A hot flower bloomed from Reality Establishment Central Office. Glass shards like windblown seeds carried out on a sudden gust of air stung skin and blinded eyes, and was followed by the scent of burning.
Naire lay there with her chest become the flowerbed for an impromptu rose. Water sprang from her eyes, and the sounds of a whispered prayer were heard by no-one.
Telemachus tried to rattle out a transport code to move his tesseract shell outside of the blast zone, but he just ended up carrying himself and the shrapnel somewhere else, so he could die alone.
15 Reality Engineers dead. They labelled them Fixed Event No Rewind Interference, or Fenrir, which meant they were literally dead. It also meant that other Ragnarok Protocols were likely to be in place, and with the way this was going, they were only being applied to Reality Engineers and not civilians. The Civilian Death Loophole might be the only thing that could feasibly jusitify revivifying a Reality Engineer, and it was likely to only be a Zombie Continuance Loop where the engineer’s consciousness was booted up in a Battery Hen version of the Bloop Hen.
They labelled the suicide bombers as Fool Stops, because they were implanted with Grail Seeker Visions of something beyond that drove their actions. The Critic Cull Unit would separate them by using a Between The Lions Script, where they were literally torn down to their base meanings and significances by Story Lions. The Lions would shit out a script, and the proscription would be Linefed into Autocorrects that were then sent out into whatever areas needed to be struck out.
The Localspace Area Rewrite stuttered along for several Linear Line Weeks, with ripples spreading out across the Multiverse. Tara Stones were shot out to fracture points, and impromptu Ard Ri were set up to talk the areas out of collapse.
How long had The Reality Wars been raging? Not many could tell you. Worlds fell away into The GutterSpace. Sentences spooling off into the Bleed. Carter Brecht defeated The Ragged Right, a corrupt conglomeration of Fried Heads, but he almost lost to The Justified at Plain Text on the planet of Sans.
The Leaders Of Enjambement, named Em-Dash and En-Dash, respectively, had provided support for Reality Engineers under Brecht for several Linear Decades, but they were beheaded in a mass edit. The number of casualties would never be truly counted because who would be able to remember the deletes? It seemed like even The Inviolate Narratives were being corrupted, and the universe was becoming freeform, or The Freeverse as some liked to call it.
Cliche Avatars began to self-populate areas, and Cyclical Narratives would repeat through time, which began to get more compressed as originality leeched out of the localspace.
It was said that the plan to loop it all into a Causality Bubble was hatched by Carter Brecht, and that he volunteered himself to deliver the payload. None of that could be confirmed though, because he went off-book, and he disappeared.
A second flower bloomed a square mile away. The city, protected with an Edit Mechanism, instituted immediate rewrite protocols, and the IMPs scattered everywhere to correct the issue. It was strange that the central command of Reality Engineers was not protected, and that only the escalation to a cross-reality-wide war legitamised a sanctioned military action on home soil, but it did. Carter Brecht traded himself for the lives of everyone.