[NB: before I actually started writing, I went off on a spiel that ran something along the lines of "Why do young guys boast about how much sex they have, and old guys joke about how little?" One of the many random questions that drift around my mind, never to be answered…][and why do women joke about how crap they hold the hold business to be?]

"Oh, as if you know how to wake him up," Flib snapped.
"Uh, Flib…"
"Yes, I do," Dee answered.
"Flib?"
"The latest in Faerie technology [borrowed from LEPrecon - intertextuality! What do you mean, "whaaat?" Read Artemis Fowl] couldn't wake him up!"
"That doesn't surprise me. Tell me, do you people still dance around mushrooms?"
"Oh, that time of the month, is it?"
"Ladies, please!" J shouted. Flib and Dee glared at him with the standard expressions of post-modern heroines when they are referred to as "ladies" (i.e. icy)
"Flib, if she can help Yakky, we should listen to her."
"Save your breath," Dee muttered. "Faeries have no understanding of logic."
"Oh, and werewolves are just masters of sarcasm."
J frowned.
"Let me get this straight…you have some big species rivalry over who's logical and who's sarcastic?"
"Well…that and the Midsummer Night's Massacre."
"Who did the massacring?"
"…It was sort of mutual massacring…"
"Returning to the point," Dee interrupted "I'll need a few things."
"You're leaving," Flib said, and clapped her hands. "Guards! Guards!"
A minute or so later, Fljen poked her head around the door.
"Sorry, did you summon me?"
"Yes, as a matter of fact, I did!"
"Oh, sorry. Can't really do the guard thing at the moment, I was doing my…medium coursework (pun, not typo)…and Flelen's in mourning."
Flib raised an eyebrow. "Medium coursework."
"Yup."
"Fljen?"
"Yeah?"
"You're holding a triple Bacardi and coke and a pool cue."
Fljen hid her hands behind her back. "I so am not."
"What's the point of me having a tag team of ninja imps if you're too busy playing pool to answer my summons?" Flib shouted, and threw her shoe at Fljen. Fljen caught it and crushed it slowly in her hand, before shutting the door.
"Probably best not to steal your mother's running joke," J observed. "Plus they are your deadly Kung-shoe ninja bodyguards, they're kind of better at it than you..."
"Shut up!" Flib snapped, and caught sight of J's gun. "J?"
"Yeah?"
"What kind of ammunition do you use?"
"Oh, just your standard double-edged hit-and-miss .300 Ag bullets."
Flib grinned.
"Kindly escort our friend to the Interdimensional Portaloo."
"But she's a werewolf! A real one!"
"Silver bullets, J."
"Ah…"

* * *

Beansprout was awake so suddenly that it took her a couple of seconds to realise it. She was lying in pitch darkness. There was no light except a fine hairline crack directly above her.
It took her a lot longer to realise that this was the sky, and that she was at the bottom of a very, very deep chasm.
Shit, she thought.
And then, why aren't I dead?
And then, before she could think any further, there was a blanket pulled up to her chin, and a fire flickering over to her left. She was sure it hadn't been there before, but maybe she hadn't been fully conscious. She had fallen a really…really…long way.
Why aren't I dead?
"Beansprout? You're awake?"
Beansprout cried to sit up, then decided it wasn't a good idea.
"Don't try to move," A figure was sitting a little way from the fire, his face hidden in shadow. How original, Beansprout thought. "You've had a nasty fall."
"No shit!"
"Here, drink this. It'll help with the pain." The figure had moved over to her, lifted her head, and was holding a cup to her lips.
Beansprout choked.
"What the folk are you doing here?"

* * *

"It's gone."
"What's gone?" asked Flib.
J shrugged. "The Interdimensional Portaloo, it's just…gone." [Do I need to point out the inconsistencies? Seeing as the reader's going to hear a lot about them very soon…][I guess not, but you're still a Blake reading iijit]
"It can't have gone!"
"Go and see for yourself, Faery."
"Quiet, you!"
"Fine, I'll go and bring Yakky out of his coma," Dee stalked off.
"Flib?" J asked, as Flibbage began to storm in the opposite direction to Dee.
"What?"
"If you hate werewolves, why do you like Yakky?"
"Point one, I do not hate werewolves, it's just…sort of chalk and cheese," said Flib. "We believe the world runs on laws of generics, they believe in logic and science, the earth going around the sun and crap like that."
"But the earth does go around-"
"So... they've gotten to you too."
J kept wisely silent.
"Anyway, it's pretty much impossible for a faerie and a werewolf to agree on anything, so we don't exactly see eye-to-eye. I mean, how well do you get on with octopuses?"
"Well, there was this - I mean, no."
"Because of the different mindset."
"And the tentacles." [If anyone makes Urotsukidoji connections I will slap them with a fish][it would be kind of unneccesary, tentacles jokes just exist, no one needs to actually make them]
"Point two, Yakky didn't inherit any of the werewolf way of thinking. In his mind, he's human."
"What's the human mindset?"
"The undertone is something along the lines of "Oooo, pretty, I want it!" "
"Oh."
"Point three, I didn't even know he was a werewolf until I already liked him…" Flib stopped. "J?"
"Yeah?"
"Am I speciesist?"
J thought for a moment.
"Have you met any other werewolves except Dee?"
"Oz."
"Did you like Oz?"
"Yeah," Flib said, sounding slightly happier. "Those ears…"
"There you go. You just hate Dee."
"Yeah…"
J looked around. "Flib?"
"What?"
"I don't recognise this bit of the palace."
Flib stared.
"Neither do I."

* * *

In the throne room, an emergency meeting of the Central Characters' Council had been called.
"Okay," said Flib. "The Interdimensional Portaloo has disappeared. The Palace has a new wing, with a casino, for folk's sake. Some weird shit is going on. Has anyone else experienced any inconsistencies?"
"I was drinking pink tea when it turned into Bayleaves!" Red moaned. "That is bad for a recovering alcoholic!"
"My spellbooks turned into copies of Playboy," said the Twiz, with a contemptuous sniff.
"Hmm…inconsistencies…let me think…" Cabbage muttered, as she tried to claw the red and white hat off of her head. [Em was not happy about me making Cabbage into the cat in the hat…][I don't like novelty hats... what more can I say? Green eggs and ham is another matter though, I am a student after all.]
"You're all forgetting Bica's random crush on Yakky," J added. Silence fell.
"Bica, GO TO YOUR ROOM!" Cabbage shrieked.
"You told him?" Bica shouted at Flib.
"Noooo," Flib said poisonously.
"LADIES!" J interrupted.
"Stop saying that!"
The door opened, and Dee strolled in, followed by a bewildered-looking Yakky. Another silence fell.
"Yakky!" Flib and J shouted, and ran over to crush him in a group hug.
"Hi Yakky," said Bica, to her shoes.
"Hi guys," Yakky looked around sadly. "No 'Sprout?"
J shook his head. "Sorry."
Meanwhile, Flib had hugged Dee and was now trying to bluster her way out of it. "So…how did you do it?"
Dee held up a dog whistle.
"God, what an anticlimax," Red muttered, and ate some of the official CCC cookies.[Central Characters Council Cookies? I like it!]
"Did she wake him with a pipe? Did she wake him with…um… folking stupid poetic hat…"
"You were talking about inconsistencies?" Dee said, sitting down.
"A-hem," Flib cleared her throat. "This is kind of a secret Council meeting about national security…"
"I know what's causing them."
"Bloody hell, you know everything, don't you?"
Dee leaned on the table. Her expression was serious. "That's the second reason why I came here. I didn't think it'd be so marked yet in Faerie. You should see the mortal realm. Big chasms opening in the ground, people waking up in two different bodies…London disappeared for six hours last Tuesday."
"Why is this happening?"
"The Big Pricks?" J hazarded. "The NGSPI…oh, wait, that's me."
"Partly both," Dee looked at Flib, Yakky and J. "It began a long time ago, and involves you four. Three."
"Did she wake him with some tripe! Oh, God, someone get this hat off or kill me…"
"Carry on," said Flib.
"I've been doing a lot of research into secret organisations - big anti-androlupine agendas, most of them - and I found something that seemed to link two of them; the NGSPIB and the Big Pricks.
"Years ago, you guys came across the ship Deepwater Yak. The biocomputer told you it was built by freelance nerds, right? Well, that was true, but those nerds had been hired by the NGSPIB, who provided all the materials and funding.
"It's a tenuous fact of speculative science that, if you're building a gene ark with a soon-to-be-reanimated crew, you need two biocomputers, and there's a 90% chance of one of them being driven insane by file corruption."
"He did say J was attractive…" Yakky murmured, and hastily added "which I'm sure he is to many people," in case Flib's curse kicked in.
"The first computer was fine," said Dee. "The second was the one that turned evil."
"So? Deepwater Yak's ancient history."
"That's what everybody thought…"

* * *

"I'm not who you think, Beansprout."
"Then who are you? Because you're a dead folking ringer for J!"
The man who wasn't J smiled. "I'm more…who J might have been. Call me WILL."
"Fine. WILL, what the folk is going on?" Beansprout tried to sit up again, winced, and drank the painkiller [cycle on your bicycle, leave all this misery behind!... ~Turin Brakes]
"You fell into an impossibly deep chasm. Luckily, you landed in a tree."
"Wouldn't that have killed me anyway?"
"…Apparently not. How should I know?" WILL snapped. "Unfortunately, you were quite seriously injured. I've been healing you while you slept." He poked the fire as he talked. My God, thought Beansprout, he's wearing a hooded cape. I've been saved by J's Jedi doppelganger.
"What did you mean, anyway, 'who J might have been'?"
WILL smiled ambiguously. "You're not familiar with the idea of having different versions of the same person?"
Beansprout paused.
"If it's any of your business, I'm not familiar with anything that's happened lately. I can't make sense of it."
"Sense is in the eye of the beholder," said WILL. "But talking can help. I'd be happy to listen."

* * *

"The Big Pricks found the remains of Deepwater Yak, and the second Biocomputer. They seem to have some kind of obsession with manipulating the insane…"
"Oho yes."
"…and something happened that…allowed them to free it," Dee frowned. "I wasn't too clear on the details. I thought you faeries could explain it."
"Why? Was it too sarcastic for you?"
"No, it involved something about the…the essence of the story, whatever the hell that is."
"Ah," said all the faeries.
Red put down her glass of Bayleaves. "See, the essence of a story-"
"RED!!!"
"She needs to know! The essence of the story is the form in which it reaches those who read it."
"When someone says 'THE story' - in the old books, anyway - it usually means life," Flib mused. "But that couldn't have anything to do with the inconsistencies."
"Why not?"
"Well, back when stories were told out loud," said Red, smirking at the livid Cabbage "there were lots of inconsistencies. But since they've been written down - since The Story's been written - there haven't been any."
"Ahem," said Cabbage.
"Weeelll…not many."
"So why the change?" asked J.
Slowly, Flib sat up.
"Because the essence has changed," she said.
"What does this have to do with-"
"Don't you see?" Flib and Dee exclaimed, and then glared at each other.
"If The Story's being Read from paper, a rogue biocomputer is just ink on the page," Flib said. "But if The Story itself has become digital, the biocomputer is the realest thing in it. It can step around the fringes of the story, changing things, even write its own plots." [And that, ladies and gentlemen, is my excuse ^_^][It's such a sly way to explain your own idiocy, that its almost genius]
"The inconsistencies are just it playing with us," said Dee. "This thing is practically God."
"Maybe it's a benevolent God?" J ventured.
"It's insane."
"And the Big Pricks thought they could control it," Flib said. "I despair!"
"What tossers they are," said the cat in the hat.
"What do we do?" asked Yakky.
"We're up against insanity and apocalyptic potential yet again," Flib sighed. "Where's Beansprout when you need her?"

[Just to be retro…]
WHAT is the Second A.I planning?
WILL Beansprout and the others be reunited soon?
HOW will Sprout react to Dee?