“With great
power comes great responsibility.”
Nero, 5th Emperor of Rome #quote
How come most cheesy jokes aren't about cheese? Anyway onto the
flash fiction!
Patching A Plot Hole
The world of the author's book stretched far and covered many miles
of the Fictionscape. Though the author created a much larger world
than the few miles in her mind, it was vastly compressed. The
locations the characters visited appeared in full, but summarized
locations twisted and shrank into maps between each place. In the
Fictionscape if the characters went from one city to another and the
cities were known but the trip skipped, then the entire skipped place
would be like a string with fuzzy details of the location spread on
it. A stranger to the Fictionscape may have great difficulty
navigating it when some places lay complete and rational, while other
places were as incomplete or summarized as they were in the author's
mind and story.
But the author's Architect was no stranger. He knew the Fictionscape
like any other Architect. Architects live in the Fictionscape to
bring the author's work to being and then help them find and patch up
any problems. Sometimes an Architect hitting the nail on the head in
the Fictionscape can be felt as that lighting bolt of inspiration.
This author's Architect needed to repair something quite dire. A
large, deep hole opened in up in the middle of the wedding of the two
main characters. The Architect entered the wedding as the story lay
frozen in time. He would fit in a modern wedding with his black
tuxedo and shoes, though perhaps not the wedding of this fantasy
world. The Architect's top-hat stood as tall as the hats of the
wizards among the wedding guests. He twirled a white cane made of
bone. Bone taken from a dragon in some far off story he worked on
before this one. This Architect worked helping other authors long
before this woman. He couldn't remember off the top of his head what
other author's story he got the bone from. Something with a ring?
He stared into the deep, black hole with his equally black eyes. He
knew this void as a plot hole. For some reason it formed in the
author's story and he knew it as his duty to help in fixing it. The
plot hole caused such tension on the Fictionscape that as he drew
closer to it the Architect could see his veins slowly tensing up
under his almond skin.
Red arms covered in blood emerged from the pit clamoring to take the
characters from the Fictionscape into the plot hole. When logic falls
apart in a story a plot hole rises to consume the world.
“Nasty thing aren't you?” The Architect looked around him. “Now
what is wrong here?” He stepped away from the plot hole to avoid
being grabbed by the bloody arms but didn't fear it in particular.
The first few plot holes that tried to drag him to logic oblivion
scared him. But he'd dealt with enough of them to be comfortable with
them. “I've checked the basic logic of this story over and over.
The events flow smoothly enough. All the base assumptions of fantasy
check out.” From plot hole emerged a creature made of animated
brain stems rolling like a tumbleweed covered in teeth and legs. When
it went after the Architect he launched it away like a golf ball with
his bone cane.
The Architect looked near where the plot hole appeared to see the
bride and groom and the bloody hands working towards them.
“Of course! The characters don't love each other!” The Architect
smiled. “Well, at least believably.” Though the author said in
her story that the characters loved each other their story they were
not the type of characters that could be True Loves. A matrimony the
way the author described would not be possible between the characters
she created that went through the story she created. The Architect
needed to inform her immediately that she needed to mend her romance
to be True Love before the plot hole consumed all the land her world
inhabited in Fictionscape.
And soon out of seemingly nowhere the author had an ephiphany about
the characters in her story. Later she finished her best seller.
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