Some issues in the existence of fictional characters

I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.

— Borges

He remembered golden fields of hyper-oats stretching from horizon to horizon. The way his shirt, soaked in blood, clung uncomfortably to his body. The sound of Kogami's voice behind him. The cold weight of a gun barrel pressing against the back of his head. And then— Nothing. Something cold dripped onto Makishima Shougo's face, and he opened his eyes. He was sitting on the ground, slumped against the trunk of a tree. The air carried the damp scents of an autumn forest. A pale, overcast dawn was breaking. Mist clung between the trees, their leaves gleaming wet — there had been rain not long ago. It was a strange forest, as if a careless painter, unconcerned with realism, had chosen to work with only two colors: rust-brown and black. Or perhaps that was simply what late autumn looked like when the rains came? Makishima, a child of a technological age, knew little of trees, seasons, or any of this; to him, Four Seasons meant Vivaldi, or at best, Tchaikovsky — not the living world. His head throbbed, but in the way it does when childhood friends accidentally nail you in the skull with a ball. When someone blows your brains out with a gun, there really shouldn't be anything left to hurt. His shirt bore no trace of blood, though it was undoubtedly the same one. Crisp, white, as if fresh from the store — unlike his pants, which bore the clear evidence of sitting in the autumn mud. Makishima scrambled to his feet and tried to brush himself off, though with little success. Theories flooded his mind, each more outlandish than the last, about how he might have survived and somehow leaped forward in time. But deep down, he knew, with absolute certainty, that none of them were true. I died, he thought, without surprise. Died and... "...found myself in a dark wood," he said aloud, savoring the words, then smirked. "Oh, come on. Seriously?" There was no sign of a road or a path, so he set off in a random direction. Every so often, he glanced around, half-expecting — perhaps half-hoping — to see Dante's leopard, lion, and gaunt she-wolf blocking his way. But the forest was empty. Heavy with rain, silent, save for the occasional patter of droplets against fallen leaves. By the time frustration began to set in — at the endless, senseless wandering among the identical dark trunks, at the lack of a Virgil to guide him somewhere, be it Hell or Paradise — he spotted a silhouette through the morning mist. A house. And in one of its windows, the outline of a lit lamp. The dark wooden door was unlocked. When he pushed it, it opened slowly with a creak. He hesitated, then stepped into the unlit entryway and made his way toward the room where the light was spilling through the doorframe. The air smelled of dust and paper. Books filled the space — lined up in rows on towering shelves, stacked on the floor, scattered across the windowsill. His eyes caught more than a few familiar names — Homer, Shakespeare, Dickens, Dostoevsky, his beloved Swift, and of course, Dante, damn him. Of course, Dante. But many of the titles were unfamiliar. Despite the overhead light, the room was empty. Makishima pushed open the next door and found more of the same — bookshelves, bindings, dust. He moved from one room to another, each a maze of books, until finally, at last, he heard a sound of human presence: the clink of a fork against a plate, the soft chime of a spoon stirring in a cup. He followed the noise and found himself in a room unlike the ones he had seen before. A kitchen. The kind that hadn't existed in his world for a long time — where machines had long since taken over such mundane matters. But this was a kitchen, in the most quintessential sense. A Platonic ideal of a kitchen, straight from the early to mid-20th century. A warm, buttery-yellow glow from a lamp under a fabric shade cast soft light over cupboards, a stove, a table. And the man seated at that table, stirring sugar into a cup. He hadn't even looked up. His head was bowed slightly, so at first, Makishima saw only a tousled mass of black hair. "Well, hello there," Kogami Shinya's voice was edged with quiet amusement. Makishima froze, fingers gripping the doorframe, caught between hesitation and a desperate urge to step forward. His heart plummeted, then lurched into a wild, erratic rhythm. For a moment — one that stretched into eternity — he stared at the man before him, who, with a sharp motion, tossed back tangled dark strands and lifted his gaze. And Makishima realized, with relief — or was it disappointment? — that he had been mistaken. Of course Kogami wouldn't be sitting there, hunched over, holding a cup so awkwardly it looked like he might drop it at any moment. The voice wasn't right either. The person at the table was a stranger — a young man with mourning-dark eyes, underscored by such deep shadows that he might not have slept for nine hundred years. "I'm dead?" Makishima finally stepped inside as he spoke. "Dead, dead. Hey, watch the shoes — take them off!" "So this is Hell?" Makishima asked, ignoring the command about his footwear. "Or Heaven. Who knows..." The stranger shrugged. "Anyway, since you've already dragged in half the forest, grab the sugar from that cupboard. You're standing right next to it. Coffee?" "Sure," Makishima said, still not quite grasping what was happening, but obediently handing over the sugar box. "Then pour yourself a cup," the young man instructed, conversational, almost friendly. He began dropping sugar cubes into his coffee — one, two, three... Makishima counted six (and that was on top of whatever sugar had already been in the cup). He suppressed a shudder. His own coffee remained jet-black, bitter as life itself — and, as it turned out, absolutely terrible. Settling into the empty chair, he studied his peculiar new acquaintance. The stranger looked a few years younger than him, with a face that might have been called handsome — if one had a taste for Byronic heroes. But the impression was somewhat ruined by his posture, his mannerisms, and the slightly manic glint in his eyes, suggesting some variety of neurodivergence. "Name's L," the young man finally announced, tilting his head slightly, as if sharing a great secret. "El? As in Elohim?" Makishima felt slightly breathless, overwhelmed by the sheer number of literary allusions manifesting around him. "Are you here to judge me or something?" "What?" L sounded almost offended. "No. Just L Lawliet. Not my fault they named me that." "My apologies, I didn't mean to mock you. I'm Makishima Shougo." "I know!" L said in what he probably thought was a deeply mysterious tone. "I know everything about you. Read your story. You reminded me of someone I used to know, and I got curious to see you in person. And—" Makishima cut him off. "My story?" "Uh-huh. The perfect society, the Sibyl System, your ever-flawless psycho-pass, your sworn enemy Kogami Shinya." L tapped a book lying on the table. "A bit cliché, but—" Makishima choked on his coffee. "Cliché? That's all you have to say about my life?" L gave a helpless little shrug. "Look, I haven't read half as many books as you, but even I know that 'man sees the rot in society, rises in rebellion, and tears it all down' is... not exactly original. And, no offense, not particularly smart." "Easy for you to say," Makishima muttered, his gaze fixed on the slim, dark-bound volume under L's hand. "From the inside, it all feels different. And you, genius, what would you have done in my place?" "Nothing. Just enjoyed the fact that my spotless psycho-pass meant none of that nonsense concerned me. People can decide for themselves whether they like the world they live in or not." "You're not much of a humanist, are you?" "And you, I've noticed, are such a humanist," L retorted, a faint smirk flickering over his lips. "Like I said, you reminded me of someone I once knew. That guy also decided one day that the world was rotten—" "I see where you're going with this, and—" "—and that the best way to fix it was to start mass-murdering people." "Just shut up, please," Makishima said, irritated. His conviction that the world he came from was utterly unjust, that great causes sometimes required terrible means — those thoughts hadn't gone anywhere. He had cultivated them for too long to abandon them so easily. And yet, here, in this infuriatingly normal kitchen, filled with the scent of coffee and scattered with crumbs from too many sweets, under the gaze of this absurd stranger with a god's name, those thoughts suddenly felt... distant. Not foreign, exactly. But certainly not as important as they once had been. "Well," L continued calmly, "I did like the part where you told Sibyl to go to hell with its offer. My friend wouldn't have been able to resist the temptation." "Yeah, no matter what I've done, I'm nowhere near the devil," Makishima muttered. L frowned in confusion, then chuckled. "No, he wasn't the devil, and I'm not God, like I said. Honestly. Sorry if this started sounding like a sermon. And this house full of books — it's not heaven or hell. I mean, maybe it is heaven, I haven't figured it out yet. Though personally, I think it's a little dull. But I'm just like you, an ordinary person, and I don't know much more than you do about what's going on here. I just wanted to talk to you, so I pulled your page out of the book. Do you like pastries?" "A page?" Makishima was getting tired of not understanding anything. "Do you even have any pastries?" "No, but I thought you could bake some... A page from the end of the book, you know, where you die in that wheat field." "It wasn't wheat," Makishima corrected automatically, "it was hyper-oats." "Same difference. A very beautiful scene, by the way... You see, it gets lonely here, all the time. That forest — it's endless. Literally. It doesn't follow Euclidean geometry; no matter which way you walk, sooner or later, you end up back at this house. The food and supplies replenish themselves, but there's really nothing to do. I've been here since spring. Out of boredom, I've even been trying to learn how to cook, but I'm not very good at it yet. Books are the only entertainment. But I was never much of a reader. When I realized I could tear out pages and bring characters here, things got a little more fun..." L's constant, rambling chatter had a hypnotic effect, dulling Makishima's focus. Only now did he notice the page lying next to the book on the table — covered in dense printed text. If this madness was real, then was that his page? His death, his life, everything he had ever been? A brown ring stained the paper — tea or coffee. Beside it sat a shriveled, unappealing object that had once been a pastry, its sickly pink crumbs stuck to the edge of the page. "How did you even come up with this? The page thing?" "There were books in my story, too. Though they were only good for killing people in increasingly elaborate ways. I always thought all that blank space could be put to better use — and I was right. I'm actually very smart," L added smugly. "And you just figured this out instantly?" Makishima raised a skeptical eyebrow, his gaze still flickering toward the page — his page — on the other side of the table. "Sorry, but that's hard to believe." "Well," L conceded, "to be honest, I arrived in this house the same way. Someone pulled my page from a book. And when I got here, I found both the book and the page lying separately, so I caught on quickly. But I don't know who did it. They never showed themselves to me." "So to summarize — you pull people out of books because you're bored. And what do you do with their pages afterward? Tear them up? Burn them?" L looked at Makishima with mild offense. "I paste them back into their books, of course. Very carefully." "And what happens to those... people?" Makishima still wasn't ready to say the word "characters." "I assume they return to their stories and keep flowing along with the plot. And what happens to them after that, well... that's a complicated metaphysical question I'm not really prepared to answer." "Have you at least tried running some experiments?" Makishima still wasn't convinced by this nonsense about books and characters, but the concept intrigued him. "You could pull out a page, then put it back, then pull it again and ask the person what happened..." "I thought of that," L admitted, "but in practice, I don't really like talking to the same people twice." "But have you ever pulled someone out more than once?" A parade of fascinating figures flashed through Makishima's mind — people he would have conversed with endlessly if given the chance. "...Nana," L finally admitted. "The St. Bernard nursemaid from Peter Pan. She helps me. You know, with cleaning, cooking... dressing... washing... But unfortunately, baking isn't her strong suit." "You're a goddamn infantilized autistic," Makishima snapped. "You think?" L tilted his head, unbothered. "For you, I'd guess paranoid psychopathy and narcissistic personality disorder." His tone made it clear he wasn't trying to insult Makishima — just stating a fact. Makishima realized this conversation was taking a bad turn. If he didn't shift things soon, he'd be pasted back into his idiotic dystopia with its miserable ending, only to find himself right back in that field with his brains blown out. "You know, it's unfair that you know everything about me, but I know nothing about you," he said smoothly, forcing himself not to look at the coffee-stained page. "I'd like to read your story, too. I'm sure it's fascinating. Will you let me see your book? If there's nothing too personal in it, of course." L nodded. He hopped down from his chair — Makishima noticed he was barefoot, moving with an odd, clumsy grace, like some hybrid of a spider and a cat — and disappeared into one of the rooms lined with bookshelves. The moment he was gone, Makishima snatched the page. A quick glance at the opening lines confirmed what he already suspected — it was the description of his death, the scene written with unbearable, cliché-ridden melodrama. He folded the page into quarters and shoved it into his pocket. L returned with a book — his book — and, noticing the missing page, didn't seem angry. Instead, he smiled. "To be honest, I was hoping you'd do that." "What?" Makishima frowned. "Decide not to go back into the book. I'm glad the ending doesn't suit you anymore. You wanted to die, remember? That bothered me the whole time I was reading. There's a difference between risking your life and stretching out a suicide over time." "And what makes you think I wanted to die?" "You told Kogami yourself. Here, I'll find the page—" L started flipping through. "No need, I remember," Makishima interrupted, already unsettled from reading his own death scene. "Look, whoever you are — God, a ferryman for the dead, or just a weird guy — I'm not giving the page back. It's mine, got it? I'll paste it into the book myself if I decide to. You already ruined it with your pastries." He shoved the page deeper into his pocket. "So... you don't want to die anymore?" L asked. "...I don't know," Makishima muttered. "I'll think about it."