The deputy had been a bit unfair in his summary of The Author’s career. Of course, sales of his books were down since the magnificent, awe-inspiring powerhouse of fiction that was Scenario 66. He was never too sure why short stories weren’t ever more popular in a world of phones and memes and character limits, but oh well. Life was life. Was being the operative tense.

But he had scored something that would have paid for all the desserts in the world with something in his latest release - what just about amounted to an all-out war for the film rights to Old Riding Day Trip. Barry had possibly been right about struggling for ideas - that one was based off a true story, from one of his hometown friends, though he had dabbled in a few changes for dramatic effect. The goblins had only had air rifles really.

But he had been about to use his imagination for all it was worth. After selling to the highest bidder, Old Riding Day Trip had naturally become Escape from Hell City. And because of Hollywood’s century-old cardinal laws dictating that every film must be about LA or New York, he had been setting out at the bequest of the director with the unenviable task of finding some backstreet cluster of alleys in either city that could capture the spirit and character of an industrial Yorkshire town. In his preliminary internet scouting he’d been hard-pressed to find a bloody tea-shop, never mind a wheel of cheese that didn’t look like it was at least eighty percent plastic. He’d actually been quite relieved at his sudden and unexpected change in altitude, and not just because The Wife would have to acknowledge that he’d been right when he’d deemed the plane ‘totally and utterly unairworthy’ from a window a hundred yards across the terminal just before breakfast.

All of that wasn’t about to get The Author off the hook. But what he was going to do first in New York just might.

They were there now: Barry and him. Him and Barry. Also, two thousand eager, chattering fans writhing across the seats of the auditorium on the first day of ‘Misadventure’, a series of lectures and panels about who was obviously the greatest British writer who had ever lived.

The Author looked from the rather dashing portrait of his wonderful mug, cheerily burning into everyone’s retinas from the twenty-foot screen on the stage, to the front rows of the audience. His heart, if he still had one, would have leapt.

Literature students. Unmistakable in their smugness of expression and the horrors of their fashion. He could always count on them to fuck things up.

His appearance was always going to have been a surprise, and news of the unfortunately short flight of the 257 hadn’t reached the rabble because they were too busy pratting around on Reddit. It was the final session of the day - an FAQ debate on his short stories. Perfect timing.

As frantic pens scraped and entitled voices screeched, The Author asked Barry if he could make a mysterious change to the physical world from beyond the grave. His request was granted.

Ten minutes and a theatre total of seventy-nine overpriced coffees later, the question came up. The host, a popular literary critic who had once called Sods and Odds the demented scratchings of a caveman but who was quite happy to extort said man’s virtues for the small price of a lobster dinner, faltered. He couldn’t remember this one.

“The, errr, story Sausage Fingers, though indisputably a sequel to the author’s debut, is also the foundation to a new wave of, of... metaphysical juxtapositional constitutionalist prose in fiction? Discuss.”

The critic scowled across the sides of the stage, hunting for the blathering buffoon who could conjure such nonsense at his expense. Everyone knew that the new wave of metaphysical juxtapositional constitutionalism had begun many years ago.

But elsewhere, angry eyes had settled on something else.

A mass fidgeting of unrest rippled through the hall. A twelve-dollar glitterlicious glamour-latte supreme with custom stencilling sprayed across the tired carpet from a disbelieving mouth in the fourth row. Laptops clittered; tablets clattered; phones were held aloft to record the carnage that was to come.

For the expanse of chairs nearest the stage, as The Author had foreseen, were filled with literature students. And to a literature student, nothing was indisputable.

“From the viewpoint of a twenty-two-year-old woman whose favourite sport is baseball,” spluttered a trenchcoated young lady at the front, rising in a flurry of Post-it notes, “I do not find this story to be a sequel of anything at all.”

There was a deep, grateful murmur of approval from across the hall.

The Author looked at Barry, but Barry remained unmoved.

A boy who seemed to have just mastered the motion of nodding but who was yet to read up on how to stop jumped to his feet in support. The organic woollen sleeves of his oversized cardigan flapped like bat wings as he made his point through the form of narrated interpretive dance. “I’ve always regarded the scenario numbers as a reflection of one facet of the author’s arrangement of his ideas, you know, one particular order in which his subplots come together.”

“And the high numbers are a commentary on the painstaking task not just in creation, but in presentation?” questioned another girl, eyes wide as if seeing the true nature of the universe for the first, wondrous time.

Another boy stood, commanding attention with his aggressively manicured and aggressively wriggling eyebrows. “There are parallel commentaries here,” he proposed, nay, explained to his enraptured fellows. “For surely it is clear that the administrators, or modders, the nature of guidance for the protagonist, the idiocy of the logic applied to the situations he finds himself in, they’re but thinly veiled criticisms of the helicopter state we find ourselves in?”

“Issues of privacy!”

“Questions on the physical nature of existence itself!”

“And spiritual!”

“And metaphorical!”

The unseen Author, whose mind had once upon a time conjured a couple of funny stories about games, and had not for one second of his entire life entertained metaphorical commentaries upon the nature of society, even within a single reflected facet of his dear little noggin, turned to his custodian and nodded. “What they said.”

Barry narrowed his eyes. His hellish ears twitched against the chatter.

And, before the moment was lost, The Author reached an ethereal hand into the next row, took up a pen, and scribbled something onto a notepad. Brought it before the officer’s flaring nostrils.

The note said settle for a draw.