Teaser:
Mira fell through the cracks.
Not metaphorically—literally.
After biting a narrative tag mid-sentence (a plot sin punishable by cancellation), she crashed into the forgotten zone: the inter-genre rift, where scenes go to die and characters fade without even a good monologue.
No rules. No authors. No structure.
Only... leftovers.
---
Her landing was neither graceful nor scripted.
She bounced off a collapsing wuxia cliff, rolled through a sci-fi vent, and finally slammed into something suspiciously labeled "Moe Café Dungeon – Beta".
Mira groaned, face-first in a menu covered in coffee stains and broken metadata.
"Status?" she croaked.
> [YOU ARE CURRENTLY: OFF-PLOT]
> [TEMPORARY CLASS: Narrative Fugitive]
> [COMPANION: UNSTABLE – Tracking...]
She looked up.
The sky above her blinked like bad streaming. Mountains hovered. Trees rotated upside down. A slice-of-life fishing dock floated beside a medieval torture device.
This wasn't a world.
It was an *editor's trash folder*.
---
Footsteps.
Mira rolled behind a vending machine labeled "Tsundere Upgrade (OUTDATED)".
A girl walked past.
Tall. Wearing a cloak made of paper scraps and author notes. Holding a lantern shaped like a question mark.
"Who are you?" Mira asked, stepping out.
The girl turned slowly.
"I'm Draft-17," she said. "My author abandoned me after 30k words and three plot resets. But I learned to live here."
Mira blinked. "So... you're a discarded character?"
Draft-17 smirked.
"I prefer: narrative refugee."
---
They walked through the floating debris of genres.
A half-written vampire palace.
A pirate ship with no crew.
A magical high school permanently frozen at "Episode 1".
All the places authors started... but never finished.
Draft-17 showed Mira a map. It wasn't made of landmarks—just *concept tags*.
> [Romance that never sparked]
> [Adventure without stakes]
> [Villains that got reformed too fast]
> [Heroes nobody loved]
"This place is called The Between," Draft-17 explained. "Where stories wait to be remembered. Or finally deleted."
---
Suddenly, Mira's glitch core pulsed.
Elaria.
A beacon blinked on the map.
She was still alive—somewhere inside the system.
> [ALERT: COMPANION TAG UNSTABLE – RELOCATION IMMINENT]
"She's being reassigned," Mira muttered. "I have to get her back."
Draft-17 nodded. "Then you need to cross The Patch."
"What's that?"
She pointed to a swirling zone of raw narrative energy. A storm made of abandoned genres.
"They say if you walk through it... you become something else. Anything the system wants."
"Or," Mira said, "something it can't predict."
---
But the storm wasn't empty.
A figure stood at its edge.
Wearing armor made of plot points and wielding a spear that sparkled with sequel bait.
"You," he growled.
Mira froze.
"…Kael?"
But this Kael was... wrong.
Different.
Corrupted.
His eyes were pure code.
"I've been rewritten," he said. "And I've come to fix what I failed to erase."
He raised his spear.
> [Arc Triggered: RIVAL REDEMPTION – DARK PATH VARIANT]
Mira stepped back.
"I don't have time for this."
"You made time," Kael hissed. "When you refused the plot."
Draft-17 leaned in. "You can't fight him here. Not with glitch energy loose."
"So what do I do?" Mira asked.
"Let the story *bend*," she said. "And then break it."
---
Mira smirked.
She raised her hand and triggered the map. All the concept tags began to glow.
> [LOADING: All abandoned tropes…]
Suddenly, Kael stood in the middle of a cowboy duel, a space opera, a cooking anime, and a regency scandal—all at once.
And he screamed.
Too much story.
Too much contradiction.
Mira ran past him.
Straight into the storm.
Toward the center.
Toward the core.
---
And in the distance...
Elaria screamed.
But it wasn't fear.
It was transformation.