wizardy herbert and the goblin game

authors note: all but two (three???) of the chapters in the first draft of this fic have been sadly lost to time, either cuz they were illegible when written or made illegible shortly after out of embarrasment. only for the sake of preservation, ive hidden the remaining snippets away in this remote server, hopefully never to be seen again. so if youre not me, stop reading!!!! -rolal

chapter 7

the sound of metal scraping against metal was all beatrix could hear as the two legally distinct transformer-like robots made out on the bed of a cheap motel room. looking out the windows, she could see nothin but the infinite white void that spans the border of every self-contained story. this universe did not exist beyond the walls of this room, the bottom of a conceptual barrel the three had found themselves in over and over again.

"they dont even have a travel pamphlet???" russet shouted as he looked through the drawers of the bedside table. he was blushing profusely as he tried not to accidentally make eye contact with either of the two muscular metal dudes on the bed next to him. "or a copy of readers digest????"

theyd searched this exact room at least a hundred times now, hoping that maybe ONE iteration of this story would have included a detail like "starmetal decided to bring a magazine with him to page through durin a break in their extended makeout sesh" or "wavefile was a big fan of high concept speculative alt history novels, and he always kept a copy of one on his person!"

they never did.

"maybe it's just time we cut our losses," herbert said. "plan scheherazade was great on paper but i guess in reality there is just a solid floor to how deep you can go in an imbedded narrative."

"i figured that theyd all eventually peter out at some point but i really didnt expect them all to lead to the same story like this," beatrix said. "and if they had, i was expecting something a bit more... primordial?"

within the text of wizardy herbert and the goblin game, there were no fewer than three different libraries described, and another two were mentioned in passing (which beatrix discovered was enough for them to exist within the explorable bounderies of the world). it wouldnt have been a book about a magic summer camp if they didnt have at LEAST one fantastical magic library full of tomes, but at this point in the series they were really goin overboard. seems like that number of zany wizard libraries would have given them a lot of stories to check out, but if you cancel out any book mentioned in the text of another book (OR within the text of a book mentioned in the text of another book) that number went down to just a couple hundred.

"i just... i thought we had a really good chance with that last one!" russet said. "like, a historical fiction novel from the pov of otzi probably wasnt the best choice for finding a setting full of layered storytelling but i thought at the very least no one there would even think to tell a story where someone tells a story about a story about two transformers just going to town in a motel room. otzi wouldn't have even known what a transformer was!"

"i think this speaks to the broader mechanisations of the human subconscious," beatrix says. "maybe at the root of all narrative processes is an archetypal image of two transforming cars with rockin bods playing tonsil tennis, and all other stories only exist to hold a narrative framework in which other people are writing this slashfic."

it wasnt long after theyd entered "iceman: the mountaineer's journey" that the titular otzi had crossed paths with a talented orator who relayed a myth of a wolf who was compelled to hunt a cursed traveler. in that story, the wolves shared tales of a grey rabbit who could outsmart any wolf that chased it. within that tale, the rabbit independently conceived of a story identical to one already in one of the books found in the library at fort slurpenook, "the new american sport", a story about a depressed american businessman who starts an underground fighting ring that features a side character trying their hand at writing erotic robot fiction. for a story featuring a man who presents himself as well learned, it was surprising for beatrix to discover that he never actually reads a book at any point across its 800 pages, leaving a draft of a scene in which two transformers make out in a motel room as the only story mentioned within that story.

"lets crunch some numbers real quick," herbert said. "what was the highest number of layers deep we ended up going?"

"thirty one," beatrix answered.

"yeah," russet responded. "that was when we went into that book about the spaceship piloted by a group of surrealist authors who all really liked writing about self obsessed librarians."

"wow russet, thanks for recapping that info to me as though i wasnt also there for that journey??" herbert said. "so lets say our simulation theory is correct, and the chances of our whole reality actually being contained within a piece of fiction go up.... lets be generous and say a whole percent for every level of narrative deeper we can go. in that case, the chances of it NOT being fictional, meaning russet still definitely has to exist in a world where his dumbfuck boyfriend died badly in an explosion, would still be...."

"oh my god..." beatrix said. "its 69%"

"bingo," herbert herberted. fuck is this whole chapter even anything??? think im just gonna save the draft here and rewrite the whole chapter when i have an ending that isnt dumb and stupod...

chapter 12

...

...

russet was speechless. the last whole year of his life, nothing more than the first draft of a story written by someone who was clearly very intoxicated. his entire relationship with his hunky rebound from grant, not just his untimely death, was contained in this single volume. how long had herb been hiding this?

"why did the author feel the need to refer to it as boykissing every time?" beatrix asked. "like, is it somehow different from just regular kissing?"

"it was but i don't want to get into it," russet said. "herb, where did you even get this?"

herbert shrugged. "picked it up while we were still at the pentagon, had to shoot a cia agent over it."

"well that explains the lacunas we experienced near the end," beatrix said, pointing out the blood stains that covered most of the last few pages. "would have loved to see how it was supposed to wrap up."

"wait... the pentagon? that doesn't make sense, that happened BEFORE this last year of camp started," russet said. "herb, are you saying that you read this whole thing, saw that we'd ended up in the same plot as the one described, and went along with it anyways for like a whole year?"

"oh, uh. yeah, i guess i did do that."

"isn't that exactly the sort of rote prophecy following that you've referred to multiple times as 'stupid and also gay'?" beatrix asked.

"what? no, this is totally different."

"how is this different?"

herbert supplied a very telling pause.

"ah. it's because you got to kill russets boyfriend at the end," bea said. she gave herbert a disappointed look, like how one would look at a dog that just ate something it wasn't supposed to when it should know better.

"... bea, they gave me an actual rocket launcher and a clear shot for some looney toons shit. it may have been the best scene ever written."

"im going to actually kill you," russet threatened. murderously. or however im gonna end that sentence. whatevs i still gotta go back and fill in the scenes i skipped anyways so i can rewrite this when i circle back 2 it.