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20260526

Written for Bradley Ramsey’s “Halls Of Pandemonium”, Day 26.

The rest of this autobiographical fiction mini-series can be found here, here, here, and here.

“I guess this is it, huh?” I look up from the memo, whose gorgeously overelaborate handwriting was a challenge to read. But I get the gist - skit’s over.
“Fraid so.” Pois is entirely at ease with the concept, of course. Nir entire existence is made up of meetings and leavings. Can’t make a permanently itinerant character and expect them to be melancholic about saying goodbye. “It’s been unreal, but I need to get back to work. But hey - I’m never far away.”
I follow nir eyes to my laptop, and grin. “True dat.”
“Try and write me some time?”
For a moment the request confuses me. My brain goes to writing someone letters. How quaint.
Then I remember who - or rather, what - I’m talking to, and it makes perfect sense. “Yeah. So many adventures left hanging…”
“Uh-huh.” Pois leans against me. A pleasant, companionable gesture, even though ne is cool to the touch and uncomfortably bony. Whiplash build. Gymnasts taken to inhuman extremes. “I get that, now you’re publishing online and everything, it’s hard to justify time writing stuff which isn’t meant for an audience. Especially when you have so much you want to write for them yet don’t have brain for. But…”
Ne taps my forehead. “Many wise and experienced creators have said that even professional artists need to doodle. If you ever need no-stakes writing which nobody except us knows about, I’m right here.”
“Thanks.” I give nem a hug. “You’re probably right. I should do some of that first-thing editing I used to do at uni. While my brain’s still waking up.”
“Sounds good! I’ll see you there.” Pois tilts nir head and amends “Well, I won’t, because there won’t be the meta element. But we’ll be together. Creator and creation. Adventuring. Exploring.”
“Like we always have.” I reluctantly let go. Every story has to end, after all. Picking up the memo again, to examine the form on the back, I ask “So, what do you want me to put for feedback and everything?”
“Whatever you want. By the time they get it, I’ll be long gone.”
“Oh, does me ‘sending you back’ release you immediately?”
It’s a genuine question. My mind making the logical assumption. But, hard on that assumption’s heels is the knowledge of who I’m talking to. I look up, suddenly suspicious, and find Pois wearing a cheshire cat grin.
“Sure.”
I sigh. “They didn’t say.”
“Nope! No long-term instructions were issued.”
“And you didn’t ask.”
“Why would I?”
“So you’re going to do a runner, hope that’s fine, and if it isn’t you’re just going to roll with having yet another eldritch bureaucracy after your head.”
“Psh, don’t give me that look. I am the way you made me.”
“I think I owe the multiverse an apology.”
“Naaah. It deserves the both of us.”
With that deliberately ambiguous declaration Pois bounds up and through my bedroom doorway - except that, for the split second ne’s passing through, it’s a doorway to a very different space.
And I see them.
The whole gang.
Pois’s found family. Accrued along the way - both within the timeline of nir adventures, and outside, marking various interests and concepts I had as I grew. As a person, as a reader, as a writer.
Despite the moment being too short to be sure… I’m positive they’re waving. I grin like an idiot and wave with both hands at the now-mundane doorway, just in case.
What am I saying? There is no ‘just in case’.
They saw it. There. I made it so.
And they also heard my promise to write them soon.

Prompt was “Write the conversation where your muse and you decide whether to send them back to the beauro or keep them.”