"I hope you understand that, due to me being strapped down, I cannot shake your hand as you wished."
He looked surprised at what I said, then began to fumble his words.
"R—Right..! Uh..." he said. "...the script! How did it go again..?"
I stared at him, dumbfounded, as though something bizarre had appeared before me.
Then, mustered up the courage to ask this lunatic:
"What do you plan—"
"Archie a—always helped me with this, you k—know. H—He told me to m—make a script so I wouldn’t s—stutter."
That isn’t helping right now, is it? I internally thought, keeping my thoughts away from blurting it out.
There was a fine line between stupidity and madness or whatever they usually say.
"Right...Uh..."
This man, of whom I had no knowledge or correlation of and the one who had kidnapped me, was a bit insane, it seemed.
He didn’t seem to be a character of "Imperfections of a Knight" considering he called me his "creator."
I didn’t want to seem arrogant and respond with an affirmative retort.
"...my name..! Right, r—right. It’s..."
He bowed down to the level of my feet and—I noticed I no longer wore my combat boots. Those were expensive!—kissed them.
"My name is Oliver—"
In disgust, I kicked his face. It was such an abrupt move that I didn’t even think about doing it. It just happened.
"—Snape," he uttered after I hit his face.
Then, his face seemed to be in shock, as he did not move for minutes and simply stared through the air.
I was losing my temper, then.
"Tell me why you kidnapped me."
"By the way, Reverie," he said, ignoring his "creator’s" words. "It seems like I didn’t need to sew your cheek."
My reflection on a test tube glimmered as I turned.
There was a scar on my cheek where this man, Oliver Snape, had sewed my cheek back together, but had begun forming back around it.
It was as though I regenerated.
Perhaps, I really had regenerated, for that was my anomaly.
Oliver stood up all of a sudden, making himself seated on the four-wheeled chair.
He folded open a laptop that sat on the steel desk, lighting it up in activation.
"Archie spoke about you a lot," said Oliver, tapping on the keyboard. I was unable to see what he was looking at due to the angle. His voice was grave and no longer stumbling. "One day, he jumped onto my balcony and told me that he found ’peak fiction.’ Those were the very words he said."
I nodded, slightly in fear. It was when timid people like him turned serious that they were about to snap.
Should I have not kicked him? But the feeling of his wet tongue in between my toes gave me the shivers, and it was not the good kind.
"You may not know this since your time with him was short, but he spent his childhood under the care of a nanny
"That nanny was a good one, for she was the one who introduced Archie to web novels.
"He thought the quality was a downgrade compared to traditional books, but, he told me, that the stories and plots were on a different level.
"He enjoyed reading those novels even more considering each novel was more than a hundred Chapters. There were more information about world-building, and the protagonists went beyond divine levels.
"In other words, he enjoyed how the stories they tell went on for so long.
"He enjoyed how their stories went beyond one simple arc, as traditional books did
"It was his solace in life, his salvation, reading novels.
"Then, one day, all excited and giddy, he ran to my apartment saying:
"’Oliver, oh, Oliver! Let me cook your liver as I speak of this novel I had found!’"
The monotonous scrolling could be heard bouncing off the walls.
"By the way, that was how it sounded to me and I don’t think it’s accurate to his own memories, but that matters not.
"He loved your novel, Imperfections of a Knight, despite its shortcomings.
"But, most of all, he disliked Benedict Ian Leyendecker, its protagonist.
My eyes darted everywhere, looking for a chance to escape.
"The way he’d treat the other characters disgusted him. He’d say: ’Arrogant piece of shit!’
"The story may have been violent, cruel, gory, and among other things, he always said the deuteragonists and tritagonists were excellently done.
"So, one day, when he claimed to have met the author who was named Angel Sick of Their Own Skin, he was ecstatic.
"I didn’t believe him at first. If that were to happen, how small was the world, really?
"He only called you by the name Reverie, so I am not aware of your full name. If you’d like to inform me, let it be now." I glared at him as he turned to face me. Looking away, he sighed. "He said it was a beautiful name.
"Though some things happened, the both of you still hit it off and kept being together.
"Months of no interaction did not pull you away.
"Until the incident, that is."
I didn’t know where he was getting at.
"Archie told me that he’d convince you to make him the protagonist some way
"Could that be related to why it happened? The incident, I mean.
"How could you refuse such an innocent soul, Reverie?"
Scowling, I bit my lip before I could say anything that might be used against me.
He stood up, holding and resting the laptop on his forearm, making his way near me.
I resisted, though it was a frail attempt at escaping the straitjacket—one that brought incredibly foul memories of my time in a mental ward.
"But now, he need not to worry.
"For in this laptop, there exist drafts of Imperfect Knight up until the ending."
My eyes widened as he turned around slowly to face me along with his laptop.
I recognized the brand at once.
"Shall I read them out?"