[PART 1: THE SOURCE CODE]
Location: Sakura Himura's Bedroom. Earth. Time: 2:17 AM.
The only light in the room came from a laptop screen, casting a pale blue glow on a face contorted with the intense focus only a teenager writing self-indulgent fan-fiction can muster.
Sakura Himura was in the zone.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard, fueled by a bag of half-eaten potato chips and the lingering thrill of having written a genuinely cool dragon scene. The comments on her last chapter had been overwhelmingly positive. "The action was so vivid!" one had said. "I didn't know you could write like that!" another had exclaimed.
She had felt a flush of pride. Yeah, she thought, I didn't know I could write like that, either.
Now, she was determined to keep the momentum going. It was time for the scene she had been dreaming of all week: the first real conversation between Princess Sakura-Aria and Sir Haruto.
Sir Haruto approached the Princess, his silver armor gleaming in the moonlight. He knelt on one knee, his gaze full of a deep, unspoken admiration. "Princess," he began, his voice like velvet and honor, "I must confess, your bravery in the face of the dragon has captured my—"
Her eyelids felt heavy. The words on the screen started to blur slightly.
Just... one more paragraph, she told herself, stifling a yawn.
The Princess looked down at him, her heart a fluttery bird in a cage of ribs. "Sir Haruto," she whispered, "you need not kneel. For in my eyes, you are already—"
Her head drooped. Her fingers slowed, resting on the keys.
The sentence remained unfinished.
A moment later, her head sank onto her arm, cushioned by a pile of textbooks. The laptop screen saver, a slideshow of cute anime cats, flickered on.
Sakura was asleep.
[PART 2: THE CONSEQUENCE]
Location: The Royal Gardens of Luv-Luv Hearts. My World. Now.
I was leaning against a marble balustrade, watching the moon—which was, for some reason, shaped like a perfect crescent despite being full last night—when the warmth started.
It was a pleasant, trickling sensation, like warm tea spreading through my veins. I felt the deep, bone-weary exhaustion from the dragon fight begin to recede. My internal well of creative energy, my "edit capacity," was refilling.
"She's writing," I murmured, a wave of relief washing over me. "Thank god."
As long as she kept writing, this world would remain stable. As long as she kept writing, I would have the power to fix her inevitable mistakes. As long as she—
The warmth stopped.
Abruptly.
I blinked, waiting for it to resume. Nothing. It had been a solid two-thousand-word-sprint's worth of energy, enough to bring my capacity back to nearly full. But it had cut off mid-flow.
I pushed myself off the balustrade, a sense of unease prickling at the back of my neck. "Did she stop?"
That's when I noticed the silence.
The chirping of the magical, color-changing crickets had ceased. The gentle hum of the glowing moon-flora had faded. Even the wind had died.
Then I saw it.
To my left, the royal garden was a masterpiece of shoujo nonsense—rose bushes shaped like hearts, a bubbling stream that sparkled with glitter, the works.
To my right... there was nothing.
Not a void. Not darkness. Just a flat, featureless expanse of pale gray, like an unrendered polygon in a video game. The garden simply ended, cut off in a perfectly straight line. The balustrade I was leaning against extended ten feet to my right and then just... stopped. Chopped clean off.
It was as if reality had run out of data.
I cautiously walked to the edge. There was no drop, no wall. Just a seamless transition from the overwrought garden to absolute, textureless nothing.
"What in the..."
My editorial instinct flared, and I understood. The words appeared in my mind like a half-finished sentence in a document.
"The Princess looked down at him, her heart a fluttery bird in a cage of ribs. 'Sir Haruto,' she whispered, 'you need not kneel. For in my eyes, you are already—"
That's where it ended.
She fell asleep mid-sentence.
She'd been describing the garden in this scene. She'd described the left side, the center where the characters stood, and then she'd passed out before she could write the right side.
So the right side of the garden hadn't been written into existence yet.
I knelt down, reaching a hand out over the edge. My fingers passed into the grayness, and I felt... nothing. No heat, no cold, no texture. It was the physical manifestation of a blank page.
A guard—not Marcus, a different one—was patrolling nearby. He walked his route, turned a corner around a non-existent rose bush, and stepped directly into the gray.
He vanished.
Not with a scream or a puff of smoke. He just ceased to be. One moment he was a poorly-written NPC with squeaky armor, the next he was gone. Deleted.
My blood ran cold.
If anyone else walked into this unwritten space, they'd be erased. The story would lose assets, continuity would fracture, and the world's stability would plummet.
"No, no, no," I muttered, scrambling back from the edge. "Think. How do I fix this?"
I couldn't create something from nothing. Rule Number One. I couldn't write the rest of the garden myself.
But I could edit.
What if I didn't need to add something new? What if I could just... stretch what was already there?
I pulled the Red Pen from the air. It felt heavy, full of the energy Sakura's late-night writing session had provided.
I looked at the perfectly manicured hedge on the edge of the finished garden. It was an existing asset.
[EDITOR'S AUTHORITY ACTIVATED]
[TARGET ASSET: "Royal Hedge - Style: Overly Ornate"]
[EXECUTING: STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT (DUPLICATION & EXTENSION)]
I drew a line with the pen, not creating a new hedge, but highlighting the existing one and dragging the line across the empty gray space.
A thin, red wireframe appeared, extending from the real hedge. It flickered. Reality strained against the command. This was a bigger edit than just changing a word or patching a fountain. I was copy-pasting a piece of the world itself.
I poured more energy into it, my teeth gritted. "Come on..."
With a sound like tearing paper, the red wireframe filled in. The hedge duplicated itself, stretching across the gray void and forming a solid wall of green. It wasn't a new garden, but it was a barrier. A patch.
I stumbled back, the Red Pen dimming. That had taken a lot out of me. Almost a third of my capacity, just for a wall.
I looked at my work. The gray void was still there, but now it was safely walled off. No one could accidentally wander in and get deleted. Crisis averted.
I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding.
Then I heard a scream.
I spun around. On the other side of the garden—the side that had been fully written—a different kind of chaos was unfolding.
Princess Sakura-Aria and Sir Haruto were standing frozen, mid-conversation. But the world around them was glitching. The moonlight flickered violently. Sir Haruto's armor kept changing color from silver to gold to a hideous shade of pea-green. The Princess's hair was flashing through colors like a strobe light—pink, blue, red, pink, blue, red.
"What now?" I groaned.
My editorial instinct gave me the answer immediately, and it was so stupid I almost laughed.
She'd fallen asleep.
The scene wasn't finished.
The characters were trapped in a narrative loop, waiting for a line of dialogue that was never written. Their code was stuck.
If they stayed like that for too long, their character files would corrupt.
I had to do something. I couldn't write the line for her. But maybe... I could give them an out.
I raised the Red Pen again, feeling my energy drain further.
I didn't edit their dialogue. I edited the stage direction.
[EXECUTING: MINOR STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT]
[INSERTING ACTION BEAT]
I found the last line of prose she'd written.
"...her heart a fluttery bird in a cage of ribs."
And right after it, I inserted a tiny, one-word edit.
A new sentence.
A cold wind blew.
In the garden, a sudden, unnatural gust of wind swept through the scene. It rustled the leaves, chilled the air, and made both the Princess and the Knight shiver.
The loop broke.
The Princess blinked, looking around as if waking from a trance. "My," she said, wrapping her arms around herself. "It has gotten rather chilly."
Sir Haruto, his armor now thankfully back to a stable silver, stood up. "Indeed, Princess. Perhaps we should continue this conversation inside."
They walked off toward the castle, the scene now logically concluded by an external interruption.
I watched them go until they disappeared through the castle doors — two characters neatly resolved, the scene closed, the narrative thread intact. One cold wind. Six words of stage direction. Clean.
Four years of craft, and it turned out the smallest edits were sometimes the ones that mattered most.
I leaned against my newly-created hedge, completely spent. Two major edits in five minutes. Both because the author had a bad sleep schedule.
My life, my entire existence, was in the hands of a narcoleptic teenager with a flair for the dramatic.
A quiet, exhausted note scribbled itself into the margin of my mind.
Crisis Management: Successful.
Edit Summary:
- Structural Duplication: Applied. Costly, but effective.
- Action Beat Insertion: Applied. Clever. Minimalist.
- Remaining Capacity: ~50%
Conclusion: The Author is unreliable. Prepare for more late-night emergencies.
Suggestion: Find a way to send her a strongly-worded memo about professional work habits.
I slid down to the ground, pulling my knees to my chest.
"I am so, so doomed."