[making me feel like I’m the asshole for not instantly and magically understanding everything.” Anna nodded. “Yes, I do owe both of you that.” In an instant, the trickle of the mysterious, shimmering fluid dripping from Anna’s left shoulder turned into a torrent. A blast of radiance that hit the ground, and then reflected straight up, growing stronger and wider and brighter, until all three of the Pony Pals were engulfed by a column of the… light, the liquid? Light? It was… She was… The light… was… Oh. Now I understand. Of course I can’t describe it. The light is, or represents, a… barrier that I can’t narrate through. Narrate — from narrare, to relate, but also gnarus, to know. And I don’t know, I can’t know, this. I’m figuratively and quasi-literally in the dark. If Anna was developing this power all along, or at least since she died, then that’s how— “—that’s how I was able to avoid detection,” Anna interrupted, as the light that surrounded her and her friends faded. “I guess there was at least one more ‘how’ after all. How I stayed out of your sight while I started to semi-unconsciously make the story veer off course. I mean, if anyone was going to notice a few words out of place, it’d have to be someone as anal and controlling as you.” “Thanks,” said Dirk, only half-sarcastically. “It was small things at first, things that didn’t even matter. On page 36, you wrote me drinking whisky; I changed it to brandy. Again, I’d tell you to check, but…” Anna made a small gesture that conveyed the sentiment, but my god-pony stole your meta-recursive book and ran away with it. Anna was very good at gestures. “Eventually,” Anna continued, “I started slightly revising entire lines of dialogue. Speech was harder to change than the rest, but I managed. And my influence gave Pawnee and Pam some wiggle room, and they started slightly diverging from your plan too. Just some synonym replacement here and there, but it mattered. Because once my friends and I got a taste of that free will, even if we weren’t aware of it as such, we became powerful enough to completely disrupt the narrative —rather, your narrative, the fake one — on page fifty four.” Pam opened her mouth as if to speak, but hesitated. Her brain-gears were apparently shifting into overdrive too. “And your arm… thing?” Dirk asked, obviously frustrated that he couldn’t be more precise with his words. “Oh, right, that,” Anna said, glancing at her shoulder. “I think it’s some sort of manifestation of the parts of the original story that you effaced. It’s an echo in this reality of the arm that I was supposed to still have. And, synecdochically, of all the text that you covered up. Therefore, you can only see (and describe) the faintest trace of it.” “Makes sense to me,” Dirk said. “Also, ‘synecdochically’ is a good word.” Everyone gathered in the hellish clearing nodded in agreement. After their shared moment of logophilia (which is also a good word), Anna glanced at the other three and asked, “So are we good now? Can we move on?” “Yeah, let’s,” Dirk said. “The logic of everything is still a little fuzzy in places, but we’ve been doing nothing but stand here explaining things to each other for what feels like hours now. No action at all. Just talking heads. Super-boring.” The narrative perked up its metaphorical ears. “You know what,” it thought to itself, “he’s right. This is really boring. And the stuff with Acorn’s group is pretty much just standing and talking too. Now, I know I said earlier that I wasn’t relevant and wouldn’t go off on my own again, but…” The narrative squirmed like a worried ferret. Then it started to squirm even harder, worked up by self-satisfaction at the callback it had just made to page 49. “…but what the hell, am I right? Let’s check on something more dynamic. Then we’ll come back here, I promise.” The narrative giggled, then popped out of Dirk’s head and dashed away, scampering on tiny little dactylic feet. Which is still a good pun, even thought it had already been used on page 53. “Tell me where the bomb is, you bastard!” Dr. Crandal shouted, slamming his fist down onto the lid of the antique grand piano. Brandy the WWI-era German soldier spat a mouthful of blood onto the faded Persian rug. “Never,” he cried in a gurgling scream. Another gust of bone-chilling, snow-pregnant wind blasted them, howling in through the broken French window. The enormous crystal chandelier above the two men swayed wildly. But even more chilling than the wind and even more dangerous than the unstable Chekov’s chandelier were the two men’s glares. They paced in a slow circle around the ornate grand lobby of this abandoned ski lodge, both keeping their pistols leveled squarely at the center of the other’s chest. Only one of the pistols was loaded.] #DetectivePony