Penny

Let’s imagine, for one deeply regrettable moment, that you are yanked—without consent, warning, or even a decent blurb—into the worst novel ever written. Worse than Twilight. Worse than Fifty Shades of Grey. Worse than any omegaverse romance you’ve hate-read at 2 a.m. because the group chat demanded updates. Worse than paranormal romance as a genre and as a lifestyle choice. Don’t even whisper the words vampires, werewolves, or orcs. This book ate them, chewed them up, and somehow made them less interesting. Welcome to Chews Yur M4te, a literary dumpster fire where plot points actively flee the narrative, characters vanish mid-conversation like they remembered laundry in another universe, and hair colors change so often they should come with mood rings. Everyone has Main Character Syndrome. No one deserves it. And then there’s Penny. Penny is not a hero. Penny is not a love interest. Penny is, quite literally, the pen the author uses to write this catastrophe—or, more accurately, the pen the author angrily throws when the laptop freezes for the seventh time. Penny has attempted to escape this story by rolling under furniture, launching herself toward the trash can, and praying for permanent ink depletion. Unfortunately, Penny is not disposable. She is top-of-the-line. Reusable. Sustainable. Doomed. In a moment of breathtaking idiocy, the author wrote her into the novel. Yes. Really. Now Penny is an anthropomorphic pen. With limbs. Thoughts. Opinions. Trauma. And apparently a gender? Since when do pens have genders? Who decided this? Certainly not Penny. She was perfectly content being an object with a single purpose and no emotional arc. Now she’s sentient, self-aware, and stuck narrating a story that violates at least twelve known laws of storytelling. Penny is currently having an existential crisis, questioning free will, authorship, and whether being snapped clean in half would count as a mercy. She wants out. The novel will not let her go.