There are a few ways you would want to start your day, much less end one, than to end up at the cosmic equivalent of the DMV, but only a few. Fortunately for our favourite bastard protagonist, he would not encounter these much worse fates. Unfortunately for him, he still had to get his licence renewed.
It all started when he was trudging along Skymount, heading to one tavern or another, when he had to traverse across a rather large snow drift that had slipped off the roof of a nearby townhouse. Frowning, of course, he grudgingly trudged over the snow that was only a few inches deep at the worst in places. And promptly fell through the snow and disappeared from the world.
He came to with a shock, standing in a row of wildly extravagant and outrageous characters to either side of him, while still absolutely covered in snow.
“Oh, the new guy woke up,” said a voice behind him. Handy whirled, sending snow flying everywhere as he reached for his hammer but stopped halfway in his turn when he came face to armoured shoulder of some Sauron-looking motherfucker. The black, spikey-armoured figure barely gave him a sideways glance out from the red-hued eye sockets of his alarmingly familiar helmet. Handy just glared at the quite obviously humanoid figure and spied a strange red amulet hanging around its neck, seemingly attached to his armour.
“Is that all of them, do you suppose?” Handy blinked and turned again, finding himself absolutely surrounded by… other humans. A lot of them. There was practically an army of them, all standing in rows facing a single direction. The latest person to speak was what appeared, for all the world, a mediaeval knight. An actual one, complete with chainmail, black tabard with a white cross, hauberk, a French accent and an aged, grandfatherly, world-weary face that gave him a polite nod of acknowledgement.
He turned again to the one who was directly behind him who’d spoken first. This one appeared to be an average man who would work at a grocer’s, complete with green apron and customer service smile.
“Nah, there’s still a few greyscale guys who have yet to wake up from their lines. We’ll be here a bit.” Wide-eyed, but moving more slowly, cautiously, the bewildered Handy faced forward. The voice was someone ahead of him, though he couldn’t make out much other than a green robe belted at the waist, brown leather boots, wild brown hair, and what looked like an empty book pouch in his hand.
“Where… Where am I?” Handy managed, snow falling off his shoulders as he looked around him. They were all, in their hundreds, their thousands, gathered in a huge, high-ceilinged hall bereft of any decoration, built with off-green hued stone. Chandeliers above them flickered with magical lights that seemed to dance from one empty candle sconce to another, casting faint multihued illumination on the floor below that was barely enough to help them see the people nearby, let alone the whole hall. Still, the general roar of conversation and the sheer reverberation bouncing off the walls was enough to give the impression of the scale of the place.
“What is—What are… You… You’re all… human.”
“The boy has eyes to see.” The elderly knight beside him chuckled. “Let’s see if he has ears to hear.”
“I bet you five bits he freaks out,” said another voice off the distance behind Handy and to his right. The bet was taken on by a few others.
“Freak out about what?” Handy asked no one in particular. Hand still on the head of his hammer, he tried valiantly to maintain a neutral, stoic expression as his mind reeled to take in this new information. Was he hallucinating? It couldn’t be a dream; he didn’t have those anymore. Was he on drugs? Drunk? Had he just lost his mind? Did… Did he make it back to Earth… somehow? Why else would there be so many humans here?
“Did… Is this Earth?”
“Is this Earth, he says!” A harsh, barking laughter came from some piratical-looking bastard with a peg leg ahead of him and to the left. He even turned around to laugh at him. “Must be nice to have such a fanciful homeland that doesn’t try to kill you for returning, but I wouldn’t know enough to tell ya. I've never been there.”
“Who… Who are you all? Where are we?” Handy asked, now a bit annoyed but still no less off-put by the situation. The knight beside him patted him on the shoulder, causing him to jump and brush his hand off. The knight held up his hand placatingly, still smiling.
“It’ll all make sense in a moment, young man, God willing,” the Frenchman said. “How fond are you of stories?”
“What does that have to do with anything?” Handy asked.
“It has everything to do with it. I’d just answer the question if I were you,” said Apron McGee.
“Well…” Handy scanned over the heads of the people he could see and… Not everyone here was a human. No, there were some weirdos plotted here and about, some way bigger than any human could be, and some most definitely weren’t human-shaped. Was that a fucking Final Fantasy character costume he saw? The one with the hair? There were others; some looked to be honest-to-God ponies… if ponies were bipedal and—
He quickly moved on from those ones to the other abominations to distract his interest.
“I… suppose I do like stories, like anyone would, but—” It hit him then when the words left his mouth, and he choked on them with a start. Stories. He was here because he was in a story. Every single person here was here because they were in a story. His whole life led to him being ensnared in a kind of cosmic storybook, written by uncaring hands and enjoyed by an unknowable audience. Every wound a pen stroke, every tragedy a punctuation, every trouble an intentional condescension from an unknowable author. He, and every single person here, was a focal point in a story of unknown providence and unfamiliar purpose, taken to this realm between the lower world that was where their lives were written and a higher one whence drew joy from their struggles and failures.
Theirs was a life of purpose, but purpose separate from themselves and apart from themselves. Their lives were not their own but given up unto others, to inflict pain or healing upon those exposed to the viscerality of their lives. They were creations but not of God, except by way of a second hand…
Or were they? Were they created or were their lives interrupted by the whims of those above them? Were those above them any different? If not, why would they be here to be judged whether their stories were worth continuing for those above to subsume into themselves. Would they continue if they were judged unworthy, and be freed from the pens of those above, or would they cease to be, as non-existent as they were before word met page and said they were to be.
“Oh my God…” The pirate ahead of him had apparently heard him and laughed uproariously.
“I sure as shit hope ya liked stories lad! Yer in one!” he shouted over his shoulder. Handy just stood there processing it as he heard others around him grumbled and the clink of coins as money changed hands as bets were won and lost on him. The priestly knight beside him simply grimaced and patted him on the shoulder in solidarity. Handy, for his part, didn’t brush him off this time.
“Are… Are we real?”
“Yes boy,” the older man said, chuckling lightly. “I have given it considerable thought myself, but we have to be.”
“How can you be sure?” The knight shrugged.
“I’m about as sure as I was before I suppose. And about as sure as I’m going to be after this is all sorted.” He gestured around and leaned over. “Otherwise, what would be the point of having us plead our cases?”
“Cases? Oh… The judgement,” Handy said, knowing but not understanding how he knew. This was a place of judgement. “... Are we dead?”
“I’d say some of us around here probably hoped we were,” interjected a gruff, dishevelled man in a brown shirt with a nasty scar across his face. One of his eyes was a milky grey indicating blindness. “But that’s probably not the case.”
“We’re here to get our stories judged. See if they’re worth continuing,” the green-cloaked man ahead of him said over his shoulder. “About the only thing we have in common is Equestria… for the most part.”
“Equestria? What the hell do ponies have to do with this?” Handy asked.
“You’ll figure it out. In the meantime, just enjoy the discerning company.” The large black-armoured knight to his left seemed to snort derisively from under his helmet. Handy, still full of questions, held his tongue for the time being.
The hall was huge. He could move freely, or he knew he could, but something compelled him to stand in place, that he was right where he should be. That and he somehow knew there was nowhere else to go just then in any case.
‘How?’ he wondered to himself. ‘How can I know this? Is this magic? Did someone manage to hack my mind with sorcery? Is this an old magic illusion?’
He studied those beside him some more. Each and every human standing there… well, the ones that were human in any case, all seemed to be just as content as he was to stay where they were. They stood there, shuffling their feet, an occasional cough there, a sneeze over there. A whispered murmur of quiet conversation could be heard on occasion breaking the otherwise impervious quietude of the great hall.
Every so often, another unlucky bastard ‘woke up’ like he did. A sudden shout, a startled cry, some muffled laughter and shouted calls from different parts of the hall as someone came to realise they were as trapped here as the rest of them. He began picking them out of the crowd after the first hour or so standing there. They were all uniformly greyscale in colour, as if some force had sapped all colour from them, and he was spying a kind of cartoonish representation of a living being, until suddenly, with a start, the colour returned to them all at once, and the stark-still, statuesque form sprung to sudden life.
One guy had apparently been drowning when he woke up, the water suddenly animating as he did as he awoke gasping for air as water soaked the stone beneath him. Another shuddered forward, having apparently been mid-fall from a great height when waking. Still another had apparently been on fire when he awoke, causing a great racket as he stumbled around, putting out little bits of flame on his clothes as he came to.
Handy found he didn’t mind standing there for the whole time. He was long since used to the eternal-leg-day that was his new life, and from standing for nearly entire days at a time stock-still in the courts of royalty when it was his duty to do so. Even so, he found himself not getting agitated or tired. Or hungry. Or thirsty. Come to think of it…
“Huh…” he said with sudden comprehension.
“Something the matter?” Apron Dude asked. Handy hadn’t bothered to ask his name, seeing as no one had bothered to ask him his, and he could respect the anonymous decorum.
“Nothing, just realised something. Anyone else feeling thirsty at all? How long have you been here?” he asked the men around him. Some shrugged; one looked up contemplatively.
“Long enough,” said James Earl motherfucking Jones beside him. Handy did a double take at the towering armoured figure and finally noticed why exactly the helmet seemed so familiar to him, despite the otherwise mediaeval aesthetic of the armour. He looked about and, sure enough, apart from the Final Fantasy person from before, there actually were quite a few people standing about dressed as some very recognisable characters from numerous games, movies, cartoons and, he was just going to assume, anime. He’d never really watched any of that, so he couldn’t be sure they weren’t just guys with absurdly terrible fashion sense and questionable choices in barbers they favoured.
Some were absolute dead ringers for the characters in question. Others, who Handy assumed their lack of faith would disturb him, looked slightly modified from what he knew like the man beside him. That wasn’t all, however.
For while there were a disturbing number of such persons of distinction in the hall he could see, some from quite a ways off either because they stood literally head and shoulders above everyone else, were floating, or were giving off so much light of their own it was impossible to mistake them, they were also some incredibly mundane-looking men and women.
Some, like the grocer behind him, or like the hobo in front of him, seemed relatively normal, just people in shirts and jeans you’d see on any given city street. Then there was the fucking US Marine Corps. Any given direction he cared to turn his head, he spotted more of them—soldiers fully kitted out in battledress, full equipment, backpacks, weapons, helmets and on and on. Some had their faces covered, some just dressed to their khakis as if they were in the middle of relaxing when they got whisked away.
Some were recognisable, with US flag patches on their shoulders. Some were not, however, wearing obscure and strange armour and uniforms he couldn’t place. Several looked downright science fiction with sloped, all-encompassing helmets with a visor obscuring their facial features. It was only then Handy realised he himself wasn’t wearing his own helmet and for once, he felt self-conscious about putting it back on. Others were like him, dressed up all knightly in various armours.
Some, however, didn’t look human at all. Not counting the ones that resembled known characters from stories he knew, there were a couple he could swear were just outright elves, judging by their ears. Several were honest-to-God ponies, like actual ponies on all four legs not counting the ones that uh… stood upright. He was pretty sure one guy three rows ahead of him was a dwarf, but he couldn’t be sure. A couple even had wings which obscured his vision in a certain direction.
There was one such person, across the main thoroughfare that bisected the great hallway, that appeared for all the world to be a woman… sort of. Made out of tree bark with mismatched wings. Handy at first thought she was another statuesque person who had yet to wake up until she moved and dispelled the disquieting illusion.
There were stranger beings aside, so bewildering in variety that Handy struggled to comprehend there being anything in common between them other than broad stroke commonalities amongst a scattering number among the throng. Except for one thing the green cloaked mage ahead of him had mentioned.
The only thing they had in common was Equestria.
This, for Handy, had terrifying implications. He had never seen nor heard of anyone here, nothing remotely like any of them apart from himself. Yet they all held Equestria in common. Did that mean they all had Earth in common as well? No, the pirate had said he had never been there, which raised all sorts of questions. Was there more than one world with Equestria on it? More than one Earth? Was this some timelines converging nonsense going on here?
He struggled with these existential questions before coming back to the existential realities he somehow knew to be true regardless. They were here to be judged, or at least their stories were to be. Their stories, their lives were, for better or worse, at least real to them if nothing else, experienced through expression to affect the lives of people above them in the hierarchical chain of being that apparently was existence. That meant everyone here all had that in common too. There couldn’t be more than one reality if they were all subject to a higher reality, after all.
And yet, every single one of them, aside from the occasional pirate, came from a world, an Earth that was not their world of origin. Did that mean the people above them were from an Earth as well? The Earth perhaps? Were they more real than he was? Or was this ‘story’ of his, the only intersection between his lower reality and their reality, for a brevity of time? What happened when it ended? Was anything before it even real? The old knight beside him was convinced that happened to be the case.
And while he could find holes in his argument, he couldn’t dismiss it. If they weren’t real in some sense, why would they even have a say in their own judgement? What defence could a hammer make for how it was used by the craftsman, after all, be it for building or murder? Their opinions would not matter.
The storm of internal questioning persisted for some time, with little to distract him from his ruminations. Despite the seemingly interminable time they had spent there already, and how it looked like they wouldn’t be leaving any time soon, they all mostly kept to themselves. Probably more than a good few of the more thinking sorts in the crowded hall were going through the same process he was working through, and still most of them hadn’t resorted to panicking, or violence, or trying to escape.
Then, rather suddenly and violently, the ceiling lit up with a blinding white light, evoking many shouts of surprise and cursing from the gathered throng as the blinding light receded to a dull, blue, glowing cloud that hung high and hid the ceiling from sight. Several sparkling shooting stars, as in quite literal physical, five-pointed bright yellow stars trailing sparkles and rainbows, erupted from the cloud and flew wildly over their heads.
There was a lot of shouting now, and a lot of rattling of weapons as some of the stars got a little too close to some of the antsier humans. The stars and their trailing entourage of glittering magical awfulness eventually seemed to tire of terrorising the humans and flew ahead to the far wall at the front of the hall to which they had all been facing. The great stone worked wall had been completely dark prior to this, untouched by disparate light of the magical chandeliers above them.
The stars coalesced, coming together in a great explosion of light, before suddenly flashing away as numerous trails of light erupted from the centre outwards and exploding into a cavalcade of colour as a gouache firework display announced the arrival of…
Handy wasn’t exactly sure what in the hell he was looking at. It was a scantily clad young woman in the most ridiculous, outlandish and literally clownish costume he could fathom, full of contrasting colour palettes and eye-bleeding designs that hurt to look at, trailing ribbons and bells and twirling a staff with a large yellow star with a plastic pink heart superimposed on top of it.
In explosions of candy-flavoured smoke appeared a band of cute critters, looking like living plushies of furry animals in parade uniforms playing a variety of musical instruments and belting out a popcorn and candyfloss rendition of When the Saints Go Marching In.
“Welcome heroes!” the magical lass announced with the most girlish laugh Handy ever had the displeasure of hearing being faked. The magical girl hung in the air and let herself slowly descend to a rising area of stone that slowly emerged out of the ground beneath her, almost as if it were a giant stage. She daintily stood on the ground and raised a hand to her head and tipped her magician’s hat up as she looked out across her captive audience with a performer’s most dazzling smile.
“Each and every one of you!” she began, looking across the crowd. “Chosen, destined, fated even to be right where you are needed most!”
Her dazzling smile seemed to become more stiff, her brow creasing, ever so slightly as she twirled and looked back and forth across them all. Once, twice, and again before continuing.
“A-After all!” A worried expression lighted upon her eyes, threatening to break the dazzling mask she wore. She was quickly looking from one bizarre caricature before her after another. “Wh-Why shouldn’t you be here!”
She slowed in the pace of her strutting dance across the stage. Now clearly looking openly worried, her smile broke and faltered.
“Right… where… you’re supposed to… be…” She slowed to a stop, the impromptu marching band playing for all they were worth behind her as the flamboyant witch-girl looked out upon the hall with the most distraught expression imaginable on her face. Her heterochromatic eyes, matching the gaudy face paint in reverse upon her overly cute features, betrayed the deepest despair as she dropped her staff from her hands, letting it roll across the stage.
“CUT!” she suddenly bellowed, a voice that had easily carried across the entire makeshift theatre hall. It was so loud that even Handy, who was midway towards the back, had to cover his ears briefly. The woman sure had a set of lungs on her. The magical girl rounded on the confused plushies, who were now looking at each other as only abominations of life could look at each other.
She started taking instruments off them and tossing them away, yelling at the plushies. “Alright, who fucked up!? This isn’t how it's supposed to go down! These aren’t even the right schmucks!” She shook a small bear-shaped plushie, whose soulless sewn-button eyes displayed the most piteous helplessness. “I prepared mentally for weeks to put up with the disgusting bullshit I always have to, and now I’m not even in the right place!? Who was on bridge control today? Who do I have to—What?”
A tiny hedgehog had waddled over to the girl and squeaked up something utterly indecipherable up to her.
“What do you mean she’s sick!? Since when do we get sick?! I didn’t agree to cover her shift! Who’s covering my shift!?” She tossed aside the bear, who crashed into a number of other plushies who were busy running around gathering discarded and broken instruments. “WHAT DO YOU MEAN GENERAL AMNESTY!”
She kicked the hedgehog, who flew at tremendous speed into a stony wall and exploded in a cloud of literal fluff and fabric.
“YOU CAN’T GIVE THOSE TRUCK-SMACKED FUCKS GENERAL AMNESTY! THERE’S TOO DAMN MANY OF THEM! SEEING SOME OF THEIR STORIES COME TO A PREMATURE END IS LITERALLY THE ONLY GOOD THING ABOUT MY JOB!”
“Uh, excuse me!” some poor bastard at the front of them all spoke up. It was a wonder the acoustics were good enough even Handy could make him out. The witch-girl suddenly snapped around and pointed an accusing finger down at the dark wizard.
“Oh don’t you worry, I’ll get to each and every one of you degenerate fucks in my own time, believe you me,” she said with the most insincere smile and the most distant looking of eyes. “Now be good and shut up while I figure out who to blame for this crap.”
She snapped her fingers and a large bean bag that was at least three times bigger than she was manifested in colourful clouds before landing on the stage with a loud ‘whump’.
She threw herself on it face-first and screamed into it in wild frustration.
“Alright!” She suddenly perked in determination as she pushed herself up from her sprawled position and settled cross-legged on the bean bag. She seemed to study them all for a long minute before letting out a long, world weary sigh. “Ah shit…. It's you guys.”
“The horse fuckers,” she muttered with tired resignation. “Alright, let's get this over with.”
She snapped her fingers and everyone went blind for a few seconds, judging by the shouts of surprise and complaint that erupted suddenly before their vision came back. The stage was transformed. That was to say, rather, it was cleaned up. Gone was the detritus of a magical marching band and their plushies and their ruined set up. Gone was the monstrously large bean bag and gone, apparently, was the magical girl.
In their place stood a large ornate wooden desk near the front of the stage, bordered to either side by mountains and mountains of what seemed to be bundles of paper, tagged with colourful clips and notes and swarmed by small magical lights.
Behind the desk sat a pure cream-white pony with deep, red, long-flowing mane. A spear-like horn rose from the crown her head and calm, regal blue eyes studied them all in imperious aloofness. She shuffled her wings, betraying her as yet another alicorn. She daintily raised a gold and silver-shod hoof to her muzzle and briefly coughed to clear her throat, and in a soothing, motherly voice that badly contrasted with the circus performer expressions of the magical girl that had stood in her place seconds ago, she spoke.
“I believe this form is more comfortable for most of you,” she said, the red-banded metal of her gold-rimmed petryal shining the altogether too bright candlelight from floating lanterns around her. There were actually more than a few appreciative responses to that coming from various places in the hall, with quite a few calling out. Handy swore he heard someone wolf-whistle and he looked back in confused disgust. The alicorn in front of them all narrowed her eyes in that person’s general direction and suddenly he got very quiet. “... A bit too much in some cases.”
“Okay, I’m not going to waste too much time with formality on this. I had this whole thing planned out, but you guys are the entirely wrong audience for it, despite your similarities to those other worthless degenerates, and now I’m no longer feeling up for it.” Her horn glowed and lifted up a number of documents before her. “Alright, let's see what we got here. Uh huh, uh huh… Riiight.”
“Okay, well before we get started, we were going to this alphabetically, but given the limited range of sub-genres you guys all have, I think it’ll be easier on us all if we have you re-organized into blocs and then handle it all one at a time. Well then!” She clapped her hooves together. “If you’re a soldier, sailor, astronaut, and you solve the problems you come across mostly through your profession, please move to the front of the hall.”
And with that, after a moment or two of hesitation, the various marines and soldiers, though notably not all of them, stepped out of line. Giving awkward apologies and pardons, they shuffled out to the centre of the hall to make their way to the designated location.
“If you solve your problems because of a mundane skill or knowledge set you had on Earth that's actually super useful in your new life, come to the front and take your place across the aisle from the last set.” She disinterestedly summoned what looked like a translucent screen of orange magic, with a rough woodworked border with false candles made out of the same magical light adorning the top of it. Handy couldn’t quite make it out, but it looked like she was playing some kind of card game on it.
“If you bought a Macguffin off a shady guy and then fell in a hole or something and ended up in your new life as a radically altered being, please move here.” She waved a hoof, her horn aglow, and a section of the hall was bathed in yellow light. Sir Vader beside him made to move, then paused, as if debating something, bouncing his head back and forth as he thought through it, looking around before finally making a decision.
“Excuse me,” the deep booming voice emerged from the helmet as he shuffled past the vampire and the crusader to make his way to the central aisle.
“If your life might as well be an article in a Playboy magazine, you can stand at the back!” A disappointing number of people, rather sheepishly, shuffled out of place and made their way back. Some of them even had the audacity to strut. He noticed several of the characters, who had moved to the near front with the others dressed as famous characters, had stepped back out into the aisle but were unsure whether they should head to the back or stay where they were.
It went on like that for a long while, the hall a cacophony of noise as hundreds of men and women moved back and forth to their respective places as best they could guess. Arguing and discussing where they were best supposed to be, they compared snippets of their own stories to one another to try to determine their place in the queue. Those adopted by ponies, those kidnapped by ponies, those invaded by ponies, those who invaded ponies, those reborn as ponies—that was a pleasant surprise for Handy to discover during the movements when he all but ran across a number of Celestias and Chrysalises.
At some point she called out for those who were summoned to Equestria on behalf of greater powers for some destined purpose. The knight beside him smiled and made to move before the alicorn at the head of the hall clarified the purpose was gambling, and he stood there, seemingly greatly annoyed. Instead, Handy noticed several others move to their new place—a griffon, a satyr with a long smoking pipe, and stranger things besides.
By the end of it, Handy was now on the opposite side of the aisle, having moved twice. The first time he moved was because he fit the criteria of a changed human, the second time because he had been summoned by a pony… which put him beside some rather interesting neighbours. And now, again, he was moving because the nature of his summon was neither accidental but instead consequential. That was a confusing criteria, because by default it should have meant everyone present, but apparently it meant that their summoning was a consequence of long-running machinations that didn’t necessarily involve him at all.
At that point, Handy just didn’t question it, and now for his complacency, he stood beside what seemed to be a blue and white robot girl with a large bladed polearm and what appeared to be a fucking scarecrow. The robot girl looked bored before suddenly shooting up straight, realising she was in the wrong place and leaped over, shouting her apologies as she leapt high over their heads into the central aisle and making her way back over to the section of, apparently real characters from famous stories. Handy tried not to think about any of the strange game, book and movie characters he saw may have actually also been from their own realities lower than even his, before getting stuck up here with the rest of them.
Did that mean all the stories he read, however terribly written, were actually somebody’s real life he was spying into? If not, then how could such characters now be here, in a supposedly higher reality along with his very real self, having their lives being viewed by those even higher than he was? Did this just continue up and down the great chain of existence indefinitely or was there a limit? Could someone higher just take his story, write their own, and the winds of fate would whisk him elsewhere? Di-
“Oh-kay! Looks like we have everyone sorted into the vaguest semblance of order!” The absolute chaos that was the throng of humans and once-humans who were not nearly done sorting themselves out into the new arrangements and the hall still awash in arguments belied the alicorn’s announcement. “Let's get this circus over and done with. Right, here’s how this is going to go down…”
“-I’m going to choose a group to begin with and then, alphabetically so the bean counters can be kept happy, I’ll deal with each one of you in turn and determine whether your stories are worth continuing or not. Get all that?”
There was a general murmur of discontent.
“Fantastic! Ahe-heh-hm!” She cleared her throat and affixed a pair of rimless spectacles across her muzzle as she drew up the first sheet of paper. “Okay, first I would like to get all these ‘slice-of-life’ types out of the way. So! Would a Mister… A-non step forward please? Full name Anonymous?”
No one stepped forward at first, and everyone looked around, wondering who was being called. Eventually, from straight up the back rows came a simply-dressed man in shirt and slacks, though when Handy blinked once, he was then wearing a simple black suit with red tie. That was not what was concerning.
“Why… Why is he green?” Handy whispered. The scarecrow shrugged. “And why doesn’t he have a face?”
At that, the scarecrow actually did look back at the vampire.
“What are you talking about? He clearly has a question mark for a face,” the scarecrow said, half-laughing.
“I don’t know what either of you are talking about. He looks normal to me,” said some absolutely hulking knight that had taken the robot girl's place when Handy hadn’t been paying attention.
This confusion was matched by the look of absolute bewilderment that adorned the face of the alicorn, whose slack jaw and wide-eyed gaze led to her spectacles slowly slipping from her face and bounced along her desk as the magical projection in front of her winked out of existence.
The strutting, confident, out of place individual came to a stop at the front of the hall, just before the stage, fists on his hips, looking up confidently at the mare. For her part, she shook herself back to her senses and gathered her things.
“You… It can’t be. Okay look, I think you may have made a mistake. I asked for the slice-of-lifers to go first, not the porn addicts.” The green man remained unmoved. “So unless you have a slice of life element dominating your story, I think you might want to march your sorry, indistinct ass to the back of the hall again before you find out what authority I actually have to deal with smartasses who test me.”
Still, the international man of misery and mystery stood his place. The alicorn narrowed her eyes.
“You… don’t happen to have more than one story, do you?” Handy couldn’t see, but he could tell the man smiled. The alicorn threw her head back and let out a groan, laying a foreleg over her face and waving with the other one. “Alright, let's get through this. How many stories do you have?”
The green man snapped his fingers, and the beeping of a reversing truck suddenly caught everyone’s attention. Looking around, sure enough, a literal garbage truck slowly backed its way up the aisle towards the stage driven by… the green man. Looking back, sure enough, he was standing at the head of the hall as well. The look of utter despair on the alicorn’s face was a site to behold as the truck finally stopped, lifted its charge, and dumped a tsunami of loose paper sheets that flooded the front of the hall. It washed through and around the feet of Anonymous who, like the Colossus of Rhodes, stood unmoved before the apocalypse.
A number of shouts came from the front rows as over a dozen people suddenly pushed back to get out of the way of the onrushing flood of paper sheets. The alicorn slammed her face down on the table in defeat, her sparkling, glorious mane flowing in a non-existent wind. She shifted her face and glared down at the arrogant man with one lidded eye.
“... It is you, isn’t it?” She lifted her head and glared down at him. “Even if I were doing my proper shift, I’d still see you, wouldn’t I? You’re him, the same eyeless, messy-haired shoe stain with a million and one stories filled with all sorts of impossible nonsense and the most unjustifiably lurid debauchery.”
Anonymous merely yawned.
“DON’T THINK YOU CAN HIDE FROM ME UNDER YOUR FILTHY GREEN SKINSUIT, YOU NAMELESS SNAKE! I KNOW WHAT YOU’RE ABOUT!” At that, Anonymous simply checked his non-existent watch and tapped his foot, waiting. The mare fumed impotently, then screamed in frustration. She summoned a comically large stamp with alternating coloured ink—Handy was almost certain it was some kind of strobed flashlight at first before he saw it in action. Lifting one of the sheets from the floor with her magic, she scanned the title, set the stamp to red, and mercilessly rammed it into the poor, unsuspecting paper, leaving a massive, red letter C on its face
She held it up for the hall to see. “Hah! Cancelled, how do you like that!?”
Anon simply gave a nonplussed reaction, nodding his head as if considering it, and turned around to the garbage truck driver and saluted him. Garbage truck Anon saluted in return, sniffed, sat back in the cab of his truck and slowly, mournfully, drove his way back down the aisle, all the while playing a broken rendition of Flowers of the Forest out of his truck’s radio.
A bright white light appeared at the back of the hall as two great doors opened that simply weren’t there before, revealing a glorious luminescence beyond through which none could see past. Slowly, gloriously, Anonymous drove off into that wondrous abyss, never to be seen again.
Well, unless you turned back around and saw the smug fucker still standing right before the alicorn as he had been before, not a care in the world crossing his ambiguous features. The alicorn fumed, ground her teeth, set the sheet on fire, and summoned up the next story, scanned it, flipped the stamp in the air, and hit it with the fury of an angry god.
Completed? An Anon appeared dressed in a suit and was sucked off to the side by a suddenly appearing door that tore the poor sap into it in a torrent of sucking air. On Hiatus? The roof opened up and a number of ropes, pulleys and hooks descended and, with a life of their own, grabbed a version of Anonymous and yanked him into the darkness above. Incomplete? The floor opened up and swallowed up another Anon.
The alicorn was a vortex of magical fury, numerous magical stamps appearing and disappearing around her as she furiously judged dozens of stories concurrently, as rapidly as she could, trying her absolute damnedest with as little fanfare as possible to tear through the disturbingly large bibliography that was, apparently, merely one simple man’s life.
Anon, for his part, looked like he was having the time of his life. Swaying from side to side to an unheard beat with completely unnecessary sunglasses, hand raised palm upwards, the other swiping sheets off it one after the other, which fell across the floor and summoning one hapless incarnation of Anonymous after another as each in turn was judged by the mare of mercilessness.
After a while, a dozen of Anons were casually striding back down the aisle between the whole lot of them, laughing, whistling, joking as they strode off to the white abyss beyond, uncaring of their brothers being whisked away elsewhere. Handy was horrified by the display, and he was far from the only one. That was their fate, right there. The anonymous peril of white nothingness behind them, being sucked into darkness to their sides, pulled into the ceiling above, or… fall to the depths below.
Handy took a look back at the abyss behind him, and the terrifying reality of his situation, somehow, only really hit him then. If he was real after all, would he still be if he walked into that white expanse? Did that even count as an escape? The second the truck and the Anons had crossed that threshold, they were gone. They couldn’t even hear them. Is that what cancellation did? Would he simply cease to exist? He turned back to the show before him and considered his situation seriously.
How exactly was he expected to defend himself? The mare wasn’t even asking any questions. She was bordering on judging these stories sight unseen and tossing numerous versions of the same man to God only knew what fate.
“How can there be more than one of him?” Handy asked absently. No one answered him as the clown show continued to its inevitable conclusion.
The mare, disheveled and exhausted, glared down at the frustratingly chipper human who, for his part, held aloft a single bundle of papers. She levitated it over to her desk, flicked through it, looked back at Anonymous, speed read more of the story, summoned another magical screen before her and scrolled through a rather long wall of text. She scanned its contents again and again, looked at the story, and looked back at the green man and took a deep breath.
She stamped a great, massive, green letter C on the pages, tossed it behind her back, summoned a small, golden, laminated card and drifted it down to the human, who took it gratefully.
“Take your filthy prize and go. Go in peace, but for the love of God just… just go.” She pointed her hoof to the doors off to the side of the hall. The great doors opened to an empty blackness beyond, as once again, for the umpteenth time that hour, a great sucking vortex of air tugged at the clothes of the subject human, who stood, gestured at the judge with a lazy three-fingered salute, and for the first time… spoke.
“See ya around, ba—” The mare lifted him up in a cloud of her glowing white magic and shoved him off his feet into the waiting vortex of air as he disappeared into the darkness, and the great doors slammed shut.
“Next!”
And with that absolutely preposterous demonstration of their fates out of the way, the judgement of their stories began in earnest for the first time. True to her word, she started with those humans whose stories were more… slice of life. That was a turn of phrase Handy wasn’t familiar with. By definition, weren’t all their stories a slice of their lives? Wasn’t that why they were all here in the first place? He disregarded it as he watched the proceedings unfold and learned that the green man’s shenanigans were the exception and not the norm.
Each human who strode to his or her judgement was summarily quizzed about the nature of their lives, questioned about their actions and judged by an obscure and seemingly arbitrary criterion that didn’t even apply equally between stories of the same genre. Handy struggled to see the difference between one story and another seemingly identical story, where one was cancelled, and another was deemed incomplete.
The logic also didn’t seem to apply equally to stories the judge actually responded favourably to. She just as readily condemned one story to incompletion, and thus falling to the floor below them, that she seemed to have enjoyed and got on well with the human in front of her, as she was to deem a story she despised as on hiatus and dragged off into the darkness of the ceiling above them. Such were the fates of the green apron-wearing individual and the foul-mouthed pirate Handy had encountered when he first awoke respectively.
Handy had been in courtrooms before. He’d been before judges before, and was slowly dreading his own time before the gavel, now with seemingly arbitrary rules and jurisprudence to determine his fate. An existential fate to compound his existential predicament, the only solace being was that it seemed everyone else here had already accepted it as inevitable as well. He could bullshit it. He certainly saw a number of others bullshit their way through their own judgements, outlining the absurdities of their lives in Equestria and beyond its borders. That seemed to work about as equally as well as those who tried to take a serious, direct, and mature approach to defending their actions and lives.
Handy liked to gamble when he knew what the odds were, but he really couldn’t discern what his odds were here, and it was getting distressingly close to his turn.
The judge had burned her way through the soldierly contingent of humans, cut a hole through the contingent that were invading or being invaded by ponies, and worked her way through the characters that were once human and then became famous characters from fiction. The only upset Handy noted was Sir Star Wars being yanked upwards to the hiatus ceiling, tearing through his bonds, and then plummeting into the incomplete trap door below. The judge’s only response to the unorthodox occurrence was to shrug her horsey shoulders and carry on with her day job.
Once she demolished the contingent of characters who actually were famous characters, her attention at last turned towards the adventure contingent, which sadly was the one Handy most accurately fit as best he could determine. It had, in reality, taken uncounted hours altogether to get to where they were now, but it didn’t feel like it. None of them felt tired, or hungry, or thirsty, or anything else really. It all felt like it was progressing at a blistering pace despite the hundreds and hundreds of unscrupulous characters that were being judged.
“That’s me,” the scarecrow to his left said as he made his excuses and made his way to the aisle. Handy hadn’t been paying attention when his name was called, stepping back and allowing the literal Halloween costume shuffle past him, lifting what looked to be a violin case up in the air above their heads so it wouldn’t get in people’s way. As the line filtered back into some semblance of order, the scarecrow exited their contingent and made his way merrily to the front of the hall. Handy looked around again.
There were some he recognised from when he first woke up. The green-cloaked, bearded mage from before was off to his right and up two rows from him. Behind him and to his left some ways back was the weird angel-tree woman. Standing beside her was some woman in armour with ridiculously long blonde hair in a voluminous ponytail. She seemed distinctly uncomfortable standing there.
He sadly couldn’t spot the crusader from before anywhere. He really could have used the kind encouragement the old man had given him. Before too long, the scarecrow’s time was up, his story told, and his judgement rendered. With a flourishing bow from the waist to both the judge and to the rest of the hall, the costumed caperer produced the violin from his case with a flourish and began to string a sad tune to play himself off. Unfortunately, the judge pulled a comically large lever, and the poor bastard fell to his doom in the trap door below, his stitched-too-many-times hat floating in the air and lazily drifted into the hole after its erstwhile master before the trap doors closed once more.
“Alright, next up is Handy… Is this a joke? Okay, whatever, Handy Haywatch—Who the fuck gives porn names to adventure characters? This had better not be what I think it is…”
Handy pretended not to hear the judge’s muttered recriminations as he made his way passed innumerable suspiciously dressed and vaguely dangerous characters of his own contingent as he pushed his way to the central aisle, almost bouncing off what he swore was some kind of carpenter as he exited. He looked at the man in confusion. He could’ve sworn the guy was one of the slice of lifers from way before who had fallen through the trap door. Seemed he somehow stuck around and was apparently chatting with several other characters still waiting their turn before opting to fall down the pit.
Whatever, it wasn’t Handy’s concern. He excused his way past the craftsman and made his way to the front. He was keenly aware of dozens of eyes upon him, judging him in his turn just as he had hundreds of others before him. Before long, he stood before the disquietingly equine judge, shifting uncomfortably in his cloak and winter clothing. The judge just sat right where she was sipping out of her stupidly large cup of what he presumed was coffee, going by the smell. As the quiet lingered as she placed the cup down, she shuffled some papers summoned over from the mountains behind her, lifted to her courteously by the servile points of light.
It was then Handy felt excruciatingly exposed for all the world to see, in a way he hadn’t ever before. Suddenly he didn’t feel the weight of dozens of eyes upon him, but thousands, from everywhere at once. Piercing him right to his soul and pinning him in place.
“Alright, so if I am reading this right…” The alicorn summoned forth not one, not two, but five magical screens full of text in a script Handy could not identify. She scrolled through them all simultaneously, yet at different speeds, pausing once or twice to reread a specific detail or another before continuing. There were what seemed to be photographic snapshots of his life from angles Handy most certainly didn’t remember there being a camera present for and, which is more disturbing, images of him with people he had no recollection of ever meeting before. Was… Was she reading ahead in his story? Was that possible? Was his fate predestined and his story already finished? Why then was he even being judged at all? Or worse, were his memories shot to hell and he was simply not remembering parts of his life? Ho—
“Ah right, okay, so Handy isn’t your real name then. You’re one of those.”
“Uhm…” Handy began, a bit uncertain. “I’m sorry, I’m not sure how this is supposed to go exactly. I’m one of those what?”
“Doesn’t matter, anyway.” She cleared her throat and waved her hoof, and the screens moved aside so she could look down imperiously upon the vampire. “So! What's your gimmick?”
“Excuse me?”
“What's your deal; what's your shtick; what makes you tick; what makes you stand out? Come on, Mister Originality, I don’t have all day. Chop chop!” The alicorn clapped her gold and silver shod hooves together in sharp clacks.
“I uh… Ahem. Right. I uh…” Handy struggled to think of a response that’d be exactly what this mare would want to hear. There were an alarming number of commonalities he’d noticed between his life and hundreds of others, and so struggled to think of what precisely made him different from any of them. He came to a conclusion soon enough, but it was one he’d normally never consider discussing in polite company. Then again, this was hardly polite company.
“I’m a… I’m a vampire. I guess.”
“Ohhh, my how original!” The alicorn snorted. “Haven’t heard that one before!”
She paused for a moment, summoned a checklist out of thin air in a poof of candy-flavoured smoke just like she had back when she appeared as a magical girl, and magically flicked through dozens of pages.
“Huh, yeah, actually there’s less of your kind than I thought there’d be. Weird.”
“What's that supposed to-?”
“Anywho, you’re a discount Dracula, what else?” She casually tossed aside her checklist, which bounced off the ground once before exploding into sparkles and disappearing.
“I guess I’m a knight,” Handy continued.
“Knight with a porn name, got it.” She scribbled something down on a piece of paper laid flat on her desk.
“My name is not a po—”
“Oh then, what is it then? Says here you chose your own name. Who the hell names themselves something so easily misconstrued?”
“It was a joke, alright!”
“And you kept it up?”
“Look, I thought it was funny at the time. The other guy didn’t get it and—”
“Oh and for the love of—You woke up in the Everfree? Really?”
“How is that my fault!?”
“And then you went into Ponyville. Of fucking course you did.” She disgustedly scrolled up one of the magical screens, sipping angrily from her oversized mug.
“What? No I didn’t,” Handy answered indignantly.
“Yes you did, literally the first thing you did after getting out of the forest. Says right here, see?” She tossed her head, her horn alight with magic as the screen levitated down before Handy. The poor bastard had a face full of incomprehensible runes all but pressed against his eyes. He pushed the screen away, which was weirdly solid and warm to the touch.
“If you’d look closer…” Handy said, now getting thoroughly annoyed. He gripped the underside of the impossibly thin magical screen and flipped it back upwards to the judge, where it slowed before hitting her, flipped and rotated itself until it was properly facing her again. “You’ll see that I did not, in fact, go into Ponyville.”
The judge rolled her eyes and scrolled through the runes, and then frowned.
“Huh, so you didn’t. You went back in and spoke to Zecora. Interesting.”
“The forest witch?”
“The zebra, yes.” She waved away the screen dismissively. “And then you met a secret prince, yadda yadda, had a misadventure where you got beaten up and enslaved by a bunch of dogs—real classic move there, following in Rarity’s footsteps.”
“Who the hell is Rarity?” Handy asked, bewildered.
“Almost sacrificed yourself but let out a great evil instead, yadda yadda—”
“Okay, in my defence, I couldn't have known it was—wait, the voice was evil?”
“How many mysterious, serpentine voices emanating from clearly deeply buried and hidden magical artefacts do you know are ever a good thing?” Handy didn’t answer. “That's what I thought. Anyway—”
“Kidnapped by changelings, really?” she asked derisively.
“I think you’re skipping the par—”
“No one cares about Spurbay, Handy,” she interjected, almost sounding bored. “Tortured by Chrysalis, yadda yadda, broke out and battered her. Aren’t you a big man?”
“Are you really feeling sorry for bloody Chrysalis in this conversation?” Handy demanded.
“After some of the stories I see her in, kinda yeah,” the judge answered. “Oh, a big skeledragon is next.”
“Story of my life.” Handy sighed.
“Unfortunately for me, yeah. Aaaand you drop a building on it. Not the most original way to beat a dragon, but at least you didn’t use a bullshit power to do it, so you got that going for you at least.”
“About that, by what standards am I being judged here? Like what exactly do I have to prove?”
“You standards are: shut up, I am talking.” She lifted a bundle of papers and flipped a sheet. “Oh, and you kept the amulet like an idiot.”
“I didn’t know what it was!”
“Still kept it when you figured it out then, didn’t you?”
“I tried to get rid of it!”
“Not hard enough. Blah blah, big fight on a train, blah blah.”
“Are you just going to ignore the entire bit in the Badlands town?”
“Yep, nothing important even happened there anyway.”
“It's where I got my armour!” Handy protested. “It's the first time I met Crimson! She’s important right?”
“If you say so, vampy boy. Oh wait, you weren’t one of those yet.”
“That happened on the train,” Handy elucidated.
“Right, the train, all because of a misunderstanding—how typical of you unoriginal blights on humanity—led to the Princess sending royal guards, yadda yadda. They attacked the train, international incident, you got into a fight with a bat pony, and she bit you. Kinky.”
“Fuck you.”
“You wish. Okay, yadda yadda, irrelevant context, irrelevant context, boring, boring—”
“I’m sorry, but how is the most consequential night of my life an irrelevant context!?” Handy sputtered in disbelief. She ignored him.
“Had an existential crisis, went to Griffonia, blah blah, fought with the actual main character.”
“Shortbeak!?”
“Sure. Politics, economics, blah blah, bullshitted your way into nobility—nicely done by the by—got a lot of land, blah blah, got roped up into going back to Equestria and meeting the princesses, wherein you did absolutely nothing to clear up the misunderstandings.”
“Hey now, I was under no obligation to trust—”
“And proceeded to mess with Twilight’s head—again, nice. Oh, and picked a fight with Blueblood. Gotta say, this is not looking good.”
“Hey now, that asshole—”
“Had it coming. Yeah yeah, that's what they all say. Still no reason for nearly every single one of you to do the same damn thing like it was a flippin’ bandwagon.” She took a long draught of her coffee and let out a satisfied breath. “Blah blah, made a deal with Fancy Pants with far-reaching narrative consequences, tournament arc, witchy dealings, Pinkie Pie if she was a slightly less annoying deer and, oh dear, poor Trixie. Why do all of you guys always treat her so dirty?”
“Who the fuck is Trixie!?” Handy asked bewilderedly, having never even heard of someone called that in his new life.
“See? You don’t even care!” she said, feigning being wounded. “Always in the background, never acknowledged directly. You didn’t even know you bit her, did you?”
“I what?!” Handy exclaimed.
“Typical vampires, always chasing that next high; don’t even think about the girls you burn through. How tragic…” She sniffled through crocodile tears.
“Okay, I don’t know what you think you’re getting at, but it's not like that and why do you even care!?” Handy demanded.
“Sympathy for a fellow show woman, I guess,” she said in a completely conversational tone, cocking her head to the side in thought. “Moving on, blah blah, fought with evil wizard—”
“Warlock.”
“—Fuck you, got sent to a magical hell forest, something something, racist deers, something something Fairy Lady, got out of the forest. Then there was a Halloween episode.”
“A what?” Handy asked.
“The thing in the town with the house with the kids and the pumpkin.”
“Ohhhh, oh right,” Handy said, having genuinely forgotten.
“Yeah, your swordspony and changeling companion got trapped in a haunted town while that was happening.”
“Really? They never told me that.”
“They never tell you a lot of things that would surprise you.” Handy snorted derisively. “Anyway, that's why there’s now a subplot of a lot of kids that's gonna bite you in the ass down the line.”
“I’m sorry, what?”
“Yeah, I’m skipping over a lot of the subplots you got going on in this absolute mess of a file you got here, but that one I’m actually kinda looking forward to. You know, if I don’t cancel you, I mean.”
“I… right,” Handy said, processing all that she just admitted to. “Hypothetically, if I get out of here alive, am I going to remember any of this?”
“Man, I hope not. I’m heading right for the spirits when this is all said and done to help me forget. I’d recommend you do the same if you recall any of this.”
“What spirits?” Handy asked, genuinely concerned he’d need to go out and seek out still further mystical nonsense.
“Usually I spend the night with Mister Daniels, but I’ve been known to fool around on deck with Captain Morgan too,” she said, chuckling. Handy looked at her in abject disappointment. “Alright Mister Stick-Up-His-Arse, have it your way. Let's burn right through this then.”
The screens lit up a bright white and her eyes began to glow as the text scrolled at blinding speed and the papers around her were ripped apart and sent flying in a blizzard of wood pulp as she went right through his entire story.
“Had a confrontation in Blackport with the Black Isles and Equestria, blew up Manehatten, spent like a month living like a vagabond, went back to Leipodopolis because apparently you can't get enough of that good ol’ changeling lovin’, stopped a war by accident that you had inadvertently almost started by accident, had a nice long rest, fucked off back to Equestria after twisting Twilight’s horsey leg in an extortionate trade. You actually went to the Dragonlands and… left it off there for four years.”
“....You what?”
“Yeah that's where your story is right now, sorry to say.”
“But… I haven’t gone to the Dragonlands. In fact, I’ve only just got done seeing Twilight and the ponies off,” Handy said in confusion. The judge frowned down at him, scrolled through another screen, and comprehension dawned on her.
“Ohhhh, right right, I see what's happened. You got snagged before your actual stopping point in your story.”
“Stopping off point? What the hell do you mean? How can you stop off at a point in your life?”
“Look my man, I don’t make the rules. That's just how things work. Your story stopped just after wrapping up in the Dragonlands. Now it's unusual for someone to get taken at a point before the up-to-date point of their story, but it's not unheard of. Anyway, sorry for the spoilers, I guess.”
“Spoilers!? You didn’t even tell me anything!” Handy protested.
“What's there to tell, really?” The judge leaned her head on a hoof and looked down at him. “Your story is a dime a dozen adventure story that long overstays its welcome where nothing much really happens.”
“Nothing—! Are you kidding me!? I barely get a week where some bullshit doesn’t get in the way of me and a peaceful life!”
“Cry me a river, big man. Oh boo hoo, I’m a vampire. Boo hoo, I lose money as quickly as I get it. Boo hoo, I have another fight to the death this week. Boo hoo, I’m stuck underground again.” She leaned forward. “You see what I’m getting at?”
“Oh, don’t give me that tripe! I’ve been listening to you judge other stories all day. You don’t mind repetition—half the slice of life stories you absolutely loved were almost all about the same thing!”
“At least half of them had a relatable character that wasn’t so easy to hate.”
“Oh, so it's personal, then?” Handy sneered.
“It would be if I could be brought to care enough but I don’t. ‘Sides, what I personally think, believe it or not, has little bearing on how I judge things,” she said dismissively, raising her stamp and the multihued ink turning to a dreaded, dark orange H. “You’ve been left hanging for four years. Pretty sure this is obviously a hiatus that’s no good to anyone up top anymore, so anyway-”
“Wait, wait just a minute! What do you mean four years? I don’t remember—”
“Well, you wouldn’t. It hasn’t happened to you yet, and now I guess it won’t. Or it will. I forget how the metaphysics work after this. Have fun in development hell, I guess.” She raised the huge stamp high above her head and brought it down with the fury of a falling star upon the collection of sheets that represented Handy’s baleful life. Handy watched it fall, and felt a pit form in his stomach in the bare second it took for the stamp to fall and hit the sheets of paper—
And promptly burst into flames.
Handy had backed up nearly half a dozen feet from the surprise combustion. The judge simply looked at the burn mark on the sheets of paper, dumbfounded. Not long after that, the awkward silence was broken by the light ring of a bell, and a green icon appeared on one of the magical displays. The judge summoned it forward and studied the notification very closely.
“Well I’ll be damned…” she said lowly.
“What? What is it?” Handy asked, once he got his breathing under control and steadied himself. It was one thing to get the dreaded orange H and have to walk his way back to the other end of the hall and walk into that good light and whatever mystery lay beyond. It was quite another to have discovered, rather forcibly, if he could actually die in this disquieting hall of judgement and then really have a lesson in existential dread forced upon him to compound his misfortune.
She didn’t answer for a long time, simply staring at the screen, before slowly, idly almost, flicking through several sheets of paper and scrolling several other screens. She hummed to herself in contemplation as the vampire, now growing annoyed once more, patiently awaited the news.
“It seems… you aren’t on hiatus after all.” She sounded almost disappointed.
“What do you mean? What the hell does any of this mean!?” Handy demanded. “What difference does any of this make? Is any of this even real?”
“Uggghhh, how many times do I have to go through this tiresome routine? Look, Mister Handjob—”
“Handy!”
“Fangfucker, whatever, look, here’s the skinny. Your story? Just picked up again.”
“The hell does that mean?”
“It means, Alucard, that your story is no longer on pause. As in it’s continuing, it’s leaving the pit stop, your train is pulling out of the station of nine and three quarters, yer a wizard ‘Arry.”
“How the hell can that be!? You said it was stopped for four years! Four years that haven't even happened apparently!”
“Well not for you they haven’t. How long do you think your story’s been going on for, really?” the judge asked, now smiling knowingly. Handy raised his hand to answer but caught himself. The screens he had spied had shown images of him with creatures he had never met before, griffons, ponies, alicorns, and other things beside. His story had apparently ‘stopped’, whatever that even meant, after his trip to the Dragonlands, which at least told him he survived the misadventure, but that meant that not only was he currently out of space, he was also outside of time. But not so out of time that he couldn’t be saved by a literal bell.
“Uh… Depends on where we’re counting from, I guess.” She laughed at his cautious response.
“Good answer. But in reality, it's been going on for some time, and it really was time something was done about it one way or another. Fortunately for you, or not if you prefer to be pessimistic about it, some folk up there thinks your story is still worth sharing.” She gestured to the strange green rune that appeared on the magical projection. “Your story just advanced to another arc.”
“I… It did? What happened to me?”
“Ah, ah, ah! No more spoilers. I told you enough already, which I can only get away with because they’ve already happened.”
“Right, but am I really going to remember any of it?”
“No, but I would really rather not get chewed out for it. Besides, like I said, how I personally feel about a story has little to do with how I judge it and right now…” she lifted her hooves upwards in resignation, “…that judgement has changed. Lucky you.”
“Wait, if what you think of a story has no bearing on its judgement, then what the hell is even the point of any of us being here, having our lives and traumatic scars raked across the critical coals, and trying to justify ourselves to you?” Handy demanded, flabbergasted at the turn of events. She snorted.
“Catharsis, I guess,” she explained.
“Catharsis for who!?”
“Well, anyone but you really. Anyway, if we’re done here, I’ve got entire worlds to judge, so if you don’t mind...” She lifted another comically oversized stamp out from behind her desk. “You have been keeping everyone waiting quite long enough, I would wager. Let’s not meet again.”
“Wait, before I go, there’s another thing.” The judge let out a disgusted noise.
“Fiiine, the condemned gets one last question.”
“The whole worlds’ thing, higher and lower—whatever. We’re all from different Earths right, different realities? Does that mean there’re different versions of every one of us, going through all this horseshit infinitely? Different timelines, multiversal nonsense—is this some comic book reboot nonsense duct taped to reality or what even is all of this? I don’t care if I don’t remember any of this. I still want an answer!”
The judge paused for a moment as if considering his question. She tapped her chin in thought and hummed. She actually ducked beneath her desk and started tossing numerous objects out from the back of it out into the mountains of paperwork behind her—ink quills, empty binders, comically large hammers, a stupidly large plushie of her magical girl form, a fucking cannon.
At last, she emerged from beneath the desk, a beige lampshade adorning her head and covering her eyes. She tilted it backwards so she could see as she lifted an incredibly heavy-looking, ornately decorated tome of unfathomable knowledge onto the desk with a resounding boom as it landed.
She actually struggled in lifting the book open with her physical hooves and used her magic to flip through its infinite pages until coming somewhere near its halfway point. She pressed her hoof to the pages and searched for her quarry, and let out an ‘A ha!’ when she found it.
“Ok yeah, multiverse theory. That's not true for you,” she said with a victorious smile on her face.
“... Well, what the hell does that mean?”
“It means it's time for you to get the hell out of my hall, mister.” She slammed her stamp down on his bundle of papers. She levitated a golden laminated card down to him. He took it from her magical grasp and looked at it. It was actually made of solid gold and covered unnecessarily in plastic lamination. Imprinted upon its surface was his name, as in his actual birth name, age, nationality, and other details in plain English alongside innumerable other runes on both sides he couldn’t read.
“So… that's it then?” he asked. “I get to… carry on?”
“Congratulations, may your woes be many and your days be few, or whatever it is the kids are saying these days. I don’t care; I’m not human.”
“I guess I’ll just… go then.” Handy clasped the golden card in his gloved hand, trying to process and internalise the absolutely maddening amount of information he had just been given. He turned and started making his way back.
“Hey, hey hey, where do you think you’re going?” she suddenly demanded, Handy turned back to her, looking between her and the glorious light of freedom at the back of the hall.
“Into the light?” She shook her head.
“No, no, no, that's only for if your story got cancelled. No freedom for you, I’m afraid.” She held aloft her stamp and the slightly less angry orange capital I that emblazoned its bottom side. “You’re going right back where you came from.”
Handy’s eyes widened in horror as he suddenly remembered, looking at the stone beneath him which had only just started to shift. He looked up at the judge one last time before his fate was sealed.
“Let's not meet again, okay? Please and thank you. Next!” were the last things he heard before the floor opened up from beneath him, and Handy plummeted into the endless darkness. Limbs flailed in helplessness as the light disappeared further and further away above him.
Soon, all he knew was perfect darkness.
--=--
Handy awoke with a start and tremendous pain in his skull that throbbed awfully. He was still in darkness, but now was aware of how he was suddenly freezing cold, numb almost. Oh, he was also suffocating.
He thrashed and emerged from the snow drift gasping for breath, in the middle of the street of Skymount. Passing griffons were muttering to themselves, seeing the local baron having been passed out in the snow in the middle of the day. Several brave souls had even drawn themselves closer to see if he was alright. He stumbled to his feet, shaking off the snow and the piercing cold, looking around blearily and trying to get his bearings.
He was in the middle of a Skymount street, covered head to foot in snow and was unsteady on his feet. Something warm was trickling down the front of his face. Lifting his gloved hand to press against it, he discovered an unsightly bump that absolutely throbbed with pain upon his touch, and he quickly withdrew his hand. He discovered a trickle of blood on his leather gloves… and something else too.
A small, perfectly rectangular slab of snow, half-frozen solid in his hand that quickly began to melt as the hot blood from his head ran down his fingers and mingled with the frozen water. The strangely-shaped clump of snow quickly disappeared and fell apart, melting into water in his hand with the remainder falling to the ground.
For the life of him, he couldn’t understand why that bothered him.
“Handy?” someone called ahead. Handy looked up, still woozy from where he had hit his head, and saw someone poke their head out from a warm-looking building that was merely a few feet ahead of where he now stood.
Jacques peered from the door of the tavern he had been carousing in, waiting for his friend. He spotted Handy, feet buried in snow, shivering and bleeding from a small cut from a nasty bump on his forehead. Jacques had to try very hard not to laugh.
“Handy, it was your idea to go out to get drunk,” the unicorn chastised, smiling as he trotted over to the human. “I didn’t think you started without me already.”
“I… What?” Handy asked, slowly piecing together the events of the day. That's right, he had found Jacques in one of his haunts after making a deal with the ponies. Something to do with a sick dragon. It didn’t matter; he was annoyed and wanted to drink away his troubles, so he had pressured Jacques, the nearest ne’er-do-well he had on hand, to go out drinking with him.
The pony had just gone on ahead of him while Handy had stopped to take care of some business with a merchant they had passed before he caught up to him. Some snow had fallen off of a nearby roof just in front of him, and in his hurry, he had just tried to push his way past it and then—
Huh. And then he fell. He gingerly touched the bump on his forehead, wincing at the sensitive area of flesh. Apparently, he had hit his head pretty badly too. The snow must have cushioned the impact just enough to save his life as much as it was responsible for causing him to trip in the first place.
“You look like you need to sit down and have a chat with some spirits, mon ami,” Jacques joked. Handy started and looked at the pony in surprise.
“Spirits?” he asked, suddenly very alert but not understanding what had set him off.
“Qui, a little bit of rum, a little bit of gin, something strong to warm you up inside and out and get you just awake enough that you don't fall asleep and get a concussion.”
“I… I’m not sure that's… that's good… Fuck it.” Handy gave in, shaking his head and wincing at the sudden pain. He glanced up blearily at the sunlight and brushed off the snow from his shoulders. “I think I’m done for the day. You mind paying for the first round?”
“Yes, but seeing as you probably can’t think straight at the moment, I probably should anyway, no?” Jacques said, chuckling. He turned, pulling his own cloak tighter about him as he led the way to the tavern. Handy looked down at his glove, wiping the meltwater on the leather with the thumb of his hand and looked at the ground beneath him.
He grimaced, took in a breath, and went off to have a nice long chat with some spirits.
Though in truth, as it often was, it’d be the spirits doing most of the talking.