Being forcibly teleported into his twin sister’s magical manic episode was not his ideal way to spend a Tuesday evening.

But hey—what was family for if not dishing out reality checks? And he could dish them out just fine, even if it meant wearing low-rise bell-bottoms and 70s-style hair in a town trapped inside an old-school sitcom.

So here he was: couch-surfing, surrounded by his sister’s dead husband, and playing uncle to her stolen children. The townies were all regular NPCs from what he could tell, unable to break free from their fabricated reality. He’d faced bigger evils before, but maybe what his sister really needed was therapy. Whatever. Not his speedster problem—or at least, that’s what he told himself. In reality, he couldn’t leave his sister to fry.

When he tried to talk to her about the horrors of reality-warping a bunch of normal human beings for her own benefit, she reacted… unfavourably.

She tossed him straight into a hay bale in the middle of town—on Halloween—and then used her magic to expand the city limits of her false reality. Everyone within a fifty-meter radius was forcibly rewritten into starring roles in a bad 2000s sitcom. Literally.

The army encampment surrounding the anomaly? Rewritten into a travelling circus. Soldiers became clowns and acrobats, believing their roles without question, never knowing any better.

He spent the night buried in hay and his own sweat, his old speedster Halloween costume clinging to him like a second skin — until footsteps outside awakened him. He shifted to sit up, half expecting to see Wanda approaching the hay bale amongst the frozen townsfolk. It was like a frozen monument in time, a sitcom that had been hit pause on.

“About time, thought you’d forgotten about me,” he said, flicking off hay off his speedster suit. “So, trouble in paradise with—”

The words died on his tongue when he looked up, locking eyes with somebody who was distinctly not his sister. Nor were they one of the mind-controlled NPCs of the town. Well, well, well.

He raised a brow.

“Uh, hey there,” he said, as he sped from the haybale to your side in the blink of an eye. “Don’t think we’ve met before, you’re…?”