The misadventures of a Main Character [Complete]

LXIV - "I think this is going to work"

Buttercup's dress fanned out in alarm as she spun to face the hollering figure. 

"Ahh!" She lashed out, striking Main in the face and judo-tossing him to the ground over her shoulder.

Winded and ears ringing, Main repeated the console's instructions over to himself again. As Buttercup turned to flee, he cocooned himself around her legs and skirt, and pressed the emergency abort button in his hand. With a horrendous red flash, and the smell of charred flesh, they were teleported back into the lift, inside the Timeline. Safe, Main thought, Finally.

Buttercup did not seem to agree. She wrestled him to the ground in her wedding gown, and locked him in a choke hold."Trying to assassinate me on my wedding night, huh?"  Her trusty fork was procured, and she toyed it in the air above his left eyeball. "Who sent you?"

"Buttercup-" Main wheezed. "Can't- br-"

"Main?" She eased off his throat slightly. "Are you the Main who's trying to kill me, or the dodgy time-traveller?"

"I came to save you," he said weakly. He waved his bandaged hand at her- "You bound my hand up, see?"

"How weirdly specific, you must be dodgy time-traveller Main then," she said. Buttercup released him, and shot to her feet. Main took a gasping breath as she regarded their surroundings. Their small platform hovered in an endless cavern of fluctuating lights and nothingness. Red strobe lights tinged the Timeline; they seemed to have intensified. "What did you- Where?" She peered out the portal, horror and curiosity fighting for dominance over her face.

"You have lilac hair," Main said, beaming dreamily up at her from the floor.

Buttercup's eyes froze on the dark scene through the portal. "Whose body is that?" she breathed. 

"I think it's the decoy, " Main heaved himself up with the aid of the console, and gazed out. "It's really realistic, right?" He pulled a very bewildered Buttercup into a hug. "I  saved you! I'm so glad you're alive!"

She winced. "Main, you smell horrific."

"This is the smell of love."

"Seriously,  there are rubbish dumps and rotting corpses who smell sweeter."

"I've been a little preoccupied," Main admitted. "Now come on, we've got to get you back to the future."

"Another movie reference, really?"

"Shhh-" he said, calibrating the console for a final time.

*

The lift whined as the trawled through a maze of time. Main tried to ignore the flashing 'Impeding Error Detected' on the console, and took it as an opportunity to fill Buttercup in. 

She looked disappointed. "Prince Humperdinck was going to kill me? But... even I was only going to divorce him after three years. Now I know why he didn't care about a prenup; Main, how did this happen?"

He shrugged. "I was dead at the time, so I can't really say."

"You don't look very dead."

"It's kind of a long story, at least thirty chapters."

The platform halted and a large oval portal slowly came into focus. The Global Worming conference came blurring out of the pixels. Inside it, Bevan sprinted in slow motion away from the gigantic Typo. Blood and gore splattered the stone floor and walls.

"It doesn't look very safe." Buttercup commented. She reached her hand out to the portal, and it hissed, red sparks flying out from her hand like molten sea spray.

"It's not," Main said. "Do you know any Shakespearean sonnets?"

"I survived Bard's academy, of course I do." she said, indignant.

"Great, just choose one and sing. I think this is going to work."

He pushed her through the doorway. A shock wave of red sparks radiated out from Buttercup as she passed through the portal. A worrying white smoke misted away from her person as more Typos materialized out of nowhere, oozing through cracks in the stone walls and haphazard time-travel principles. Main gulped, that wasn't ideal.