Poorly Planned Comics: Blue Beta 2

4. Blue Beta 2 Shenanigans

Blue King: Alright, alright. We all sometimes have bad days, some have creative blocks and some the creativity of a cement block, but we should keep things running. This is part of the production... management... why am I even the one doing this?

Storyteller: Yes, what His Majesty is pointing to is that those kinds of hiccups ultimately happen. We have to remember that we are supposedly full on a studio and have to act like one. Right now we're doing the equivalent of letting the entire national defense policy be decided by a bunch of...

Whit: [whispering]

Storyteller: ...An enthusiast who's read some stuff off the internet would only look at big, ingenious and history-defining tactical concepts...

Blue King: Didn't know you could even do this stuff

Storyteller: ...Is a complex machine and a part of what makes our statehood. And in fact, having that kind of genius reformist running amock might take more then give...

Whit: Should we hold an all-advisor conference?

Storyteller: ...A serious production process, run by professionals. An institution that exists to ultimately put out entertainment PERIODICALLY...

Blue King: No, talking about that now will have consequences, we've learned that the hard way. Also Dobbs, stop talking in the background, each time more and more of your exposition gets skipped and it's just not a nice thing.

Storyteller: I see the knob broke off at last? Might we have to do something more then simply "fixing" the timeline now?

Blue King: No no no, and don't mention any timelines unraveling. What I'm getting from... what Whit said... the implications of that information... allow me to comprehend that we're indeed in a state of being largely undefined as characters. And I can already notice a bunch of problems with that, can you?

Storyteller: existing as just a force of the story, having no character in a character, being a vague framing device to be influenced by any bit of text at all, not giving the reader a concept of our essence which means we have no natural defense from disturbances, our wellbeing having no value to the story, the kingdom being a bunch of metaphysical concepts hindering our duty to...

Blue King: Stop, stop stop. Be very... careful and attentive of what ideas... come out after a thinking process. So, I grasped the implications of all those things and will start taking decisive measures. Let's see what we have here. Jean the producer, Joe the makeup artist, John the cameraman... are they all related, like a cinematography dynasty? Yes yes, some quirkyness in the story, some... bling some...thing nice and fun. Like you were supposed to intervene or whatever a bit ago, I'm about to say something like 2 unnamed characters at the very least, you gotta save our butts.

Storyteller: So we are in a studio, in the, uh, busy filming room with a stage, the camera, some leftover actors and the costumes still not put back in place. We were on the way to the wri- the conference room in- to revise and calibrate some things for the Orange Kingdom co... And right now the filming room is being closed for the day, the equipment is being cleaned up by the specialists. Those two characters His Majesty made the very human mistake of uncourteously not getting to know the names of, especially in a day packed with kingdom-defining... things... are actors Terry... K... Simpson and...

Blue King: Aaaalright. But we're making progress. Can we just keep getting more into that kind of logic until the readers get used to us pretty much deciding what the rules are?

Storyteller: That's kind of dangerous mystic stuff, to put it mildly

Blue King: But if we manage to make mystic stuff work here... I mean the story isn't even set in stone... does that... oh my...

Storyteller: ...And also there's Whit, the longtime faithful advisor of His Majesty, always ready to give insight, being involved in many of the important day-to-day running of... things... having grown wise and mellow, always calm during the storm. And... that's al-

Blue King: AND THAT'S ALSO ALGIERS AND THE BOOKWORM. Sorry guys.

Algiers: Sorry for what?

Blue King: Ok, Whit how did you- oh ok ok. The storyteller... ugh... thanks for flinching and letting me understand... grasp things in time. So I guess now we're going to do some of the milder stuff to increase the reality levels of whatever we are.

Storyteller: As I said, we have a lot of kingdom-defining things for the day. Now we're going on conferences, checking the books of how things are run, inspecting tours of the most important landmarks and in general going on to talk to the public about their lives.

Blue King: ALL OF WHICH I HAD BEEN DOING HEAVILY EVER SINCE I'VE- SINCE THE TIME I'M- IN MY LIFE AS THE ETERNAL KING

Jean the camerawoman: ...

Terry K Simpson: ...

Storyteller: ...

John the makeup artist: ...

Josh the... Josh: ...

Algiers: gh gh...

Storyteller: ...

Whit: ...

Blue King: Ok ok...

Storyteller: Right. And given that later on we will be throwing words to ambiguously imply the storyline to be in the fourth year so you can play edgelord, at least add line... mannerisms to... yourself.

Blue King: Right, right. All the exposition we'll have to do is just suffocating. I mean, that's just us two talking now because the others don't even have a strong enough impetus to pop up by themselves, which is probably the only thing keeping this from going off the rails. Can't you also just explain all this briefly?

Storyteller: Well, that's one of the things we were going to have it be the fourth year. And at one point you would even notice that you're the only one with absolute narrative power, going on a project to create some kind of redundant mega-meta-advisor to keep things together

Blue King: Right........ it's the "mysticism", I got it. That made.... this right now happen. Now that we're finally ourselves... which actually... ok so now that we're ourselves we can do... Ok, like, let's just finally do it for a second. It technically didn't have a concrete place in time so that should soften stuff a bit. What even are we?

Storyteller: It says "Poorly Planned Comics: Blue Beta 2" obviously, it's also chapter 4 "4. Blue..." well that's a placeholder name that'll still probably stay.

Blue King: Yes, going well. Now I'll ask "But what does that mean".

Storyteller: It's basically fanfiction of Poorly Planned Comics

Blue King: ... the premise of which is that everybody wants to write fanfiction. But why?

Storyteller: Well, we're on a website where people do that, or they can just mash suggested words on their mobile keyboards, I guess. It's also still called books and usually people do it after getting some simple but interesting throught about their media interest and-

Blue King: Wait, so we're on a website full of amateur versions of various culturally important media, with primitively undefined narrative powers, just waiting to be conquered?

Storyteller: Let me see... in the chapter list after this the Oran-

Blue King: Khmmm-

Storyteller: No, like, it's already made. Set in stone. That just does nothing.

Blue King: But I had a dream...

Storyteller: We have to go through a quirky meeting with a bunch of advisors... then exposition... you get twice as many crown spikes as the red king and one big central one apparently, also a darker shade of blue then in the original PPC... then we go on doing/learning about government bureaucracy which is all normally delegated heavily, learn about inflation, start building cool tanks anyway... at some point you start creating a new class of characters with narrative powers to rely on and also do what we did a bit ago... technically me not intervening in you calling, ok technically almost calling them unnamed characters was due to unclear "storyline layout" according to this... strategy guide?.. My name is Dobbs?.. Also it was supposed to be mentioned that theres trouble with setting this to be public domain somehow.