ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVW YZ... a story (A to Z challenge)

X helped make humans immortal -- and one of those humans has helped make a million universes, all of which are now in danger...


_________________________________________________________________________





So many worlds!

R, let me speak now: you rest. We must finish this up and must decide what to do.

Of course we all recognized it: we had just heard the voice itself, and now it was as though her laugh, her tears, her scorn and lack of sanity and the rest of her psyche were embedded, woven, skeined through the universe itself.

Which, of course, they were.  Had she created Diana’s universe? It seems unlikely – but as X’s mistake –

Hold, X! For mistake it was!

As X’s mistake allowed the real and abstract to intertwine, it allowed her sister’s creations to leap off the page, to become more than hot-tempered wild dreams, to become real.  From one universe with real and abstract had spun a hundred, a thousand, a million universes, maybe more. Suddenly, suddenly, everything ever dreamed of had become real, somewhere, and we were in the middle of it, with Diana, but the majority of the universes, of the existences, of the spirits, had sprung directly from a lifetime of the sister’s writing.

Trapped on paper, stuck in her room, these worlds lived only in her mind. She never believed they were not as real as the room in which she sat – and she never believed they were not more real than the world that she saw but never visited out of her window. 

But though real to her, they were not to us.

But X! You scoundrel: you changed that.  Your sympathy, though well-placed, has led us to this: a lifetime of derangement, sprung open and scattered around the cosmos, each one of which has a different piece of the sister’s soul, and each one of which is ending.

Ending.

I see it in all your faces: you know it, too.

She cannot bear the strain of all these realities.  She cannot stand. Her mind is snapping, and because of that all of the universes, all existence – so recently sprung into being – will soon fold up and wither and die.

As will she: When her mind dies, it may be that every world every where dies with it so entwined she is with them.

Standing there in Diana’s room we only just realized that, listening to L’s report of what L had gone through, enough worlds flickering by like the pages of a book turning, and each of them with that ever-growing, ever-more-frightening laugh on the horizon.

Did someone say it was thunder?  It is not, and we know it now.

So:

This is what we have come to.  We wasted vital time, some of us, chasing through worlds looking for David. And now we…

… and now we must ask X for a favor.

_______________________________________________________________________

Each letter has had a turn to talk.  Here's links to all of them.  They're best, probably, if read in order but each is also more or less independent and they can be read in any order and result in the same story.

A's story is here and B's here. C talks here. Here is D. E's version of events was here. F was here. Also, G, H spokehere. Then I, then J . Click here for k, and here for L.
Then there's M's story, here, 

Then N.  And O And P, and Q, and R