The lights are out. The bar feels…different. Angela conducts the infamous shifty-eyed inspection: left, right, left. Bergen is nowhere in sight, but the tension weighs too heavily on her shoulders. Something is most definitely up.
She takes one step, and the 240-pound Viking prince plow-drives the writer to the floor and all goes dark.
* * *
A light clicks on, and Angela squints into the painfully white light aimed directly into her face. She’s sporting a fat lip and possibly a black eye that hurts when she attempts to look around. She’s been tied to a chair and shoved up to one of her bar tables. Overwhelming evidence that Bergen has stolen more of her Guinness surrounds her. ‘Irked’ barely begins to describe her temper when she sees her new 6-pack of Sacred Irish goodness already emptied.
“I know you’ve been premeditating my demise,” Bergen says.
Angela would be intimidated if he wasn’t so damn sexy. In complete submission, she puffs out her chest and declares, “I deny nothing.” She refuses to show him fear then adds, “I am your writer. I premeditate all your demises.”
“But this time you’ve gone too far!”
“Just wait. There’s more,” Angela says monotonically.
Hm, I didn’t think that would be a word, she muses. That must be the worst adverb ever.
Bergen, with a script of his own composing that he will follow no matter how inappropriate or cheesy, ignores Angela’s admission of guilt and bellows, “How do you explain this?”
With a refined slap that reminds Angela of a bad Hollywood mob movie, Bergen throws down a crinkled paper to the table. Angela peers down and, at once, recognizes the forum thread she posted only yesterday with the response from Wolf Road copied from the Scribophile forums.
Angela B. Chrysler: Is it sadistic of me to order custom made stress balls with my MC’s name on them so I can squeeze his balls when he pisses me off?
Wolf Road: Procure a Glock 18 from your imagination. Put it in the glove box of your car and lock it. Tell him you are taking him out for a ride to look at the nice sunset because you want to spend quality time with him. Smile a lot and make small talk. It will not be as hard as you think. Maybe give him a cold beer.
Take him out of town some place quiet then execute him. Drive off before he reanimates and make sure you take his shoes with you. Let him walk and try to hitch back through sheets of horizontal rain for ten or so hours barefoot with a hole in his forehead.
I guarantee he will be more compliant and stop giving you a hard time when he shows up. He’ll be glad to see you. Run him a warm bath with lots of suds and smelly stuff. Put a fluffy towel out. If you’re still pissed at him, you can wire the bath to the mains and electrocute him.
Unease settles into Angela’s stomach. No character should ever know the fate their writers have planned for them. And besides, a rogue character was no laughing matter. She had to resolve this and fast. Mustering her best innocent face she saw in a movie once, Angela peers up from the table.
“So, does this means you won’t be joining me for a quiet ride through the woods?”
Bergen narrows his black eyes into perfect slits. Angela was loosing her cool.
“Don’t you scowl at me. I gave you that scowl! How dare you use it against me!”
“If this post were the only issue, I might have forgiven you this endeavor,” Bergen says leaning over the table so that his face is only inches from Angela’s. She purses her lips because it seems the appropriate thing to do at this time. “But then, this morning,” Bergen continues, “I found these!”
With a series of slaps much like the first, only more, Bergen throws down the twenty or so 2×3 index cards marred with Angela’s writing. Her own hand betrays her and she gulps dramatically.
“What are you doing with my outline?” she asks.
“What are you doing with me?”
For a moment, they exchange looks that lead to a stare off. After many more moments, Angela raises her nose to the air and stares into the distance. “I’m writing a novella.”
“About me.”
“Well of course its about you! Now untie me so I can get back to work!”
Bergen doesn’t move. He sits and stares and assesses, unsure whether or not he can trust the writer. Just as he realizes he’s thinking in omniscient, Angela points out that this whole thing is really in her head, so its not omniscient at all seeing as how she’s writing about herself and this isn’t really head hopping at all.
Bergen shrugs in agreement, for now, but will he untie her? That has yet to be foreseen because…in all honesty, the writer is out of ideas. So they sit and stare and procure many adverbs between them instead.
