The archers! The archers! LASS! THE ARCHERS!!!
I was awaken by the sound of my own voice, drenched in cold sweat, in a warm bedroom with the lights still on.
"Hey, are you okay?" An anxious voice questioned me, by a person hot as a coal right beside me on the bed. I was welcomed by an acrid smell and the feeling of a fluffy arm wriggled tightly around me.
"I think I... oh! My head's going to explode!" As a matter of fact, trying to move even in inch seemed to multiply the speed of the countdown to explosion in my head... Was that a...?
"It's okay, just a nasty hangover, don't move, I'll be back with a boosted painkiller in a minute!" The man whose arm was around me went away, and I was surprised by his unusual surge of kindness as soon as I recognized his voice. With the last remnants of sleepiness chased away by my headache, memories of the night before came to shed some light on his odd behaviour. While I was brooding, my "best friend"* (*I guess the right term would now be "friends with benefits"? Or something more?) returned with the life-saving medicine. After a while, when I was finally over with my morning routine, we both sat on the kitchen bench to partake on some coffee and snacks and address the elephant in the room.
"So... did you take advantage of me last night while I was drunk?," I tried to ease into the conversation. "Taking advantage of you? Oh, please, my little star, it was you that took advantage of me instead!" He said that with a devilish smile, making it rather obvious of how much he consented my act. Shameless as ever. Unfortunately, I remembered enough to know just how right he was. Becoming rather self-conscious, I tried to break the subject for now. "Well, it was something that was on my mind for some t... em hm... anyway, we're both adults! What happened, happened. The point is..."
"The point is," he shut me off with a very quick, but very memorable, soft kiss on the side of the lips. "The point is, that last night you needed some comforting, and I was very happy to oblige!"
I was surprised once again by his cheekiness, but welcomed it nevertheless. It felt familiar and cosy. It was indeed comforting. As to why I needed comforting...
"I'll not presume you'll need me all the time, that we are something more, or something less. Take your time, you need it!" A mischievous smile again... "Oh, it's not the first time anyway! And I know that deep down, or should I say, deep inside, you women are all the same, Freudian phallic symbols and all!"
I was speechless! It was as if two different people were inside him, a gentleman-like, adorable, dependable kind of guy, and an annoying monster of a boy-man, which was his usual offending self. It was as if he reminded me (and himself) to not get too comfortable in my chair, because here he was, the pain in my buttocks.
Back to the reason – or at least the pretext – why anything happened, why I started drinking and all, why I needed comforting, it had something to do with this book I'm trying to write. This book's characters did not behave. Things happened, that it wasn't my own imagination driving them forward, and it was really scary! It all started with that blasted archers, but it didn't stop there. Here I was, trying hard to satisfy my fans and think things through, but they...
"What fans? I'm your number one fan! You only have me, and that imaginary friend!," my occasional lover, and proofreader #1 intervened once again... "What imaginary friend?" I wondered. "That girl, you know." "What girl?"
'Poof!'
"You know, that girl!"
"He means me," the girl he pointed at, my proofreader #2, answered my query. "And I wanted to know, when does the romance start?"
Disregarding her question, and proofreader #1's wide eyes, I tried to focus on my writing...
"A disciple I never knew I had. Be quick to explain, Miss Lan, before the beauty by my side^1 changes their mind and tries to use their fabulous boots in unorthodox ways again!"
The girl gulped. "Well, remember you'd once declared, the first one who would manage to stand 100 advances from you and survived, you'd make them your disciple!"
The Mystery Man seemed to think about it for a minute. "As badly as I would like to teach you a lesson in manners, I respect your father enough to want to spare his little princess, although I only know him by reputation and not personally." Changing the subject and addressee abruptly, he said to Dongkun Edda, "No need to concern yourself, *She* will handle it!"
The girl was momentarily confused, until she realised she was definitely not the *She* he was mentioning, and turned to see.
The head assassin had managed to get on his knees, and with a surge of wilfulness rushed forward, blending into the shadows at the same time. Before anyone else on the roof - or anywhere - could react, he crossed to the roof of the next building, closing in on his target. He leaped again, ready to shoot with another hidden weapon, a super secret weapon...
...Only to slip and fall at the last minute, when a roof tile curiously dislocated (by itself?). His last thoughts were lingering on the unfairness of this here imaginary universe^2, while his dying breath was a quarter-uttered curse on its creator.
Take that, usurper! You think you can rebel? Not on my watch! Even if countless of you slipped my influence, I would still control anything else on this book's universe, physics be damned!
Meanwhile, the rest of the roof-dwellers observed^3 that curious happening as just a momentary distraction.
"Anyway, as I was saying, it's better to continue this conversation somewhere else," the mysterious Master was telling to the girl who claimed herself as his disciple.
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NOTES
^1: Please keep in mind that any thoughts, opinions, beliefs, or declarations expressed by characters in this book, no matter how offending, or not, they might appear, are the sole views of the characters themselves, and not the author of the book per se, or are they necessarily the viewpoints of any real character!
^2: Not that any *real* universe has any atom of fairness!! (As stated by a real author in a real masterpiece of a book, see the quote about it in Sir Terry Pratchett's "Hogfather".)
^3: The fact that the people on that roof could actually observe what happened with that archer, is a testament to their high martial arts, since he had hidden in the shadows. He was a very talented, but very unlucky assassin. Will he be missed?
...You punk, you will NOT be missed at all, now SCRAM!!!