The misadventures of a Main Character [Complete]

LXII - The Timeline

The old man hobbled over to Main, his blue robe making him look very Grim Reapery. He dragged the chair from the room, with Main attached, scraping against the cold floor.

"Your hair is brown," he told him kindly.

"That doesn't matter now," Main sulked.

They scraped out through a set of doors and down a damp corridor, with rivulets of water criss-crossing the floor. The icy water seeped through Main's clothes, soaking them.

After fiddling with the a large set of keys on his belt, his captor wedged one into a crack in the wall. With a hydraulic hiss, the stone wall rolled backwards and out of sight, revealing an open sided lift. "We're entering the Timeline now," the elderly man said. "All of creation, all of reality exists in here." White and blue pixels whizzed by as Main was dragged unceremoniously onto the lift.

"If you're throwing me back into the Global Worming conference, you could at least tell me how to beat the typos," Main grumbled, as the current of pixels blurred by.

"Try a Shakespearean sonnet, the language sends them into a stupor," he said, winking. "Then again, it's not the Typos that are the problem."

"What?!"

"Didn't you listen to the Narrator?" the old man asked. "He ran his whole script past me, it was very touching."

Main shook his head.

The wizened white beard wobbled from side to side in disappointment.

"What are you punching in there?" Main asked, straining his neck up to see.

"Oh, just the necessities," he said, squinting at the console. He frowned, and gave it a kick. There was an almighty clang, and the lift  began free-falling down the Timeline. Main barely had time to scream when it shuddered to a halt. 

"Sorry, we've got a new system," his captor apologized. "The instructions are useless. At least now we've got an 'emergency abort' function that creates decoy corpses - it's great for abductions." He sighed. "Abducting's my favourite part of the job. Still, it's not without its hazards:" He lifted his robe to showcase his traumatic gallery of scars and sagging skin. "I got my kidneys harvested on the black market a few years back."

"Uh, cool," Main said politely. He sucked his stomach in, feeling self conscious that the old man had better abs than he did.

The lift jolted to the lift and right, surging first upwards and then down, like a poorly oiled roller coaster. Main lost his lunch over the side of the lift. He wondered what point in time it would end up in. Maybe his vomit would save Buttercup, he hoped. Maybe it would blind her murderer, and she'd get away. It was freer than he was, at least.  He sighed. The silence had grown long and awkward when sirens began wailing, and strobe lights painted the tunnel walls red.

*

 "Is that normal?" Main asked.

"Oh, yes, routine," the man assured him, punching numbers frantically into the console.    

"Warning: Timeline breach in sector five. Intruder alert," a voice blared.

Main looked up, people in black suits were abseiling down from the walls out of randomly appearing doors. The solid doors glitched and shuddered their way into existence through the pixel-walls. Their black capes rippled impressively in the dramatic lighting as the figures descended.

"Oh dear," Main's captor muttered.