Fictio-Vacua House: The Author’s Final Plot
The moment the heavy, bronze-plated door to Fictio-Vacua House was carefully pushed open, the air rushed out—cold, dense, and heavy with the pervasive, unsettling odor of dry paper, mineral dust, and the sharp scent of heavy metals. The name, combining fiction/story with empty/void, perfectly captured the manor’s function: a physical space dedicated to achieving the ultimate truth of narrative, now embodying its own absolute termination of plot. This abandoned Victorian house was structured not for ordinary living, but for unwavering, controlled prose, its internal layout a bewildering maze of small, isolated world-building rooms, soundproofed dictation booths, and meticulously designed light-filtering windows intended to eliminate all external variables that might corrupt a pure creative impulse.
The final inhabitant was Scribe Teller Penumbra Vox, a brilliant, but intensely reclusive master author and narrative theorist of the late 19th century. Teller Vox’s profession was the study of plot, character, and the structure of storytelling, seeking to codify a single, unified, and perfectly consistent narrative that was free of all clichés, contrivances, or subjective reading. His singular obsession, however, was the creation of the ‘Zero Plot’—a single, perfect, flawless story that would, through the absolute synthesis of all known literary principles, reveal the ultimate, objective truth of fiction, free of all conflict, character, or discernible event. After realizing that the very act of writing a story required a choice (the words used), proving that absolute, objective narrative was impossible, shattering his faith in fixed meaning, he retreated to the manor. He dedicated his final years to resolving this single, terrifying goal, believing that the only way to achieve the Zero Plot was to understand the ultimate absence of all story. His personality was intensely systematic, fearful of inconsistency, and utterly consumed by the pursuit of narrative finality.
The Climax Chamber
Teller Vox’s mania culminated in the Climax Chamber. This secure, sealed room was where he spent his final days, not writing, but deconstructing the act of telling a story itself, attempting to define the ultimate objectivity by isolating the point that offered no possible narrative flow. His journals, written in a cramped, precise hand that eventually gave way to complex diagrams of non-sequential events and the theoretical limits of non-existence, were found sealed inside a hollow metal bookmark. He stopped trying to define the perfect story and began trying to define the un-told, concluding that the only way to achieve the Zero Plot was to eliminate the need for any event whatsoever. “The hero is an artifice; the conflict is a lie,” one entry read. “The final plot requires the complete surrender of all narrative and all meaning. The truth must be a single, self-evident, unstated conclusion, contained in a fundamental, perfect void.”
The house preserves his systematic anxiety structurally. Many internal passages are fitted with small, precisely calibrated anti-glare lighting and constant humidity controls built into the walls, now all rusted and frozen, remnants of his attempts to create a universal, absolutely fixed and non-distracting environment for creative contemplation.
The Final Manuscript in the Abandoned Victorian House
Scribe Teller Penumbra Vox was last heard working in his chamber, followed by a sudden, intense sound of heavy metal crushing and wood splintering (from the typewriter and the desk) and then immediate, profound silence. He did not leave the manor. The next morning, the chamber was cold, the Climax Chamber sealed, and the man was gone. No body was found, and the only evidence was the singular, physical alteration to his final philosophical work.
The ultimate chilling clue is the small hole in the laid paper. It is the final story—the Zero Plot achieved, representing the cessation of all narrative existence and the perfect, objective truth found in a single, un-dimensioned point of pure, absolute nothingness. The broken ruler and blank paper ensure no further attempt could be made to chart the flawed, storied world. This abandoned Victorian House, with its silent chambers and broken tools, stands as a cold, imposing testament to the master author who pursued the ultimate, pure form of fiction, and who, in the end, may have successfully defined the Perfect Non-Story, vanishing into the un-written, objective finality that he engineered as his final, terrifying statement of pure existence.
