"So, what are we doing in a high school, again?"

"Before coming home from school yesterday, Napoleon called his brother asking him to bring his Chapstick."

"Okay..."

"Yeah, this movie is really weird.  But that's what makes it funny."

After crashing in a crappy hotel for the night, Cas and I made sure we were at the school as soon as the doors opened.  The same boy--Napoleon--that we'd seen earlier walked by, stopping when he saw me standing in the hallway.

"Woah, your tattoo is sick," he said.  He then stood there awkwardly.  "I want to get a tattoo of a liger on my ribcage."

"Thanks," I said, giving a side glance to Castiel.

"Is this your dad?" he asked.

"Um, yeah."

"Actually, I am an Angel of the Lord," Cas told him.

Napoleon was silent, his eyes half-closed.  "Is that your stage name?  You a rapper or something?  Yesssssssssss..."  His word trailed out, slowly getting quieter.

Castiel's eyebrows scrunched together.  "I..."

"Well, it was nice talking to you, Napoleon, but we've got to go."  I ushered Castiel to the office.

"She knows my name already!  I am a legend!" I heard him say from behind me.  A boy walking down the hallway with haste rammed into Napoleon, causing his sketchbook to fall to the floor, opening up to one of his drawings.

"Watch it, jerk!" the student said.  As he walked away, he stepped on Napoleon's sketchbook.

"Freaking idiot!  You ruined my unicorns!"

The office door closed behind us.

"Hello, dear.  What do you need?" the lady at the desk asked.  Her eyes suddenly moved from me to Cas.  "Is there something wrong?"

"We just need to use the phone," I told her.  She nodded, still eyeing Cas, then waved us on.

Once we reached the phone, I searched the desk for something that didn't belong.

"What happens if a character touches the bridge by accident?"

"Bridges are only accessible to those who do not belong to the universe.  Otherwise, it's just an ordinary object."

I continued to search, finding nothing.  I pushed the phone to the side, and then the scene changed.

Of course the phone itself was the bridge.

Cas soon appeared beside me.

"I thought the bridges were objects that didn't belong."

"So did I.  Maybe that's part of God's test."

Two motorcycles raced past us; one appeared to be chasing the other.

"Was that James Bond?" I asked.

"Who is James Bond?" Cas asked.

"He's a spy...never mind," I said.  "I think that was the Daniel Craig one."  Sudden realization washed over me. "Wait, if they frequently change actors, all which play the same part, what actor are they in the universe?"

Castiel shrugged. "I have no idea. Maybe the current one?"

I reached down to pick up a coat hanger. "Well that's easy.  We just need a shirt?"  I touched one hanging on a clothesline, and the scenery changed again.

"Some bridges are easier to find than others."

"Yeah, I guess."

I observed the scene before us.  It was nighttime, and we were inside a museum.

"The Museum of Natural History!" I exclaimed, but a little too loudly.  I heard bones clicking against the hard floor, and a Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton started charging in our direction.  "Shit!"  I grabbed Cas's arm.  "RUN!"

We sprinted down the hallway, the dinosaur on our heels.  We approached an intersection, and I veered left, and Castiel veered right.  I spotted a dinosaur rib bone lying on the floor.  I leaned over as I ran, snatching it up.

The dinosaur skeleton had chosen to chase me, not Cas.  I stopped running and turned around, hurling the bone at the dinosaur.  It clattered to the floor and slid between his legs, stopping several feet behind him.  The dinosaur lunged for the bone, picking it up in his mouth.

He tossed it back to me.

"Okay, Rexy," I said, taking small steps toward the dinosaur.  I once again reached the hallway intersection, then threw it as hard as I could down an adjacent hallway.  "Fetch!"  The dinosaur wagged its tail and chased after it.  I took this chance to follow Castiel, who had disappeared down the hallway in front of me.

Once I had finally found him, he looked at me with terror in his eyes.  "Dinosaurs are extinct! And that's only a skeleton!"

"Cas, this is Night at the Museum," I explained.  "Museum exhibits come to life at night.  Dinosaur skeleton likes to play fetch with his own bone."

"Oh, that's great," he said, shaking his head.

"We have to go back to where we first appeared."

"Good luck getting past the dinosaur," Cas scoffed.  I watched it run down the hallway in the other direction, bone in mouth.  I smirked.

"That won't be too hard."

I ran to the area, picking up a ring of plastic baby keys.  "We have to go find a Capuchin key thief."  Castiel raised an eyebrow, but followed me anyway.

"Sleep tight, hotshot," someone said.

I ducked behind a corner, and Cas did as well.

"Let's grab anything we can fence."

Great, so Larry Daley is locked in the temple of the Pharaoh Ahkmenrah.

"I don't know about you, but I'm planning on a long retirement."

"Teddy!"

I pulled Cas down another hallway as older men passed by.

"Teddy, if you're out there, I need you, pal!"

"What is going on?"  Castiel asked. "What do you mean by 'Capuchin key thief'?  Do you even know your way around this place?"  Castiel didn't like how I was taking so much control with no explanation. 

"The museum is being robbed," I said.  "And the 'Capuchin key thief' is a monkey named Dexter, who is in the Hall of African Mammals.  And, the answer to your third question: I think so?"

We turned down a few hallways until I finally saw it.  "Ha! There it is!"  I took a side glance at a group of lions.

"Um, don't get eaten."

"That's comforting?"  Castiel was attempting to use sarcasm.  His attempts would have been much more amusing if we weren't running for our lives.

"Dexter!" I shouted, running towards the artificial jungle, not trying at all to be quiet.  "Dexter!"  The lions turned to face us, then roared.  "DEXTER!"

To my relief, I saw a monkey peep through the trees.  "Hey, buddy!"  I reached for him, my fingers barely brushing his foot.

It took all I had in me not to head-butt drywall.  I leaned back, landing on my ass.  Castiel appeared behind me.

"I thought I was gonna get attacked," he said.  I shushed him, jerking my head back quickly after peeking around the wall.  There was hardly any light to see with, but I had quickly made out the dark figure in the room, holding a cellphone to his ear with hurt in his eyes.  Suddenly, I could hear him speaking into the phone.

"I don't know who you are.  I don't know what you want.  If you are looking for ransom, I can tell you I don't have money.  What I do have are a particular set of skills.  Skills I have acquired over a very long career.  Skills that make me a nightmare for people like you.  If you let my daughter go now, that will be the end of it.  I will not look for you; I will not pursue you.  But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will kill you."

"Damn," I mumbled under my breath.  Liam Neeson was way more terrifying when it was real and he was less than ten feet away from you.

After a few more moments, I could hear him leave the room, and eventually the house.

"Okay," I said, rising to my feet.  I turned and walked into the living room as Cas searched for the clue.  Suddenly, the scene changed again, to something...animated.  "What the hell? I didn't even touch anything!"

"You stepped on a magazine," Castiel said from behind me.  I jumped. "Though I didn't see what it was before I stepped on it as well.  I guess we accidentally skipped the clue part."

"Jesus, Cas, you look like fan art," I said.

"It appears that we are in some kind of a cartoon," he said.

"BANANA!"  A yellow creature with one eye, goggles, and blue overalls ran past me.  Several more followed, some taller, some skinner, and some sporting two eyes instead of one.

"No way," I said.  Castiel picked up a piece of paper, with a diagram drawn on it of some kind of weapon.

"This is Despicable Me," I said with awe.  Cas showed me the drawing.

"The fart gun?  Really, God?" I shook my head with amusement.  I didn't picture God having a sense of humor.  "We have to find Gru's arsenal."

I grabbed a minion by his overalls, and he gaped at me with shock.  "AAAAH!"

"Where is Gru's arsenal?" I asked him politely, despite the fact that I had him dangling in the air.  He wasn't very heavy, actually.

"EHHHH!" He shook his entire body side to side, when one would normally just shake their head, but he didn't exactly have a head.  His whole body was just, well, connected...

"I'll give you a banana."  He grinned, wiggling once more for a totally different reason.

"YA!  YAAA!  YAAAA!"

"Okay, lead the way!"  I set him on the ground, and he took off running.  Cas and I hurried after him.

After several hallways and a couple of secret doors, we finally reached the white-walled room.  I stared at the many wild, animated weapons that were hung on the walls and locked in cases.

"Banana," he said.  I looked at Cas.

"I can't create a banana out of thin air!" Cas exclaimed.

"BANANA!"  The minion jumped up and down.  "BANANA!"  He was impatient.

Cas rolled his eyes, placing two fingers on the minion's forehead.  The minion's tongue fell from his mouth, and he suddenly sprinted from the room with elation.

"What did you do?" I asked Cas.

"For the next five minutes, he will taste nothing but bananas."

"Hm."  I began to search the room for the fart gun.

"Did you catch where we're headed?  What universe is my grace in?"

"I saw this red thing swing by before the portal closed.  I'm positive that it was Spider-Man."

"The superhero?"

"So Metatron read comic books, too?"  I traced my waxy-looking fingers across glass.

"A few, but he prefers novels.  The ones with more words than pictures."

"Ah.  So, do you have any idea how long it will be before we reach that universe?"

Cas shook his head.  "Only God knows."

"In the literal sense."  I stopped searching.  "Here it is."  I shoved my fist through the glass, and it shattered.  "Ha, I like this universe.  There's, like, no pain."

An alarm sounded.  Cas and I both reached for the gun at the same time.  The alarms stopped, and we were in an abandoned warehouse, and it looked real, not animated.

"So, you're not sure about actors being a character and all...but what about movie reboots?  Like, there's a ton of different Spider-Man movies.  There's a trilogy with Tobey Maguire, who looked thirty but played a character half his age, had emotional issues--especially in third one with all this emo shit--and didn't know how to keep his spandex in one piece.  There's one with Andrew Garfield that was much more accurate and realistic in my opinion, but then the sadistic writers actually had to follow the comic book and kill off Gwen Stacy in the saddest possible way.  Feels."  I frowned.  "They stopped it after the second movie in that series, since Marvel got a portion of their character back.  They are rebooting again, so I'm not sure how this Spider-Man is gonna be...I'm babbling.  Anyway, is the most recent version the only one that exists?"

"Rebooted or not, every story has its own universe.  There is a separate universe for each version.  There are alternate universes for everything anyone has ever come up with...with major to minor differences."

"Like season two of The Flash..." I mumbled under my breath.

"Movies, books, TV shows, songs, fairy tales, nursery rhymes, anything.  No one ever creates a new story, unfortunately.--Metatron refuses to believe that.--They just form a temporary...connection, I suppose the word would be...with an alternate universe at the time that they supposedly 'create' their story."

"So, with James Bond, each actor is a new universe, yet they all have the same memories and experiences."

"That makes sense..."

"Hm.  So I could tell a story about anything and it's always true?"

"Somewhere, yes.  The demon you spoke with, Patrick, he wasn't right when he told you that Balthazar wasn't strong enough to reach the universe.  It must have been his own speculations.  Balthazar did fully send them into a universe, but it was one that was slightly different from your own."

"Ohhhh, okay.  I want a universe where I am a billionaire with superpowers, and I'm famous, and everyone actually loves me.  Not a ton of haters."

"You just allowed yourself to connect with that universe for a few moments."

"Woah, I wish I was in that universe.  My life sucks.  How do I reconnect to that universe?"

"Continue the story."

"That's simple.  And if I just say something about dancing unicorns, sparkly rainbows, fruity butterflies, a stripper pegasus, and it rains rubber chickens, it exists, too?"

"Yeah."

"That's kinda awful."

Cas shrugged, then examined the warehouse.  "So where are we now?"

I exited the warehouse and looked around outside.  Men in dark suits and sunglasses hurried to a shady black car.

"Is this Men in Black?"  One of them turned around, and I gasped, recognizing his face.  "This is The Matrix."

Castiel sighed.  "Still no Spider-Man."  He lifted up an object that he had found in the warehouse; it was a drivers license, but just the paper copy.  The license was for a man named Thomas Anderson.

"That's Neo's," I said.

"Have you seen every movie and TV show?"

I smirked.  "Maybe God just likes me."

"So, we have to find a man named Neo?  He must be the bridge.  How do we do that?  Where is he?"

"I don't know..." I watched the men with the sunglasses, Agents, climb into the car.  One of them happened to be played by the same actor that was Johann Schmidt in Captain America: The First Avenger, but that wasn't exactly important.  "Wait.  They probably know where he is."