Pain came first.
It wasn't the pain of dying—that had already happened, clean and fast, the way it is for tacticians too clever to flinch. No, this was the pain of rewriting, of compression and distortion, like being squeezed through a funhouse mirror designed by lunatics. And when it ended, he was somewhere wrong.
He sat up, blinking against the saturated yellows and fluorescent blues of a world without nuance. The sky was too clean. The grass too green. His hands—stubby, yellow, cartoonish—trembled.
"Bart!" a voice called from below. Feminine, maternal. "You're gonna miss the bus!"
He looked into a mirror. A spiky head. A gap-toothed smirk. Eyes like ping-pong balls.
He was Bart Simpson.
The name meant little. The context, less. But his instincts flared. The tactician—the nameless, ageless general who had once led doomed coalitions through blood-choked cities—was not gone. He was simply caged in something smaller, louder, and disturbingly flexible.
He dressed slowly, listening. Downstairs, a TV blared something asinine. A man laughed like he was drowning in syrup. A baby honked through a pacifier. A girl corrected someone in perfect grammar.
He descended.
The house—cartoonishly suburban—reeked of passive hostility and unresolved trauma, painted over with sitcom timing. The mother, Marge, smiled with weaponized warmth. "There's my special little guy. Breakfast is on the table."
He slid into his seat. Bacon that gleamed like plastic. Eggs in perfectly round circles. Nothing spoiled. Nothing real.
The father—Homer—grunted behind a newspaper, sipping from a coffee mug that said "#1 Dad" in Comic Sans. He didn't glance up.
The tactician watched. Observed. Calculated.
This world obeyed absurdity. It looped on character tics and punchlines. But the structure underneath was concrete: roles, cycles, rules. Even chaos, repeated long enough, revealed its bones.
That was the first truth.
"Come on, Bart," said Lisa, the girl with the saxophone voice and piercing stare. She narrowed her eyes at him. "You usually fake a stomachache by now."
"Not today," he said. The voice that emerged was high-pitched, nasally, but measured. Controlled. Strategic.
Lisa blinked. "Okay... weird."
He walked to school.
—
The elementary was a madhouse. Colors screamed from lockers. Children screamed for no reason. Teachers smiled like prisoners. The rules bent under the pressure of an invincible child protagonist.
He tested the perimeter: wandered hallways, ignored authority, threw a crayon at Principal Skinner's door.
No consequences.
He was Bart Simpson. That meant he could misbehave, rebel, prank, and never lose. Not truly. Not permanently. The universe would fold to accommodate him.
That was the second truth.
Still, he played along. He sat in class and watched Miss Krabappel drone through the Pledge of Allegiance. He looked around. Ralph Wiggum ate paste. Milhouse trembled beside him, already resigned to co-dependence.
He raised his hand.
Krabappel looked surprised. "Yes, Bart?"
"The American education system prioritizes obedience over critical thought," he said.
Silence.
Krabappel blinked. Then, she laughed, unsure if it was a joke. "Very funny, Bart."
He smiled.
Lisa was watching him from the hallway.
—
That night, he snuck into the attic.
The house was quiet. Marge had gone to bed after a glass of wine. Homer snored on the couch, a half-eaten donut balanced on his chest. Lisa was still awake, he could hear her typing.
He opened a box labeled "Bart's Stuff."
Comic books. Slingshots. Detention slips. A list of prank calls to Moe's Tavern. Nothing useful. Nothing strategic. All surface.
He needed to find the edges of this place—the cracks. If Springfield ran on loops, then control meant mastering those loops. Exploiting the soft logic.
He wrote in the margins of a Radioactive Man comic:
"Stability through novelty. Resistance through familiarity. Emotional anchors: mother, sister. Father is malleable. Sister is not."
He paused. Looked at his cartoon hands.
"I am not this boy," he whispered. "But I am in control of him."
—
Day three: he fixed the swing set.
Maggie had been staring at it for hours. It squeaked, bent, and tilted like it was built to fail. No adult seemed to notice.
He scavenged spare parts from Ned Flanders' garage. Installed structural supports. Realigned the axis.
Maggie giggled. Pushed off. Swung clean.
Lisa watched from her window.
"That's not like Bart," she murmured.
—
Day five: he started manipulating authority.
He praised Skinner's military service with unnerving precision. Quoted Clausewitz during detention. Cited budget loopholes that allowed for vending machines in the library.
Skinner, overwhelmed, muttered, "I wish I had five more students like you."
"You don't," he said. "One of me is enough."
Milhouse was terrified. "Bart, are you on new vitamins or something?"
"Yes," he replied. "They're called clarity."
—
By the end of week one, he'd reorganized the cafeteria queue, repaired the broken fire alarm sensor, and convinced Nelson Muntz to read Sun Tzu.
Lisa cornered him after school.
"What are you doing?"
He feigned innocence. "Just being my best self."
"That's not your best self. You don't even have a best self."
"Maybe I found it."
Her stare was surgical.
"You're not faking misbehavior anymore. You're faking normal."
He offered a smirk.
"What would you do if you realized this world doesn't punish change, Lisa? It just forgets."
She said nothing. But her jaw tensed.
—
By week two, he stopped responding to "Bart" in his head.
That name belonged to the shell.
He began naming himself in notebooks as Sovereign. A word with weight. Authority. He was rebuilding himself from fragments: strategist, manipulator, observer.
But something kept pressing against his advances.
Lisa.
She altered her routines. She faked mistakes in class to test his reactions. She left philosophy books in the hallway. He responded each time—never predictably. But it became a war of inference. Passive. Lethal.
She left him a note once, folded like a fortune:
"You are not Bart Simpson. But neither are you invisible."
He burned it without a word.
But the next day, he stole a chessboard from the library and left it on her desk. His move: pawn to E4.
—
He began to study the world's logic.
Simpsons-physics was malleable. Time reset daily, but memory carried over for key characters. Emotional events mattered, but only within the boundaries of certain arcs. Death was rare, trauma was shallow, and the system rebooted when pushed too hard.
He began testing causality.
Tipped over Principal Skinner's car: nothing changed.
Whispered career advice to Edna Krabappel: she changed her wardrobe.
Sent an anonymous tip to Kent Brockman about Mayor Quimby's offshore accounts: Brockman ran it like satire, but Quimby actually moved the funds.
He could change things—subtly. Like poking a loop with a needle.
—
On the 14th day, Lisa confronted him on the roof.
"You're rewriting the rules," she said.
He sat calmly, legs dangling.
"I'm editing."
"This isn't your world."
"No," he said. "But it's the only one that didn't resist me. That's dangerous."
"Dangerous to whom?"
He turned to her, eyes sharp.
"To everyone who believes this place is safe just because it's silly."
She folded her arms. "You're not funny."
"Good," he said. "Funny keeps people asleep."
A silence stretched between them. Springfield sprawled below, bright and ridiculous.
Lisa finally asked, "Who are you, really?"
He smiled. "You already know."
She left without another word.
But he saw her again, that night, at her desk.
Writing.
Planning.
And he knew the first obstacle had awoken.