"Set in an experimental sci-fi comic book action adventure literary world-building project universe of multi-book series nested within other book series, 'The Zeppoverse' may be a bit disorienting to navigate at first... but you kind get used to it...
"Set in an experimental sci-fi comic book action adventure literary world-building project universe of multi-book series nested within other book series, 'The Zeppoverse' may be a bit disorienting to navigate at first... but you kind get used to it... eventually."
~ The Reader, describing his own experience reading about himself as a character living within The Zeppoverse.
A long moment unwinds
between you and The Reader.
Time Dilates
Echos from another life...
a cacophony of sounds...
a gentle breeze teases your firetruck red curls that forever frame your resting bitchface.
Slow... sumptuously visceral time dilation...
Motes in the air become planetary systems of micro-scale and you can hear the people living there complain about the default issues everyone complains about.
Your eyes locked dead center on The Reader's Eyes.
You can't quite believe that you are sitting, locked in mind melting hours long unblinking eye contact, but here you are... doing just that.
Your eyes sting and get watery ad yet you do not blink.
You think to yourself in 3rd person: "You are effing "lilMiss Mack",
the one and only Queen of Eye Contact Kills.
Undefeated Lifetime Killer of Eyecontact Contests.
And you laugh at yourself for actually having thought all those words out loud in your own head to yourself.
You were indeed once known among your peers and enemies as the one and only, the living legend 'lil Miss Mack Queen of the Eye Contact Killers'
That was decades ago. It felt as though it happened multiple lifetimes ago, in a foreign place. But it also simultaneously felt like it all happened just last week before last.
You know you are not easily overpowered.
And yet, this creature is tearing you apart, thread by thread...
Time Dilation Dopamine Dump.
The Reader's Eyes
..... exquisite delicious pain.....
Unbearable
The Reader's Eyes were drinking in your soul like twin black hole portals into some otherworldly sun's molten core heart.
When The Reader once again speaks to you, you jump... startled like an orphaned baby deer that knows it is about to be eaten alive.
The Reader: It was to...
you: Strange?
The Reader: No, stranger...
(cont.)
It was so... trippy. You know?
He asks you like he is not really expecting an answer.
The Reader: [continues on in a fugue state] ...beyond "tipping balls" trippy. You never get that high?
You do NOT dare break eye contact.
The Reader: [judgment in his tone of voice] No, not by the look on your face. well, I have...
You: [after yet another unbearably long pause] And?
The Reader: And this was categorically weirder. and more viscerally REAL.... yet totally palpably UNreal... like none of it ever happened.
And yet it did. Hard. Painful. Terminal.
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