Part 13
“All better?” I ask, patting the Scribe on the shoulder. I may as well have been talking to a wall since he ignores my words and my touch and just continues to scrawl letters and sentences across the pages. I shrug.
“I guess so,” I mutter, before leaning down to pick up the last page the Scribe had been working on before I was attacked.
“something tackles me from around the corner,” I read aloud, “and I fall sideways, crashing into the back of the Scri-.” The page ends and I flip it over to find it blank on the other side, then search the other nearby sheets for any more loose sheets.
“Is that it? Did it end there?” After a moment of searching I return to the sheet in my hand, read it silently to myself, then curse quiet under my breath.
“The entire last few minutes weren’t recorded,” I say, waving the sheet in the direction of Bastian and the Bugbear as they sip tea by the fire. I try to remember how this all came about but… I’m drawing a complete blank. “Do either of you know what happened? Weren’t we fighting?”
Bastian politely sets his tea cup upon the plate in his free hand and looks at me.
“I have… no idea. I’m drawing a blank,” Bastian says. Beyond just being the one who writes, the scribe is also the record keeper. Without him, without his writings… nothing happens.
“I thought I was the most important part,” I mutter. “But, without the scribe, there is no record of a story ever occurring. I’m just-“
“You are both equally important,” the bug bear says. he shifts his glasses up his nose, sips his tea, and continues speaking. “Without you, the scribe has nothing to say, without the scribe, your story has nowhere to go. Without the author, neither of you have a story to begin with. It is a perfect trifecta, none of you can succeed without the others.”
Bastian and I stare at the bugbear.
“I didn’t know you could talk,” I say.
“You never asked.” The bugbear replies.
“Fair enough,” I mutter. “Where did the tea come from?”
Bastian ooks to his tea cup, then from the tea cup to the bugbear. The bugbear does the same, looking from his cup to Bastian. The two turn to face me and both shrug.
“Ok,” I say and shrug in return. “Plot hole, I guess.”
It is then that I notice a piece paper clenched in my left hand. I flatten the sheet as best I can and read it. It seems to be mostly gibberish, just a string of numbers, letters, and symbols, but as I read I feel myself compelled to continue reading. I begin reading quietly to myself when the string numbers turns into a series of letters and words separated by symbols.
“C colon backslash users backslash Oliver backslash desktop…” I pause at the end. I scan the page for a moment, then notice a word at the bottom corner. “Enter?” The instant the word leaves my mouth my mind suddenly swells with knowledge and when I close my eyes I find myself staring at… at… I… I don’t now what I’m staring at.
It seems to be a window opening to a still night time scene with silhouetted trees against a sky full of stars. A number of strange objects stand in the sky like birds frozen in time. One of them seems to be a yellow folder in the top left with little white letters naming it ‘Documents’. A few other similar objects are labeled ‘Photos’, ‘Games’, ‘Journals’, ‘Roleplay’ and so forth.
“Oh my god,” I mutter. I raise my hand and wave it through the field of what my vision would be if my eyes were open; a small white arrow follows the trail of my index finger. “I can see his work… I have access to the author’s notes, his stories, his- his everything.”
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