The first thing that I noticed, was a knock on the door. The second thing I noticed, immediately after that, was the door exploding. I dove underneath the table, to protect myself from any further explosions, and curled up to protect my head.
I heard footsteps. Heavy ones. I looked up, and saw two plain, worn, leather boots resting on my floor. The sound they made was inconsistent with the size of them. I figured that it must be the police. I wondered, what if-
The table collapsed, sheared in half by some massive force. With horror, I look up, and saw an enormous mechanical claw, and a stern face with a bionic eye staring down at me.
The man bearing the claw and eye turned towards what once was the door, and called out to some beings that were out of sight.
“I found him… Do I kill him now, or do we listen to him?”
I gulped. I knew this man. I had been hired to write a story involving him, once. If this was him…
I heard another voice from outside. Synthesized, and female. Accents upon the wrong syllable. I had heard it before.
“You’re good at murder. Why don’t you murder him? I would do it myself, but this body is positively insulting.”
Oh, shit.
I heard another voice. Very gruff, deep… cockney.
“Da ‘umie gave me dese new legs, whoy don’ we talk to ‘im? I wan’ arms to match ‘em!”
I developed a strange sinking feeling in my gut. Various other voices sounded from the front lawn, of all sorts of inflections and species. I opened my mouth to speak, but was slapped across the face by the man who stood above me. “Fething bastard…”
He grabbed me by the collar, and pulled me out into the light of outside. My front lawn was full of various characters, some fictional, some real. Abraham Lincoln waved to me, while Ghazghkull Mag Uruk Thraka gripped Jefferson Davis’ sleeve, preventing him from running at me. Davis’ AK-47 lay on the ground, underneath the Ork Warlord’s metal foot. I winced. I had forgotten Ghazghkull didn’t have bionic legs.
I looked into the crowd, some more. I saw a woman in an orange jumpsuit carrying a white personal massager, with a yellow eye and speaker sticking out of it. I winced again. It was a bastardization of my favorite character in video games, but commission money is commission money.
Here and there, I saw more mistakes I had made. There was Batman, his armor augmented with parts torn from the Tau battlesuits that had attacked him in a WhoWouldWin prompt I responded to. I saw Sonic The Hedgehog, his fur slightly singed. Just my luck, the version from the story where I applied realistic physics to his run speed. The Black Pharaoh, Nyarlathotep, sat next to the driveway, drawing hieroglyphs in the pavement with his fingernail.
Various extra characters filled the rest of the crowd, redshirts from Star Trek, a random Uruk-hai, and a few Skitarii, which stood far away from the group to avoid giving anyone radiation poisoning. A Deathclaw sat right in the middle, remarkably well-behaved for a ten-foot-tall killing machine. A carcass lay below it, which I sadly realized was Boris the Talking Russian Cow.
I cleared my throat nervously.
“Ahem… er… why are you here?”
I became adamantly aware of Yarrick’s storm bolter pointed at my head.
The voices of the crowd sounded as one.
“You’re terrible! You-“
A jumbled mess of grievances started being spouted, all at the same time.
“One at a time…”, my voice broke, ”Er, please…”
“Please isn’t what you said when you put me in this thing. You monster”, said GLaDOS, from her phallic physical form.
The man next to me, Yarrick, started.
“You threw me in an Imperial prison, for littering, so you could write your ‘Third War For Armageddon But Without Yarrick’ story!”
Various characters yelled out more accusations, in sequence.
“You turned me into an Aperture Science Handheld Personal Relaxation Device!”
“You blew up half of Gotham with a giant robot. Jerk.”
“You completely overestimated That Man In The White House’s wrestling skills! I had my repeater, he had a museum-issue blunderbuss!”
“I’m just here because Jeff is.”
“’UMIE! GIMME NEW ARMS!”
“Randolph Carter is not a cyborg. He also never beat me. I let him win. Being the greatest is hard sometimes. I need worthy opponents.”
A hooded man in green let off a short sob at Nyarlathotep’s last sentence.
“You set me on fire!”
I listened to more and more grievances, for what seemed like an eternity. I focused absolutely, retreating further and further into the wall of my house. When the yelling finished, I looked at the crowd, and broke down crying.
“I never… I’m sorry… I couldn’t-“
Something soft but firm, and heavy, hit me in the face. It rolled away, leaving a trail of green slime. A Shoggoth that had somehow appeared in the driveway burbled and let out a moaning noise.
“The money- The job at the gas station doesn’t pay enough! People are sick fucks, sometimes…”
“I can agree to that”, said GLaDOS.
“Well… what do you want me to do?!”, I asked the crowd frantically, searching for a way out.
“Burn to death!”
“Never write again!”
“Write more, that was fun. Just saying.”
“JUSTICE.”
Nyarlathotep said something nauseatingly painful to listen to, the horror of which I cannot describe.
Yarrick walked up to me, and lifted me with his power klaw.
“Never abuse us again. Write us good endings. Except for the Ork.”
A loud “WAAAAAAAAAAAAGH!” sounded from the front lawn, escorted by the sound of a rocket firing into the air.
Abraham Lincoln turned to Ghazghkull.
“That’s going to come down, you know.”
“OI KNO, ‘UMIE! WHERE CAN OI GET YER HAT?!”
I turned and weakly vomited.
“Can I go?! Please…”
Yarrick shoved me through the door, and turned to address the crowd. He said a few words, and pointed at my window.
“That bastard’s writing us new endings. Don’t kill him. Yet.”
As I wrote, and deleted old stories, characters disappeared from my lawn. Chell and GLaDOS vanished first, as I quickly wrote a retcon for their terrible tale, and hit the flash drive containing the hard copy with a hammer. Ghazghkull got his new arms, Yarrick got to fight at Armageddon, and Batman lost his Tau bits. Half of Gotham was miraculously rebuilt by Superman’s rebuild-vision.
Eventually, just two characters remained. Jefferson Davis looked at Lincoln, and begrudgingly extended his hand.
“Here’s to a good end.”
Lincoln took the hand, and my lawn was cleared.