A quick note of explanation, as this is the climax of a longer tale: the Subreality Cafe is an interdimensional anomaly where writers and characters alike can mingle. You'd like it there. It's a fun place. Until one day characters started to disappear..

"A Cold Dash of (Sub)Reality" was a round-robin tale woven about this mystery, masterminded by myself. If you'd like to read it (it's a kick!), the lot (including an epilogue set after this piece) is archived in my own virtual library. Otherwise, read on! All you need to know as you head into this is that even the writers and the omnipresent Cafe staff have vanished from the face of Subreality at this point...that only I, Kielle, knew who the heroine was going to be at this point (though seeing as it's archived here, it'll be obvious to you!)...and that Ash is a rather famous alternate fanfic version of the X-Men's Gambit. :)

It hadn't been easy to get into the Mainstream place up the "road" from the Cafe, but enough soulful moping in the direction of a certain weather goddess had finally done the trick -- he had the pitiful appeal of a half-starved alley-cat, and he knew it. "One drink," she'd cautioned him, "one single drink, and then straight back to where you belong."

That, of course, was before he'd managed to "accidentally" run into the "real" Remy LeBeau. Despite Storm's increasingly feeble protests and cautions, one drink had turned into several drinks, then several cigarettes, then several hands of poker, then a promise to smuggle Ash in through the back door the next night. And the next. And the next.

Hands thrust deep into pockets, Ash now sauntered in the direction of his usual haunt, the Subreality Cafe, the interdimensional watering hole for fanfic characters such as himself. He almost caught himself whistling, and instead broke into a wide grin which would have shocked the boots off of anyone who knew him from his own series. In that, he was a timid, frightened, tortured soul, a mere shell of the man who was better known as the debonair Gambit in kinder realities. However, he'd been learning to loosen up when he was "off duty." And the icing on the cake was the newly-discovered fact that the real Gambit was currently having a MUCH worse time of it than his fanfic counterpart...

As the Cafe loomed out of the mists ahead, Ash chuckled to himself at the thought. "I might have it rough, oui, but at least MY Rogue would never leave me out in de snow wit'out a shirt on...d'accord, dere was dat one time, but Muir Island ain't exactly the Antarctic..."

He stopped dead and stared up at the Cafe as something very important finally registered on his wandering brain. At this time of the evening the place should have been rocking, ablaze with lights and laughter and the occasional crash of breaking glass. Instead, only the faintest glow illuminated a window or two from within. The neon signs were dark. And the Bouncer's nook was empty.

Only then did Ash remember the rumors which had only just begun filtering around the fictive community on the night he'd accepted a double-dare from Target Dexterity and set out for the Mainstream place. Rumors of characters gone missing, Writers wandering astray...

Non, that can't be... Perhaps someone is playing a joke -- a surprise party, peut-etre? Oui, dat has to be it; it IS almost my birthday. Tres amusant, mes amis. But y'can't fool me! With a smile slowly spreading over his rangy features, he strained his ears and his spatial sense for movement.

He found nothing. His grin froze and then collapsed.

"Mon dieu," he whispered, shivering as a random breeze whirled the clammy mists through his hair and around his tense body.

He might have said more, perhaps entered the Cafe seeking answers. As it turned out, he had a lot more to worry about. A moment before there had been nothing behind him. Suddenly Something WAS there -- he could feel it like a cold wind at his back, a black shadow hanging over his mutant senses. He didn't need to look to know that it was something very, very bad. Moving on pure instinct, he started to whirl, dropping low, ready for anything--

Whatever it was, it gestured at Ash with a rough graceless tearing motion. Without a sound, without pain, the shocked fictive simply...unravelled.

As what was left of the fragment of imagination known as Remy "Ash" LeBeau dispersed into the mists in a crystalline spray, his last thoughts were for his Writer. This shouldn't have happened! Had she forsaken him? Why...?

It had been hard work, admittedly, but it was worth the trouble. The long years of fuming impotently at the sidelines were almost over. At last, it would have control.

The Mainstream universe was like a river rushing through a great glass pipe, visible to all but only dancing to the whims of those strange murky minds who moved within its depths. Minds who sometimes failed in their task. Weak minds who twisted and distorted the substance of the river of thought as they took from it, unable to comprehend the true potential of what they had always taken for granted.

It knew it could do better.

It had beaten jealously against the glass for far too long...clawing at the impenetrable barrier, longing to join in, but to no avail. The barrier had been too strong, the crystalline filaments that were the pipe too tightly woven to penetrate. There was no room for loopholes.

Then one day it had looked closer and found a tiny tributary springing from the closed system, hardly more than a glittering leak. The tiny trickle looped through the mind of a human being and then flowed away into the mists, its path arrow-straight, as if it knew exactly where it was going. Curious, the watcher tore itself away from its fixation with the main source long enough to follow the tiny rivulet, which was joined by other threads of focused imagination until they melded into a rushing stream.

A stream which it could touch, unlike the forbidden "river."

For a long time it crouched there, blank with astonishment, running its fingers almost obsessively through the merry little rush of ideas. Then it straightened up and found itself gazing through a firelit pane of glass...directly into the cheerful cacophony of what it would later come to know as the Subreality Cafe.

It had blinked with amazement, frozen unnoticed at the window. The ambiguous little tavern was practically humming with the creativity and wonder which it had sometimes glimpsed within the great river -- sometimes good, sometimes bad, but all of it untamed and running free through this plane between realities.

At that moment it knew:

It would HAVE this place.

Even more satisfying, however, was to watch their Writers. Without muses, the Writers set aside their projects, swearing half-heartedly to "get back to them next month maybe." Without new chapters to amuse them, Readers sought out new sources of entertainment.

Without Writers to rescue them with another chapter or the appreciation of Readers to keep them vibrant, characters became easy prey. At the same time the dreams and fragments, the characters-yet-to-be, quietly scattered back into the mists like a handful of ashes in the wind. The intruder had nothing against the "fictives," actually. It was simply that if creativity was allowed to run loose like this a myriad of splinter universes and alternate realities were created, none significantly more important than any other. At least, none to rival Mainstream. Each character (or set of characters, like that troublesome Neramani and his pals) were the lynchpin which made their particular splinter reality unique. Excise their mutating, plot-twisting presence, and there was nothing to differentiate that particular sub-reality. There was no room for redundancy -- the now lusterless subreality winked out, collapsing back into the Mainstream.

They all had to go.

Because once the playing field was level, so to speak, it would ease off on the unsuspecting Writers, allowing them to return to their notepads and their keyboards. It would release the muses, albeit on very short leashes. They would carry its ideas to their human counterparts. It would control the story -- for it would be ONE majestic interwoven storyline, none of this rampant individuality, even if the Writers knew it not. What had been a chaotic mess would rise as a single coherent vision, one powerful dream, one sweeping river of continuity and cohesion to rival the original.

Only this time, IT would be in control.

There would be no more standing to one side as fictives and slivers of imagination scattered around like so many mindless insects, totally oblivious to the bigger picture. No more gazing with soul-consuming longing into the river it knew it could never be a part of. There would be a new river, and that river would belong to IT.

It liked the thought.

Right now, however, it stood outside the Cafe with a deep frown furrowed into its featureless face, fists on what were ostensibly its hips. The lights were dark, and the signs had burned out; a pall of dead grey hung over the formerly lively structure. The door swung listlessly open, creaking in a nonexistent breeze. It had them all. It was over.

So why was the place still standing?

Oddly, she wasn't frightened, or depressed. Anxious enough to gnaw on her nails, perhaps -- uncertain about what she was supposed to do, definitely. But she had faith that she'd think of something. She usually did. It was her nature.

She sat alone in the deserted Cafe, at a table framed squarely by a slant of sunlight which streamed through a curtainless window. Dust motes danced in the swathe of gold, but the light itself seemed tired, permeated with an oppressive orange taint. The kind of light one expects to see emanating from an ancient sun, she thought, just before it begins to go super-nova. There was a glass at her elbow which contained nothing but cola-tinted water which had been ice some time before, although she wasn't exactly sure when or where she'd gotten it; she idly swirled a straw through it, her chin resting on her other hand.

Perhaps she should go out there to confront whatever it was. She'd been telling herself that for the past two hours. But for some reason her feet had refused to cooperate. Which was strange, because she was certainly not a coward. Intuition, perhaps? A hunch?

Of course, she realized, sitting up straight as understanding struck. It'll have to come HERE if it wants to finish the job. Whatever "it" is, and whatever that "job" might be, it surely can't be done until--

Right on cue, the front door creaked open and there IT stood.

Even though she had never laid eyes on it before, the instant she saw it she knew what it was...and what it wanted.

She'd thought that she'd be frightened when she finally met it. After all, how many nights had she and the others stayed at the Cafe as late as possible, trying to outscare each other with the latest chilling rumors about the disappearances? Whatever it was, it had taken away all of her friends -- she didn't know if they were still out there, somewhere, alive but captive, or if had been returned to the ethers of the minds from whence they had come. It had practically destroyed the Subreality Cafe and everything it stood for, blithely dismissing the collective joy, pain, even the fictives themselves -- everything that had made subreality REAL.

And now it was here for her...implacable, uncaring, inhuman. She should have been terrified. Inexplicably, she wasn't afraid of it in the least...

And then she understood.

Calmly, she straightened her silk blouse and flicked the dust off of her jeans with a motion of exaggerated care. Only then did she rise to her feet to face the thing.

With a distinctly irritated expression (which was strange, for it had no discernable features) the stranger raised a hand and gestured at her. It was an odd gesture, arm moving as if to catch ahold of some invisible substance, then pulling on it ever so casually. Braced for anything, anything at all, she was surprised to feel only the slightest tug...just the slightest disruption of her sense of balance.

It occurred to her then that perhaps there was an actual reason as to why she was the last one left.

Her confidence rising, she stubbornly planted her feet and glared at the intruder. It seemed quite taken aback at her reaction. It tried again -- to banish her or capture her, she wasn't sure which, but either way she would have none of it. She simply refused to be affected...and it worked. For all of her opponent's obvious effort, absolutely nothing unpleasant happened to her.

She almost laughed aloud at the angry confusion radiating from the intruder. The amusement must have shown on her face, for it snarled soundlessly and made another, even more dramatic flourish, this time "yanking" whatever it was it held. She got the impression that the "gloves" were now off, that whatever it had just done should have been devastating...but all she felt was a slight twinge, a mere pinch. Intuitively, she knew that the third strike had not been a direct attack upon herself but, rather, had been a demoralizing strike at her Writer. It was trying to cut her off from the mind which had created her -- it was trying to undermine her footing in "reality."

It was failing spectacularly.

And she understood exactly why.

"I just figured something out," she said in an almost friendly manner. Her voice was very loud in the echoingly empty Cafe. "Did you know that we were starting to figure it out in the end -- at least, the Writers did, once their kind started disappearing from the Cafe too. You were making them too busy with their 'real' lives to protect their characters.

"But I'm different. You can't stop them all. There's absolutely nothing you can do to me."

It snarled again. She took one step forward. Almost against its will, it was forced back a step itself, even though she was still a good ten feet away from it.

Her, a mere unarmed girl.

She didn't suddenly feel Immensely Powerful -- she didn't really feel any different at all. What WAS important was one simple fact: everything finally made sense. For the first time in her confusing, topsy-turvy life, It All Made Sense.

She smiled at the creature without malice. "I feel sorry for you, actually. You must have worked really hard on whatever it is you thought you were doing. But you must see now that as long as I'm here, everything you've done can be unraveled. Because I'm the center. The core. The heart. The beginning. I am the first, and I will exist for as long as there are minds left to dream. Whether you like it or not.

"Whether ANYONE likes it or not."

It had tried to capture the errant wisp of imagination like it had snared all the rest. Twice. The second time it had bared its claws and struck hard enough to half-obliterate a smaller character, attempting to unravel the physical form of this tiny slip of a girl. It had worked many times before -- destroy the body and the energy is returned to the stream, stored away nicely for later use. It was all so simple...

Or at least it had been until now.

Irritated, it had then decided to drive her Writer's attention away from her, to discourage his or her ideas and thus strand this impudent little bit of nothing high and dry without fuel for her rebellious existence. When it had reached out, however, the problem became apparent: more than one mind supplied the "spark" to this particular character.

It was annoyed but not surprised. When it had confronted that dismayingly changeable McCoy girl it had taken a truly tremendous effort to wrench her away from her network of supporting Writers and Readers before it could strike her down. It was troublesome, it was hard work, but it could be done.

Ah well -- now that the majority of its work was done, it could certainly afford however much time and effort was needed to wear this one down, too. And, although it liked to think it was more civilized, it wouldn't be completely adverse to making the perverse fictive hurt a little for all the annoyances she was causing. All this trouble simply because these silly little crumbs of thought, these wayward delusions refuse to follow my dream of perfect Order...

With a long-suffering sigh, it deigned to take a close look at the task which now lay before it. At how many Writers it would have to deal with before this last defiant shred of rebellion could be brought under control...

It looked, and the first taste of fear suddenly soured its tongue and chilled its stomach.

She stood her ground. Without the slightest trace of fear, she closed her eyes and purposely dug deep into her mental "bag of tricks" -- for the first time in her life, she strove to select her mutant power du jour instead of passively allowing a Writer to choose it for her. Within a heartbeat which seemed to last an eternity, she felt a satisfying imaginary "click" as she found what she was looking for. There was no name for the weird new ability she'd dredged up from within her mixed-up chromosomes, but then again she'd probably never need to use it again anyway.

Convenient Power Manifestation was handy that way.

Her eyes snapped open and focused. "Sorry about this," she told the intruder with real regret in her voice. And she waved her hand--

The Subreality Cafe is unusually quiet for this particular day of the week. Is it deserted? Closed...? No, not quite; firelight flickers cozily through the windows, and the Bouncer is standing in his shadowy nook to the right of the door. Brawny arms crossed, he nods companionably to you as you join him under the eaves. Your fingers trail down stained glass and varnished wood to settle on the handle of the front door -- it's metal tonight, curved, and it turns easily.

As you step inside, a whiff of something foul nearly makes you choke. You flail frantically at the tainted air and the scorched scent dissipates, giving way to the smells of greasy cooking and exotic drinks, smoke and sawdust.

You wipe your tearing eyes clear to find to your amazement that you are the only person in the Cafe. No, correction: you are the second person in the Cafe, for you can hear someone thumping around in one of the back rooms. You recognize the voice (and the string of curses) as belonging to the Manager as something distant falls over with a tinkle of breaking glass...

Scratch that -- you're the THIRD person in the Cafe. A blonde elven girl with feline eyes, no more than sixteen years old, is sitting alone at a table facing the front door, idly drumming her heels against the legs of her chair. As your gaze alights upon her, she becomes a twenty-year-old brunette with the neatly folded pinions of a Gargoyle, an ornate bare sword resting across her lap...then the wings are gone and she is a simple farmgirl with a froth of red curls and a smattering of freckles across her cute nose. All of her manifestations are beautiful, and all occur without her ever looking up from the battered old copy of "Arrows Of The Queen" in which she seems to be utterly engrossed. The great white wolf reclining at her feet darkens to ebony and then shivers into a flock of brightly-colored firelizards no longer than your forearm, scraps of jewel-bright color which chitter excitedly at each other as they take to the air and dart away in search of a bowl of peanuts.

In the Subreality Cafe, this is nothing unusual.

She finally looks up from her book and spots you; she breaks into a charming smile as her hair shifts gold and her eyes shade from emerald to amethyst. The sword becomes a glowing scepter, then vanishes completely. Hooves clatter on the wooden walkway outside as a unicorn -- or is it Pegasus this time, or a Companion? -- paces where there was no such thing a moment before.

"Oh! There you are!" the ever-changing girl exclaims happily. "Come on in, come sit down. Don't worry, everything's going to be okay after all. I took care of it, you know. That's my job."

Without being able to explain exactly why, you know that she's telling the truth.

And so you join Mary Sue for a drink and to wait for the others to arrive.

..-= FINIS =-.

Yes, there are a few. First of all, I want to thank everyone who chipped in on this project: Falstaff, Tapestry, Phil Foster, Haesslich, and Geoff Jones for adding chapters and ideas to my vague plotline (further chapters are still welcome, because all kinds of cool stuff could have happened before or after this finale!); poor confused Laersyn, who let me bounce bizarre ideas off of him until one worked; and Susan Crites, who solidified the character of the infamous Mary Sue and unwittingly handed me the perfect heroine for this story. I'll bet you thought for a few moments that she was supposed to be me, didn't you? Gotcha!

(NOTE: If you don't know who Mary Sue is, let's just say that she pre-dates the Internet, tracing her roots waaaay back to the Star Trek 'zines and APAs of the seventies. She's every fangirl character ever created: the brilliant beautiful ensign who gets Kirk to fall in love with her, the half-elven warrior/cleric/ sorceress/thief who roams the land with her trusty talking unicorn in search of adventure, the plucky mutant teenager who captures Gambit's heart, every orphaned barmaid who ever became a hero or a queen, a plethora of Sailor Whatevers, and just about any female character ever to star in a McCaffery or Lackey fanfic. ;)

Speaking of Anne & Misty, firelizards belong to the former; "Arrows Of The Queen" and Companions belong to the latter. Marvel characters (ie. Gambit & Storm) belong to Marvel. And the Gargoyle concept in question is owned by Disney. Ideas for the names for both this chapter amd the first were pulled from William Butler Yeats' "The Second Coming."

Remy "Ash" LeBeau belongs to Lori McDonald, who graciously gave me permission to use the dear boy and threatened bodily harm if I didn't give him back. ;) Target Dexterity belongs to herself, though Martha McMahon THINKS she owns her. Rem'aillon "Remi" Neramani and company belong to Valerie Jones. "That McCoy girl" is, of course, Darqstar's Sikudhani. The Bouncer and the Manager are, as always, attributable to the brilliant Falstaff. This particular manifestation of Mary Sue was first chronicled by Susan Crites.

On the other hand, the weird-ass villain of this piece and the Subreality concept are both of my own creation. No, I can't fully explain the "bad guy" either -- it was more of a feeling or a "concept" than an actual hard-edged character. Sometimes things don't make perfect sense, that's all -- even in stories. Maybe said being represents fandom itself. I leave it up to your interpretation, dear reader.

The Mainstream belongs to all of the comic-book companies we like to write about. No Writers, Artists, or characters were harmed in the making of this series. No money was made, either. Gee, sounds like an Andrew Dice Clay movie. <G;> Please ask before archiving, though Image has blanket permission as usual. Feedback is appreciated. What did you think of the ending twist....?

And last but not least, you belong to yourself. Well, isn't it about time I wrote you into one of these? ;)

.-=K=-.