The Fandom Games

Peter

For once, nobody interrupts Peter.  Neither Legolas nor Leia tell him off.  Hermione doesn’t talk over him and Arya doesn’t talk over her.  Snow White doesn’t break into a musical number about the joys of sharing your feelings with your friends to help your sorrows come to an end.  Even the sharks are hovering in a bubbly current, as if his words had cast one of Hermione’s spells on them too.  Indiana Jones dabs his eyes with a napkin.

‘That’ll do,’ Steven Spielberg decides, ‘you’ve earned one favour in exchange for that favour.’

Hopefully nobody sees how much Peter is grinning under his mask.  Relief washes over him like the syrup fountain washing over his waffles.  He did pay enough attention to literature class after all (and by literature class, he means Ned’s Star Wars fanfiction society).

‘Are you certain that this is the favour you want to buy?’ Spielberg asks.  ‘I don’t do refunds.  Or accept other kinds of payment.  You are only getting one favour from me.’

Peter straightens his back against the chair.  ‘Absolutely I am.  Like, what else could any of us possibly want more than…?’

Spielberg snaps his fingers.  Indiana Jones vanishes out the door, then wheels in a man-size metal block.  Well, ‘man-size’ would be a compliment, because the person frozen inside it is even shorter than Peter.  The metal is warped around the boy’s features: skeletal fingers gripping a stick in a hopeless attempt to defend himself, dorky knee-high school socks and a silly cape like Hermione’s uniform, unfashionable circular glasses.  Although his face is really distorted by his final scream, Peter can just about make out a zig-zag on his forehead that the metal had reacted to differently for some reason.

He knows exactly who the boy is even before Hermione shrieks, ‘Harry!’  She lurches towards him, but Arya restrains her.  Indiana Jones positions what was Harry Potter by the empty seat at the table, as if he were somehow able to join in their brunch party.

Spielberg licks his lips.  ‘That, Peter, is what any of you could possibly want more.  You see, the morning after the Golden Trio argued and Ron wandered off to start his own little adventure, Harry was raging that he didn’t do more to stop him, and decided to cast a tracking spell on Hermione in case he lost control of her too.  He followed your trail through the Wayne Mansion and MCU New York and into my dinosaur zoo, where Indiana Jones and Toothless kidnapped him for me.’

Peter remembers those strange twig-cracking noises in Jurassic Park, like someone else was tailing them.  Yesterday he’d assumed it was another dinosaur.  But maybe it had been Harry Potter, hell-bent on hunting Hermione.

Hermione wrestles free of Arya’s grip and points her wand at Spielberg’s throat.  ‘If it was you who killed him, I swear it on the life of his dead parents, and his dead godfather, and all his dead grandparents, and all our dead friends that…’

‘He’s not quite dead!’ Peter leans between Hermione’s wand and Spielberg.  As much as he’d totally love to see Hermione kick his ass with a hundred funky magic spells, Spielberg can’t show them where the Library is if he’s turned into a toad or stuck in jell-o or whatever else Hermione has planned.  ‘He’s just been frozen in carbonite, like at the end of Star Wars: Episode V when’ – Fangirl clears her throat.  Peter glances nervously at Leia, who is yet to live through her boyfriend becoming a giant slug’s wall decoration – ‘someone gets frozen in carbonite.  He’s just in a kind of hibernation, after someone cooled carbon gas super-quick, while he…’

‘I thought it was tibanna gas,’ Fangirl interrupts, ‘from all the mines on Cloud City.’

‘Omg you’re so right.  Unless…’

Hermione snaps, ‘I don’t care about made-up scientific rubbish.  How do we defrost him?’

‘Sweet Harry Potter can only be released when the carbonite returns to its gaseous state,’ Spielberg explains, ‘which can only be triggered by the controls on the back of the frame.  Which can only be activated by a unique twelve-digit code known only by me.’  Peter realises with a sick lurch that the password is probably his exact net worth.

Legolas mutters something that’s probably quite offensive in Elvish.  Hermione stifles a sob.  It hurts Peter to see her this hurt.  Plus, although Peter has been scared to say it out loud in case the others think he’s too obnoxious, he’s kind of been hoping that he’d get to meet this Harry Potter at some point.  After Deadpool and Legolas and Leia and Hermione (like, ten times) and who knows who else have been comparing Peter to this Harry Potter so much, he can’t help but be curious about this other high school superhero Chosen One boy who is sort of his mirror image in another world.  It makes sense that Harry Potter would be one of the seven heroes Deadpool said would be part of the mission.  Way more sense than Snow White.  And although Harry probably would help them get defeated a bit less, there’s no way that he could benefit their mission more than actually knowing their destination would.  They can’t let what they personally want the most override what will help the most people.  That’s exactly the kind of thing Steven Spielberg would do.

Spielberg continues, ‘I know everything, and I know what you’ll all be thinking now.  Legolas is confident that everyone else will come to the right decision.  Snow White is trying to get the attention of my rainbow fish.  Leia is suppressing her fears about which of her friends will end up in carbonite by aggressively repeating to herself that she is a rational leader who would never make the mistake of picking a friend over the Library.  Arya is worried that she’ll have to fight with Hermione over this and that Hermione will hate her even more and their situation will become worse.  Hermione is comparing Harry Potter’s body to an eerily well-preserved 5,500 year old Egyptian corpse she saw in the British Museum. Peter is sad because he’d been hoping to double the attendees at his next birthday party by befriending his cousin Harry, and it made sense to him that Harry would be one of the seven heroes Deadpool mentioned, but is determined that they can’t let what they personally want the most override what will help the most people.’  He gasps melodramatically, mocking being insulted.  ‘Don’t be rude to your host.’ 

Peter doesn’t believe his ears.  That’s exactly what he’d just been thinking.  Not just the general vibes of it, which somebody probably could guess at if they knew him well enough, but the exact words of his internal monologue. Spielberg even reacted exactly at the point when Peter had thought about him

‘Then, the human plebeian is wondering if she became too emotionally co-dependent on Harry Potter when she was ten, the answer to which is obviously yes, you should have been making more friends instead of wasting your life playing the Harry Potter lego game so much.  You can only see one person’s thoughts at once, but I know everything.  I know you’re worrying about the wrong things.  Deadpool told you that Spider-Man would lead the mission to the Library, but I know that Harry Potter will lead the army into battle once you’re there.’

Peter tries to banish the intrusive thoughts that Spielberg or anyone else can somehow read all his thoughts.  He screams inside his head; in case the noise makes Spielberg flinch.  Instead, Spielberg winks at him.  Peter internally screams for real.  He pictures the blue light from the aquarium staining his friends’ faces, seeping into every corner of this house, smothering the lawn, spreading across the whole of California and the whole of this world, then finally twisting its way through his nostrils and into his brain.  Is he really reading their minds, or is this just another party game he likes to play with his brunch guests?

‘That’s logically flawed,’ Hermione points out, ‘because how can you make us choose between Harry and the Library’s location now when you’ve seen Harry with us at the Library, thus negating the future you’ve seen, in which case you would no longer have the foresight that is informing your choice now that is erasing that future?’

‘It’s a paradox.  Like every other Doctor Who episode,’ Fangirl adds.

Peter’s brain hurts.  The time travel stuff in the endgame with Thanos confused him enough (like, if Gamora can be extracted from 2016 and brought to the present with no consequences after she died to get the Soul Stone, why can’t they save Black Widow in the same way?  Every time Peter brings it up the Hulk just shouts, ‘that’s not how time travel works’ at him and expects him to move on with his life).  Spielberg sniggers at him.  Peter nudges his chair so far away from Spielberg that he’s practically sitting on Hermione’s lap.  Was that just a coincidence?

Spielberg ignores Fangirl and talks across to Hermione.  ‘I actually don’t know all the details between now and then.  I like to leave a few little things a surprise for myself.  Otherwise, life gets terribly boring.  There’s only so many times a week you can take a helicopter ride to Antigua, know what I mean?’

Leia shoots Spielberg a filthy look.  ‘Look, we all know that whatever some of us feel about Harry Potter is incomprehensibly inconsequential compared to this mission.  We’re heroes.  We’re going to make the logical choice and pick the Library.  Maybe Harry Potter is predestined to find a way to rescue himself or something.’  Her eyes drift to the block of carbonite block.  It’s difficult to process that it’s not a weird sculpture from Etsy and another boy is actually trapped in there.

‘Maybe Spielberg is deliberately misleading us,’ Hermione reasons, ‘he wants us to pick the Library so we’ll fail somehow.  Maybe he’s deterring us from picking Harry because Harry actually knows where the Library is or something.’

Arya snorts.  ‘You would say that, wouldn’t you?’

‘I don’t think he is trying to trick us,’ Fangirl pipes up, ‘like, have you seen his films?  He practically gets high off suspense and tension and stuff.  Maybe he genuinely doesn’t know how we all get from here to a certain point later, because it’s more enjoyable for him if he doesn’t.  He’s creating suspense for himself.’  Her voice is drowned out by Legolas, who booms some rousing statements about trusting their heroic hearts or whatever, and by Arya, who berates him for not coming to a decision.  Spielberg smiles dreamily at the conflict erupting before his eyes.

His friends can’t keep reverting to rowing every time Spielberg tosses something new into the mix.  Peter has to break this cycle of mind games somehow, or they’ll never make it out Steven Spielberg’s brunch intimidation room.  They’ll argue round and round while Spielberg munches popcorn until the Villain in the Dark rings the front doorbell to announce their victory.  Peter doesn’t know whether Spielberg is just so good at all this storytelling stuff that he can predict their thoughts, or whether he can actually read their minds.  But Peter does know that if they’re going to outpace Spielberg instead of being dragged along behind him like puppies on leads, then they can’t think in ways that Spielberg would expect.  They need to be uncharacteristic.  Unpredictable.  Thoughtless.  Being idiotically impulsive all Peter’s life might finally pay off.

‘I choose Harry Potter,’ Peter announces.  He doesn’t study his friends’ reactions or listen to their complaints.  He has to think as little as possible.  ‘I came up with the best worst moment, so I get to make the decision.  And I want Harry Potter.’

Spielberg rises from his chair and punches a twelve-digit number into the frame.  The carbonite glows red, then breaks out with golden patches as the metal evaporates to reveal chunks of Harry’s skin.  His glasses drop out of the liquid and clatter on the ground, then Harry himself does the same, flopping onto the floor in front of Leia’s feet.  His chest rises and falls from rasping breaths.  Hermione darts towards him, cradling his head and muttering that it’s over and he’s safe.  ‘I can’t see.’ Harry fumbles around for his glasses, and slides them onto his nose.  ‘Hermione, why can’t I see?’

Fangirl leans over him and checks his pulse, maybe to check he’s alright, or maybe to check that he’s real.  ‘You’ll probably be blind and melodramatically weak for a few hours still.’

Peter raises his wrists, and shoots a torrent of webs that solidify into a sphere.  He flings his web grenade at the aquarium.  Cracks ripple across the glass in the spiral pattern of a spiderweb.  Everyone watches, astounded.  Then a stream of water gushes through.  Fish paddle frantically away.  Spielberg reaches under the table – maybe for some kind of alarm – but Peter releases another web, which sticks Spielberg into his own chair.  Instead of shouting at Peter, he smiles. 

‘What the hell are you thinking?’ Leia hisses.

Peter yells over the roaring water, ‘I’m not thinking at all.’

‘You got that right,’ Arya retorts.

The glass gives way in another spot, and water splurges into the dining room at double the speed.  Peter turns to the exit wading through the already ankle-deep water and soggy pastries and some extremely disgruntled-looking clownfish.  He heads out the doorway.  His friends follow.  Hermione half-drags half-carries Harry behind them. 

Indiana Jones is blocking the doorway.  ‘Ah, darn,’ he says with even less enthusiasm than Peter writing a history essay, ‘you’re all escaping.  I guess I should probably try to stop you.’  Legolas draws his knives and twirls them about menacingly. Indiana half-heartedly raises his gun.  Arya, who has somehow crept up behind him, plucks the gun out his hand.  ‘Damnit, you defeated me,’ he says in total monotone.  They file out the door one by one.  As Leia passes him, Indiana whispers, ‘maybe I’ll see you later?’  Leia leans on her tiptoes to kiss one check then slap the other.  Indiana Jones doffs his cap at them as he disappears from their view.

A wave follows them down the corridor.  Fangirl lifts Harry’s legs to stop them from dragging in the water.  Hermione’s face lights up from realisation.  ‘You reasoned that Spielberg wasn’t lying when he said there was a portal to the Library next door, because if he has dinner with fictional characters as much as Indiana Jones said he did and this house is this neat and orderly, then all those characters can’t be traipsing through his garden like we did every time they pop round for tea.  He must have portals in this wing of the house.’

‘Sh,’ Peter hisses, ‘no thinking!  He understands our thinking too much, so you’ve got to see and decide and do stuff with as little thinking as possible.’

The water is agitated.  Something crashes and clatters.  A dragon bursts through an archway, knocking pictures off the wall.  His skin, that resembles faux leather car seats, and his wide toothless grin make him way cuter than his is scary.  He shrieks at Peter’s friends and barrels towards them.  The spines on his wings rip jagged gashes into the walls. Chunks of plaster snow down on them.

Peter would like to redact his previous statement.  Definitely more scary than cute.  Stupid Peter.  No thinking allowed, not even quips and self-loathing.

He studies the row of doorways and settles on the one with the most locks.  Hermione casts a spell, and a red bolt of light blasts away door, hinges, bolts, alarm and all.  As soon as Peter darts instead, his heart sinks.  Every inch of this room’s walls and ceiling are plastered with posters – from movies, from tv shows, from games, from everything.  Peter recognises a few, like Star Wars and Alien and Footloose.  The almond eyes of the Spider-Man mask stare back at him from almost every corner.  Some posters are half-familiar now.  A hand-drawn Hermione and Harry grin alongside the ginger friend.  Harley Quinn pouts in impractically skimpy shorts.  But the majority are way more alien to him than actual Alien.  The effect of being cocooned by so many clashing colours is dizzying, like being lost inside a kaleidoscope.

The toothless dragon forces his head inside.  Bricks flake away as his shoulders widen the doorway by about a metre. Just as the dragon unhinges its jaw ready to blow fire, Legolas shoots a slew of arrows down its throat.  The dragon whinnies and shuffles back into the corridor, his flailing wings wrecking even more of that wall.

They no longer risk being toasted by dragon breath, but now water is pouring through the much-wider doorway way too fast.  The first few inches of posters are already submerged.

Leia examines the room.  ‘What the hell do we do now?  The Library could be in any one of these storyworlds.’

‘I pictured that there would only be, like two portals up here,’ Peter protests, ‘and there’d be a big neon sign or something by the one that leads to the Library.’

Hermione stumbles under Harry’s weight.  ‘We must be able to work out where it is.  Spielberg mentioned the Library’s most common locations, didn’t he?  There has to be some sort of logic behind where it moves to.’

Peter lets the ideas he’d usually keep tucked-up safely inside his head spill out his mouth.  Hopefully, even if Spielberg can hear their internal voices with his mind, he can’t hear their external voices with his ears over the collapsing aquarium and crying dragon.  ‘Deadpool said that writers like Spielberg created it to help them manage all the different perceptions of fandoms.  So, wouldn’t it make sense for the Library to gravitate towards the storyworld that is being perceived the most?  The fandom with the most hype at that moment.’

One by one, they all turn to Fangirl.

Fangirl wades through the waist-deep water, frantically scanning the posters.  ‘Ummm… Tumblr always credits Sherlock Homes as being the first modern fandom.  But really, ancient bardic traditions are the ancestors of the way we all write different versions of stories taking place in one universe.’

The bottom metre of posters is peeling away from the walls, the paper becoming translucent.  ‘Less monologuing, more moving,’ Arya yells over the roaring water, ‘or there will be no posters left to use as portals.’

‘Lord of the Rings basically invented the entire fantasy genre as we know it…’ Fangirl continues.

Legolas dives towards a golden poster with his face on.  ‘Of course, shall we…?’

‘…paving the way for Game of Thrones, which became completely objectively the greatest TV show of all time.  Like, a few years ago I would have said Game of Thrones was a reasonable bet, but man did that ending with the Night King and Daenerys suck.’  Arya doesn’t dispute that.  ‘Then Disney owns everything.  And Snow White and the Seven Dwarves is the very first Disney film that started it all.’  She glances at Snow White, who is singing to a stray turtle.  ‘But because all the classic Disneys take place in different worlds, I don’t know if any individual one of those worlds would cut it.’

The water rises to Peter’s face.  His eyes sting from the salt.  He kicks upwards and treads water.

Fangirl paddles further across the room, pushing her head above the surface as she studies the ceiling.  ‘The Marvel Cinematic Universe is the highest grossing film franchise of all time.  But the movies are making less and less due to terrible planning after Endgame.  And it’s still only made about 20 billion in merchandising or something.  So maybe Marvel is loved more widely than it is deeply at the moment?  Like, don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of obsessed Marvel fans dwelling in their mother’s basements, but when you compare it to Star Wars, which made 42 billion in merchandising not even adjusted for inflation… I swear Snow White and her Disney princess friends could buy and sell the whole Marvel pantheon.’

A jellyfish floats near Peter’s neck.  He springs backwards, and his feet scuff up a line of posters.  The paper disintegrates.  Rainbow mulch swirls around his legs.

Leia points at the ceiling.  Peter can make out a vintage 1977 Star Wars poster, with Darth Vader’s shadowed helmet rising behind Leia and the other heroes.  ‘We could try that one,’ she offers, ‘I could make the Rebellion pilots search all the most famed places in the galaxy.’

Fangirl looks past her to Hermione and Harry.  ‘But Harry has made basically the same at the box office.  And it’s so many people’s first fandom, you know?  And so many people obsess over it who don’t obsess over anything else.  Plus, there are twice as many Harry stories on fanfiction.net that there are anything else.’

A corner of the ceiling caves in.  More water streams through the gap.  The surface rises even faster.  ‘Decide,’ Legolas commands over the rushing water.

Fangirl slaps the surface of the water, splashing water everywhere.  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she wails, ‘but I’m just not sure. Fantastic Beasts got euthanised and J.K. Rowling is a transphobe and a bit of a racist, but lots of people find excuses to keep loving Harry anyway.  Plus, the movies are back on Netflix and HBO greenlit a money-grabbing reboot. Mandalorian Season 3 was extremely mediocre, but the Ahsoka show comes out really soon and it looks absolutely peng.  I feel like it will be Harry Potter or Star Wars.  But I don’t know which.’

Snow White’s waterlogged skirts pull her beneath the waves.  Legolas plunges into the water, then remerges with her slung over his shoulder.

‘We have to split up,’ Peter realises, ‘half of us go to each storyworld.  Whoever finds the Library will have to figure out how to use it to reconnect with the other group.’

‘We can’t’ – Even with Fangirl’s help, Hermione is struggling under Harry’s weight.  She kicks to stay afloat – ‘we only just assembled.  Spielberg basically said that we’re the seven heroes that are destined to go on the quest.’ 

Peter tries not to dwell on how Spielberg and Hermione must be including Snow White but not Fangirl in that number.  ‘Well, does anyone have a better idea?’  The only response is the gurgling of the water.

Leia’s face hardens with determination.  ‘Hermione, you take Harry to your world.  I’ll lead the experts to mine.’  She elbows a turtle out her way and swims towards Fangirl and Peter.

‘How come you get Fangirl?’ Hermione protests.

Fangirl is clinging onto Legolas’ arm for support.  ‘That Star Wars portal could take us anywhere within a galaxy 1,135,287,700,000,000,000 kilometres across.  That Harry Potter portal could take us anywhere within a school less than 2 kilometres across.  Or about three other places in England, at a push.’ She points to a greenish poster above Peter’s head.  Harry and a nose-less freak stare intensely into each other’s eyes and at a pointy thing in a way that can only be described as homoerotically.  ‘Our job is way harder than yours.  We should get Legolas, too.’

Hermione looks over her shoulder, and clocks that Arya is left treading water next to her and Harry.  ‘You must be joking,’ she moans, ‘wouldn’t she be more use in Star Wars?  Sword-waggling is useless against our world’s magic, and…’

Her moaning is cut short.  The monster shark hurtles through the doorway, snapping its jaws.  Everything shrieks and swims further into the room.  Cracks form across the ceiling on the other side, then the toothless dragon pokes its head through the skirting.  Steven Spielberg will have to update his net worth after he’s finished repairing his house.  Peter kind of hopes he did hear that thought.  The dragon sneezes, and blue flame shoots across the surface of the water.  The heat stings Peter’s eyes.  Arya dives towards the shark, sword in hand.  Leia shakes the water out her blaster and opens fire on the dragon.  The laser bounces off the dragon’s rubbery skin and rebounds off the walls. 

The ceiling vibrates.  Then shakes.  Then collapses. 

Peter dives under the water.  All around him, ribbons of ruined poster are billowing about like the jellyfish, and huge segments of concrete and plaster plummet through the water.  Through the murk, he glimpses Arya silhouetted by swirling red as she stabs the shark again and again.  Then part of the wall caves in, and she’s blocked from view.  His lungs scream for air, so he swims through the surface and gulps down the oxygen. 

Everything is black.  The electricity must’ve blown out.  When his suit’s night-vision mode kicks in, he can make out what’s happened.  The whole centre of the room caved in on itself, and the rubble has split the space in two.  Legolas and Leia are tearing away at the concrete slabs.  Snow White and Fangirl are talking at the dragon, who seems to have decided not to barbecue them for now.  The others are nowhere to be seen.

‘Arya,’ Peter calls, ‘Harry Potter?  Big scary shark?’

Hermione’s voice echoes from the other side of the rubble, ‘we’re fine.  But so is the shark!’  Water splashes.  Metal rings against brick.  Cracks between the concrete glow with coloured light from Hermione’s magic.

‘Leia, use the Force,’ he shouts.

Fangirl glares at him.  ‘Peter, remember your Star Wars timelines.’

Peter’s head bashes the ceiling.  The whole room will be flooded soon.  He spots the Harry Potter poster beyond Snow White’s head.  The Star Wars one must be on the side with the group that was meant to go to the wizard school.  He presses his forehead against the ceiling, and gasps for air.  ‘Empire is bad and Rebels are good.  Try Tatooine.  Go!’

Hermione and Arya must have reached the same understanding, because Hermione calls back, ‘find Ron.’

Peter swallows one last mouthful of air as the waves embrace the ceiling.  He kicks down towards the Harry Potter poster.  His hands go straight through it as if it were a window.  He twists through it.  The greyscale shapes all merge into a vortex, and he falls.