This is my most ambitious work yet! Enjoy.
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The voice cut through reality like scissors through silk, and every other sound in the cosmic arena faded to background noise.
"Alright, that's enough fun for a single chapter!"
The arena froze. Oblivion hung mid-swing with void energy pouring off him like steam. Domino stood with the Colt raised, Death Stone blazing violet. Luv reached for his father, mouth open in warning.
Even the Living Tribunal's three faces locked mid-rotation.
Everything except Jay.
Jay stood there with rainbow blood still dripping from his shoulder stump and six Infinity Stone resonances pulsing in his chest. He felt confused in a way that went past even his Super Computer of a mind.
The arena melted and changed around him without any flash of light or portal or any cosmic mechanism he could identify. It just stopped being the arena and started being somewhere else, as clean as a scene change in a play.
He found himself standing in a cluttered back-room.
An aggressively normal room that felt wrong after hours of cosmic courts and impossible spaces; somehow, it felt refreshing, like drinking tap water after months in a desert. Too simple, too small and too real.
Warm lighting from a desk lamp with a cream shade. Bookshelves crammed with paperbacks and hardcovers in no particular order, spines facing every direction like someone had been pulling them out and shoving them back for years.
A worn couch with a throw blanket bunched up on one end. And a desk covered in organized chaos.
Notebooks stacked three high. A keyboard with keys worn smooth at W, A, S, D. A simple Laptop who's monitor showed what looked like a document with way too many words, while the side tab displayed a forum thread with nested comments going down for miles. A tea cup with a faded blue-and-white border sat half-full and probably cold.
Behind the desk sat a man in his mid-twenties, with Indian features and wavy hair that needed a trim. His beard looked like it had been shaped with care about three days ago and had been coasting since. He wore beige shorts and a t-shirt with some faded band logo Jay didn't recognize, sporting a bit of a gut and the hunched posture that came from spending entire days at a keyboard.
He was typing with the steady rhythm of someone in the zone, fingers moving across keys with unconscious rhythm. The clicking filled the room with a sound that was somehow more real than anything Jay had heard in the Dimension of Manifestations.
Jay took a step closer, drawn by what he couldn't name, and the angle shifted enough to see the monitor. His own name was on the screen alongside his actions, his thoughts, the exact sequence of events that had just happened rendered in prose that was both clinical and intimate. He watched the cursor blink at the end of a sentence that read: "Jay stood there, rainbow blood still dripping from his shoulder stump, six Infinity Stone resonances pulsing in his chest..."
Physical cold moved through his sternum as the realization hit. He was reading himself, standing here reading himself in present tense in a document on someone else's screen.
The man's fingers moved, keys clicked again as new words appeared: "The arena melted…"
Jay remembered the arena dissolving around him with perfect clarity. The typing and the event had happened simultaneously across two different places, and his brain refused to believe what the proof was hinting at.
The man stopped typing after hitting enter and turned in his chair with a slow swivel that suggested a carefree author, finally free of his work, had just needed to finish his thought first.
When their eyes met, the man's face went through several expressions in rapid succession: genuine surprise, followed immediately by recognition, before settling into a smile that was equal parts welcoming and exciting.
"Oh, you are here?" the man said, gesturing at the couch which Jay noticed had suddenly been straightened, throw blanket folded. "Well. This is earlier than I planned. Please, sit. You look like you've had a day."
Jay looked down at himself.
The rainbow blood was gone. The shoulder stump had become a shoulder again with his arm intact and fingers flexing with the automatic response of limbs that had never been severed. His suit was pristine again, the black patterns unmarred by any evidence of combat with unimaginable beings.
He looked back at the screen where the words had just appeared while he was looking away: "Jay looked down at himself. The rainbow blood was gone."
"Who are you?" Jay said, his voice coming out flat with a scratch of anxiety underneath it, the residue of having gone through this too recently. "Where am I? Where's my son? Where's Dom? We were fighting Oblivion and then this voice came and..."
"Hey, hey." The man stood up with stiffness from having been sitting too long and picked up a glass from the desk, already filled with something pale and cold, condensation beading on the outside. Seems like Lemonade, from the smell.
He held it out.
"Take a breath. Everyone's fine. I'm just taking a break from my work, so everything's on hold. Nobody's going anywhere, nothing bad is happening to them while you're here."
Jay stared at the glass, at the man, at the screen where new words were appearing in real time: "Jay stared at the glass."
His Comic Book Nerd perk fired up, searching for cross-references.
Fourth-wall breaks, meta-narratives, beings that operated outside standard reality. Deadpool talked to the audience, and She-Hulk's done the same. The Beyonders existed outside the multiverse proper. The search kept sliding off whatever this was, finding adjacent categories and losing the thread because whatever this was had no category. All searches came back with no results at all.
"Don't you recognize me?" the man said, his voice carrying a note of hurt, like he'd expected a different reaction.
Jay took the lemonade partly because his throat was raw from screaming, fighting and bleeding, partly because it gave him something to do with his hands while his brain caught up. The glass was cold and real, even the lemonade tasted exactly like lemonade, which somehow made the whole thing worse.
He studied the man. Young, definitely human passing, with tired eyes, with sagging bags under them that came from repeated and rigorous deskwork.
"No," Jay said finally before adding, because the pieces were assembling into a shape he didn't particularly want to look at directly, "Should I?"
A thought suddenly occurred to him, no matter how improbable.
"Are you The One Above All?"
The man laughed with genuine humour, a snort in the middle that was filled with the absurdity of Jay's statement.
"Buddy, where did you get that idea?" The man was still grinning as he shook his head and settled back into his chair. "No. God, no. I'm not. Looks like XYZ did a rubbish job introducing the whole patron situation. Typical. Guy's been doing this for twenty thousand years and still skips the important bits."
He leaned back in his chair with his hands behind his head in a posture so casually human it made Jay's danger sense build its hum again.
"I'm ROB. Ya know 'Random Omnipotent Being.'" He tapped the keyboard. "More specifically? I'm the author of this story."
Jay's brain short-circuited.
"Wait," he said as the lemonade glass shook in his hand. "Wait. You're... what?"
"The author," ROB said, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "The person writing your story. Your entire existence, from the moment XYZ showed you that CYOA tablet to right now, this conversation we're having. I've been writing it, following the plotting, posting it chapter by chapter to people who, from your perspective, exist in a completely different layer of reality."
He gestured at the second monitor with the forum thread. "There's actually a really engaged comment section. Want to see what people think of your character arc?"
"No," Jay said before his brain caught up. "Wait, yes? No. I... what?"
ROB's expression softened as he reached over to his desk and pulled out one of the notebooks, flipped it open to a page covered in handwritten notes. Jay could see his own name scattered across it, connected to other names with lines and arrows: Domino, Luv, Oblivion, Bobby the whole cosmic web laid out in blue ink and corrections with margin notes that said things like "check power scaling", "foreshadow this earlier", and "readers will hate this, do it anyway."
"Look," ROB said. "I know this is a lot. Believe me, I know. There's a whole philosophical question about whether you're real or just a really detailed simulation I've been running." He shrugged. "Honestly? I don't have a clean answer for that. But what I can tell you is this: I've been with you since the beginning. Every choice you made, every power you stole, every little moment that led to your character growth from a sceptic powers dealer to a well-rounded human who'd choose to protect someone else instead of playing it safe. I was there, writing it, making it real in the only way I know how."
Jay's legs suddenly gave out and fortunately, the couch was there, because his brain seemed to stop functioning to process this for a minute.
"You're saying…" Jay started, stopped, started again. "You're saying my entire life. Everything I've done. Every fight, every choice, every moment with Domino and Luv, every time I nearly died and didn't. You were... writing it?"
"Yes and no. I didn't create them," ROB said, not quite apologetic. "I rescued them from obscurity and put them to work. I didn't create you either. I'm more of a demi-urgic power: someone else makes you perfect and innocent, and then I step in and spoil everything. It's a little satanic, I suppose."
Jay glanced around, trying to make sense of it. "And you're... a person. A regular person. Sitting in a room somewhere that's not even in the Marvel universe, typing on a keyboard."
"Pretty much, yeah."
"And the cosmic trial. Oblivion trying to erase my son. The Living Tribunal and all those abstracts voting on whether Luv deserved to exist. That was all..."
"Part of the story, yeah." ROB looked uncomfortable now. "Look, I know how that sounds. Like I put you and your family through hell for entertainment. And from a certain angle, that's exactly what I did. But it's more complicated than that."
Jay's body went still for a moment.
Then, in the next instant, he decked the guy across the left cheek. Without thinking, he used Polarity to activate Decay powers, turning this human into a cluster of cancer cells and rot in a slow, agonizing death.
For a moment, there was ecstasy. Pure, overwhelming satisfaction at finally hurting the target of his anger.
Then terror dawned.
He realized he'd made a promise to himself to never turn Tommy's pure healing aura into a weapon of decay and disease. But wait. How had he even used this power? He remembered giving it to Bonk back in the arena.
And finally, the deepest terror of all crashed over him. Jay was not a cruel and cold-blooded murderer. He had never and would never kill someone just for claiming they were writing him. Of course he was in Marvel. Of course The One Above All was constantly writing them all into creation. This wasn't...
A slow clap came from behind.
Jay whirled around to find ROB completely fine, standing and walking toward him with an almost casual gait.
Shocked, Jay turned back to look at ROB's decayed body on the floor.
There was nothing there.
"What's going on?" Jay demanded, his voice shaking.
ROB smiled, though it didn't quite reach his eyes. "That was a demonstration. To show you that I really am the author, constantly writing your actions and reactions." He paused, studying Jay's expression. "Plus, I thought you deserved to relieve your rightful anger. Even if it was just for a moment."
Jay laughed.
It was the laugh of someone, past disbelief into hysteria.
He'd spent so long fighting gods and cosmic forces, not to mention stealing their authorities while his body was being battered and bloody, and the entire time he'd been a character in someone's story.
His son's tears had been plot points, and Domino's ascension to Death had been a narrative beat.
Every moment of fear, pain and desperate love had been typed on a keyboard by a guy with bubble gut in this shoddy room.
"More complicated," Jay repeated. The lemonade glass was empty though he didn't remember drinking it. "Right. Sure. Tell me how it's more complicated. Go on, then."
ROB was quiet for a moment before minimizing the document he'd been working on and pulling up a different file. The title read: "Chapter 183: Judgment Without Mercy."
He scrolled down and Jay could see his own name repeated over and over, could see Luv's, could see the scene rendered in prose: the moment his five-year-old son stood alone in a cosmic courtroom while beings older than time itself voted on whether he deserved to exist.
"I spent six days on this chapter," ROB said quietly. "Kept stopping, kept deleting sections, kept asking myself if I really needed to put Luv through this. If there was another way to get to the resolution without..." He trailed off. "Without writing a scene where a child cries because people in power are debating his right to live."
Jay was very still.
"But you wrote it anyway."
"Yeah, I did," ROB confirmed. "Because the story needed it. Because without that trial, without that vote, the victory doesn't mean anything. The ending, whether it be happy or sad, has to be earned."
"Earned." Jay's voice came out flat, the register it went to when he was holding a large amount of anger and hadn't yet decided what to do with it. "By making my son cry. By putting him in front of beings who wanted him erased. By writing his fear and his confusion and his..." He stopped, barely holding his tongue, because his pragmatism stopped him from messing with a being who transmigrated him and gave him such powers. "You chose that? You sat here and chose to write that?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
ROB met his eyes. "Because the alternative was worse."
He pulled up a folder and Jay could see the file names.
He read them one at a time.
"Chapter-150: Alt_Ending_The_Clone_Dies.docx."
Jay's hand went flat on the couch cushion beside him, fingers pressing down into the fabric as he kept reading.
"Chapter-171: Domino's_Sacrifice.docx."
"Chapter-183: Verdict_Erasure.docx."
"Chapter-190: Jay_Loses_Everything.docx."
Dozens of them, all marked with dates, all labelled "deleted" or "alt" or "scrapped," and Jay's heart stopped for a moment before restarting when reading the words "Luv Dies" on a hard drive that belonged to someone else. The words existing in any form, deleted or not, in a folder on this desk, in this room, in a layer of reality he had no access to and no control over.
Jay's voice shook, "Do you know what you've done to me?"
"Of course I know. I wrote your grief and your rage and your acceptance. It added drama. All stories need drama."
ROB said, his voice very quiet now. "Luv dying in your arms while you screamed his name and his body dissolved into nothing. Domino never making it back from Vormir with her last thought being your name, wondering if you'd remember her. The Living Tribunal pronouncing Luv's erasure and you being powerless to stop it. Ans, so on and on and on…"
ROB said after a pause, "It's easy to get a cheap emotional shock by killing popular characters. But that's not fair"
"No," Jay's voice cracked. "That's not."
ROB's expression softened for a moment. He told a small, private story. "One of my dogs died last year. An infection got him. He suffered for weeks. His name was Hammy. You find the name familiar?"
Jay, for once, was silent as he remembered Vice President Rodriguez's daughter Jenna, whom he healed and her best friend, her dog, 'Hammy'.
"Your world is so much simpler than his," ROB said in a low voice. "It can be invaded by aliens or suffer catastrophes and everything comes back good as new. There's no problem that can't be solved by some idiot in tights."
"Don't come complaining to me about what's fair and what's not," Jay said, resentful.
"Fair enough," ROB said dryly.
He opened one of the files and Jay saw prose, saw his own name attached to actions he'd never taken and words he'd never said.
Saw himself holding Luv's body.
Saw himself screaming.
The prose was good, which was the horror of it.
It wasn't a rough draft or a placeholder. It was written with care, with the same professionalism and emotional weight as every chapter Jay had apparently lived through, and the Luv in it was exactly his son, Luv, with the way he reached for Jay's collar when he was scared and the sound he made. The scene went on for four more paragraphs after Jay started screaming, and they were the four worst paragraphs Jay had ever read.
He saw Domino's final moments on Vormir, alone with the Soul Stone's light fading.
"I deleted them," ROB said. "Rewrote them. Some chapters I did three, four times before I found the version where they were given a fair chance, where you were given a fair chance." He looked at Jay. "The trial was hard, the vote was painful, but it wasn't THIS. And that's why I wrote it."
Jay didn't say anything for a moment as he looked at the filename "Chapter-150: Alt_Ending_The_Clone_Dies.docx," at Chapter 150 from months ago. The file had existed from the moment they found Luv in the Blast centre, proposing how different their lives would be.
"You wrote Luv's tears?" he said finally.
"Yes."
"And you chose those every single time?"
"Yes."
Jay stood up, and the infinity stones' multicoloured light came on all at once, columns of six-coloured resonance hitting the ceiling and trying to break it apart, but the reality simply didn't budge as if looking at an ant and scoffing at him for even trying to bend it.
His voice, when it came, was more silent and to the point despite the shock.
"You sat here and decided that cosmic beings would vote on whether my five-year-old son deserved to exist. For some story structure. That's what you said."
ROB's hands went still on the keyboard.
"For..."
"For WHAT?" Still quiet, the delivery of someone who has been in enough genuine conflict to know that volume isn't a performance. "What narrative purpose justified making Luv cry himself sick? What story beat required Bonk to bleed out on the cold floor in front of his friend? What story beat required Domino to watch our son be judged like an experiment that needed approval? What plot point was worth putting a five-year-old in front of the Living Tribunal and Oblivion and every bloody abstract in the multiverse while they decided he shouldn't exist?"
He was shaking now, and his eyes, now glowing rainbow light, were on ROB.
"The resolution..."
"The resolution doesn't erase what you put them through!" For one beat where Jay held it in. "You wrote every tear. Every moment of fear. Every second, Luv stood there thinking maybe his mother shouldn't have saved him. You CHOSE that. You could have written anything, any other conflict, any other crisis, any other set of stakes. You chose to put my son on trial for existing, and you did it knowing exactly what it would produce because that's the job. Isn't it?"