Chapter Text
You weren't doing anything particularly interesting when it happened.
It was the morning of April 1st. Your room looked exactly the way it always did: posters slightly crooked on the wall, a half-eaten bag of chips on the desk, a stack of manga you kept meaning to finish, and a battered game controller resting on top like a relic of better, simpler times.
"Topsy Turvy" from The Hunchback of Notre Dame was looping softly through your headphones, just because it was that kind of morning. Bouncy. Chaotic. Slightly unhinged.
You were barely paying attention to the screen in front of you when the music got louder.
Not slightly louder. Impossibly louder. The kind of louder that shouldn't be physically possible from a single pair of earbuds. The kind of louder that makes you pull one earbud out and check whether you've accidentally plugged into something you shouldn't have.
The screen brighten and became vibrant. Not like it was dying, but like it was taking a deep breath.
Then Clopin Trouillefou, master of ceremonies and general agent of chaos, leaped onto the stage in the middle of the most crowded square you had ever seen in your life. He was wearing his full jester regalia, bells jingling, staff spinning, grin wide enough to unsettle small children and some adults.
The square itself was enormous; it had no business being that enormous, because it was simultaneously the plaza of Notre Dame in 1482, the main street of Bikini Bottom, the deck of the Thousand Sunny, the training grounds of UA High School, Hyrule Castle's front courtyard, and at least seven other places that had no geographic reason to share the same zip code.
And somehow, impossibly, it was packed.
Thousands of characters from every corner of fiction had shown up, crammed into the square with the energy of people who had been told the party of the millennium was about to start and they were not going to miss it. Luffy was already eating. Deadpool was already narrating. Sans was already napping against a lamppost, somehow also participating in three conversations. Batman was brooding from a rooftop — but even he had a small, suspicious party hat balanced on top of his cowl, which Alfred had clearly placed there against his will.
Clopin raised his arms, and the crowd settled into something resembling quiet.
"Ladies! Gentlemen! Heroes, villains, sidekicks, plumbers, shinigami, witches, pirates, Pokémon trainers, sorcerers, superheroes, an inexplicably large number of spiky-haired young men with dreams of becoming the greatest something-or-other, welcome to the Topsy Turvy Festival of Fools!"
The crowd went absolutely berserk. Fireworks burst overhead in the shapes of question marks. Confetti made of torn comic pages rained from what should have been the sky. Pikachu's sparks set off a chain reaction that accidentally lit Deadpool on fire, which bothered him not at all.
"Every year, on this glorious April 1st, we flip the world upside down. Every king becomes a clown. Every sidekick becomes the hero. Every villain gets to try the buffet first, because honestly, they've been waiting long enough."
Shrek, in the front row, raised a tankard. "Finally," he muttered to no one in particular.
"But this year—this year, my friends—we've been planning something very different. Something unprecedented. Something that involves the one person who has been here for all of it. Every story, every adventure, every ridiculous plot twist and heartbreaking sacrifice and inexplicably long training montage."
The music softened. A genuine hush fell over the square. Luffy paused mid-bite. Deadpool lowered his chimichanga. Even Discord, floating upside down above the crowd, stopped turning nearby pigeons into rubber chickens for a moment.
"The one who was never drawn on a page. Never rendered in pixels. Never given a voice actor or a character sheet or so much as a name in the credits. And yet... always there."
He took a step forward. The spotlight, which had been sweeping lazily over the crowd, stopped.
It pointed directly at the screen.
Directly at the fourth wall.
Every single character in that impossible square turned at the same moment. Thousands of eyes—wide, narrow, glowing, robotic, reptilian, cartoonishly large—all swiveled toward the fourth wall.
Toward the screen.
Toward you, sitting in your room with one earbud half-out, a chip halfway to your mouth, and absolutely no idea what to do with any of this.
"The one who kept coming back. All hail the King, Queen, or whatever fits best today, of Fools!"
And the multiverse absolutely lost its mind.
Upon discovering this, your first instinct was completely rational.
You slammed the laptop shut.
The screen went black. The music cut off. The square, the crowd, the thousands of eyes... gone. Your room was just your room again. The fan hummed. A car passed outside. The chips in your hand were still chips.
You sat there for a moment, breathing slowly, convincing yourself that you had simply drifted off and imagined the entire thing.
'It's April Fools, just the human brain playing tricks. Completely normal,' you thought.
Then the walls started rumbling.
It started low, like a subway train three streets over. Then it grew. Pictures rattled on the walls. The stack of manga trembled. The GameCube controller slid two inches to the left, which felt deeply ominous given the circumstances.
The rumble became a roar, and the roar became music; that same brass-and-drums rhythm, warped and cheerful and absolutely relentless, bleeding through the walls of your house like the plaster itself had caught the melody.
You looked at the window.
Outside, your perfectly normal suburban street had stopped being perfectly normal. The asphalt was cracking, not with damage, but with cobblestones pushing up through from underneath, medieval Paris insisting on existing beneath your neighborhood. Streetlights flickered and came back glowing warm amber, like lanterns. Your neighbor's oak tree had grown, inexplicably, a dozen tiny jester bells in its upper branches.
A Goomba, one of the squat, mushroom-headed ones from the Mushroom Kingdom, waddled enthusiastically out of the rose bushes, tripped over the garden hose, and waved at you (how?) with embarrassing friendliness.
A portal, roughly the size and shape of a storybook page being torn open, ripped itself into existence in the middle of the street.
And through it came the stampede.
You booked it.
Out the front door, down the porch steps, sneakers hitting cobblestones that hadn't been there three minutes ago. The air smelled like popcorn and gunpowder and faint ocean salt, which made no geographic sense. You didn't care. You just ran.
Leading the charge, because of course she was leading the charge, was Atsuko Kagari, or Akko to literally everyone who knew her, which at this point was most of the known multiverse.
She burst through the portal on her broom at a speed that could generously be described as "controlled" and less generously as "a pigeon who has forgotten how wings work." Her chestnut hair was flying, her witch hat was tilted at an angle suggesting a recent collision, and her crimson eyes were wide with the particular intensity of someone who has been waiting for this moment and is absolutely not going to let physics stop them.
"Wait! Don't close anything!" she said with a grin of her face. "We just want to say thank you! You watched all my training! You were there when I couldn't do a single spell right and you kept watching anyway and I— come back, please!"
Behind her: Luffy, grinning that impossible rubber grin, stretching an arm out to grab a lamppost and slingshot himself forward with zero regard for the lamp. Sonic, a blue blur who skidded around the corner so fast he left scorch marks on the cobblestones. Mario and Luigi, bouncing along in synchronized triple-jumps that sent them sailing over parked cars they couldn't be bothered to go around. Deadpool, cartwheeling on a stolen shopping trolley while providing live color commentary to absolutely no one.
"And the reader makes their escape! Classic fight-or-flight response, folks. Honestly, relatable. If an entire multiverse pointed at me and started yelling, I'd also run. Oh wait, they do that every Tuesday."
The chase was on.