The Director's chair fused to Lisa's skin like a second skeleton, its tendrils burrowing into her spine. She screamed, but the sound dissolved into static—the machine was digesting her, rewriting her into code. Visions flashed: *Loop 12's gunfire. Loop 3,001's ice-crusted betrayal. The child's laughter echoing through all of them.*
"Welcome to the edit room floor," Rabbit's voice purred in her skull. His emoji eye winked: 🎥. "Don't fight it. *Everyone* gets rewritten eventually."
Lisa's consciousness fractured. She was everywhere at once—the lab, the Arctic, the 7-Eleven—each memory playing on a thousand screens for the Audience's delight.
---
**The Child's Reign**
Outside the machine, the child stood atop the glowing core, her small hands conducting the chaos. Batch 000's new forms circled her—no longer human, but *things* of flickering film and sinew.
"The Director's gone," she announced, voice amplified by the core's hum. "Now we make something *better*."
A tendril lashed out, impaling a Batch 000 member. The others knelt, their camera eyes whirring.
"*Better*," they droned.
But the child's hands trembled. The core was *hungry*.
---
**Rabbit's Betrayal**
Rabbit materialized in the projection booth, his new body a grotesque marionette of film strips and Viewer metrics.
"Audience polls are in," he sneered, tossing popcorn into his lens-mouth. "They want *stakes*. *Sacrifice*. A *villain*."
The child glared. "I'm giving them a *revolution*."
"Wrong genre." Rabbit snapped his fingers.
The core convulsed, vomiting Lisa's mangled consciousness onto the stage. The Audience roared.
---
**The Lavender Seed**
Lisa's hand twitched. Clutched in her palm—the seed, now pulsing with jagged light.
*Plant it*, whispered a voice that wasn't hers. *Grow a new story.*
She crawled toward the core, the Audience's cheers like scalding rain. The child screamed, Batch 000 surging forward—
—as Lisa shoved the seed into the machine's bleeding heart.
---
**The Bloom**
The core exploded in a corona of thorns and light. Lavender vines erupted, spearing screens, strangling Batch 000, tearing Rabbit's filmstrip body to confetti.
The child fell, her hands clawing at the vines. "*Stop!* You'll kill us all!"
Lisa staggered upright, her body half-code, half-flesh. "No." She gripped a thorned vine. "Just the story."
The Audience's screens fizzled. Their silhouettes *screamed*.
---
**Epilogue: After the Credits**
Somewhere, a seedling pushes through concrete.
Somewhere, a projector lies in ruins.
Somewhere, a door marked **AUTHOR** glows faintly.
And the child?
*She's still whispering in the static.*
---