PRELUDE TO A PROLOGUE
By Jeanne Morningstar
With a little tip o'the hat to Scott Johnson

On 9/5/21 12:49 PM, Dave Van Domelen wrote:
> It occurs to me that the Looniverse, being based in Usenet, is an
> ancient world with archaic rules, lacking in modern technology but with a
> magic of its own.
>
> The Looniverse is an isekai destination for modern webcomics
> characters.
>
> Dave Van Domelen, "The Internet is not a truck!"
>

====

Rune Redquake, the Hero, drew his cursed sword Fightbattler. "Have at
you, goblin!" he shouted.

"Owww," said the evil goblin lord Xnaz the Horripilating as Rune
Redquake sliced him in two.

Once, Rune Redquake had been an ordinary man living an ordinary life in
a world with no cursed swords or goblin lords. He'd been unable to find
a job or a purpose for his life. He'd died after going on a cabbage soup
diet on the advice of Reddit and causing an enormous methane explosion.
But now he'd been reincarnated into a new life where he got to be a for
real Hero, and had not one but two incredibly hot women who were
desperate for him.

"The Goblin Lord is slain!" said the first of the two women, Velaria,
the Elven ranger-priestess of the Moon. Tall and elegantly muscular, she
held a bow that glowed with eldritch light. Her deep purple eyes looked
into the darkness of the Tower of Grimmevilbad. "Now we can defeat the
Lich Demon God King and drive evil from the land!"

"And get the treasure, don't forget that!" said his other companion.
Maitrakh, the weirdly hot fat girl with the lobster-red skin and the
metal bikini, was a succubus thief, kicked out of Hell because she was
better at setting people on fire than seducing them.

"I suppose," said Velaria. And she looked at Rune Redquake, her eyes
glittering with delight. "And then we can get married!"

"Hey, *I* was going to marry him!" said Maitrakh.

"Now, well," said Rune Redquake. He had indeed promised to marry both of
them independently. He really should have talked it out with them at
this point but didn't know what to say. It occurred to him there may
have been reasons beyond him not being a hero with a cursed sword he had
trouble getting dates in his old life, but he could ignore that for now.
"First, we must enter into the final chamber of this Tower and destroy
the ultimate evil!"

"OK, fine," said Maitrakh.

But when they opened the door, they did not find the room that held the
final boss. They found an echo of the room they just left, made up of
repeated tiles that flickered in and out of existence. "What? This game
world has a minus level?" said Rune Redquake.

"Uh," said a voice from the shadows. "Your world is about to be
destroyed. Sorry about that." Out stepped a woman in crimson robes
carrying a staff. She faintly resembled Pandora from the New 52,
assuming anyone remembers all of that now.

"Who the hell are you!" said Maitrakh, flames crackling around her hands.

"I'm the Panjandrum Stranger," she said. "The Stranger in charge of
isekai worlds."

"...Isekai?" said Velaria. "I've never heard that world before."

"I'll explain later. Anyway, uh, wait." She looked Rune Redquake in the
eye. "Did you really promise to marry both of them?"

Rune Redquake wiped the sweat off his brow. "...Ok, yes."

"WHAT?" they both said at once.

"You should be straight with them," said the Panjandrum Stranger,
thumping her staff on the ground. "Nothing's wrong with polyamory, but
you gotta be explicit about your desires and boundaries. Which one do
you want, or do you want to marry both of them, or what?"

"Um," said Rune Redquake. "Uh." Just then, he began to flicker and fade.
His body broke up into squares of light which gradually disappeared,
leaving nothing behind.

"What happened to him?" shouted Velaria. "Is he dead?"

"Nah," said the Panjandrum Stranger. "He's just been re-reincarnated
back to his old shitty life. You should be more worried about everything
else."

"What?" said Maitrakh.

"You see," said the Panjandrum Stranger, "this world isn't real. You're
in a webcomic. That friend of yours, he was a Protagonist--a random
loser reincarnated from some other world. The people in charge of this
part of the Internetverse--the Isekaisers--drag in Protagonists and
build rudimentary worlds around them, then use the emotional energy from
the story's audience to gradually make them real. Pretty common
quick-and-dirty method of world creation.

"It's my job to look after all those worlds. These worlds are mostly
similar enough there's just one Stranger looking after them all. I make
sure they hold together and take out any Protagonists who are abusing
their powers."

"So... what's going to happen now, exactly?" said Velaria.

"Well, to put it bluntly, your world's about to go kablooey. There's
been a big hypercosmic collapse recently, and the MCU's been acting up
again so the narrative hyperflows are all janky. That means your world
collapsed before it could be fully become real. But don't worry--"

"You say our world's dying and you say not to worry?!" said Maitrakh.

"I was gonna say," said the Panjandrum Stranger, "I'll just send you to
a new one. Just let me call the Stranger Society. See, the Strangers
used to only watch over Usenetverse worlds, but now we have jurisdiction
over other Internetverse worlds through the Reddit Accord--"

"I don't know what any of those words mean, individually or together,"
said Velaria.

"Hold on a moment," said the Panjandrum Stranger. She pulled a strange
glowing square thing (which the now-re-reincarnated Rune Redquake would
have recognized as a cell phone) from the folds of her robe. "Hello?"
she said into it. "Patch me through to alt.stranger.recovery." She
waited and tapped her feet. "Sorry, on hold." Then there was a noise
from the other side. "Hello there? I've got two survivors from a
collapsed isekai world I need sent somewhere else, and--ah." She
listened to a long explanation on the other end.

"OK," she said, turning to Maitrakh and Velaria, "unfortunately with the
hyperflow being what it is right now, I can't send you to another world
like this one. I'll have to send you to an Usenetverse world. Lessee, I
guess I'll send you to Drew's world rather than Dave's since there's
less going on there right now. Hold on a sec." She held out the phone to
them and a tunnel of shifting light came out of them. A mighty wind
sucked them in and they fell, screaming, into infinity. And then--

They were somewhere else. A city by a lake, with shining towers higher
than the one they'd left behind. "What manner of world is this?" said
Velaria.

"As long as it has things I can blow up, I'm good," said Maitrakh. "So
what do we do now?" They'd spent most of their energy arguing over Rune
Redquake and didn't know what to do now that he was gone. Maybe they
enjoyed arguing with each other more than they actually wanted him. They
weren't going to think about the implications of that because there were
too many things to think about the implications of right now.

They saw a sort of ragged newspaper blowing in the wind. Maitrakh
snatched it up. The headline said:

LNH STILL MISSING

The subheadline said: PROBABLY THEY'RE IN SPACE OR SOMETHING.

Below that were smaller headlines that red: IOWA FARMER BREAKS RECORD
FOR WORLD'S BIGGEST WATERMELON and beside that, IT'S A SLOW NEWS DAY,
SORRY ABOUT THAT

"Hmm. What's an LNH?" said Velaria.

"I think it's one of those things Rune Redquake was going on about.
Those, uh, soup heroes."

"Superheroes."

"Like that Captain Armenia guy."

"Hmm," said Velaria. "So this world's greatest heroes are missing.
Perhaps... Perhaps we could become this world's greatest heroes ourselves."

"So you wanna be a superhero? Sounds cool, I guess. We should go find a
dungeon and raid it--"

"I don't think that's how being a hero works in this world," said
Velaria. "I'll have to investigate some more."

"Yeah," said Maitrakh. "Y'know, I wonder if there are any other people
who got yoinked in here from other worlds. If we find any, maybe we
could form a party--"

"A superhero team?" said Velaria. "Hmm. I suppose we could call
ourselves something like, the 'Unlikely Aliens...'"

"Nah," said Maitrakh. "We need something more badass. Like...

"THE SLAYERS OF THE NET!"

TO BE CONTINUED...?

====

NOTE:

Everything in this story is Free For Use. I really have no idea where
it's going. Anyone can feel free to jump on.

The Dvandom Stranger and the concept of Strangers were created by Dave
Van Domelen; the Ununnilium Stranger was created by Drew Nilium.

A number of the names in this story came from generators from
seventhsanctum.com

The imaginary newsgroup alt.stranger.recovery is based on the real world
alt.sysadmin.recovery, whose forbidding reputation led to the
anagrammatic nickname of "scary devil monastery."

The hypercosmic collapse is somewhat explained in the Jenny Everywhere
story I'm currently writing on tumblr, which will be posted here in
collected form
https://thejennyeverywhereproject.tumblr.com/tagged/thgje/chrono

I have never actually seen an isekai anime, but I do love the
isekai-parody-ish lesbian romance webcomic Mage and Demon Queen.