me get this straight: you’re saying that in order to save the book, all I have to do is meet with these two?”

     “And Bobu has to get all her pieces back,” Ricco reminded her. “Which she’s really close to doing; there’s only one more left!”

     “The evil one?” Campren guessed.

     “Naturally,” answered Bobu.

     “And this is how the universe is going to be saved?” Anna asked skeptically. “Not by fixing more stories?”

     “Fixing stories was pointless to begin with,” the bug lady remarked. “Imagine you have your legs chopped off by a chainsaw, and you’re sent to the hospital. You lie there on the operating table, expecting surgery, but the doctor just hooks you up to blood bag and calls it a day. Fixing stories is like that. More new tales don’t hurt, but they’re not much good if the Book is still bleeding to death.”

     “Okay, I get your point,” Anna grunted.

     Bobu gave her a thumbs-up. “So we’re on the same page now? Great. Now let’s stop wasting time and go find those twins!”