FicWad

Author's Note: In its original conception "Keys" was a light hearted Mary-Sue parody. Then as I began fleshing the characters out, Tom especially, they gained a semi-twisted veiw of the reality in which they lived, and eventually got to the point where it seemed reasonable for Tom to say, out of the blue: "Let's kill her" and for Zani to agree. As for Sharon, I've been in her shoes, most writers have. Mary Sue characters are just so tempting to write.



The Keys to Control


Princess Xanvia Torlescana Illubotri then jumped on the back of her dragon, the noble Giligiashi. She looked sadly at Lord Relez.

"I have to go, Reli. I have to save Tom."

He looked into her deep violet eyes, and sighed, wishing that she would get rid of her riding gear, and come back to his castle with him, and get into the delicate pink silk garment that she had put aside, just to rush off and save her friend. He was glad to see that she was still wearing the opal necklace that he had given her. It went very well with her black leather riding gear, balanced on the mounds of her cleavage.

"Must you leave me? Tom is only a peasant, after all," Relez attempted one last effort to persuade her to stay.

Xanvia/ drew herself upright in the saddle, her eyes flashing red with the righteousness of her anger. /

"Tom is much more than a peasant. He is a dear friend who has helped me through thick and thin. You only dislike him for his accidentally being bitten by a werewolf. Now he is outcast from both races because of prejudiced people like you."

She rose in the saddle, her raven tresses streaming in the wind as



Sharon Jones yawned, looking at the clock. Oh man, it was already eleven. Well, she had written a lot. She hadn't finished the 47th chapter of her ongoing story, Dragon Flame: The Midnight Shard, but her fans on the writers' forum wouldn't mind too much. She was glad that the story was progressing so rapidly. She couldn't wait until Xanvia got to the Castle Wrincirea, where Tom was being held. When she rescued Tom, Tom would confess his love for Xanvia, before the demon lord Braxzth would brainwash the werewolf and set the two friends to fighting one another. Then, when things looked their blackest, Relez would come in and save the day. Braxzth would get away, of course, dropping more mysterious hints about Xanvia's past. But that was what sequels were for. It was supposed to be a trilogy, after all.

Sharon scanned over the lines on the wavering monitor in front of her. She must be tired, she decided, as the bright light of the screen seemed to fill her vision. However, she didn't want to wake up tomorrow and realize that she had misspelled something, or had forgotten to describe things properly.

Reading the story over, Sharon grimaced. She had forgotten to go into detail about Relez's clothes, and while she hadn't changed the style or color of Xanvia's riding leathers for some time, she really should add a paragraph somewhere for reinforcement. And she wasn't too sure about the word "cleavage." Perhaps it was just a little childish. But Xanvia was supposed to be a very beautiful woman. If she wasn't large in certain, um, areas, it wouldn't be realistic to have all of the men after her that she did.

Satisfied, Sharon began the shut-down sequence on her computer, and wandered off to her room.



"Arrgh!" Zani growled as she stretched. "She left me in that bloody pose again! My back and legs are killing me! I hate it when she does that. And she hasn't given the dragon of insanely long names enough personality for him to stay solid when her computer shuts off."

"Fell down again?" Tom's voice was a tired growl, as cyberspace swirled around him in ever-changing lines of code. If he looked carefully he could see the lines of type that made up his body and clothes.

"On my hip. I'll have a huge bruise, there," Zani sighed, in the tone of someone looking for a handy wall to beat her head against. "And she's trying to make my eyes glow again."

"Eldritch powers of no explanation?" Tom questioned. "I thought you had been able to get her to stop typing that trash."

"No luck. Why were we cursed with a creator who has delusions of artistic ability?" Zani complained sitting on a couch of spiraling code.

Her mind could barely manage to hold both it and her body together in this world. She was still too 2-D, and Tom was in worse condition, as their author had barely invested any personality in him. More than any of the other characters in the ongoing torture that Sharon had devised, but still, they existed only as bare shadows in comparison to other rich and vibrant characters that teemed the RAM worlds of computers used by aspiring writers. When connected to the online writing communities that Sharon visited, Zani and Tom could only stare in envy at the vast settings and solid bodies that other characters created.

"We should kill her." Tom said, not looking up, his blank eyes still fixed on his semi-transparent hand.

Zani looked at him in surprise. "What? Why?"

"We should kill her. To pay her back for this miserable existence that she has forced us into. Not quite living, and not quite dead. In agony every day trying to find the mental will to survive, when we both know it would be much less painful for us to cast our sparks of conciousness to the abyss. Look at Reli. He's happy now that he has rid himself of all conscious will and effort."

Zani eyed Tom. What he said had definite merit. But it seemed extreme. Out of the story that Sharon had woven for them she disliked the man. As Sharon's creation he was an over angsty wimp who always relied on Princess Xanvia to rescue him, or teach him the reasons why he should care about himself. As a being of his own will and spirit Tom was a twisted empty shell.

His acting in the stories was antithetical to the nature that had been created with the First Idea in Sharon's head. She had envisioned a werewolf from a poor background striving for greatness against all odds. This was the stuff that Tom had been originally made from. Sharon had then forced such a character into the strictures of her own writing, which would ultimately accept no other hero than her perfect princess, or allow for any intelligence than that belonging to her noble princess.

A state that left Tom full of the venom of unused, and wasted potential. Empty and pointless. Useless. A man, in other words, who had a lot of time on his hands to think about the person who had done him such a wrong.

"Sharon's only a stupid girl, you know," Zani said. "Killing her would be a bit extreme."

Tom smiled, and it reached his eyes, kindling a fire in them. "I'm saying that we kill her the same way she has killed us. With painful writing."

"You're not suggesting we manipulate the keyboard, are you?!" Zani exclaimed.

"Only a little. I know what needs to be written." The light in Tom's eyes was growing as his spirit managed to pull more type together in a whirl of letters under his skin. "We need to do this, Zani. For Reli, who let himself go, rather than fight against her torture, and your dragon, who never even pulled himself together. For the fact that there are only two of us, where there should be an entire world of ideas and dreams in this hard drive."

"You want me to bring a keyboard here, though?" Zani asked. She could do it. It would be easier than the couch in a way, because it was smaller. She could pull the keyboard together under her own will. Tom could type. It could work, now that she thought of it.

Even as she thought the couch whirled out of existence. A keyboard formed, and Tom excitedly reached out. His fingers soon began to dance over the keys, as Zani watched, amazed. Words flowed through him into the air, and letters. He rewrote the code, and then began to rewrite life.



Sharon/ got up. /

She got dressed.

She went to school.

She had a test today. She hadn't studied for it.

When she failed she went to ask her friends for help.

"Why should we help a stupid idiot like you?" Emily asked.

"Yeah," said Claire, "I have to get ready for my date with Chad. If you didn't study it's your own fault. Go take the make up."

Everywhere the response was the same.

Sharon/ felt anger building in her. Building and building. Her friends turned her way. Formerly sympathetic teachers rolled their eyes. Sharon heard more synonyms for stupid that day than she had ever heard in her life. The betrayal of the world cut deep. /

There was a tight feeling in her gut. Tight and painful, like steel stretched thin. When she walked into the girl's bathroom and looked in the mirror-

Sharon looked around, her head threatening to split open. What was happening? Her school day had been going by in a blur. It was as if someone had decided to skip all f the "boring" parts. Boring, but essential, Sharon felt, for the first time. She didn't even know if she had gotten out of bed that morning. It was as if time had become disjointed.

Life wasn't like this. That realization stopped her cold. She was looking in the bathroom mirror, her sides heaving as she tried not to cry. She felt angry, a raw red fury that should have made this sort of reflection impossible. Yet she was still thinking fairly clearly, as if she was being told that she was angry, very convincingly.

She looked at the mirror, and then grabbed her sweatshirt from her backpack.

Wait, she hadn't brought her sweatshirt? Or had she? Without Sharon's knowledge the grey fleece-lined cloth was wound around her arm.

Her anger -- at being betrayed, hated, ignored, and manipulated -- surged down from her mind and up from her stomach along her arm. The mirror smashed. She pounded into the broken frame, pure rage fueling the adrenaline.

How could they ignore her?! How could they not care?! How could they just go on with their lives without knowing the pain and suffering that they inflicted?!

She felt barely alive, but with each tinkle of falling glass, life returned. As her anger and hate poured out at last sanity re-established itself for one critical moment. One moment of logic in chaos. If they had made her feel this way, then she should make them understand how she felt.

Wait, what?! No! Sharon stumbled back. Or tried to. Her body wasn't obeying her anymore. Her thoughts weren't obeying her.

She picked up the longest piece of glass. And wrapped her sweatshirt around the base to use as hilt for the sword-sized shard.

She ran out into the halls. A small girl carrying a lunch box walked past Sharon. With one angry snarl Sharon lashed out. The sharp, broken edge caught the child's neck, slashing the soft flesh open. Blood, dark and pumping, splattered everywhere.



Tom breathed out, and sat back, away from the keyboard. He was much more solid than before, Zani noticed.

"There," he said to himself. "That should do for a while. I'll leave her there for a few hours, and come back to her when I have a moment."

"That's horrible," Zani read what had been written.

"I thought I was very considerate. I didn't leave her hanging in the middle of a sentence after all."