[“You just love your little allusions, don’t you, Dirk?” Anna said. “Gotta make sure everybody knows how well-read you are. God forbid someone think you don’t have any Baudelaire memorized, right?” “Fuck.” “C'est que notre âme, hélas! n'est pas assez hardie,” Pam whispered. “I didn’t know you spoke French,” Pawnee whispered back. “I don’t…” “It seems like you’ve figured it out already,” Anna said, “but for the sake of my chatty friends behind me, I’ll spell it out. I passed through everything — every poem, every novel, every essay — that you quoted or paraphrased or just plain stole from. And as I passed through, little bits of them got stuck in me, like splinters.” “And now you can commune with them, or channel them, or… become them?” Dirk said. Anna shrugged. “Again, more or less right. I don’t know exactly how it works. But I do know that it’s not the texts themselves, it’s the characters.” She tapped her head. “I’ve got a couple hundred guests in here with me now. Some of them are totally useless — fuckin’ Prufrock, am I right? — and some are downright holding me back — lookin’ at you, Underground Man. But you were also kind enough to give me a couple aces in the hole. Claudius (who you gave me just a few minutes ago with your dumb nutshell joke; thanks for that) is a son of a bitch, but he gets shit done. Lenore gets power from absence, which is a little tricky to apply, but pretty damn useful once you figure it out. John Shade and co. are a mixed bag; I’ll leave it at that, lest the poor king and that bigger, more respectable, more competent glassmaker slither their way in here. Hell, speaking of mixed bags, the entire goddamn Bible!” “Okay, we get it,” Dirk said. “Jesus. Which, just to be clear, is being used as a profanity here, not as a reference to any work of literature, past present or future, in which Jesus is a character.” “But what’s most important now,” Anna continued, “is that ridiculous Dante interlude you shoehorned in. I can’t say I’m at all surprised that you’re a fan of the most famous self-insert fanfiction in the traditional Western canon. But this one’s a little different. You didn’t just mention The Divine Comedy, you structured part of this story after it. And you should know better than anyone how important structure is. You made Acorn into your Dante, and Minos your Virgil. Which is a little confusing, because Minos is already a character in the Inferno, playing his traditional mythological role as the one who judges the damned and assigns them a spot in hell. And your cat Minos is also playing that role… but the point is that there’s one role you left conspicuously unfilled.” “Beatrice,” Dirk said quietly. “Damn straight. The figure who knows of Hell, but who dwells in Heaven. How very like you to focus on the angsty, moping dudes while ignoring the woman who’s really pulling all the strings. (By the way, just fyi, literally every single work you alluded to in this dumb story was written by a man. All of them. Which is pretty fucked up, really. I’m just sayin’. You might want to have a hard think about that.) Anyway, by killing me, albeit temporarily, you made me a perfect fit for the part of Beatrice. Existing in the spaces in between. Now, in The Divine Comedy, Beatrice sees Dante being chased by wild animals, so she orders Virgil to lead him to her. So, by analogue—” “—I gave you power over Minos,” Dirk finished. “That’s right. But, due to your sloppiness with the structure of your references, I not only got control of Dante-Minos, I also became the commander of the version of Minos who is the judge of the dead. And I don’t think that you’re exactly eager to be judged by me. Am I right?” Dirk was drumming the fingers of his left hand on the side of his leg. “I follow you so far,” he said. “But how do you know all this? All the exact details of it, I mean. All those characters that you— you absorbed, became, whatever. They (and your deus-ex-dyslexia) give you this power, but who gave you the overarching knowledge of the structure in which the power operates?” “You did, Dirk,” Anna said. “As skeevy as it sounds, I’ve got a little splinter of you in my head right now. Which raises several very interesting and concerning implications. First and foremost of which: you see yourself as a literary character.” “Well, I’m here in this fucking book, aren’t I?” Dirk said, waving his arms around. “If that doesn’t make me a literary character—” Anna shook her head, the motion causing another trickle of the mysterious fluid to drip from her shoulder. “No, that’s just a version of you on the inside. In this text. I needed to pass through a version of you in order to absorb it, necessarily putting it outside the text. You, in your life outside this book, frame your existence as literary. Is it because you want your life to] #DetectivePony