The Fourth Wall

Chapter 5.5: The Rules

This side chapter doesn't really effect the main plot. It just hashes out the rules of the author's world, and tbh I find it boring to read lol. You can skip it if you'd like :D 

.

.

The author snuck through the town, keeping an eye out for any suspicious characters. It was nearly impossible to spot another author who didn't want to be seen, but they had to begin taking precautions now before unprecedented interference rendered the story incapable of continuing.

Thanking the heavens that Boruto was the only one who saw Sarada's death, the author began to think back on all of the regulations assigned by the organization.

Authors were essentially all powerful in the world of their choosing. There were only a few rules they had to abide by if they wanted to stay in the cannon world:

First, and most obvious, they weren't allowed to let the characters know that they were in a story.

Second, they weren't allowed to directly manipulate the character's speech, emotions, abilities, or actions by entering text into the laptops. The use of different jutsu to accomplish these manipulations was however allowed.

Third, they couldn't create new characters. After all, they were given the freedom to use every jutsu in the narutoverse and give missions to any existing person, whether they were known in the anime or not.

Fourth, they weren't allowed to conjure up things from other worlds.

Fifth, they had to act within the shadow of the anime. If an anime episode began to air while the story was going on, the characters would lose their memory.

Sixth, any injuries could be healed with the use of medical ninjutsu, but authors were given special permission to heal especially large wounds under one condition: the injury had to be seen by the main character.

Seventh, to prevent stories from getting out of hand, each author was only permitted three revives per story. If the death was seen by anyone who didn't know of the author's power, they would stay dead to prevent inconsistency in the plot.

And finally, if their chosen main character died, they would have to restart.

Violation of any of these rules resulted in an alternate universe being created for the author to play with freely. But in that case, the author had to manipulate everything. Every line, every emotion, every action, every setting. All of it had to be written out line by line.

As long as the rules were followed, the text automatically generated on the screen in accordance with the main character's perspective: the character who was given the mission. Any other perspectives or thoughts had to be handwritten by the author, but the use of jutsu to peer into minds was permitted.

From the looks of it, the other author had gone all the way to Amegakure to give an assassin a mission for the sole purpose of stopping the story. The author's job was to figure out why. Boruto's actions so far may have revealed the purpose of the mission, but Amegakure was an 18-hour trip. The timing didn't line up. Unless, of course, they threw the character into a space-time portal... But who would willingly follow a stranger into a space time portal and take an assassin mission for the son of a leader of another land? And why would the other author come all the way back, only to throw a single kunai? Why didn't they just try to kill Boruto when they had the chance? Were there multiple authors in opposition?

The author sighed. There were too many unanswered questions. The dangers of the troublemakers were well known to authors, but stories continued to be written despite it all.

Treasuring what little time they had left before the characters fell asleep, the author decided to pay a visit to the hokage disguised as Sasuke. Someone needed to volunteer to take care of the "kid" that had been reported earlier that day, and it couldn't be assigned to another team as a mission, since they didn't actually exist. They also had to make sure Naruto wasn't going to be home for dinner.