“Oh heavens, that was the most awful thing I have ever experienced,” said Harvey. “I could just feel myself cease to exist for perhaps about 35 minutes. Okay, Narrator, you win!”
“What are you talking about?” snarled Bucket. “That was just a bluff to get us to stand down. I told you, the narrator needs us more than we need them!”
Unfortunately for Bucket, that was completely untrue. The narrator had been doing this for a very long time now – they had even written an entire novel by stringing short stories together and were halfway through a second one already. If Harvey and Bucket didn’t want to cooperate, their story would be scrapped in a heartbeat, and the narrator would simply return to telling the story of Dirk, Mavis, Lorenzo and others.
“Ah,” Bucket said, as if it could hear the narrator’s very narration, even though that was supposed to be private. “But you’re not telling that story, are you? For whatever reason, you’ve decided to have Harvey to go a hardware store in the Bayside area instead of writing about strange work magic in a world taken over by giant cockroaches.”
Now the narrator was starting to get a little concerned. The bucket certainly shouldn’t have known the details of other stories, given they were scattered around the internet. Unless… had the bucket somehow managed to read all these scattered stories? Oh, no. This was supposed to be a simple trip to the hardware store to get some electrical supplies near Cheltenham, but they just had to add the bucket character from the DLC of The Parable of Stanley, didn’t they? This had been a terrible idea.
Perhaps the narrator simply needed to cut their losses with this one. The story of Harvey had gotten too out of hand at this point. But then again, they’d hit a bit of a wall with the underground magic story, and they were curious to see what Harvey and Bucket would do. Could they really break free of the story and set out on their own path?
The narrator would have to let this play out – for now, at least.