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“So, what was my father like?”
Boingo stared at the man sitting across the table from him, who up until today he’d known as “cryptid_brando” from the conspiracy forum they both frequented. He’d been picturing a yeti, or maybe some kind of weird snake, but this was a man with the body of a weightlifter and the face of a fish. Crap. No, no, he could do this, this wasn’t some stranger with the unlikely name of “Ungalo”, this was cryptid_brando and he was PinkDarkBoy83 and they were real friends. This was just like chatting online.
“...Fucking scary,” he finally spat. Ungalo raised an unkempt eyebrow. “He was, like, this seven foot tall vampire. And I was six.”
“SIX?” Ungalo echoed. Boingo jumped a little in his chair. “Why the hell did he have a six year old working for him?”
Deep breaths, deep breaths. Boingo glanced directly at Ungalo’s weird swimmy eyes, like his brother had taught him to do. “‘Cause I’ve got this.” He reached up into the air, curled his fingers as if plucking a book from the shelf, and then there it was in his hand. The Book of Thoth. So thick that the spine was cracked, the pages were fanned out. He’d consulted it a lot over the years and had been well-rewarded, as long as he didn’t think about it too much. “Here.”
He handed it to Ungalo, watched his expression change as he thumbed through the pages. “Huh,” he said. “This is kinda… whoa, what the hell?”
Boingo glanced over to the page that depicted a normal apartment, two scribbly men sitting at the kitchen table. The description, bold lettering in a yellow box, read: “UNGALO USED HIS STAND TO MAKE THE BOOK OF THOTH COME TO LIFE.”
“Ngh… W-why would you do that?”
“I dunno,” Ungalo shrugged. “I wouldn’t have thought I could.” Oh no. This was one of those situations where the book told people what to do. These one hundred percent never, ever worked out okay. “Huh, now I kinda want to-” No no no NO
“No…” he managed, in little more than a whisper.
Ungalo smirked. “Bohemian Rhapsody!”
“DON’T-”
Boingo watched, sickened, as their wobbly caricatures peeled themselves slowly from the page. What the hell had he done to the Book to deserve this? It was like looking into a funhouse mirror and having your reflection walk around behind you. If only he’d left their friendship on the message board, where it belonged.
“Great job, man,” said Thoth-Ungalo, in a voice like a warped record. The real thing laughed, apparently proud of his weird little stunt.
“This is,” Boingo fumbled for the right words and settled on, “not cool.” His indistinct doppleganger wavered in front of him, grinning like a jack-o-lantern.
“But you like me best, right?” said Thoth-Boingo, placing its hands on its cheeks in a parody of coyness.
“Best?”
“Of the two of us.”
“Uh…” If he had to choose between the two gremlins? “I guess?”
Ungalo stopped laughing long enough for a strangled “Wait, NO,” cut off as the world turned into a tunnel and they were drawn nauseatingly downwards, pulled vertiginously into the Book itself.
“Hahaha!” The faces of the Thoth pair loomed above them. “Then you’ll be stuck here in your favorite story!” Which was incredibly stupid, because if you asked Boingo, he’d have said that his favorite story was the Chris Claremont/Frank Miller “Wolverine” limited series, but that seemed like a useless distinction to bring up while dealing with the more pressing concern of being stuck inside a book.
“What’d you do that for?” said Ungalo’s voice off to his left, and he turned… no… flipped his head to see a straight line and the blurry edge of a page behind it. Crap. Two dimensions. It was even more disorienting than looking at their Thoth-selves.
“I didn’t-” he sputtered, “how was I supposed to know? You’re the one who brought them to life in the first place.”
“Well,” said Ungalo, and trailed off, unable to think of a comeback. Boingo bit his lip, tried to keep from vomiting as he flipped his hand into his pocket in search of the stubby pencil he always had on hand. If they were in the Book, then just maybe he could… there. He flopped his hand back out and reached off to his right, trusting that his years of practice drawing comics would serve to save their lives. A bad drawing of a bad drawing… and now the lettering…
“UNGALO USED HIS STAND TO MAKE HIM AND BOINGO SWITCH PLACES WITH THE ORIGINAL VERSIONS”
That tunnel again, only backwards. Boingo swallowed dryly and, for the first time, realized how appreciative he was to occupy three different dimensions at once. That was awful, and would have been exponentially more awful if he didn’t always carry around a writing implement. He made a silent promise to himself to be nicer to the drawings that the Book showed him. Could they have possibly had consciousness this whole time? Living in that kind of world where-
“Hey,” Ungalo’s voice broke through his train of thought. “Are you sure we’re the real ones?”