"Congrats on becoming the main character!" My voice calls out in Mike's head.

Mike instantly sits up in bed. "Excuse me? Main character?"

"Yes, Mike Byrne, you are the main character of the story I am narrating." I say.

Mike shakes his head. "This has to be a mistake. My name isn't even Mike, I'm Steven." He puts his hands on his head, rubbing his face. "Maybe it's a dream, normal people don't hear voices in their heads."

"That's because you're not normal, Mike. You're the main character. You always have been, but you didn't progress according to the story line. That's why I'm here!"

He stumbles out of bed and rushes in front of the mirror. "No, see, I'm still Steven. Who even are you?"

"I'm the narrator, I told you so." It seems like Mike is confused, he needs some help getting on track. "And as the narrator, I'm responsible for telling the story. The story you're supposed to act out. So you best get going!"

Mike mutters something under his breath. "How many times do I need say I'm Steven to this trash narrator."

"As the narrator I can hear whatever you mutter, Mike."

He grumbles as he heads downstairs.

"Good morning, Mike! Breakfast is almost ready." Mike's mother announces.

Mike frowns. "This is ridiculous. I don't even look like the person in these pictures." He points at the family photo's hanging on the wall. It's Mike and his mother last year during Christmas.

"What are you talking about Mike? It's you." I appear in his head once again.

"How does he even come close to me? He has black hair, mine is brown!" Mike holds his black hair to show off.

... "It's black, Mike." Has the main character lost his mind? Is that why it all went wrong?

Mike rushes out of the house, leaving behind his breakfast. "I will prove to you that I'm not Mike."

"And how would you do that..?" I ask Mike.

He looks around the city, smiling to himself. "By finding the actual main character." There is no doubt about it, the main character has gone crazy. And it's my job to narrate it all.

Lifeblinder

It's cold on the cliffs. It smells like the sea, churning blue and white and uncaring a thousand feet beneath us. The wind cuts and blows my hair back. From behind me I hear Charon's robes, rich embroidered silk now stained with blood, flapping in the wind. But even that is a distant sound.

Otherwise...it's quiet.

Now that he's dead.

Now that he's finally dead.

I look down. My boot is still where I left it, pressed to the chest of the one they call Lifeblinder. It looks gruesome, and brutal, my boot on his chest like that. Not very heroic. But I needed to stabalize when I drove my sword through his temple. It's still there-- burried six inches past his cranium and into the soil

Also gruesome.

Also non-heroic.

"Sorry Mitch," I say, and pull the blade free. "I probably don't look quite like the hero you're always telling me to be. But the deed is done."

"The deed is done," echoes a voice, but it isn't Mitch's.

It's Charon, staggering forward and holding her head where dried blood at her temple softly mimics Lifeblinder's mortal wound.

She joins me at the cliff face. She stares down at Lifeblinder.

Shakes her head.

Then after a moment, our mage speaks.

"Who's Mitch?" she asks, glancing up at me with a frown.

"Who's Mit--" I begin, turning a quarter of the way to smile at Mitch.

Except Mitch isn't there.

No one is there.

"Mitch," I ask, loudly.

"Durro, you're scaring me..." Charon says, glancing between me and the corpse. She thinks I'm in shock or something. I am confused-- I'll give her that. But not shock.

"Oh, shit, did he..."

My heart seizes.

"Did Mitch fall?" I ask. I can feel my face growing pale. I run to the cliff edge. Like that would do any good.

Charon is slow to follow.

"Durro," she says, voice steadying itself now that the battle is over, "Who is Mitch?"

"Now's not the fucking time, Charon," I mumble.

"Time for what?"

"For jokes, or...messing with me, or whatever this is."

"I don't really mess with people," The mage says slowly, "And I don't think I've ever joked in my life."

That was true enough.

I peer over the edge.

No Mitch, no corpse dashed against the rocks as far as I can see. Of course, if he fell into the ocean he'd be long gone.

Vertigo took me for a moment, spinning, wavering, and I took a step back.

"Who is Mitch?" Charon repeated. She left me to hesitate while she darted back to her pack to rifle through some scrolls and components.

"Mitch, you know, Mitchell Haundrin? You've known him for three years? Pale, medium build, black hair? Do you not remember? What is this?"

"It's something," Charon murmured, rifling through her things. "Something--"

She stopped mid sentence and glanced up, eyes wide.

I turned to follow her gaze.

There was a figure there. Cloaked. Standing in the moors.

When I first turned the beholder on all eleven eyes twitched. I studied its reactions carefully while reading vitals from the monitor. I swear there was absolutely no indication that anything foul was happening or was about to happen.

There's just no way. The main eye in the center contains an 8k resolution camera, feeding the creature's auto-movement AI engine, which I had written myself over the years. It was responsible for navigation and movement. The ten other eyes fire a combination of bullets, lasers, and tiny grenades, only on my explicit command from the control panel on my remote PC. Flight capabilities came from a bleeding-edge drone, which lay beneath the thick plastic monster coating lined with Kevlar.

My pilot plan was to rob an armed security truck that drove on a highway nearby. Nobody would see the beholder coming, nobody would be prepared for it. Once the shooting began people would see that it could escape their bullets, and that the ammunition that it didn't escape would bounce right off. It was the perfect weapon, totally untraceable. Even if by some chance it did get shot down, there was no way it would lead back to me.

So you can see, I really hadn't planned for the creature to start talking to me in some gibberish language that I didn't understand. All I heard out of its very first words was something about a lair in a forgotten realm somewhere. When I pored over the source code, I found nothing to indicate that any functionality like that should be present. Talking was never a priority for this build-out. Hell, I didn't even put speakers in it. Then, when it started firing weird rays at me, I knew that something had gone horribly wrong. I had lost control of it.

The cop took a long sip from a cup of what looked like dumpster-worthy black coffee.

"You're telling me you're responsible for the deaths of 112 people because you lost control of your Frankenstein and you can't even remember the code you put in it to make it do that?"

"It wasn't supposed to come alive. Surely, you understand that!"

"Yeah, sure. Forensics will tell the tale. I hope you're ready to spend a long time talking to the FBI, because they're going to have a lot of questions for you."

"I'm pretty curious about that forensics report too."

That was the last thing I said before I scratched an itch on my ankle. When I looked down at it, I saw a red splotch where one of the rays had hit me. Funny that I hadn't noticed it before. What was more concerning is that there was tissue growing from that spot.

When I looked up again I saw both the cop's head and his feet.

----

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After a long battle with the demon king, the hero emerges victorious. And in glory of coming back alive, the hero and his party comes back to town, but the hero brings something up. “Uuh, where is Luka?” He asks. “Who?” Maria the cleric questions his strange question, a question square you might say, but it’s indeed strange, this name has never been mentioned before, surely something is wrong. “Luka, my best friend” The hero adds to the name, speaking as it was the truth, but this lonely hero grew alone, on the streets, about to die in a cold winter until… wait… something is quite wrong. “Luka? What are you even talking about sir hero?” The elven mage, Tonatiel, barges in for the question, a question by the cube I might say, but this time is no time for little math jokes, something is stirring on the hero’s mind. “Luka, the one who salved me when I was little, our party’s tank, and Maria’s lover, where is he” Not even a trace of redness is on Maria’s face, if it was real, she would be mad red as she gets when they mention sir hero and her together, after all, the one she loves is the heroic Gabriel, not an unknown Luka. But for the hero thins just don’t add up “it’s as if you guys forgot about him”. But there was never a him, was there? Did the demon lord hit his head with that forsaken magic too hard? Wait a moment, it never hit him, did it? It just stopped midair, like a ghost was there, no, I’m sure that was no ghost, connecting the dots, even I myself, the goddess and narrator of this world, would understand that sir hero head is intact and that this 'Luka' folk was somewhere at sometime, but for some reason, only sir hero alone knows about this. Strange. “How could we forget about him if like we never met him, are you sure your head is alright?” Tonatiel speaks up. “No, I’m sure of it, I’m not mad, there is something wrong, I, I know it, I know someone that would certainly know it too!” He is talking about me isn’t he? The hero opens his skill window and uses [the voice of god], something quite of an google of this world only got for those who are chosen by me to use. “Goddess, do you know Luka?” [does not exist] is what I responded, you know, I’m trying to pierce together what this is all about now, breaking the narrator character for a moment, Luka simply ceased to exist from that fight, but there is something in Gabriel himself now that I look up close, a hole. As a reincarnation from a world full of energy but no magic, he is still unstable, but a hole this big was never there before, and now I think I get it. When this child died, in order to cease the pain from a unfair death caused by me (y’know the child energy levels where perfect for a hero, I needed to meddle in) I decided for myself to erase his existence all together from that world, I mean it’s the right thing, no Gabriel, no pain from his death, I still think I did a great job at that, didn’t I? Whatever, if this is the same thing, that bastardly demon lord used that hole to send Luka to Gabriel’s world in his last moments as a revenge, and erasing him in a reverse casting of my own, in theory only the demon lord would know what happened to Luka, but his souls got absorbed as energy to the hero who slayed it, so it seems that he still remembers it. This Luka guy has completely taken over the hero’s life in his old family, old school, his original parents, and he must be quite confused, not that I really care, but I don’t think I can send the hero back to his homeworld now can I? At least I will send him this consolation message so he quits sobbing like his mother did when he died by that comically large anvil I spawned on top of him. [Luka did exist, but now with your parents👍].

/ first writing prompt, did I do decent for first time? 🥺